Good for Whom? Olmsted, Parks, and Public Good
Adding Contexts of Settler Colonialism and Systemic Racism
National Parks and Settler Colonialism: Yosemite National Park and Indigenous Resistance Then & Now
National Parks, like Yosemite National Park, have facilitated Indigenous dispossession and genocide. The Ahwahneechee resisted the United States, and many nations have ancestral connections to the Ahwahneechee and the land that became Yosemite National Park.
Olmsted wanted to preserve natural landscapes for the public. This seemingly good intention resulted in unconscionable violence and both physical and cultural genocide of Indigenous Peoples. The U.S. Federal Government and white settlers were destroying the environments where Indigenous nations were living to starve or displace them.
Critical Inquiry: What have you previously heard or learned about Seneca Village and historical affluent Black communities in the United States? What does their destruction tell us about who parks and other "public good" projects and institutions were intended for?
How can digital scholarship projects help us understand what life in Seneca Village was like? What projects did you find illuminating?
Different groups have worked on honoring Seneca Village and preserving its legacy. If you were a designer for Central Park, how would you propose preserving Seneca Village's history?
Seven Surviving Nations with Ancestral Connections to Yosemite National Park
Yosemite National Park cites seven nations with ancestral connections to the land Yosemite National Park occupies, including Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation (see their "Archival Research & Useful Links" for more information about how the creation of Yosemite National Park dispossessed Indigenous peoples), Bishop Paiute Tribe, Bridgeport Indian Colony, Mono Lake Kutzadikaa, North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians of California, Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians, and the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians.
Each of these linked sites offer their nation's histories as told from their governments.
Intermountain Histories Project offers a digital tour entitled "Native American Removal from National Parks," which includes a brief history of the removal of the Ahwahneechee. This research was curated by a student at Brigham Young University.
Intermountain Histories is a free mobile app and website that provide scholarly information and interpretive stories of historic sites and events around the Intermountain West regions of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Hosted and managed by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, the collaborative project features carefully researched histories developed by students and professors in classroom settings from universities around the Intermountain West.
Native Land is an app to help map Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages. Using the map's search function, you can input park addresses like Yosemite National Park or Elm Park to view the Indigenous territories that the parks occupy.
Author: Mark David Spence
National parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier preserve some of this country's most cherished wilderness landscapes. While visions of pristine, uninhabited nature led to the creation of these parks, they also inspired policies of Indian removal. By contrasting the native histories of these places with the links between Indian policy developments and preservationist efforts, this work examines the complex origins of the national parks and the troubling consequences of the American wilderness ideal. The first study to place national park history within the context of the early reservation era, it details the ways that national parks developed into one of the most important arenas of contention between native peoples and non-Indians in the twentieth century.
Historian David Treuer (Ojibwe) made the case for returning the National Parks to Indigenous nations as part of The Atlantic's 2021 series entitled "Who Owns America's Wilderness?" You can access his article, "Return the National Parks to the Tribes: The jewels of America's landscape should belong to America's original peoples" online.
In this interview with PBS News Hour, Treuer expands on his ideas, stating, "It's actually not a very radical idea to give them to tribes to protect, and not only to protect from sort of environmental degradation and overcrowding and all the other things that parks deal with, but to protect from the very government that created them in the first place."
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