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While a growing body of literature explores tourism impacts in search of sustainable outcomes, research on justice in diverse tourism settings is nascent. Theoretically informed studies drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives are just beginning to emerge to help examine contestations and injustices such as addressed in the case study presented here. The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument (or “Custer’s Last Stand” as some know it; LBH) is a protected heritage tourism site that commemorates a battle between Native American tribes and the U.S. military in 1876. Indigenous stakeholders have struggled for decades with the National Park Service to overturn a long legacy of misrepresentation and exclusion from the commemoration and development of the site for heritage tourism. Site closures and other effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic present additional challenges for Native American stakeholders like the Crow Tribe. Guided by Nancy Fraser’s principles of trivalent justice (redistribution, recognition, and representation), this qualitative study traces the conflict over heritage commemoration, and explores the potential for praxis through ethical tourism development and marketing. Fraser’s trivalent approach to justice demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary research to examine historically entrenched discrimination, redress injustices, and facilitate healing and well-being of diverse groups at sites like LBH.

This paper aims to share post-pandemic lessons for destination resilience and the sustainability of events. It offers a new perspective that reimagines the space and place of events as learning destinations enmeshed in complex systems. Complexity arises due to the interactions and interrelationships between numerous stakeholders, activities, and events in the social–ecological destination system, where boundaries are porous, and issues and actions from afar can impact the local community. The case presented here describes the micro-level activities and actions undertaken to engage with destination resilience and sustainable event management and certification at a learning destination in Texas, USA. These situated efforts are shown (i) at the campus-wide level for the university and (ii) with the collaborative, learning-oriented activities undertaken by students in event management classes to pilot test the Sustainable Event Certification Checklist that was developed. They corroborate the general characteristics and criteria of the complex learning destination summarized in the paper, along with identifying and discussing the skills, literacies, and lessons learned to advance destination resilience and the sustainability of events. Participants in the learning destination draw on practical knowledge and develop soft skills to engage in adaptive planning proactively and collaboratively with other stakeholders to address emergent challenges and practical problems in the complex destination and sustainable event domain.

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