The Dark Side of Environmentalism

Mark David Spence. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. vii + 190 pp. Pictures, notes, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

Environmental history has from its inception born the mark of the environmental movement, drawing much of its inspiration and many of its questions from contemporary ecological issues. Nowhere is this clearer than in studies of the creation and management of nature parks and wilderness areas. Environmental historians generally present these places as self-evidently "natural" or "wilderness" areas, unaffected by humans and appealing precisely because of their distance from the forces and institutions of modern life. Most historical treatments of such areas are triumphalist tales in which environmentalists or their conservationist predecessors struggle to "preserve" nature in the face of materialist efforts to exploit natural resources.

Mark Spence's study of the connections between wilderness ideology and Indian removal takes square aim at this tradition. American travelers may have thought places remote from major population centers to be empty, but in fact even the most seemingly wild areas had long histories of use and habitation. Spence shows how the federal government removed Indian peoples from three flagship national parks--Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier--and later obscured the history of their occupancy. "Uninhabited wilderness," he proclaims, "had to be created before it existed, and this type of landscape became reified in the first national parks" (p. 4). The expulsions, he argues, "became precedents for the exclusion of native peoples from other holdings within the national park system . . . [and] as the grand symbols of American wilderness, the uninhabited landscapes preserved in these parks have served as models for preservationist efforts, and native dispossession, the world over" (p. 5). Where tourists saw iconographic scenery and reflections of national character, Indian peoples experienced the state's creation and management of "natural" areas as another aspect of their conquest and subordination.

The human use of what became national parks left abundant archeological and ecological signs. In the Yellowstone valley, dispersed bands hunted large game, birds, and fish, and harvested seeds, roots, and berries since the end of last ice age. Different peoples mined the region's large obsidian deposits, trading the rock (useful for making blades and tools) across the Rocky Mountains and beyond. The abundant hot springs and geysers seemed to intrigue past residents as much as later tourists, for their immediate environs contain numerous archeological sites. Seasonal burning may have kept large areas of savannah free of trees and stimulated the growth of particular berries, tubers, and game habitat. The people now called Shoshone moved into the Yellowstone area by the end of the fifteenth century. When American settlers and armed forces expanded into the Northern Rockies and Great Plains in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, Blackfeet, and other peoples would seek to maintain access to Yellowstone's backcountry. Similarly, groups of Salish-Kootenai, Kalispel, Crow, Atsina, Nakota, Cree, and Assiniboine frequented the backcountry of what became Glacier Park. Yosemite Indians lived in the valley that bore their name for more than six hundred years, and possibly as long as three thousand, relying on trout, game, sweet clover, roots, acorns, pine nuts, fruits and berries for their sustenance.

The presence of Indians was more than a matter of history for early park managers. How they confronted and ultimately eliminated most Indian occupancy and use from the areas under their charge forms the bulk of Spence's book. Although Bannock and Shoshone hunters were initially able to avoid tourists in Yellowstone, by the 1880s the Army officers in charge of the park concluded that they had to go. "[E]fforts . . . to protect the remnant of the large game of this country and the growing timber in the National Park and adjacent regions," as park superintendent Captain Moses A. Harris wrote in 1889, could not be implemented as long as the park "afford[ed] summer amusement and...