Our National Parks, Uninhabited Wilderness, and Toilets in Weird Places
A few years ago, I spent a week in August above 8000 ft in the Ansel Adams wilderness. My mostly middle-aged, but determined, friends and I each hauled 40 pounds up from 6000 feet across 8 miles to a limited access area. To maintain minimal impact from human visitors, we had to bring our own fuel, shelter, and food, and carry out all our trash. Building a low impact latrine (rationed toilet paper!) was an interesting challenge, so was using it with arthritic knees.
Our first campsite sat on a bluff above a small glacial lake surrounded by sharp granite peaks. The first morning, we sat sipping coffee in our little spot of paradise and watched the first sunrays light the depths of the crystalline lake. Later, we hauled icy water out to a sun warmed boulder and washed off the trail dust before plunging in for a bracing, short immersion. After dark, we watched a waxing moon rise over the peaks and turn them into gray guardian ghosts. We also survived a bear raid on our food in the middle of the night. It was kinda noisy, but all they got were the vitamin E pills. I talked the same crazy friends into a week sailing the North Sea and Norway’s stunningly beautiful fjords the next year. With our Norwegian skipper, we managed to hit a reef while looking for whales, but lived to tell about it and had the week of our lives.
I always find my soul restored in such places, and our vast planet offers so many of them. I spent two years in Switzerland studying theology, but majored in hiking and skiing the Alps. A couple of times on trips to Japan, I did the same in its Alps. Once, I skied on an active volcano in New Zealand—dormant at the time. I also abseiled into a deep cave and floated half a day down the rushing waters of a black river, which had glowworms in its pitch dark caves; The worms glowed when we yelled at the top of our lungs. They blinked like yellow-green stars. In college, I crossed the Serengeti Plains in a land rover, talked to Masai herding cattle, and watched thousands of flamingoes rise like a massive pink cloud from the shores of the lake in the middle of Ngorongoro Crater. One full moon lit night, we slept in the van and found lion tracks around it the next morning. No one had heard a thing.
This spring, I visited a friend named Dagfinn who lives on Vardo Island, Norway, a friendly little place in the Arctic Circle with 2000 residents. One day, Dagfinn and I skied across frozen tundra to one of its lakes. The concert clarinetist in town met us, carrying a big manual drill in his backpack. He bored a hole in the meter-thick ice. Then he served us the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had while we waited for the fish to take our bait, which were rather sad little frozen maggots that started out alive. We used coins as weights. Dagfinn claimed the socialist fish died laughing at our lame attempt to catch them. Near the end of my visit, we skied to the top of Vardo’s tallest mountain; from its 400 foot high peak, I was able to see Russia and brush up my foreign policy experience.
I love the natural world, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch the Ken Burns series on the national parks. At the National Press Club, Burns said, “At the heart of the national park idea is the democratic notion that the most magificent and sacred places in our nation belong to everyone…And from the very start, people of all backgrounds, rich and poor, well known and unknown, have been involved in the evolution of the park idea. We wanted to find them and tell their stories.”
The hyperbolic subtitle of the series, “America’s Best Idea” made my heart ache. This is a pretty good idea, but it is not true of our national parks. Many of them were created by the powerful and white for themselves, at the expense of Native Americans who had lived sustainably on the land for centuries. They were not “involved in the evolution of the park idea.” They were actively eliminated from the idea.
Native Americans were ethnically cleansed from their homes and lands to create the idea of our national parks as “uninhabited” wilderness. This needs to be said clearly. They were mostly killed or forcibly removed. Jill LePore’s amazing history, The Name of War, shows how the lie of the extinct Indian was common in the nineteenth century. This falsehood somehow managed to prevail despite policies, like Indian Removal, that indicated there were still quite a few around—they were in the way of western expansion and white settlers.
The rise of the myth of the vanishing Indian occurs in the same period as the emergence of the idea of the parks as uninhabited wilderness. The romance of wilderness, cultivated by nineteenth century colonists, depended on the massive deforestation and urbanization that led to longings for “nature” and the lie of the vanishing natives. This is the American colonial contribution to the idea of nature, a hunger for “uninhabited” wilderness.
