The Canadian Parks Service is charged with the responsibility of protecting significant examples of Canada's natural and cultural heritage and with encouraging public understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of these areas. The management strategies adopted by the agency have, it is argued, traditionally failed to address the importance of developing a better awareness of the interdependent roles and relationships between people and parks. The paper addresses two of the emerging socio-political issues in establishing Canadian parks and in their ongoing management planning: the recognition of informal knowledge (i.e., traditional, ecological knowledge and customary users' knowledge) as a legitimate source of data in systems and management planning; and the identification of mechanisms that will develop long-term and interactive partnerships between professional managers, customary users and indigenous peoples. The first part describes the assumptions related to the types of formal knowledge needed to establish Canadian national parks and to guide their subsequent planning. The second part defines and describes customary and indigenous knowledge and evaluates its actual and/or potential impact on scientific information used in park planning. The third section briefly suggests several non-hierarchical alternatives that parks might consider to ameliorate relations between management and its public.