history interpretation intervention
landscape possession
the naturalising of a nation definitions | tenure and ownership by desirée valadares
the tonic of wildness Cultural constructs of North American identity have long hinged on wilderness, the mythology of uninhabited nature, and the vastness of a virgin landscape. The idea of national parks as spaces of ecological purity and sources of national pride relate to the search for an authentic and unspoiled landscape. In 1995, William Cronon stirred controversy with his article, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’. He declared the time had come to rethink the very notion of wilderness which had served as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi- religious values of modern environmentalism rest. Wilderness environmentalism originated with ideology embedded in two intellectual movements: the Romantic Sublime and the Post-Frontier (Primitivist) philosophy. Western preconceptions of nature underwent sweeping changes in the nineteenth century; environmental philosophers — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopol and painters such as George Catlin from the Hudson River School (1820-1880), were instrumental in shaping cultural values and attitudes toward wilderness conservation. Their collective sentiments loosely informed The Wilderness Act of 1964, a historically important event in American environmental politics — ”A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognised as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The Wilderness Act of 1964 became a powerful legislative instrument to memorialise America’s wilderness heritage and
to enshrine vignettes of a primitive America symbolic of a once- virgin land. For Canada and the United States, the acquisition of territory for the creation of national parks remains a complex and deeply contested narrative that is virtually neglected. It is often overshadowed by the cultural rhetoric of wilderness, ecological integrity and associated landscape aesthetics – the picturesque, sublime and pastoral. Park histories often minimise race, class and gender consequences in order to promote national parks as a physical and political construction of the nation-state and as an imagined national unity that further silences alternative and difficult histories, including the bitter, emotional conflict and contentious debates over land use in heritage sites, protected areas and conservation districts. dispossessing the wilderness “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him…It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia and Siberia should pass out of the hands of the red, black and yellow aboriginal owners and become the heritage of the dominant world races” —Theodore Roosevelt. The Winning of the West , 1904 Sociologist Joe Hermer describes the ‘emparkment’ of nature associated with the creation of North American national parks as a vivid paradox. Conservation policy typically excluded the inhabitation of these landscapes and managed encroachment by strict law enforcement. This ‘pleasure ground ideal’ emerged not only from a twentieth-century tourist culture but was also deeply embedded in the institutions of colonialism
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R Js: the issue is big and broad, and the history, so often charted as beginning with Yellowstone, seems to me to be longer. Displacement, hunting restrictions, rhetoric of cultural superiority - echos of these policies for the control of wild spaces go back to feudal principles of land ownership under which hunting becomes characterised as something done for sport rather than sustenance. It is an understanding of wilderness as a place
But into these initial assumptions go a string of competing policies that take the wilderness and divide it up. Out of them you get, variously, crown lands, Z.E.C, provincial parks, national parks, designated wilderness areas (Canada), national parks, state parks, national forests (US, sample designations). S W: There is a history of land transfer in Canada between Department of Indian Affairs, Parks Canada and Department of Defence: reserves were established by treaty, but a lot of reserve land was requisitioned during
WWI and never returned. It either sat as DND land, or shifted to national or even provincial park land. First Nations protests during the 1990s often revolved around reclaiming reserve land (a slightly different issue from land claims where no reserve had been established yet). The Sarcee Reserve (now the Tsuu T’ina First Nation) attached to southwest Calgary had a portion appropriated by DND in 1915 for Camp Sarcee, which existed as such, a full Canadian Forces base, until its transfer back to the Sarcee Reserve after a long battle in the mid- 1990s.
with a restrictive idea of civilisation. In North America, and elsewhere (but especially here, the US being the country that invented the national park) these expectations about the purpose of uncultivated land encounter mythic, landscape-driven ideas of national identity (westward expansion, explorational legacies) and policies of displacement and genocide that free up vast swathes of previously inhabited territory to become ‘proper’ wilderness - land of leisure, away from the ‘human’ landscapes of city, town, and farm.
of leisure, of its maintenance for the
purpose of the pursuit of pleasures associated
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