E-response to Cronon, Spence, and Dungy

Introduction: From Common Ground

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Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks Mark David Spence

Print publication date: 2000 Print ISBN-13: 9780195142433 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195142433.001.0001

Introduction: From Common Ground Mark David Spence

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195142433.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords The idealization of uninhabited landscapes and establishment of the first national parks reflect important developments in late-nineteenth-century Indian policy. Although the creation of the first national parks coincided with efforts to restrict Indians to reservations and assimilate them into American society, native use and occupancy of park lands often continued unabated. This book argues that uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved, and this type of landscape became reified in the first national parks. It also focuses on the policies of Indian removal developed at Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier national parks from the 1870s to the 1930s.

Keywords:   uninhabited landscapes, national parks, Indian policy, Indians, reservations, wilderness, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier

I wonder if the ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said? I wonder if the ground would come alive and what is on it?

We-ah Te-na-tee-ma-ny, or “Little Chief” (Cayuse), 18551

SHORTLY AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT OF Badlands National Monument in 1929, the Oglala Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk expressed profound consternation with the idea of wilderness preservation. For him, the creation of the national monument adjacent to his home on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota seemed only to confirm a disturbing trend. Wind Cave National Park had already been established in the nearby Black Hills, and large areas of land surrounding the park had recently been incorporated into a national forest.

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Remembering his youth and the time he spent in these areas, Black Elk recalled that his people “were happy in [their] own country, and were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us.” Although a considerable portion of this Sioux country received federal protection, native peoples were largely excluded from their former lands. As Black Elk observed, the Americans had “made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds,” and every year the two were moving farther and farther apart.2 In short, Black Elk understood all too well that wilderness preservation went hand in hand with native dispossession.

The dual “island” system of nature preserves and Indian reservations did not originate in the 1920s. At least until Black Elk's early childhood, Americans generally conceived of the West as a vast “Indian wilderness,” and they rarely made a (p.4) distinction between native peoples and the lands they inhabited. Consequently, the earliest national park advocates hoped to protect “wild” landscapes and the people who called these places home. Preservationist efforts did not succeed until the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, when outdoor enthusiasts viewed wilderness as an uninhabited Eden that should be set aside for the benefit and pleasure of vacationing Americans. The fact that Indians continued to hunt and light purposeful fires in such places seemed only to demonstrate a marked inability to appreciate natural beauty. To guard against these “violations,” the establishment of the first national parks necessarily entailed the exclusion or removal of native peoples.

The transition in American conceptions of wilderness resulted from several deeper trends in U.S. society and politics. The powerful sense of national destiny that accompanied both the Mexican War and the Civil War, the increased activism of the federal government during Reconstruction, the growth of western tourism, and the widespread sentimentalism for a “vanishing” frontier profoundly shaped the ways that Americans would perceive the “New West” for several decades. For many people, the processes of conquest and nation building seemed to alter the essential nature of the region; through a sort of patriotic transubstantiation, a number of western landscapes quickly became American Canterburys. More than great “pleasureground[s] for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” the first national parks were places where summer pilgrims could go to share their national identity and an appreciation for natural beauty.3 Much as they still do today, Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and the ragged peaks of the northern Rocky Mountains provided the basic elements of a scenic anthem that praised the grandeur and power of the United States.

The idealization of uninhabited landscapes and the establishment of the first national parks also reflect important developments in late-nineteenth-century Indian policy. Much as the conquest of the West reshaped ideas about wilderness, it also led to the creation of an extensive reservation system.

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Ultimately, these isolated patches of land came to represent the final refuge of the American Indian, and by the late 1860s and early 1870s, Americans regarded reservations, rather than the “wilderness,” as the appropriate place for all Indians to live. These sentiments changed somewhat in the following decades, when self-described friends of the Indian sought to dismantle the reservations and assimilate native peoples into American society. While such “friends” argued that an Indian's place was not on the reservation, they asserted even more emphatically that an Indian's place was not in the wilderness—except on the odd chance that one had become a “civilized” tourist.

