Since Canada established its famous national parks in the Rocky Mountains one hundred and more years ago, the Federal Government's policy for reserving wilderness lands as protected areas has come, in the last thirty years, to involve native peoples in a central way. The symbolic security of the state, which national parks ideally and idealistically represent, thus depends vitally on native people. This holds especially for the security of the Canadian North, where co- management agreements between Parks Canada Agency and local First Nations govern the national parks and national park reserves, which are among the most recently established in the national system of parks and protected areas.