May 17, 2019
Hello ,
Here's something to chew on if you plan to visit a National Park this summer.
At the foundation of America's National Park system is the false premise that sections of land, so-called pristine wilderness, should be saved in their original state for the enjoyment of future generations.
The problem being, that almost all of the national parks were not "wilderness" but the homelands of indigenous people for thousands of years before Europeans arrived on the continent.
Natives call them Land Grabs
Visitors flock to our national parks to see an idealized natural landscape that in most cases denies the actual history of these unique and stunning places.
The scene below, painted in 1872 by Albert Bierstadt, shows the Mariposa Indian Encampment in what is now Yosemite National Park in California.
The Yosemite Valley supported thriving communities whose people cultivated the land and managed the forests with controlled burns.
Systematically, Native Americans were removed, either by killing them or forcing them to new locations.
Different native peoples lived in the the Yosemite Valley over the last millennia, but by the mid-1800s, the Southern Sierra Miwok primarily inhabited the area, though members of the Northern Paiute and Mono people also prospered there.
When President Lincoln first set aside the area for public use in 1864, much of the local indigenous community had already been killed by a state militia group, the Mariposa Battalion, as a part of what is today known as the Mariposa War.
Yosemite opened for visitors in the 1860s and officially became a national park in 1872. Over the following decades as tourism boomed and development burgeoned, the indigenous residents of the valley assimilated into the community of whites working in the park.
At left: Unidentified Paiute woman doing laundry in the Yosemite Valley. Photo by John P. Soule, 1870. Courtesy California State Library.
Tony Brochini, a descendant of the Southern Sierra Miwok was born and raised in Yosemite and worked for the National Park Service for 38 years.
“The hope of the Park Service was that the Indian community in the village would assimilate into the work culture,” Brochini says. “You either worked for the concessionaire or you worked for the government, and that was part of my legacy, working for the National Park Service as my father and grandfather did before me.”
The Yosemite Park museum timeline display includes the 1851 invasion and murder of indigenous residents by the U.S. cavalry, but Brochini suspects most visitors are unaware of the sustained mistreatment of Native Americans by the National Park Service. “The interpreters don’t talk about that stuff,” Brochini says. “They don’t tell the real story.”
Indian Field Days became popular with whites visiting the park in 1910-20s. Employees living in the native village in the park were dressed up in Plains Indian headdress and costume and paraded around on horses to act out white conceptions of native life.
Ed DesRosier, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Nation in northwestern Montana, wanted sight-seers at Glacier National Park to learned the indigenous history of the icy glaciers, craggy peaks and deep forests.
He wanted to tell the stories of the Blackfeet people for whom the mountains and rivers had been sacred. But the corporation running concessions in Glacier refused to give DesRosier a license to offer tours.
When he went ahead on his own, DesRosier was arrested and spent years fighting in court before finally being allowed to legally run his tour company focused on the indigenous history of the park.
The eastern half of Glacier was once part of the Blackfeet Reservation, the official boundaries laid out by the federal government in the Lame Bull Treaty of 1855. Then in 1895, with sights on gold and copper reserves the feds negotiated a new agreement with the tribe, which was now at serious risk of starving due to depleted buffalo herd.
The Blackfeet believed they were leasing the land to the U.S. government and retaining hunting and gathering rights, but when Glacier became a national park in 1910, all tribal rights were revoked.
Now the Blackfeet tribe is considering asserting its place in the region's history, by turning a large area of its remaining reservation adjacent to Glacier into a tribal-run national park. This would help protect natural resources in the region
and provide economic opportunity to tribal members in the area.
There is one other national park located inside an Indian Reservation: Canyon de Chelly National Monument is comprised entirely of Navajo land and sustains a community of Dine' (Navajo) people.
The striking, sheer cliffs of Canyon de Chelly may appear harsh and barren, but natural water sources and rich soil here have supported indigenous people for thousands of years. The Ancient Puebloans cultivated corn, beans and squash 5,000 years ago, their descendants, the Hopi people raised families here and tended peach orchards and cornfields.
The National Monument was established in 1931, largely to preserve its rich archaeological sites and is managed jointly by the Navajo Nation and the park service. Dine' families continue to live here, raising livestock, and farming in the canyons.
Canyon de Chelly National Monument contains many examples of prehistoric rock art, and show above are the White House Ruins and Mummy Cave, remains of ancient Pueblo villages.
A plan for tribal management of a section of Badlands National Park in South Dakota has not yet come to fruition.
Nearly 250-thousand acres of rolling hills, dry grasslands and rimmed buttes form the Badlands near the Pine Ridge Reservation, possibly the poorest reservation in America.
The park is divided into two sections called the North and South Units. The North Unit of the Badlands run by the federal government has paved roads, marked trails, campgrounds, cabins and other amenities.
The South Unit jointly administered by the park service and the Oglala Sioux, or Oglala Lakota remains nearly inaccessible.
Plans have been floated for the tribe to take over full management of the South Unit, making it America's first tribal park, but so far, they have failed to get off the ground.
In 2015, the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian, and Pueblo of Zuni formed the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to advocate for the creation of a new national monument in Utah.
The following year, President Obama created the Bears Ears National Monument, with understanding that the land would be managed jointly by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, with input from a new commission, which includes a representative from each of the five tribes.
Though Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and President Trump have since attempted to pare down the size of Bears Ears, local tribes and conservation groups have filed lawsuits to block this encroachment.
It's obvious, we do want these amazing areas protected for future generations. But some parks, such as Yosemite and Yellowstone have actually been endangered by forest fire suppression over the last century. And pretending that these lands have always been uninhabited wilderness denies they stolen from people who had loved, honored and preserved them for thousands of years.
If you visit any of our treasured national parks this summer, see them clearly for what they are, one-of-a-kind, awe-inspiring examples of the natural world that had been cherished and revered under the stewardship of indigenous cultures for many more centuries than we've called them "parks."
I am totally thrilled at the wonderful review of Standing Up Against Hate that came out this week in the Children's Book Review. I especially liked this
part: "...this new volume skillfully demonstrates how prejudice and hatred for those deemed “other” by society – whether that means women, or African-Americans, or Jews – are not isolated problems, but connected issues which spring from a common root."
Also, thanks to Norm at the Daily Chronicles of World War II for highlighting May 14th, the day Congress approved the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps in 1942. (Including an interesting film produced by the U.S. War Activities Committee film explaining why women should be in the army.)
Had to share my lilac tree. It's
blooming up a storm this year! The fragrance is wonderful. They're come in full bloom for a week at most, so I spend as much time as I can enjoying it.
Thanks so much to those who wrote in last week to help me describe why gardening feels so good.
Quinn says, "Putting your hands in the dirt is restorative."
Karen added, "It grounds me. Same for weeding. I feel so good when the weeds are gone."
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To find out more about my books, how I help students, teachers, librarians and writers visit my website at www.MaryCronkFarrell.com.
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