Changing ideas and policies did not make native peoples disappear, however, nor did they make wilderness uninhabited. Although the creation of the first national parks coincided with efforts to restrict Indians to reservations and assimilate them into American society, native use and occupancy of park lands often continued unabated. A basic argument of this book is that uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved, and this type of landscape became reified in the first national parks. In particular, I focus on the policies of (p.5) Indian removal developed at Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier national parks from the 1870s to the 1930s. These parks are especially relevant for three reasons: first, each supported a native population at the time of its establishment; second, the removal of Indians from these parks became precedents for the exclusion of native peoples from other holdings within the national park system; and third, as the grand symbols of American wilderness, the uninhabited landscapes preserved in these parks have served as models for preservationist efforts, and native dispossession, the world over.4

Generations of preservationists, government officials, and park visitors have accepted and defended the uninhabited wilderness preserved in national parks as remnants of a priori Nature (with a very capital N). Such a conception of wilderness forgets that native peoples shaped these environments for millennia, and thus parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier are more representative of old fantasies about a continent awaiting “discovery” than actual conditions at the time of Columbus's voyage or Lewis and Clark's adventure.5 For the most part, these romantic visions of primordial North America have contributed to a sort of widespread cultural myopia that allows late-twentieth-century Americans to ignore the fact that national parks enshrine recently dispossessed landscapes.

In the past few years, a number of scholars have argued that wilderness is not an absolute condition of Nature but is instead a fairly recent American invention.6 While I share the conviction that wilderness is both a historical and cultural construct, I believe that such a definition requires an examination of the events and processes that led to the creation of this particular artifact. Doing so should also make plain the manner in which popular conceptions of certain wilderness areas have precluded alternate visions of the same landscapes. Ultimately, an understanding of the context and motives that led to the

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idealization of uninhabited wilderness not only helps to explain what national parks actually preserve but also reveals the degree to which older cultural values continue to shape current environmentalist and preservationist thinking.

The American wilderness ideal, as it has developed over the last century, necessarily includes a number of strange notions about native peoples and national parks. In the rare instances that park literature even mentions Indians, they tend to assume the unthreatening guise of “first visitors.”7 Just like tourists today, it seems these ancient nature lovers did not really use or occupy future park areas. Apparently, they possessed an innate appreciation for wilderness as a place where, to paraphrase the 1964 Wilderness Act, humans are visitors who do not remain.8 Amazingly, if we follow this reasoning to its logical extreme, the park service has managed to protect the only areas on the North American continent that Indians did not use on a regular basis.

Of course, this all sounds absurd, but scholars and park officials alike have long asserted that native peoples avoided national park areas because these places were not conducive to use or occupation.9 Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The foothills, mountains, and canyons of most western parks provided shelter from winter storms and summer heat, sustained seasonal herds of important game animals, and served as the locale for tribal gatherings and important religious (p.6) celebrations. In short, native peoples made extensive use of these areas— often well into the twentieth century. To the degree that such practices ceased, the lack of use was the result of policies to keep Indians away from these areas. Unfortunately, subsequent denials of native claims on parks have served only to perpetuate the legacy of native dispossession.

Besides taking issue with park histories that ignore the presence of Indians, this book also examines the changing importance of Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite national parks for several different native groups. The people with the strongest connections to these parks include the Crow, Shoshone, and Bannock in Yellowstone; the Blackfeet in Glacier; and the Yosemite Indians in Yosemite. All have very distinct traditions, and the native presence in one park hardly resembled that in another. Blackfeet use of Glacier National Park, for instance, differed markedly from that of the Indians in Yosemite. Likewise, native use of both these places changed considerably from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1930s, as had the lifeways of the people who lived in these areas. At Yellowstone, several groups could occupy the same general area at the same time but often for very different purposes. At all of these parks and within each Indian community, a great deal of task differentiation by gender and age group also determined the seasonal or historical importance of a particular area. During the early reservation era, for instance, male hunters accounted for most Blackfeet use of the Glacier area in summer and fall. In earlier and later periods,

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however, women used the area more frequently, particularly in spring and early summer, when they gathered important food and medicinal plants.

Despite their often pronounced differences, the Crow, Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfeet, and Yosemite all shared important similarities: each utilized or lived within a national park at the time of its establishment, all were affected by federal efforts to preserve certain western landscapes, none ever fully relinquished their claims to these areas in a treaty with the United States, and each park remained important to these different groups because it was large enough to protect and sustain numerous resources. While these native groups all present a powerful challenge to long-held ideas about pristine wilderness and its preservation, their use of national park lands also sheds new light on the continuing but changing significance of such areas for many Indian peoples. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a series of harsh assimilationist programs required their adoption of new land use practices both on and off the reservation and threatened to destroy tribal societies.10 In the midst of these profound changes, many of the places associated with older cultural practices took on new meanings or acquired new importance. Consequently, access to national park lands became a crucial aspect of native efforts to both ensure cultural survival and assert threatened treaty rights.

