Zion National Park, Utah
(evenfh/Getty Images) The park system is, even with its bloody past in tow, a national endowment not another front in the expanding culture wars.
What happens when the cultures of a great melting pot can no longer abide the historical sins of one another? The question is hardly theoretical. The Middle East provides an immediate answer: Resentment and warfare in perpetuity over territory, tribal affiliation, religion, and past wrongs.
Yet that question is applicable in surveying the brush fire of grievance that has broken out in the U.S., gradually but inexorably, in recent years. This month,
Return the National Parks to the Tribes David Treuer
Image above: Glacier National Park, in Montana, as seen from the Blackfeet Reservation, near Duck Lake.
This article was published online on April 12, 2021.
I. The End Result of Dirty Business
In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view,” he later wrote. “A peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears.” Many of those who have followed in Bunnell’s foot