National parks are beautiful—but the way they were created isn’t
On the other hand, it’s probably better than human zoos of Native Americans
On August 25, 1916, 100 years ago, President Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service by establishing a new bureau in the Department of the Interior. Know what other bureau has always sat right alongside it? The Bureau of Indian Affairs.
This is no small coincidence. The two departments were not only closely situated, they were closely related in a “dual island system” of nature preserves and Indian reservations. We tend today to think of our national parks as sprawling natural treasures, gifted to our country by the government, starting with Congress’ Yellowstone Act of 1872, spurred on by the interests and legacy of Theodore Roosevelt. The Yellowstone Act began a global national park movement, for which we are very grateful today, as scores of travelers enjoy the majestic wilderness and natural preserves they protect.
But there’s a whole lot they didn’t protect at all.
All of these lands were once inhabited by Indian tribes, whose claims to ownership the federal government either ignored, invalidated, or did not recognize. In Indian Country, God’s Country, historian Phil Burnham describes how many of America’s most beloved national parks were carved out of land originally belonging to Native Americans, or intended as reservations: Glacier, Badlands, Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. These chunks of land were forcefully taken from the Native American communities that lived within them as part of the United States government’s larger efforts to relocate and remove them.
Yellowstone is the perfect example. Congress “gifted” this stunning stretch of 2.2 million acres to the American public. The Yellowstone Act passed quickly and without much debate because the land was so far west, and so unknown, that very few people had seen or knew anything about it, said park historian Lee Whittlesly — only a few fur trappers and gold prospectors had begun to explore the area thought of as one of the last bastions of “uninhabited wilderness” to be discovered by white settlers. But of course, it wasn’t uninhabited at all: a total of 26 indigenous tribes are believed to have lived on what they still consider sacred land.
From very early on, the park’s conflicted history with its indigenous communities was apparent. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone Act into law in 1872, describing the “natural curiosities” and “wonders” that would be protected were “hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale… and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people; and all persons who shall locate or settle upon or occupy the same, or any part thereof, except as hereinafter provided, shall be considered trespassers and removed therefrom.”
Quickly after the park was established, Whittlesly describes white superintendents trying to make the area “safe” by removing “primitive savages” from the park, claiming they didn’t live there to begin with as they were afraid of the geysers. Those claims were completely untrue; in fact, the Yosemite Indians — as well as Sheep-eaters and Mountain Shoshone tribes — lived on and revered the land, and many others also considered the geysers to be sacred. Tribes such as the Crow, the Blackfeet, the Flatheads and the Kiowa would travel through the land as well at other points of the year, for hunting or in search of obsidian for arrowheads.
Making the land safe wasn’t the least of the problems for the Native American tribes. In a “park” now protected and preserved from “the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said park, and against their capture or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit,” how were the tribes to eat, sleep, hunt, gather food, light fires? They weren’t. Forced off the land now considered a natural preserve by the government, Indians were once again removed from their ancestral home.
In Dispossessing the Wilderness, Mark David Spence recounts the peoples’ “ejection” to make way for park tourists. This was far from a smooth process. In 1877 an infamous incident called the “Nez Perce War” arose, when the U.S. government pursued several bands of the Nez Perce tribe into the park in a series of violent battles, between 2,000 federal soldiers and 700 Nez Perce, over the tribe’s relocation from Oregon to Idaho.
One of these large battles took place in Yellowstone. Two different groups of tourists, totaling about 15 travelers, fell into encounters with the Nez Perce. One tourist was killed, two suffered serious wounds; the rest of the tourists either scattered into the forest or were given the protection of Nez Perce Chief Joseph and taken back to their camps, then given horses and released to find the United States cavalry. Chief Joseph would ultimately surrender several months later, at the Canadian border. This incident, of course, was vividly recounted in the press, and only intensified the need to “make safe” the area; rumor had it that General Sherman himself had been a tourist in the park just a few days earlier.
The irony is that the very idea of Native Americans was part of the original inspiration for our national parks. In an uncomfortable twist of protectionism, painter George Catlin — famous for his Indian portraits and paintings of American wilderness, and one of the first voices advocating for national parks — expressed his belief that Native Americans should be protected as well. Or was it… preserved?
As Keller and Turek point out in American Indians & National Parks, “[I]n 1832, when Catlin conceived the idea of preserving the West in its ‘pristine beauty and wildness’ by creating ‘a Nation’s Park,’ he had hoped to protect the culture of Plains Indians as well as to preserve grasslands, wolves, and buffalo… ‘One imagines…by some great protecting policy of government…a magnificent park, where the world would 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 elk and buffalo.”
Sounds an awful lot like a… zoo?
Keller and Turek go on to note that “tribes today contain 50 million acres; the Park Service controls approximately 80 million.” Which begs the question: is it worse to be removed from your ancestral land, attacked, humiliated, wounded, even slaughtered, and dumped somewhere hundreds or thousands of miles away? Or to be exhibited and preserved in your “natural splendor” for visiting tourists to enjoy?
