07: America’s Best Idea
Often praised as "America's best idea," the origin story of the national parks is largely incomplete.
Trail Weight is produced and written by Andrew Steven. Our Story Producer is Monte Montepare. Executive produced by Jeff Umbro and The Podglomerate.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker's books "As Long as Grass Grows" and "All the Real Indians Died Off" are available online.
Transcript
Note: Transcripts have been generated with automated software and may contain errors.
[Theme Music]
Andrew: I’m Andrew Steven, and this is “Trail Weight,” a podcast about hiking outdoors and the lessons learned along the way.
On today’s episode, we’re stepping off the trail for a moment—and we’ll be back to the hike on the next episode—but today, we’re taking a break to talk about what we often hear referred to as “America’s best idea.”
President Barack Obama: [Fades in] What’s been called America’s best idea: Our national parks...There’s something sacred about this place. [Fades out]
The origin story behind the US’s national parks seems to always tell the story of seemingly mythical men.
President Barack Obama: [Fades in] It’s no wonder, then, that 150 years ago, President Lincoln first protected the ground on which we stand. [Fades out]
Andrew: George Bird Grinnell, Teddy Roosevelt...
President Barack Obama: And then Teddy Roosevelt, who called the great trees here a “temple grander than any human architect could possibly build--” [Fades out]
Andrew: And the namesake of the trail we were currently on, John Muir.
President Barack Obama: [Fades in] …spent a whole bunch of time camping around here with John Muir. [Fades out]
Andrew: And like President Barack Obama just said, they saw these “sacred spaces” and the need to preserve and protect them for future generations, so people like me could come along and hike through them many years later.
I remember watching through Ken Burns’ national parks series on PBS a few years ago and thinking about how wonderful an idea the national parks were, and how grateful I had been to be able to visit them.
[“The National Parks”] Ranger Shelton Johnson: [Fades in] The first time I arrived in Yellowstone I got off the bus, right off the north entrance, and there’s that wonderful stone arch that says “For the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” It doesn’t say “For the benefit and enjoyment of some of the people, or a few of the people.” It said “All of the people,” and for me that meant democracy, and for me that meant I was welcome … [Fades out]
Andrew: As a kid and now as an adult, visiting these public lands is something I find myself doing a lot.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: You know, 48% of the land in the Western United States is public lands, and much of that—probably most of that—taken illegally from Native people. [Fades out]
Andrew: This is Professor Dina Gilio-Whitaker. We heard her briefly on an earlier episode, and she is a writer, scholar of Indigenous studies, and a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: I interact with park service people in various ways. And, uh, it's-- it seems to be becoming more frequent. … There's a recognition that things are askew. There's inaccuracies of the history—the injustices—and needing to really look at “how do we take a different approach to land management” and with an eye toward justice.
Andrew: Professor Whitaker and many others have been saying that the way we’re running our national parks has been keeping this false narrative alive.
This week we’re talking with Dina Gilio-Whitaker to find out the truth behind…
President Barack Obama: ...America’s best idea...
Andrew: But first...
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: I well, you know-- I grew up in LA. So when you grow up in LA, you like, one way or another, you're going to get involved in beach culture.
Andrew: Yeah.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Well, maybe not everybody because not everybody has equal access to the ocean. But still, growing up, my parents, you know-- we went to Santa Monica Beach during the summer times on the weekends and, you know, in the sixties and-- you know, wave riding was pretty much what we did when we could get to the beach.
And so later I moved to Hawaii in 1980, it was in my early twenties and I moved to the North Shore of Oahu, not knowing I was moving to the epicenter of the surf world. I mean, I literally didn't know that.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: I had moved there for a whole other reason involving a guy. And, um, and-- And so, while I was there living in Haleiwa in the epicenter of the surf world, I did what you do when you live on the North Shore, because there's nothing else to do, and that's learn to surf.
Andrew: Yeah.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: You know, for the two and a half years that I lived there, I ate, breathed, and lived surfing and the lifestyle. And I moved back to California after two and a half-- three years, and kept surfing. But then I fell out of it. I moved to Northern California to the wine country. I wasn't very close to the ocean. And the ocean was really, really cold--
Andrew: I was going to say it's a lot harder to-- to get out in the ocean when you're in Northern California.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: It's really, yeah-- It just pretty much ended surfing for me for 25 years. Like literally, I did not surf for 25 years. And so I reconnected with an old boyfriend from my North Shore days who was living in San Clemente. Long story short, I married him. I'm married to him now, and that was 11 years ago. So, I got back into surfing and I was living in New Mexico at the time and in grad school-- And so I got back into surfing while I was visiting him here in San Clemente. So I’ve just been surfing again. So I restarted surfing at age 50.
