Mark David Spence: Unpacking the colonial roots of how national parks were established (ep292)
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Mark David Spence joins us in this episode to discuss:
the colonial roots of the establishment of national parks in the United States;
the misguided conceptualization of the "pristine wilderness" devoid of Indigenous cultural influence;
what it means to “de-nationalize” our seemingly proprietary national wildlife reserves; and more.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Raye Zaragoza (IG: @rayezaragoza, Spotify: Raye Zaragoza)
“Wilderness is a good way to problematize our relationships with the past, with other peoples, with each other, with the natural world… there is no wilderness; there are only cultural landscapes.”
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Here’s Mark on the establishment of Yosemite National Park:
“The first national park on earth was Yosemite, and it was essentially Yosemite Valley at the time as well as Hetch Hetchy Valley, which is another valley to the north.
The word ‘discovery’, as applied to Yosemite, was from a militia that had gone up to go kill the people who lived in Yosemite Valley under the presumption that they were harassing gold miners further downstream—in the foothills as opposed to up in the mountains. This was in the 1850s.
By the 1860s, the romantic notions and this magnificent grandeur of the place led people to want to create a park that could not become private property. The primary definition of a national park is public land—it can never be owned by anybody. It can only be owned by the public, but the public narrowly defined—tourists and consumers of images of the place.
As Yosemite developed, the primary aesthetic—or even spiritual approach—to the place was that it was sublime, and the sublime is basically a manifestation of the divine. That becomes the template of how people experience national parks: They’re sublime landscapes.
Over time, that sublimity gets reified in the concept of the nation: ‘We are such a blessed nation that the divine has chosen to create this eruption of the sacred into the world, and it’s our world. It’s ours to see, and we all own it.’
It becomes extraordinarily proprietary, and it functions in a cultural context that has no meaning to Native peoples.”
About Mark
Mark David Spence (Twitter: @markdavidspence ; Facebook: @mark.spence.372661) is a public historian, a consultant, and a visiting professor in the Oregon University System. For the past several years, he has been the sole proprietor of HistoryCraft, where his work is largely focused on historical studies for the National Park Service.
Before moving to Oregon, Spence was an Associate Professor of History and Chair of American Studies at Knox College in Illinois. His scholarship and teaching focused on comparative and cross-disciplinary approaches to U.S. environmental, western, American Indian, and Latin American subjects.
Spence is the author of Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, a highly influential book that examines American conceptions of wilderness, Indian removal, and the creation of national parks in the U.S. from the 1870s to the 1930s.
