Artist George Catlin traveled to the American West and painted Native Americans in their homelands, before the land was carved up into towns, farms, and ranches. He envisioned land set aside to stay in the condition in which he found it, complete with the settlements of the tribes who lived there. His idea of allowing outsiders to come in and see the Native Americans was exploitive at best, although what ended up happening was hardly better. They were almost completely displaced.
Today, the foundational myth of America’s National Parks revolves around the heroic preservation of “pristine wilderness,” places supposedly devoid of human inhabitants that were saved in an unaltered state for future generations. This is obviously a falsehood: Places like Yosemite were already home to thriving communities that had long cherished—and changed—the environment around them. Catlin’s paintings are vivid reminders that the vast expanses of our western frontier were not empty, but rather brimming with human cultures.
Though the National Park Service prevented wholesale industrialization, they still packaged the wilderness for consumption, creating a scenic, pre-historical fantasy surrounded by roads and tourist accommodations, all designed to mask the violence inherent to these parks’ creation. More than a century later, the United States has done little to acknowledge the government-led genocide of native populations, as well as the continued hardships they face because of the many bad-faith treaties enacted by the U.S. government. This story is an elemental part of our National Park system, the great outdoor museum of the American landscape, but the myth continues to outweigh the truth. How did the National Park Service evict Yosemite’s indigenous communities and erase their history, and can it come to terms with this troubling legacy today?
While the latter is a theoretical question, the story of how the National Park system grew while completely discounting those who lived there is told at Collectors Weekly.