The National Parks Service is mishandling tribal access to sacred sites within park lands, according to a lawsuit filed on Thursday from a Native American man who was tasered in 2020 for walking off trail in New Mexico’s Petroglyph National Monument.
In late December of 2020, Darrell House, a Marine veteran of Navajo and Oneida background, walked off trail during a visit to the famed park outside of Albuquerque, which is home to thousands of petroglyphs from ancestral Pueblo peoples with cultural significance to an estimated 29 present-day tribes.
A park ranger approached the pair and demanded Mr House’s name and identification.
When he refused, body camera footage shows the ranger shooting the man with taser stun gun and calling for backup.
According to the lawsuit, Mr House was diagnosed with PTSD after the incident.
“This situation, Darrell House was not a threat to anybody,” his attorney Jeffrey Haas told KRQE. “It wasn’t a threat to the officer, he wasn’t a threat to the property, and I think if there had been any sensitivity shown to who he was, or why he was there, this incident never would have escalated.”
The lawyer said the site calls on the NPS “to recognize the rights, particularly of Indigenous people, to pray on sacred land and on sacred territory, and to be sensitive to that and the history of that.”
The Independent has contacted the NPS for comment.
Last year, the parks agency concluded the park ranger’s conduct was "consistent with agency policy and appropriate given the totality of the circumstances."
Despite the trauma of the incident, Mr House said he would continue to use the park for religious and recreational purposes.
“I will continue doing my prayers and going off-trail without permission without consent because that’s my right,” he told local reporters at the time.
The violent incident shocked local leaders.
“House was completely calm. He doesn’t ever get violent or aggressive. (The ranger) went straight to tasing,” Jennifer Denetdale of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission told the Navajo Times.
