Celebrate Public Lands Day with a Good Critique of the Park Service
Reckoning with the history of our national parks is necessary for their future
It’s National Public Lands Day on Saturday, a yearly event that’s been happening since 1994, according to the National Park Service. No, since 1979, according to the Bureau of Land Management—while linking to a page for the National Environmental Education Foundation that is in agreement with NPS that the inaugural year is 1994. But hey, folks, nothing to see here—there’s no lack of coordination between our various federal agencies on land issues, and no playing fast and loose with even the simplest of facts. Though maybe we should cut the BLM some slack, given that there’s hardly anyone left there to ensure completion of tasks like fact-checking its website, after Trump-era shenanigans led to mass exits of staff. Don’t worry! Deb Haaland’s on it, and bringing some actual administration and organization to the agency after its management by an executive that believed neither in management nor administration. Or is she? Over at The Land Desk (another Substack publication worth reading if you like some of the subject matter here), Jonathan Thompson talks about the mysterious stalling of the Biden administration to reverse course on the massive shrinking of various monuments under Trump, as well as the failure to engage in basic common-sense actions on climate, like slowing the handing out of oil and gas permits on public lands.
Perhaps all that will convince you that there’s no way to celebrate National Public Lands Day like reading about the misdeeds or simply missed opportunities of our convoluted public lands bureaucracies. Or at least that’s what I figured, so in anticipation of the day, I finally pulled out a volume I picked up earlier this year, (at the Grand Canyon bookstore, no less) titled American Indians & National Parks.
Authors Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek1 wrote the book because they felt that indigenous affairs and national park management and history were most frequently treated as independent subjects, despite their clear interconnections. “Interconnected” is a soft way of putting it, given that the national parks are synonymous with indigenous displacement and dispossession, and with the erasure of indigenous history. For those who aren’t familiar with this, one of the most iconic stories comes from one of the most iconic parks. Yosemite—that grand gem of the park system, which inspired both John Muir and the formation of the Sierra Club—could only be imagined as “wilderness,” unpopulated and untouched, by Muir and his associates precisely because a local battalion of soldiers in California—interested in mining gold in the area—came to march off the Awhahneechees of the Southern Sierra Miwuk while Muir was still a pre-teen. Miners had already torched villages and destroyed food stores in an attempt to make the Miwuk leave, before this final battle in which they forced Chief Tenaya and his people out of Yosemite Valley. Both Miwuk and Paiute people continued to find ways to live in the park, but have been forced off by the park service time and again.
The Yosemite story is known widely enough that Keller and Turek don’t bother to dig into it in this volume.2 But the pattern there is repeated elsewhere in the history of the parks. Sometimes brutal force comes in ‘softer’ forms, with government reps using the threat of complete displacement to negotiate an ‘agreement,’ as happened with the establishment of Mesa Verda on Ute territory. Frequently the choice to ignore indigenous claims to lands occurs in paternalistic guise, with the aim of encouraging assimilation—and just as frequently turns exploitative, with Native peoples put on display or pushed to perform for white tourists, even as they are denied treaty rights to hunt or gather on park land, despite prior agreements, as occurred at Glacier with the Blackfeet. Glacier officials also engaged in backroom schemes to further take over reservation land. The Blackfeet successfully resisted this, however, and continued to press the park on other matters as well:
Besides an unfriendly superintendent, the Blackfeet had other problems with Glacier. While visiting Washington in 1915, a delegation that included Curly Bear and Wolf Plume met with Stephen Mather and Horace Albright [soon to be director and assistant director of the park service] a few months prior to the establishment of the NPS. The Indians protested renaming lakes, mountains, glaciers, and rivers in the park. Tail-Feathers-Coming-Over-The-Hill complained that white men “used foolish names of no meaning whatever!” The Indians wanted Blackfeet names, and Mather promised that in the future only the Indian language or translations would be employed.3
If you’ve been to Glacier, you know that latter promise was not kept. The breaking of such promises is one of the other persistent themes in the stories gathered in the book. This is perhaps best captured by Havasaupai council member Lee Marshall, who gave testimony before Congress in 1973, during his tribe’s pursuit to reclaim their lands from Grand Canyon National Park. Marshall read a list of agreements and promises made from 1880 through until that present moment. After each item on the list, his summary of the outcome of such promises was the same: “Nothing was done.”4
Despite this legacy, the authors, writing towards the end of the 1990s (Keller has since passed away)5 seem optimistic about the future of cooperation between NPS with the many indigenous groups affected by the work of that agency. As they summarize their research:
To begin, park/Indian relations seem to fall into four phases: (1) unilateral appropriate of recreational land by the government; (2) an end to land-taking but a continued federal neglect of tribal needs, cultures, and treaties; (3) Indian resistance, leading to aggressive pursuit of tribal interests; and (4) a new NPS commitment to cross-cultural integrity and cooperation.6
Is their optimism warranted? I had the opportunity in the first half of this year to travel to a great number of parks and monuments, especially in the Southwest. My personal, not very scientific assessment? It seems to be a work in progress. Mesa Verde signage surely has come a long ways, for instance, and seemed to be filled with quotes from the Ute and others who trace their lineage to the area, though I saw the same names again and again, making me wonder if consultation happened but in a limited fashion. Many of the monuments are rather vague in their information, and do little to make connections between past inhabitants and present-day nearby residents. And then you have places like Coronado National Monument, whose website currently notes that “while often violent,” Spanish “arrival” in the Southwest “brought about a dramatic biological and cultural exchange.” Well, that’s one way of putting it.