Andrew: That’s awesome.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: And I'm 62 now almost 63 and I still surf.
Andrew: When she’s not surfing, Dina Gilio-Whitaker authored the books, "As Long as Grass Grows" and "All the Real Indians Died Off" as has written a lot about environmental justice and the false narratives about Native Americans. Though, surfing is still an important part of her life.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: And I've incorporated as part of, really, my research agenda. There's this whole-- Coincidentally, there's this whole emerging scholarship that seems to be booming. And it's exploding with regard to, uh, you know, what's being called “Critical Surf Studies.” So, I just used the opportunity to do, like, research from the perspective of settler colonialism. Like, so there's like-- It's a whole other conversation that is way beyond “Surfing USA” and--
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: You know, getting the “stoke,” and like all of that. So, um, there's all these, you know, very diverse perspectives that people are bringing into the scholarship. And I bring my perspective as an American Indian woman looking at the history of surfing. So a lot of what's happening with it is that surfing is being rewritten, you know, and corrected, really, from a century of-- full century of these really, uh, incorrect, very limited narratives that have been written from the perspective of white men.
There's a predominant narrative in surf history that emerged from the turn of the 20th century with a character named Alexander Hume Ford, who partnered up with Jack London, the literary writer, right? This American literary, uh, icon, um, who had gotten-- One of the things he was famous for was going to Hawaii-- sailing to Hawaii on this boat called The Snark—which he wrote a book about—and learned to surf with Alexander Hume Ford there. And they kind of came up with this plan that they had said, you know, “Hawaiians allowed the sport to die.” That's literally how they narrated it. “They allowed the sport to die. Thus, because we are now resurrecting the sport. We are saving the sport.” So it's a total white-- great white hope narrative, white savior narrative.
Andrew: Yeah.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: And they pretty much made this up. There was only a kernel of truth in it. And the kernel of truth was that surfing—standing up on boards, riding boards standing up—was pretty much gone. But it was really, it turns out due to the research of Native Hawaiian scholars who could mine Hawaiian language archives to find out the veracity of those claims—It turns out that, yes there was a decline in surfing around Honolulu at that time, and it had to do with population collapse. Not because Hawaiians, you know, like, just got bored with it and gave it up after, you know, 1500 years of surfing. It's-- It's directly related to this population collapse due to foreign diseases that they fail to mention. And also the fact that in the outer parts of the, like Oahu and the other islands, these surfing traditions are still happening. But what gets recorded in the historical narrative by white, male journalists for a century, like this story is repeated over and over and over, it's taken for granted that surfing gets saved by Alexander Hume Ford and Jack London.
The way history, in general, is told, it always begins with-- with white people, with settlers.
Andrew: Mmhmm.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: You know, with-- with people who come to a landscape that is empty somehow.
Andrew: Yeah
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: And certainly this is the case with-- with surfing's. But the fact of it is that it could not have happened the way it did without the ethnic cleansing that had just been completed just within a couple of decades prior.
Andrew: And this is just one “discovery” of many of things that had already been “discovered.” And “America’s best idea” of discovering and preserving these “wilderness parks” are no different.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: I mean, it-- it begins with the idea of how we understand wilderness and wilderness being a place free of people.
Andrew: In his book “Dispossessing the Wilderness” author Mark David Spence links the creation of national parks with the US federal policy of Native American removal. He writes that the first quote-unquote “wilderness” areas that the government wanted to protect had to first be created. Not only were the areas Indigenous-occupied, but the idea of an uninhabited wilderness was an invented concept.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Wilderness is always wild places with wild animals and plants, and there's no people there. And, I mean, the whole reason this concept of wilderness gets invented-- well, for one thing, that's connected to the virgin soil mythology that this is a deep part of American history and American narratives. That's all about justifying the foreign invasion into-- And then legitimizing the violent displacement of Native people. [Fades out]
Andrew: Commonly thought of as the father of the national parks and a major proponent of conservationism and environmentalism, John Muir irreparably altered and changed the ecosystem of one of the first national parks, Yosemite.
Before John Muir even set foot there, the Ahwahneechee people lived in the area we now know as Yosemite for at least 3,500 years. But Muir’s conceived idea of wilderness didn’t involve humans. In the Wilderness Act of 1964, wilderness is defined as, quote “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is absent” unquote. The American idea of wilderness did not exist, it had to be created. Muir would go on to write that he found the Indigenous people he met to be, quote “most ugly, and some of them altogether hideous” unquote. And in Yosemite, he would add, quote “they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass.” unquote.
Perhaps unfathomable to Muir, these quote-unquote “strange creatures” as he described them, were the very people responsible Yosemite’s quote-unquote “landscape gardens” that he so praised.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: So, there's two different things going on here. Like, on the one hand, like, oh, it's virgin — The continent is a Virgin wilderness, right?
Andrew: Yeah.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: But then there's all these narratives and stories and journals of early, you know, arrivants about their interactions with Native people. And how, I mean, even in, you know the-- There's recognition about how the creation of the US Constitution is influenced by Iroquois people. So there's like these two competing narratives that somehow nobody seems to question. But-- but it's still this-- this idea as populations explode, especially in the east with all these waves of migration, especially during the 1800s, you have an urbanization, the growing up of cities and the shrinking of natural space as leads to this like national angst about growing pollution in-- in these urban areas. And, you know, it coincides with the closing of the frontier, right?
So the Western expansion is now complete. There's this whole romanticization that goes with these pioneering stories and, you know, “the wild west” and all of that stuff. And California becoming a state in 1850, the west is finally closed. And so there's-- that's part of like the ainst, you know, like no more romanticizing about the wild west and intrepid pioneering and all that stuff. Now it starts to become like, we need to start protecting, you know, what's left of these wide-- wide open spaces. And now it's about, you know, wise land use. The, you know-- This concept of wilderness gets, you know, further entrenched in the national imagination. Um-- And as Mark David Spence says, you know, by 1872, when Yellowstone is created under the guise of protecting wilderness, like at first it has to be created this wilderness and how do they do it by running people off the land that have been there since time immemorial.
Andrew: Conservation is often talked about as preserving nature in its natural state and to have as little impact as possible.
Andrew: It's so easy for me to sort of see how like, one can fall for the sales pitch of conservation. But then when you take a step back, like you're saying, it's, you know-- who are making these decisions? You have to create wilderness first in order to conserve it. And it's-- it's almost like it's a-- a new form, or a hidden form of, again, of colonialism.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Yeah. And it's really a reflection of a very, very different orientation to space and to land and to the natural world. Like, to have this category you call “wilderness,” which is separate from humans, is something that Native people would not have recognized. And you often hear people say that we don't have a word for wilderness in our language, because there was no view of being seen as separate from that, right? In a-- in a worldview that's relational, right? You are part of-- part of the natural world. So, um-- So it's like comparing apples and oranges. And the tensions between those two worldviews to this day are what hampered legal protections for Native American sacred sites, outside reservation boundaries.
Andrew: So when you-- when you hear, like, a phrase like “public land,” like, what do you hear, or what does that-- what does that mean to you?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Public land is just stolen Indian lands. I mean, that-- that's what they are. These are-- For Native people, these are homelands. There is no place on this continent that wasn't Indigenous lands that people did not occupy or use on a regular basis. When settlers came, you know, they came into these spaces that they didn't always see people in, but that was because the people weren't using the land in the ways that Europeans would recognize.
Andrew: Yeah.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Meaning like, really densely populated permanent structures attached to the land, through regimes of private property ownership. Like they couldn't grok that. And so, already coming onto the land with these ideas that they were superior to begin with because of their really messed up ideas about land, then Native people with their relational worldviews that didn't really conceive of ownership in the same way that Europeans did. It was easy to justify in all these ways, the violet dispossession that happens later.
[BREAK ]
Andrew: In the summer of 2020, partially in response to the murder of Geroge Floyd by the Minneapouls Police, and the protests that follwed, and the removal of Confederate monumnets, the Sierra Club released a statment titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments.” In it, they write:
“The Sierra Club is a 128-year-old organization with a complex history, some of which has caused significant and immeasurable harm. As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”
“It’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history.”
Andrew: The Sierra club, like put out a thing, talking about, we need to tear down our monuments, and--
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: Yeah. I got contacted by more than one person about that. You know, I mean, I think it was because of the uprising and it's-- in some ways it's surprising, but the movement has also been building in the Big Green industry and they do this-- they evaluate themselves like these big green organizations. They’re-- They evaluate themselves for their diversity and equity. So they're not unaware. They have not been unaware that they have an image problem around whiteness. [Laughs]
Andrew: [Laughs]
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: And so it was not surprising that-- that John Muir would be taken to task because scholars had been taken to task for years.
Andrew: Yeah.
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: This is not a new conversation.
Andrew: In their piece, the Sierra Club admitted that John Muir, on of the clubs founder members, “made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes.” And that “Muir maintained friendships with people like Henry Fairfield Osborn, who worked for both the conservation of nature and the conservation of the white race” and “also helped found the American Eugenics Society in the years after Muir’s death.”
And they go on to write that, “Other early Sierra Club members and leaders -- like Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan -- were vocal advocates for white supremacy and its pseudo-scientific arm, eugenics.” Jordan “pushed for forced-sterilization laws and programs that deprived tens of thousands of women of their right to bear children -- mostly Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and poor women, and those living with disabilities and mental illness. He cofounded the Human Betterment Foundation, whose research and model laws were used to create Nazi Germany’s eugenics legislation.”
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: So Aldo Leopold, I mean, he was a contemporary of John Muir, but he was-- he idolized John Muir and he's kind of considered the father of modern conservation. He goes to school in-- in the 1920s. Goes to school at Yale in the Yale Forestry program. And he becomes famous and he works for the federal government, like right after coming out of Yale. And then he-- he starts teaching and he was a prolific writer. And, you know, he's just like idolized. He's, he's-- His work is like part of the canon of the conservation world. And he's celebrated as sort of revolutionarily changing the world of conservation from what they call “utilitarianism” to this perspective of how we utilize the land, or use the land in ways that are destructive or constructive. You know, he has this awakening and-- and he writes this essay called the “Sand County Almanac,” and he writes about the “land ethic” in there. There's this-- it’s this famous thing, like, the “land ethic.”
And it's because he has this epiphany about humans are, you know, we-- We are part of a biotic community. So he starts seeing that humans are not separate from nature. That humans are “plain members citizens--" this is the language that he used, “plain members citizens” of it. And so he gets celebrated as having this radical new, like, worldview, but-- But it's like Native people have been living that way for thousands of years. Like that's how-- what it is to be like-- to live sustainably within particular ecosystems. And so there's all this work being done by scholars, and they're saying, well, you know, some, some people have said, “oh, he was, he was influenced by Native Americans. And you know, that it shows in his work…” But there's really no evidence for that. And that's actually pretty offensive for Native people to hear that for a variety of reasons.
But it's like, why does a white guy who has this, you know, change of mind, you know, in the 1940s and, you know-- he is celebrated the world over for it. But, you know, Indigenous people have always lived that way. And-- and yet it's our knowledges that get erased, that get considered inferior. They're, you know-- we're just “ignorant, savages,” all of that stuff. So, Aldo Leopold is getting knocked off his pedestal, just like John Muir is, and that's going to keep happening as we continue to interrogate these long standing white celebratory mythological people narratives.
Andrew: The lingering effects of Muir and Roosevelt and the Wilderness Protection Acts have institutionalized the idea of “wilderness” as places always in need of protection and that should be free from human presence. But as Professor Whitaker writes in her book, “ As Long As Grass Grows,” quote “this logic completely evades the fact of ancient Indigenous habitation and cultural use of such places.” end-quote She goes on to say that, quote “When environmentalists laud ‘America’s best idea’ and reiterate narratives about pristine national park environments, they are participating in the erasure of Indigenous peoples, thus replicating colonial patterns of white supremacy and settler privilege.” end-quote
Andrew: So what does that mean for national parks moving forward?
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: I interact with park service people in various ways. For example, I've been involved in an organization called the Upstander Academy, and we do professional development training for teachers. So what we do is we train them in reframing the narratives in American historical narratives and look at it through the lens of genocide, like teaching a really straight forward, this is really the actual history of this country. And you know, of course there's these environmental elements that we incorporate into that. And so we had some high-level national parks service people in that training last year, and we continue to interact with them.
You know, I'm cautiously optimistic about what I see as far as the desire to want to change things. And I think this Land Back movement is definitely going to continue to loom large.
Andrew: Returning public land—stolen land—back--
Dina Gilio-Whitaker: There's many different ways that we can look at that-- the restoration of lands to Native people can happen. It can happen through land trusts. It can happen through conservation easements. It can happen through co-management agreements. Tribal parks are another way that I see that. So all these different kinds of arrangements, the ways that that can happen.
Andrew: In 2021, the US just swore in our first Native American secretary of the interior.
Vice President Kamala Harris: I, Debra Haaland--
Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland: I, Debra Haaland--
Vice President Kamala Harris: --do solemnly swear--
Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland: --do solemnly swear--
Vice President Kamala Harris: --that I will support and defend--
Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland: --that I will support and defend-- [Fades out]
Andrew: And a big part of the job as secretary of the interior is managing national parks and public land.
Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland: [Fades in] I will honor the sovereignty of tribal nations and recognize their part in America’s story. And I’ll be a fierce advocate for our public lands. I believe we all have a stake in the future of our country. [Fades out]
Andrew: For some, giving the land back seems too big, too difficult, or, unfortunately, too unlikely. But people said the same thing when the US first started the national park movement, many thought it was too big of an idea that wouldn't ever work, with too many things standing in its way. But it happened. And maybe it can happen again.
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