Drive Tribal People out, Keep Wild Things in
Built on anti-Indigenous violence, the Yosemite model started in the U.S. then spread around the world.
As the Land Rover neared the Talek Gate leading into Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve — the northern reach of the legendary Serengeti plain and its vast migrating herds — a crowd of people appeared alongside the road. They milled around several corrals holding dozens of cattle guarded by uniformed rangers with assault weapons slung across their backs. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t wild, and it wasn’t anything I’d expected to see.
“What’s happening?” I asked Robert Njapit, the Maasai guide.
“Those people and their cattle got caught last night inside the reserve,” Robert explained. “So now they pay a fine to get their animals back. Tonight they’ll do it again. They’ve been grazing their cattle here since longer than anyone can remember, and now they can’t. They see no good reason why.”
This happened in the summer of 2011, and my know-it-all white dude self of the time could have told Robert why: that’s how national parks work. People don’t belong, wild critters do, and the only way to preserve the sanctuary is to establish boundaries and protect them against incursion, by force if necessary. It’s known as fortress conservation, a.k.a. the Yosemite model, and since the early 20th century it’s been a leading paradigm for national parks and preserves around the globe. From the fortress conservation perspective, an American ecotourist like me belonged in Maasai Mara, while those Maasai herders and their cattle did not.
Not that it has to be this way. Indeed, the national park idea originated from a distinctly different vision.
When George Catlin, the well-known student and painter of Native America, was traveling in the Dakotas in the early 1830s, he was appalled by the rapacious slaughter of bison for the buffalo-robe trade and the destruction of the tribes of the Great Sioux Nation (Očhéthi Šakówiŋ) by rotgut alcohol. Extinction of both beasts and peoples seemed inevitable. Catlin envisioned a way out of this destruction that lay in the landscape itself.
He saw little agricultural or settlement potential in the grassy plains that stretched from the Mexican borderlands to Canada’s Lake Winnipeg. Instead, they could serve a higher, wilder purpose:
It is here, and here chiefly, that the buffaloes dwell; and with, and hovering about them, live and flourish the tribes of Indians, whom God made for the enjoyment of that fair land and its luxuries.
The great prairies, with their teeming wildlife and tribal nations, could be protected as they were:
They might in future be seen (by some great protecting policy of government) preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness, in a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes…. What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages! A nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!
Henry David Thoreau had a notion less ambitious than Catlin’s but similar. He saw wilderness as something civilization needed: “the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.” The kings of England set aside preserves for hunting, impelled by the instinctual draw to wildness. So, Thoreau asked:
Why should not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist and not be “civilized off the face of the earth?”
Exactly forty years after Catlin’s epiphany on the prairie, when Congress passed and President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill that made Yellowstone the first national park, even Thoreau’s less expansive vision had dimmed to but a glimmer. The law aimed to set aside this huge region of nearly 3,500 square miles as “a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” meaning Euro-Americans. It outlawed anyone from settling or occupying the reserve. Violators, the law declared, “shall be considered trespassers and removed therefrom.” That provision explicitly barred the Indigenous peoples Catlin and Thoreau had considered part and parcel of their vision of “a nation’s Park.”
The Yellowstone paradigm arose from received wisdom unquestioned in the early 1870s. Purportedly the park was never more than thinly populated by tribal nations who had little interest in its resources; the only full-time residents were the lowly, primitive, terminally impoverished Sheepeaters (Tukudikas); Plains tribes steered clear of the place for fear of its geysers, hot springs, and fumaroles; and the establishment of the park ended all Native interest in the Yellowstone Plateau. None of these tales was accurate. A long list of tribal nations traveled through, camped, hunted, fished, foraged, and sought visions in Yellowstone: Crow (Apsaalooke), Blackfoot Confederacy (Natsitapii), Salish (Sqelixw), Kootenai (Ktunaxa), Bannocks (Bana’kwut), Nez Perce (Nimiípuu), and Shoshone (Sosoni). As for the Sheepeaters, they practiced a vibrant culture well adapted to living on the snowy plateau all year long. Yellowstone’s thermal displays raised no unusual fears among the tribes, who were as interested in the plateau after the park was established as they had been before. After all, the ancestral tribes had been present in the area for well over 9,000 years.
Native Americans’ lives had changed legally just the year before the Yellowstone law was signed. The Indian Appropriation Act of 1871 declared that Native American tribes and nations were no longer political entities to be dealt with by treaty. At the same time, the United States’ reservation policy aimed to turn the tribes into slowly vanishing, post-conquest relics. The Yellowstone law boosted this trend. It made tribal nations not a part of nature, as Caitlin and Thoreau imagined, but unworthy throwbacks who lacked histories and cultures able to withstand the challenge of advancing Euro-America.
John Muir agreed: sacred wilderness had to be defended against the invading secular. When God sent Adam and Eve packing, he stationed cherubims armed with a flaming sword at Eden’s entrance to keep them from slipping back in. Muir advocated this Biblical strategy for the Sierra Nevada high country:
One might reasonably look for a wall of fire to fence such gardens…. As far as I have seen, man alone, and the animals he tames, destroy these gardens
Muir made it clear, too that Indigenous people had nothing to do with the natural world at the core of the park idea. Dirty and debased in Muir’s eyes, the tribes “seemed to have no right place in the landscape.” He wanted to preserve the land itself, freed from tribal clutter, and open it to exploration, adventure, and spiritual quest by Euro-Americans, not habitation, subsistence, or ceremony by Native Americans. Only then could unfettered nature achieve its greatest glory as a pristine zone of recovered Eden where tourists and adventurers might open their souls to the world as God created it.
To make sure it happened that way, Muir and his allies had to convince the U.S. Congress to declare the preserve, ,build the ramparts and call out the troops. That’s where we pick up the story next week.
Fortress Conservation in Full Color
The environmental magazine Grist gives the graphic novel treatment to fortress conservation and brings home the vivid horror it is. Do have a look.
Upcoming Cast out of Eden events
Sunday, Sept. 29, 12:45 p.m., Berkeley Society of Friends: I'll be talking about the book, John Muir, and the foundations of the national park system in person at the meetinghouse, 2151 Vine St. (near Shattuck), Berkeley, CA 94709. Free and open to all.
Saturday, Oct. 5, 2 p.m., Orinda Books: I'll be reading from Cast out of Eden, answering questions and comments, and signing copies at this in-person event at Orinda Books, 276 Village Square, Orinda, CA 94563. Free and open to all.