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?

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.

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?