I think a major reason for the longing for wilderness is part of the Protestant apocalyptic habit of making a mess of the world. Then, we wind up longing for something powerful, beautiful, or overwhelming to fix the mess. We spin in a perpetual, unrequited seeking for redemption from somewhere else or someone else or some other time.
Once they were “vanished,” people got romantic and misty about the “noble savages” they had killed. Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo calls this behavior imperialist nostalgia. Once people enter that status, they get monuments, admiration, and mentions as “contributors” to who we are now, but they don’t get justice. Tragicallly, the same pattern is operating globally with the creation of national parks for rich tourists—more about that problem below.
I’ve heard the Burns series has a brief discussion of what happened to Native Americans in the creation of the parks, and Burns wants more people of color to visit them today. While the parks are open to all visitors, they don’t see many of our nation’s inner city poor people. When I lived in the Twin Cities, I got to know Anishinabek and Lakota people in the community who belonged to the largest urban Indian population in the country, including some who were part of the famous Wounded Knee trials. I also spent a little time getting to know folks on a reservation in South Dakota whose ways of living were quite different from their urban kin. I learned some painful things about how traditional Westerners view land as a possession, just like they view religious buildings as possessions, whereas the natural world is the home, materially and spiritually, of traditional Native Americans. They don’t divide the world into wild or domesticated, inhabited or uninhabited. Everything is related and requires respect and careful observation.
Burns’ inclusive and innocuous choice of words idealizes the creation of the parks, as if Native Americans were just part of the “evolution” of the parks. No other group suffered ethnic cleansing in the creation of the parks. Crimes against humanity are not just imperfections or shortcomings in our history that we need to just get over, so we can cling to the same ideas. Voluntary sacrifices for an ideal are noble, but when those voluntary sacrifices lead to terror and forcible removal for others, we should not deny the moral ambiguity of those sacrifices and perpetuate the crimes in new forms. The use of ethnic cleansing persists and is being replicated in other places today.
We are exporting the U.S. national parks idea to other countries, along with the idea that wilderness is uninhabited. This environmental evangelism means some indigenous people, like the Masai in Tanzania and Kenya, who have herded cattle for a very long time, are being forcibly evicted from their land so tourists can hunt in “uninhabited” nature preserves. The Masai strenuously object to killing animals for sport.
National Parks don’t have to get made this way. In soul-restoring, achingly beautiful natural places I’ve experienced in Kenya, Switzerland, Japan, and Norway, people live there, where they have lived for a very long time. The human presence did not detract from my appreciation of the land and its beauty. It was always a bit of a surprise to climb for miles up a spectacular wild mountain trail, like some I hiked in Glarus or Zermatt, round a bend, and find an Alpine pasture with a cow trough planted in bright red geraniums, followed by a hut where you could get a beer, sausage, and space on a mattress. The Matterhorn has a toilet about 2/3 of the way up—you can see it with binoculars if you know where to look. It’s impressive to climb that peak, but I am really impressed by the construction workers who went up there to work every day to build that thing. They live there.
If Burns is serious in his aim to restore and maintain the parks, I hope he finds ways to further new, more just relationships to Native Americans that takes seriously the continuing legacy of discrimination against them. Native Americans are still fighting for land rights. In addition, thousands of them have been waiting over a decade for a settlement in a class-action discrimination lawsuit against the Agriculture Department, alleging widespread racial discrimination in loan programs meant to be a resource of last resort for those turned down by banks.
The Burns series aims to encourage more visitors to the parks, but this is not necessarily a good thing. The biggest problem our national parks currently face are all the tourists, many of whom are not only clueless about how to take care of them but who want upscale city amenities, like royalty. Some actually vandalize them on purpose, hauling away illegal souvenirs to display like trophies. Tourism is another form of consumption, not of establishing relationships of mutual care. The sheer numbers of tourists to parks often threaten fragile eco-systems. If we are to preserve the parks, we’ll have to limit access to tourists, just like they limit backpackers in the Ansel Adams wilderness.
I love natural beauty as much as anyone can, and I believe we have to find ways to live sustainably so we don’t keep making an uglier and uglier, uninhabitable world. This requires, however, not just restricted areas that make people tourists, but a respect for the knowledge human beings develop over many generations from living sustainably on the land of their ancestors. And we have to find ways to live sustainably with beauty nearby, not just in faraway uninhabited places.