Even if NPS were doing a top-notch job with acknowledging the full history of its own parks, if we’re concerned with public lands more broadly, only a portion of them are within national parks anyhow. Not only are there the many other federal agencies both in and outside Interior—who may or may not take their cues from NPS—there are all the myriad big and small state and local land agencies. Some examples to illuminate the problem: I learned about the massacre that made way for the BLM’s Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness, not through the BLM’s website or materials, but through my own research in advance of a hike there. And a visit to Big Bend State Park (just west of the more famous national park) turned up this sign (zoom in to read the text):
Now I was momentarily encouraged to see Texas promoting water conservation, as it should, and noting that activities like mining are not sustainable in such an area. But then there’s that whole bit of labeling a given group of people as “prehistoric.” Unclear when the author of this sign thinks history began; the Jumanos were certainly present when the Spanish first came through, and were hit hard by the infectious diseases they brought. What’s more, they continued living in the area well into the 18th century. Seems well within the bounds of historical time to me.
Even where public lands interpreters do attempt to capture something closer to the whole story of a place, they often make the same mistake as at Big Bend, writing about indigenous communities as though they are only in the past. A few years back, on a weekend trip from Seattle to the Olympic peninsula, I visited the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge. (Wildlife refuges are managed by US Fish and Wildlife, yet another agency within the Department of the Interior that is neither NPS nor BLM.)
Now, before we even talk about the refuge itself, here’s the entirety of its cultural history as presented the Dungeness webpage:
On April 30, 1792, Captain George Vancouver anchored Discovery near the spit. He named it Dungeness Spit after a famous headland (a narrow piece of land that projects from a coastline into the sea) on the south coast of Kent in England. He thought this new area closely resembled that of the English coastline feature. Vancouver was unaware that the area had already been named Punta de Santa Cruz two years earlier by the Spanish explorer Manuel Quimper. Vancouver’s name stuck.
So there we have one kind of erasure, with no mention of any other potential place names before the arrival of Europeans. (I believe the S’Klallam name for the spit is Tsi-tsa-kwick, the nearby bay Tses-kut.)7
Thankfully, the actual signage at the refuge is an improvement and attempts to include a broader cultural history. Only as I read through all the info presented there, I began to realize that while things like contemporary white fishing culture, or the biotic communities of the park, were talked about in present tense, all the descriptions of indigenous life were in the past tense.
There was a volunteer staffing a table by the signs; I asked her about it. “Can you tell me why all the mention of the S’Klallam on your signs are written in the past tense? I mean, they’re not gone—like they’re literally right over there, we drove right past them.” (The Jamestown S’Klallam own land and have a number of prominent buildings not far away from the spit on Hwy. 101)
“Yes, that’s true,” she said.
“So why’s it all in past tense?” I asked again. She was silent at first, but after I waited a moment, she tried to mount a defense of the descriptions. When I asked if she knew how the info got updated or if it was possible to pass along to staff at the refuge that it should be, she was evasive. Given that I was clearly increasing her defensiveness, rather than winning her over to the idea of changing the language, I gave it up for the moment and went to hike the spit.
But again, inclusion of indigenous history at all is a step up from where some of our state parks are at. Here in Oregon, the focus is often exclusively on the stories of explorers and pioneers. Given the emphasis on events like the Lewis and Clark expedition, one is still more likely to read about Sacagawea—as I did on a recent hike up over Tillamook Head north of Cannon Beach—than to read details about use of the land by the indigenous people actually in the area. (That would include the Clatsop, Nehalem, and Tillamook. Sacagawea is Shoshone, from further east near what is now the Idaho-Montana border). But perhaps it will surprise no one that it’s simply not on the agenda of most state agencies to go revamp signs they installed in the 1970s.
So what to make of all of this as we think about National Public Lands day? I think one of the main conclusions has to be that we need to stop thinking of these places as entirely separate, as somehow special and beyond the fray of human culture and power games. They are the product of those very power games, the same scramble for land and money as the rest of American culture.
