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.