I am sure I would be moved by Burns’ cinematography. But if beauty hides ugly truths, instead of helping us feel them and want to heal them, it becomes a tool of propaganda. If spreading our idea of national parks in the name of environmentalism and conservation means more ethnic cleansing, “uninhabited” wilderness will continue to be haunted by the ghosts of those who once lived there, and the soil will carry their blood. The world will perpetuate another cycle of imperialist nostalgia for the vanishing native whom the nostalgic are also simultaneously cleansing. And then, we’ll have to figure out, again, how to keep all those pesky tourists under control and build a lot more fancy toilets in weird places.
I strongly suggest you watch the series. You may find your critique stands. Or you might learn something. It covers quite a bit of history, including Native American history. Clearly Native Americans did not end up with these spaces. Industrialists, profiteers, etc. were all at the head of the line, well before the Naturalists of the day, let alone Native American interests. While that is an unpleasant truth, the parks were not going to be returned to Native American hands but would have been chewed up and destroyed. At least that’s the history Burns presents. But watch it, and then tell us how Burns was wrong In particular your representation that Indians were forcibly removed to create the parks. Where? In which park?
Fair enough. I will watch it. Thanks for the question about how prevalent ethnic cleansing was.
The short answer to your question is that most parks had Indians killed or removed to create them. The anomaly is Death Valley, where there is a tiny Shoeshone corner that was officially granted to them in 2000 in an unprecedented case. Mark Miller discusses this case in relation to the typical procedures in http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-197855405/timbisha-shoshone-and-national.html
“The Timbisha Shoshone and the National Park idea: building toward accommodation and acknowledgment at Death Valley National Park, 1933-2000.” Journal of the Southwest, December 22, 2008 COPYRIGHT 2008 University of Arizona.
As Miller notes:
“Important recent studies by Mark David Spence, Philip Burnham, Robert H. Keller, and Michael F. Turek, show that the Park Service’s secret history was that these seemingly untouched environments were predicated upon Indian removal beforehand and exclusion afterward. As historian Spence concludes, when officials evicted the last Miwok tribesman from Yosemite Valley in 1969, it brought the park in line with the “standards of the national park idea.”
After Native Americans were militarily defeated, the gov’t moved relations with them from the Dept of War to the Dept of the Interior and treated them like wild animals or natural resources, rather than human beings, ie the Dept of Justice. Miller comments on this attitude in relation even to Death Valley:
“In the 1830s, artist George Catlin is credited with first dreaming of what he called ‘a nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty.’ In this vein, a 1930 Saturday Evening Post article on Death Valley, Scotty, a grubstake miner who built the famous Scotty’s Castle for millionaire Albert Johnson in the late 1920s, remarked that Scotty ‘enjoys the Indians as part of the desert which has meant so much to him.’ Another book of the time similarly concluded the Shoshone were the ‘highest form of wildlife in Death Valley.’”
There was obviously a struggle between developers, miners, etc. and conservationists in protecting the land, but in this battle between various Euro Americans, Native Americans were not even acknowledged as having any claim on land they already occupied, and if saving land for conservation required ethnic cleansing (which I am not convinced it did), we should not be touting this as the best idea we ever had for democracy.
The creation of the parks denied Native Americans religious freedom. They were removed from their spiritual, sacred sites and forced onto reservations and relationships with the federal government that stole their ways of life and fractured their social systems, many of which were far more democratic and respectful of women than the constitutional white democrats who regarded them as savages.
The idea of wilderness is a construction of the American colonists’ relationship to land, and it is constructed as pristine and uninhabited. This construction was not true of most of the land turned into national parks. Local tribes had long managed the land, doing controlled burns, herding animals, etc. just as the NPS now manages parks itself, including, for ex. building hiking trails and campsites, and controlling animal populations.
My concern with telling the truth about what was done to create the parks relates to the perpetuation of these ethnic cleansing practices today. The colonial idea of uninhabited wilderness is now being used against indigenous people in places like east Africa. Do we really want to laud something as our best idea for democracy, when practices based on this idea are now turning indigenous people against the idea of conservation?
Rita,
As I was moved by your depictions of the spirituality revealed by nature, and shaken all over again by your reminders of the horrific banality of ethnic cleansing, I would like to read your take on the Oklahoma tribal life, where the forced marches came to an end and where nearly fifty tribal governments now rule significant portions of the state.
Here move than 400,000 persons qualify as tribal members by the definitions set by the tribes themselves, and many hundreds of thousands more claim descendancy from at least one tribal ancestor (such as my Cherokee great-great-grandmother).
I have become gradually aware of a kind of uniquely quiet walk upon the earth faintly traceable in Oklahoma, still present in spite of the obvious efforts to obliterate it.
I can see great dignity within stark poverty; remnants of cosmic spirituality juxtaposed with rage directed both internally and externally; and valiant struggles to maintain and expand ancient identities even as the same tribes are take the lead in such dubious enterprises as the multi-billion-dollar casino industry.
For me, the ancient history of tribal consciousness, the arrival of the many post-tribal civilizations of Europe, and the continuing struggles for survival of groups as well as for the freedom to leave the groups of origin and seek integration in the post-modern possibilities, all make for a unique communal effort found in Oklahoma as nowhere else.
With your acute moral sense, you may find a different presence here, but I would welcome your interpretation.
I would not claim to be an expert on Native Americans, and certainly not the Cherokee in Oklahoma. My good friend Naomi Southard did doctoral work among them. I recognize some of what you say. My experiences were more in Minnesota and South Dakota, as well as Arizona and New Mexico, where I came to appreciate their gentle ironic humor, modesty, careful observation, hospitality, and generosity, despite the struggles. One thing that really stood out for me was how their respect for silence was so like my recollection of my Japanese Buddhist grandfather. I loved just sitting in silence with the older people, who seemed to understand it. There’s a lot of misery too, poverty, alcoholism, etc. as you’d expect from people who have had what happened to them, and is still happening.
I’ve also had the privilege of working for many years in the religion academy with Native American scholars and learned a lot as well as learned how little I know. I try to listen and absorb when I’m in Native contexts. I taught a unit in intro to religion on Lakota and Navaho history and lifeways when I taught in Minnesota, so I’ve studied them the most, but, since I don’t speak the languages, I would not claim to be a scholar of those traditions. I have participated in some of the ceremonials, and I think there is nothing like having an embodied experience, if one is lucky enough to be invited.
One interesting thing I learned from the woman who directs the domestic violence and rape shelter in Rosebud, South Dakota, was they had to move their shelter off the Episcopal church property when they wanted to use a sweat lodge to help women release poison from their being. Sad– I found the sweat lodge an amazing experience.
She said the traditional way her people had handled domestic violence was to take the woman out and let her live with one of the other women. Then the women of the community would cook the husband a big dinner, sit him down to eat it, then, when he was done, they would tell him that what he was doing was wrong. They told him they knew he could do right, they would be watching in the future, and if he hurt his wife again, they would help her leave him.
My own Puerto Rican great grandfather was a full blooded Taino, which makes me 1/8, but I only know them as historical artifacts. He changed his name to Morales to get work, and, as far as I know, any trace of Taino culture is gone. My grandfather was, however, very ruddy and Indian- looking. Whereas my grandmother, from the Canary Islands, was very fair.
I don’t watch television, so saying I haven’t seen Burn’s series isn’t significant. But it was widely promoted, including on public radio, so I certainly heard about it.
My first thought was a memory — 15, maybe 20, years old. In that length of time, I hope things have changed. But at that point, I was visiting a national park, and in the museum / history area, stopped to read about the “settlement” years. The focus was primarily on the richness and beauty of the land. It included the statement that the land was uninhabited when the “first settlers” arrived. The next information station, however, provided some “history” about the struggles of the settlers, including the necessity of fighting what could only be the already existing “inhabitants.”
Who is allowed full participation in telling the story remains an essential factor.
Rita, thanks in particular for the information about the domestic violence and rape shelter, and how domestic violence was (is?) handled — sounds like a kind of community “intervention.” That women lead in this process is very interesting, raising all sorts of questions, including what role the men (other than husband) play?