dispossessing the natives: US National Parks are born

The US national park system was created in 1872 when Congress gifted Yellowstone National Park in the territories of Montana and Wyoming to the American public as a “pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” and placed it under control of the Secretary of the Interior. Not much regard, of course, was given to the tribes who had been living and hunting on this area for generations — the Tukudika, for example, who called this land home and were forcibly evicted. Evidently, they didn’t qualify as part of the “American” public.

As a young country without the architectural grandeur of old European cities, the US saw the institutionalisation of their awe-inspiring landscapes as an answer to the urban superiority of other nations. More parks soon followed when President Theodore Roosevelt created five new parks, 18 national monuments, four national game refuges, 51 bird sanctuaries, and over 100 million acres of national forest between the years of 1901-1909.

A main driving force behind the advocacy for these parks were naturalists like John Muir, the founder of the conservation group Sierra Club, whose writing on the beauty of the land was prolific and widely distributed. In Muir’s view, the preservation of nature and human inhabitants were incompatible. In 1889, when pushing for the protection of the “untouched wilderness” of Yosemite, Muir disregarded how the Ahwahneechee tribe were already stewarding the land and living in harmony with it. In fact, his description of the Ahwahneechee people he encountered was far from sympathetic, characterising them as “most ugly, and some of them altogether hideous.”

Muir’s vision for the American wilderness wasn’t the only ideology in circulation. In Ethnic Cleansing and America’s creation of National Parks, Isaac Kantor writes that “the first articulation of the 'national park' theme was expressed by Western artist George Catlin. Catlin wanted to preserve the landscape in its entirety, including the animals and people living upon it. Therefore, he wished for the creation of a ‘nation's Park containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty!’."

Muir’s vision for conservation prevailed and, according to Kantor, “the Department of Interior’s stated purpose for Yellowstone’s existence was the preservation of the wilderness (animals, fish, and trees), to be enforced by the military, which was already aggressively pursuing resistant Indians throughout the Plains.”

conservationism as neocolonialism

Muir’s idea of preserving the unpeopled wilderness became the dominant ideology behind conservationism — and its deeply racist principles were then transported to colonies. National parks in colonies were overseen by groups of white colonisers with racist ideas of indigenous populations as primitives who were harming the wilderness with their very existence. As a result to ‘conserve’ a national park area, indigenous people were forcibly removed from their ancestral land, fragmenting cultures and destroying livelihoods. As the parks were managed by wealthy white colonists, the culture of trophy hunting was transported to colonies, where Africa’s spectacular megafauna became sought-after prizes.

In Elizabeth Garland’s essay, The Elephant in the Room: Confronting the Colonial Character of Wildlife Conservation in Africa, she writes that “Robust as certain kinds of western discourses about African nature may be — images of golden savannahs teeming with animals but devoid of human beings, and of Eden-like jungles, innocent in the face of an onslaught of African humanity — numerous scholars have shown how such representations have more to do with the West’s historical relation of domination over Africa than with the realities of African environmental history and practice.”

This colonial ideology continues today. with colonial countries exerting their dominance through financial and geopolitical power plays. In reference to the 2002 formation of Gabon’s national park system, which was financed to the tune of $53m by the US government, Garland demonstrates that the establishment of national parks can be a trojan horse to establish neocolonial control of huge amounts of land and natural resources. She writes “The areas designated to become parks will continue to belong legally to Gabon, of course, but if the experience of other African countries is any indication of things to come, the international conservation community will henceforth expect to have a stake, and a say, in the parks’ management and use. Further, the new park system is very likely to have a detrimental impact on many Gabonese people — more than one quarter of whom are employed in the nation’s logging industry, that is said to earn fifty million dollars annually from the trade in bushmeat.”

Within white-run national parks in former colonies, structural racism is rife. Safaris led by white guides are often more expensive than those led by native people, whilst professional mobility within the park system is often capped at a certain level for non-white park staff. In Garland’s words “the influence wielded over national conservation priorities by donors and investors based in Europe and North America are taken for granted as more or less inevitable features” of neocolonial national parks.

The financial disparity between the wealth of rich Global North funders and Global South governments is exacerbated by the long-term effects of the relentless resource extraction and destruction that took place under colonialism. This power dynamic ensures that land continues to be seized from former colonies under the guise of aid and conservation.

To this very day, the ideology of white-saviour conservationism can function as an enabler for the marginalisation of indigenous people across the world. The Guardian, writing about the Central Kalahari game park in Botswana, provides a chilling account of how, “for the past 20 years, the San tribe have been systematically stripped of their homes, land and culture. In a series of heavy-handed evictions, houses have been burned, schools and health centres closed, and water supplies cut off. Now these people live, dispossessed, on the edge of the huge game park, forbidden to hunt in or enter the land they have lived on sustainably for centuries. Meanwhile, one of the largest diamond mines in the world has been allowed to open in the park, and wealthy big game hunters from abroad are welcomed to newly constructed state-of-the-art game lodges.”

The San people are not an isolated case — tribespeople all over the world are affected, from Tanzania, to Mongolia, from Chile, to Sri Lanka and beyond. Western conservation groups often have a role in financing and enabling these human rights abuses. The Guardian reports that “dozens of cases of human rights abuses [have been documented] in central Africa in 2016, where up to $500m had been spent by the US, EU and other western donors to protect the … rainforest.”

To release the stranglehold of neocolonialism and white saviourism, control of these protected lands should go back to the indigenous people who have nourished and depended on them for centuries. And this is not only a matter of justice — it’s also one of efficiency, as studies have shown that communities with full legal rights to their land protect nature through traditional ecological knowledge that is as cheap as it is effective.

the great outdoors is #sowhite

Within the sphere of US national parks, there is also the question of inclusivity. A National Park Pass costs $80 per person per year which is a huge outlay for any struggling families. Add to that the petrol cost, which is especially high for working class people living in urban centres, and there is a built in exclusivity which dictates the demographic of people likely to visit the parks regularly. The result is that 78% of park attendees are white.

This lack of inclusivity has given rise to groups like Outdoor Afro, who aim to make national parks more diverse spaces by organising meet ups for black people who want to experience nature. They also provide training for those who want to work in the park service to help disrupt the whiteness of the national park service’s employees.

Other initiatives like Black Birders Week host week-long series of online events to platform black nature enthusiasts and to increase the visibility of black birders, who face unique challenges when engaging in outdoor activities. One student who attended the series tweeted “The lack of diversity in STEM has led me to question my capabilities and my place in biology. #BlackBirdersWeek has truly reinvigorated and reassured me that I’m not alone. I can do this, & I BELONG HERE.”

The question then becomes how do we move forward with a park system that protects wild areas from resource exploitation, but also promotes accessibility while providing reparations for past injustices. In the US, the National Park Service released a report in 2001 titled “Rethinking the National Parks for the 21st Century” recommending seven principles, including to “actively acknowledge the connections between native cultures and the parks, and assure that no relevant chapter in the American heritage experience remains unopened.” It’s a good place to start — hopefully, the beginning of a longer conversation that can make a real change.