From He Sápa to the World
The WILD12 Symposium Proceedings Are Here
By Bob Dvorak, Tina Tin, Chris Armatas, and Steve Carver — WILD12 Symposium Proceedings Chairs
In August 2024, more than 50 Tribes and Indigenous Nations and delegates from 36 countries gathered in the Black Hills for the 12th World Wilderness Congress. We’re pleased to share the WILD12 — Global Gathering on Knowledge, Wisdom, and Ways of Knowing —Symposium Proceedings.
Held in Rapid City, South Dakota, WILD12 became one of the largest international conservation congresses ever hosted by Indigenous Peoples, with Indigenous knowledge, leadership, and perspective placed at its center rather than its margins. The Congress convened in He Sápa, the Black Hills, sacred territory of the Lakota Nation, at the invitation of the Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council, whose call brought participants together to reimagine wilderness through the lens of traditional cultural knowledge and to explore the relationships that bind people, place, culture, and the living world.
The newly released proceedings preserve and extend that dialogue. Inside, you’ll find 24 peer-reviewed papers organized around four themes:
- Indigenous Perspectives and Global Stewardship
- Rewilding, Values, Meanings, and Relevance of Wilderness
- Methods and Approaches for Managing Social and Ecological Systems
- Collaboration, Partnership, and Community Conservation
Together, the papers move from Tribal wilderness stewardship and the cultural meaning of wild places to rewilding, landscape connectivity, community partnerships, and the management of interconnected social and ecological systems. The volume also includes the 12 resolutions adopted at WILD12, the Congress’s formal commitments for what comes next.
No single publication can hold everything that happened at the Global Gathering — every story, every exchange, every teaching shared in the room. What these proceedings offer instead is a partial record, deliberately built to travel: to scholars, practitioners, community leaders, and wilderness advocates who weren’t in Rapid City but need what was said there just the same.
The Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, the WILD Foundation, and the Wildland Research Institute at the University of Leeds collaborated to compile, publish, and distribute this volume. Our thanks go to the authors, knowledge holders, organizers, reviewers, and participants who made both the gathering and this publication possible, and to the WILD Foundation’s Adam Hanson, WILD12 Deputy Executive Organizer, for his leadership in coordinating the symposium.
More than anything, we hope these proceedings carry forward what made WILD12 distinct: the central role of Indigenous leadership, and an invitation to understand wilderness not simply as a place, but as a web of relationships, responsibilities, and ways of knowing.
WILD12 Symposium Proceedings:
