Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History
What has the psychic wound of racism resulted in?
Inevitably in wounds in the land, the country itself
What year did John Muir embark on his trip to Yosemite Valley?
1903
True or false: Visions of justice look the same for every cultural group and person who tries to hold the National Park Service accountable.
False
What was W. Otis Halfmoon’s job for Nez Perce National Historic Park?
An interpreter
How many visited Yosemite the first year after its public designation in 1864?
147 visitors
What group of people did the author say has presented more difficult problems for European colonizers than did Indigneous peoples?
African Americans
What did John Muir cofound?
The Sierra Club
What month is Native American History Month, and what has the National Park Service done to honor it?
November, they have featured Native stories on their website
What was the name of the park created to teach visitors about Nez Perce history and culture, Lewis and Clark, and the missionaries that came into Nez Perce Homeland?
Nez Perce National Park
What did Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane describe the National Park System as?
a “national playground system"
What did Thoreau include in his environmental ethic that Muir did not really include?
Humanity
What is the rest of the quote, “The worst thing about them is their…”
Uncleanliness
What does Joshua Tree National Park’s website say about Indigenous people?
It makes it seem as though they are only a part of history and ignores the fact that they still exist in the area.
What was the result of the partnership with the Pendleton Round-Up staff?
It brought together indigenous NPS employees from different parks and all different tribes
What is the foundational myth of America’s National Parks?
“pristine wilderness,” places supposedly devoid of human inhabitants that were saved in an unaltered state for future generations
During his “Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf,” how did Muir describe African Americans?
Some were well trained, extremely polite, and very civil but most were lazy and noisy
What is John Muir considered to be?
The father of the National Park System
What are two things the author says you should do next time you visit a national park?
1. Think about the peoples whose land you are enjoying 2. How to support their campaigns for reinstatement of rights or reparations
What was one of the biggest challenges for W. Otis Halfmoon while apart of the National Park Service?
Getting the Park service to say that almost all sites have a tribal story.
Indigenous Americans eventually began referring to treaties with the United States government as ______ because they learned the written contracts of European Americans were untrustworthy.
“bad paper”
Name one of the new ways to think about the relationship between race and environmental history.
slavery and soil degradation are interlinked systems of exploitation, Native Americans were removed from the lands they had managed for centuries, American Indigans and African Americans perciped wilderness in ways that differed markedly from thoes of white Americans, a coincidental order of injustice - blacks expectd to pay for land with wages at the same time that free lands taken from Indians were being promoted to whites, or African Americans broe the brunt of early forms of envrionmtnal pollution and disease
What caused the Ahwahneechee people driven out?
John Savage started a trading post, used and deceived the tribe, and incited violence that led to military occupation
What was the author taught about European Americans and wilderness as a child?
They struggled against the wild forces of nature and brought civilization and wealth to the West, and they were the ones to truly appreciate this country’s beautiful wilderness and preserved it.
According to Conner Tupponce (an indigenous employee of NPS), why does he feel that only “natives should work on native sites.”
Allows full transparency
What journalist we’ve already covered said, “We know they are not our equals; we know that our right to the soil, as a race capable of its superior improvement, is above theirs; and let us act openly and directly our faith. … Let us say to him, you are our ward, our child, the victim of our destiny, ours to displace, ours to protect. We want your hunting grounds to dig gold from, to raise grain on, and you must ‘move on.’ … when the march of our empire demands this reservation of yours, we will assign you another; but so long as we choose, this is your home, your prison, your playground.” (possibly add, “in his 1869 book Parks and Mountains of Colorado”)
Journalist Samuel Bowles