Keller and Turek make the following point:
Writers often refer to national parks and Indian reservations as islands: Parks are called “islands under siege” or “islands of hope”; reservations appear as islands of poverty and islands of despair. But whereas the concept of an ecological island may help us understand biology, insular analogies will mislead anyone studying the history of native people and parks. The word “island” implies some degree of autonomy and isolation, of geographic separation with distinct borders. Except for a few parks such as Isle Royale, the Channels Islands, and Apostle Islands, however, that is not physically, politically, or culturally true of national parks. Parks, like reservations, border other lands defined by artificial and often controversial boundaries that change over time, borders that seldom coincide with rivers, wind currents, animal migration routes, toxic waste pollution, highways—or with the cultural heritage of native people. As we shall learn, the island metaphor does not apply. Or at the very least, it requires a half-dozen sturdy bridges for every mile of waterfront.8
It’s not just that avoiding the island metaphor will help us better understand the intertwined histories of people and public lands on Turtle Island, as Keller and Turek’s aim to do. Avoiding the island metaphor also helps get us out of the false frontier mindset that undergirds all our modern political and economic systems, and their resulting problems: the mindset that denies interdependence, thinks there will always be some new, wild place to go explore, so that they may forget the current place where waste and mess can be left behind. It’s that same mindset that allows us to destroy a forest and end of up with a Superfund site, and pretend that we can go on doing that indefinitely. That makes us think we can solve social problems by forcing those we deem ‘undesirable’ to some unseen place where we won’t have to think about them—the Indian on a reservation, the immigrant on the other side of a wall, the homeless on a bus to “somewhere else.”
But at the moment, many of us still tend to think of public lands as places that are “elsewhere”—a place to which we can escape, and experience temporary reprieve from the rest of messy modern life. (I am very, very implicated in this sensibility.) Yet this illusion is being challenged mightily as too many of us try to get away at the same time9, and for that matter, too often bring all the trappings of the places we ostensibly are trying to leave behind: cars and portable audio devices and vans or RVs decked out with wi-fi and TV and more. Maybe, as the entrance lines grow ever longer and the permitting process ever more restrictive, we’ll finally realize that we can’t protect the land and cultural riches within parks until we find a different way of using and protecting the land and cultural riches outside of them. For the same institutional and cultural practices that surround the parks are inside of them as well, be it white supremacy and its attendant historical amnesia, or a complete lack of knowledge about soil processes that lead to visitors thinking their toilet paper will magically compost overnight when strewn about the forest floor.
The traditional thing to do on public lands day is to volunteer—help out with trash pickup, say, or join a trail maintenance project. But if we think of these places not as islands that need to be kept pristine, but as places deeply connected to where we live and the dominant cultures there, I wonder if there isn’t a better way to show our desire to engage in stewardship. Helping to stop future pipelines comes easily to mind as an option, but so does finding ways to teach the young folks around us (or the not so young, for that matter) that the cycle of overconsumption, depression, and a final rushed escape to the woods is not really the way to live life.
“Protect what you love” is a climate movement motto, yet I think often about how our efforts to protect places we care about become botched from the start because we do so little to truly know them. This, surely, is the history of the national parks in America: settlers rushing in to “save” not so much a piece of land that they love as the image of the land made in their minds, with little knowledge of how that land came to be as it was in the first place. The managers and administrators of our public parks are only just learning how to see the many ways that others were loving and protecting the land long before their arrival.
As individuals, we need not move as slowly as the park service bureaucracy; we can choose to use tomorrow to begin reckoning with that legacy, and seeking to know these places more fully—including their peopled history—that we might genuinely be of use in their future stewardship. This post is my own attempt at starting that task, and I hope you’ll consider using tomorrow as an opportunity to learn more about the longer history of the public lands dear to you.10
Thanks for reading Unsettling, everyone. If you like this post, please consider subscribing.
Keller was a historian at Western Washington University who, among other things, advocated for including treaties in the curriculum for undergraduate history students. Turek, on the other hand, was not an academic for has worked for the Park Service, Forest Service, and the Yakama Indian Nation, among other places.
Rebecca Solnit details the event in her Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. For the briefest of treatments see the Wikipedia article on the Mariposa War. Outside Online discusses the longer history of displacement of the Miwuk and more recent attempts the park has made at reconciliation.
p. 51
p.167
I thought I might reach out to Keller with questions about the book, but alas. He sounds like he would have been an interesting person to know.
p.233
Those are the names shared at https://www.historylink.org/File/7066
p.29
There’s been lots written on the increase in numbers at national parks throughout the last year. Here’s just one: https://www.hcn.org/articles/national-park-service-national-park-managers-search-for-answers-to-overcrowding
As always, https://native-land.ca/ is a good place to start if you’re unsure of the indigenous communities near the places you live or visit.