talesofthestarshipregeneration:
Bobrycki was calling attention to the fact that, long before Yosemite became a popular tourist destination, the Ahwahneechee Indians who resided in the region knew it as “Ahwahnee,” or “gaping mouth-like place.” During the Mariposa War in 1851, California soldiers “discovered” the valley while pursuing the Ahwahneechee. The soldiers expelled the Ahwahneechee and renamed their valley “Yosemite.” But the Ahwahneechee returned, and worked humiliating jobs entertaining tourists as “Indian performers” to remain in their homeland. The national park finally evicted the last of them and burned down their remaining homes in a fire-fighting drill in 1969.
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Historian William Cronon began unearthing the forgotten stories of indigenous peoples in the 1980s, followed by others like Mark Spence and Karl Jacoby. Their writings revealed the displacement hidden within enduring romantic ideas about national parks.
“Conservation is used as a tool of colonialism,” Jacoby told HuffPost. “Conservation is basically trying to say that ‘We the state and the state bureaucracies, have the appropriate knowledge to manage the environment in the best way,” rather than indigenous peoples and other prior inhabitants.
Jacoby’s first book, Crimes Against Nature, draws on case studies from the Adirondacks, Grand Canyon and Yellowstone to demonstrate the history of displacement that underlies American conservation.
“In the 19th century, there is a very strong critique of native environmental practices in a lot of the conservation literature that you read,” said Jacoby. “The only way you can come in and say ‘We [the state] need to manage this space and manage the environment,’ is you have to in some ways present the current managers of it — the native peoples — as incompetent.”
Native peoples, like the Ahwahneechee, however, did not leave their homes in the parks of their own accord and often had to be removed and kept away from their homelands by force. The United States Army, for example, was stationed at Yellowstone from 1886 to 1918 to keep out indigenous peoples and others with the threat of violence.
via @chicanochamberofcommerce
The Forgotten History Of ‘Violent Displacement’ That Helped Create The National Parks
The Carving Witch 