MICHAEL YATES wrote:
Full at http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org
<http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/>
In light of the interest in the national parks of the United States
generated by Ken Burns' <http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/> new PBS
documentary, I thought that readers might be interested in what I wrote
about the parks in my book, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist’s
Travelogue. I will have some additional thoughts after I view the entire
series. I welcome reader comments. I have placed some new explanatory
remarks in brackets. The Addendum provides a sketch of one of the main
National Park concessionaires.
**
*Whither Our National Parks*
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/indian/blackfoot.htm
I want to conclude this article with an examination of an obscure moment
in American history that involves the Blackfoot and the environmentalist
movement. It is, as far as I know, one of the first instances of
eco-imperialism on record and evokes more recent clashes between outfits
like Sea-Shepherd and the Makah, or Greenpeace and the Innuit. The facts
on this appear in Mark David Spence's "Crown of the Continent, Backbone
of the World: The American Wilderness Ideal and Blackfeet Exclusion from
Glacier National Park," an article in the July, 1996 edition of
"Environmental History."
The eastern half of Glacier National Park was once part of the Blackfoot
reservation and the tribe insists that an 1895 treaty allowed them
certain ownership privileges. These lands are of utmost importance to
the Blackfoot because they contain certain plants, animals and religious
sites that are of key importance to the cultural identity. The federal
government considered the land to be one of its "crown jewels" and
thought that the Blackfoot would tarnish it through their intrusions.
This separation between man and nature of course goes against Indian
wisdom. The park founders idea of "wilderness" owed more to European
romanticism than it did to the reality of American history. The
indigenous peoples and the forests, rivers and grasslands lived in
coexistence and codetermined each other's existence thousands of years
before Columbus--the first invader--arrived.
The mountains within Glacier National Park contained powerful spirits
such as Wind Maker, Cold Maker, thunder and Snow Shrinker. One of the
most important figures in Blackfoot religion, a trickster named Napi or
Old Man, disappeared into these mountains when he left the Blackfoot.
The park is also the source of the Beaver Pipe bundle, one of the "most
venerated and powerful spiritual possessions of the tribe." "Chief
Mountain, standing at the border of the reservation and the national
park, is by far the most distinct and spiritually charged land feature
within the Blackfeet universe."
While pre-reservation life was centered on the plains and bison-hunting,
the resources of the mountains and foothills contained within the park
were also important to their livelihood. Women and youngsters dug for
roots and other foodstuffs in the parklands at the beginning of the
spring hunting cycle. At the conclusion of the bison hunting season,
which was marked by the Sun Dance ceremony, the various bands would
retreat to the mountains and hunt for elk, deer, big horn sheep, and
mountain goats. They would also cut lodge poles from the forests and
gather berries through the autumn months. All of these activities were
as important to them spiritually as economically. By denying them this,
the park administrators were cutting them off from something as sacred
as the whale is to the Makah.
What gives the banning of the Blackfoot from Glacier National Park a
special poignancy and sadness was that its architect was none other than
George Bird Grinnell. Grinnell was not only a park administrator, but a
friend of the Blackfoot. He won the trust of Blackfoot story-tellers and
this allowed him to put into print the "Blackfoot Lodge Tales." Although
Grinnell said in the preface to the collection that "the most shameful
chapter of American history is that in which is recorded the account of
our dealings with the Indians," this did not prevent him from declaring
Glacier National Park off-limits to a people he supposedly admired. Of
course, without any self-consciousness he also states in this preface
that "the Indian is a man, not very different from his white brother,
except that he is undeveloped." Also, "the Indian has the mind and
feelings of a child with the stature of a man." When you stop and
consider that Grinnell was a leading supporter of American Indian
rights, it is truly frightening to consider the depths of racism that
must have existed during the late 1800s, when he was collecting his
tales from the Blackfoot while banning them from the park.
Spence has an astute interpretation of Grinnell's contradictory
attitudes. He says that for Grinnell the parks represented a living
resource for American civilization. It would be a place for tourists to
come and take photographs of the natural splendors. As for the
Blackfoot, they were an important part of America's past. They would
live on through the "Blackfoot Lodge Tales" and dioramas at places like
the Museum of Natural History.
