Remembering What the Parks Forgot

I often straddle divides, which can become rather uncomfortable at times—forever betwixt and between. At one point I was an Upper Skagit who wore the green and gray uniform of a National Park Service ranger. My felt ranger hat hangs on the wall in my university faculty office to this day as a reminder of that period in my life. It reminds me that I have changed over time, history has changed over time, and the National Park Service has changed too.

America’s best idea, as Wallace Stegner coined it, contained other hidden and sometimes sinister implications. Many of the “crown jewel” national parks predate the 1916 creation of the National Park Service (NPS). In 1910, half of the Blackfeet Reservation was lopped off to help create Glacier National Park, as historian Mark David Spence documented in Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (2000). While the land may have been Indigenous, the title was held by the federal government, which was loath to let Native people live on it. The Blackfeet were so close to Glacier and so far from God in the view of the US government.

After the creation of the NPS, a concerted campaign began to erase Native people from the history of the parks. The government had their reasons for this. Mostly the NPS saw Native people and their claims to the national parks as nuisances or as spoiling the Anglo-American views of “pristine” wilderness. I use pristine in a tongue-in-cheek manner, since at that time the government also hired landscape architects to shape the parks and scores of hunters to cull herds of bison and elk and annihilate predator species such as wolves. Of course, early park boosters also built grand lodges, railroad terminals, and roadways, but these were for the “right sort” of visitors—namely wealthy, influential, and largely urbane Americans. Native American residents spoiled the view.