By examining the political, spiritual, and social importance of national park areas to different native groups, I explore the same issues that inform current American Indian concerns about the management of Devil's Tower National Monument, the industrial and commercial development of the Black Hills, (p.7) and the sanctity of ancient religious sites on public lands throughout the West. This book is not just about the sacredness of certain places, however. It also addresses the rights and needs of native peoples to maintain their cultural distinctiveness through the exercise of treaty rights and the practice of certain skills that can take place only within a large national park. Recent concerns about hunting or gathering traditional food and medicinal plants on protected lands are frequently associated with a new round of cultural revivalism among various Indian groups, but these activities are rooted in a century of “illegal” and extralegal use of such areas. While these actions have presented a constant challenge to the idealization of pristine, uninhabited landscapes, they also contributed another “cultural construction” of wilderness—in this case, one in which concerns about subsistence gave way to concerns about cultural persistence and political sovereignty.

To show the ways that native peoples and wilderness enthusiasts have valued and shaped three of the nation's oldest and most revered parks, I have chosen to present this study in four parts. The first two chapters examine the ideas and historical processes that eventually led to the almost simultaneous development of national parks and Indian reservations in the years following the Civil War. The subsequent discussions of Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite focus on the

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native histories of each park and the ways that preservationist ideals shaped policies of Indian removal or exclusion. Although the early history of Yellowstone demonstrates a close connection between the evolution of national parks and that of Indian reservations, Glacier presents a maturation of these two related but conflicting institutions. Both Yellowstone and Glacier served as important models for later preservationist efforts, and each one indirectly inspired the policies of Indian removal developed at Yosemite in the 1930s. Native residence in Yosemite Valley developed from a number of unique conditions, but park officials sought to emulate conditions in other national parks once the presence of Indians proved too exceptional. Although Indian removal has largely made these parks into American symbols of wilderness, continued restrictions on native use of park lands remain an important point of contention between many Indian tribes and the Department of the Interior. For that reason, I end this study with a chapter that connects the histories of these three parks with current concerns about nature preserves and indigenous rights throughout the United States.

As America's holiest shrines, national parks reflect a whole spectrum of ideas about nation, culture, and even natural origins. The examples of Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite national parks clearly illustrate these tendencies. The early history of these parks also demonstrates how different groups, with opposing ideas about the importance of a particular place, often expressed their concerns in remarkably similar terms—and were often motivated by similar needs and historical processes. While culturally distinct and with radically different ideas about wilderness and place, Indians and non-Indians have both looked on national parks as crucial to their political, cultural, and even spiritual identity. So far, this similarity has provided only the common ground on which to base a series of (p.8) profound disagreements. If anything, national parks serve as a microcosm for the history of conflict and misunderstanding that has long characterized the unequal relations between the United States and native peoples. As common ground, however, national parks might also provide an important arena of understanding and resolution—and it is toward that goal that I devote this book.

Notes:

(1.) Lawrence Kip, The Indian Council at Walla Walla, May and June, 1855 (Eugene: University of Oregon, 1897), 22.

(2.) John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (New York: William Morrow, 1932; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 9. Badlands National Monument was authorized by Congress in 1929, enlarged in 1936 and again in 1976, and redesignated Badlands National Park in 1978. For a longer but more accurate rendering of Black Elk's words, see Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather: Black

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Access brought to you by:

Elk's Teachings Given to John G Neihardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 288–290.

(3.) Quote is from the Yellowstone Park Act, U.S. Statutes at Large 17(1872):32– 33.

(4.) In some respects, Grand Canyon National Park also fits these basic criteria; see chapter 9.

(5.) For an excellent example of the many recent studies on how native peoples altered and “domesticated” the physical landscape, see Thomas Blackburn and Kat Anderson, eds., Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians (Menlo Park, Calif.: Ballena Press, 1993).

(6.) William Cronon, “The Problem with Wilderness,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 78–79; William Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 369–385; Michael Frome, Regreening the National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 225–227; Gary Paul Nabhan, “Cultural Parallax in Viewing North American Habitats,” in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995), 87–101; and Barbara Deutsch Lynch, “The Garden and the Sea: US. Latino Discourses and Mainstream Environmentalism,” Social Problems 40 (1993): 108–125.

(7.) This term was used in the text for historical exhibits in Mammoth Visitor Center and Lake Yellowstone Lodge, Yellowstone National Park, summer 1997.

(8.) Public Law 88–577 in U.S. Statutes at Large 78 (1964): 890–896.

(9.) See, for example, Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, 3d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 53.

(10.) For two excellent studies of changing land use practices on reservations, see Melissa Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and David Rich Lewis, Neither Wolf Nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).