Spence concludes his article with a description of how the clash between
park administrators never really went away:
"By 1935, relations between the Blackfeet and the National Park Service
had reached an impasse that remains in place to this day. On one side,
the park service, tourists, preservationists largely made Glacier into
the uninhabited wilderness that continues to inform potent ideas about
nature and national identity. Blackfeet use of park undermined this
idealized notion of wilderness and the tribe's resistance to Glacier's
eastward expansion limited its physical expression. Tension between
Indians and the park service subsided over the next few decades, but the
issue of Blackfeet in the eastern half of Glacier never disappeared.
"By the 1960s, few Blackfeet actually hunted near the park, and fewer
still went to the mountains to gather traditional plant foods and
medicines. But the continuing importance of the Backbone of the World
never depended on how many people went to the mountains. Although the
Glacier region provided the tribe with a large portion of its physical
sustenance in the 1890s, the issue of Blackfeet rights in the area
always reflected concerns about cultural persistence and tribal
sovereignty. In conjunction with the 'Red Power' movement of the 1970s,
these concerns arose again as Blackfeet leaders pushed for recognition
of tribal rights in the park. Their efforts met strong opposition from
both park officials and environmentalists, who resisted the Blackfeet
'threat' as fervently as they did plans to mine coal and explore for oil
in the park. The state of near-war that once characterized relations
between the Blackfeet and park officials resurfaced in the early 1980s;
the two sides only narrowly armed conflict on several occasions.
Ultimately, continued Indian protests, ongoing risk of violence, and
Blackfeet proposals for joint management of the eastern half of Glacier
forced the National Park Service to revisit issues its leaders had been
buried in the 1930s."
A program for sweeping social and economic change in the United States
has to put indigenous rights in the forefront. If the Indian is the
canary in the mine, whose survival represents survival for everybody,
then no other group deserves greater solidarity. Part of the enormous
job in allying all the diverse sectors of the American population
against an increasingly reactionary and violent government is explaining
that the Indian comes first. This means that Sea-Shepherd and Greenpeace
activists must understand that preservation of the "wilderness" makes no
sense if the Indian is excluded.
The best way to restore the United States to ecological, economic and
spiritual health is to reconsider ways in which the pre-capitalist past
can be approximated in a modern setting. Just as it makes sense for the
Makah to use whatever weapons they deem necessary in pursuit of the
whale, it might make sense for the entire northwestern plains states to
be returned to the bison under the stewardship of the Blackfoot Indian.
They have a much better track record on taking care of resources than do
the agribusiness corporations who despoil the land for profit. Timothy
Egan thinks that this makes sense, as does Ernest Callenbach, the author
of "Bring Back the Buffalo: A Sustainable Future for America's Great
Plains." (Island Press, 1998) I will conclude with his suggestion for a
new relationship between indigenous peoples and the land and animals
that were once theirs:
"The basic Indian goal is the reestablishment on the reservations of the
natural ecological balance or reciprocity among humans, plants, and
animals that existed before Euro-American occupation. On the Plains, a
restored population of bison would be a sign that things had been put
back together again on a sustainable basis. As Fred DuBray puts it, 'We
recognize that the bison is a symbol of our strength and unity and that
as we bring our herds back to health, we will also bring our people back
to health.' In Mark Heckert's view, this could be called sustainable
agriculture 'because you can get what you need to survive without
inordinately disrupting the system,' and the result would be
self-governing tribes in which the bison are thriving again, the
ceremonies have been revived, and the bond between Indian people and the
bison has been reestablished. At Pine Ridge there is an ongoing program
of teaching stewardship: grandparents go into the schools and explain to
the children that all the parts of the natural order are necessary and
interrelated; they pass on the store of traditional knowledge that has
been kept in the memories of the elders of the community The comeback of
the sacred bison--and, more specifically, the appearance of a
one-in-a-million white bison--would 'mean a spiritual recharge for our
people,' as Alex White Plume puts it. 'There's talk locally that the
time is approaching, so people are beginning to get ready, learning the
old songs and revitalizing the ritual that they need to go through. It
might be within the next ten years. I hope it's during my time.'"
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