Crown of the Continent, Backbone of the World: The American Wilderness Ideal and Blackfeet Exclusion from Glacier National Park

Abstract

The creation and early management of Glacier National Park in the 1910S and 1920S reflected the maturation of American ideas about wilderness as scenic playground, national symbol, and sacred remnant of Nature's original handiwork. These years also marked a heightened interest in the vanishing Indian, and the Blackfeet, whose reservation borders the park on the east, became an important feature in early park promotions. Although the presence of Indian dancers in front of the park's grand hotels tantalized visitors who had come to meet noble [Indians in]...their native home, park officials vigorously enforced a series of programs that excluded the Blackfeet from the rest of the park., The importance of Indians to the Glacier tourist experience seems odd when juxtaposed with policies that banned Indians from the Glacier backcountry, but this apparent irony holds an internal consistency when viewed in terms of early twentieth-century ideas about Native Americans and wilderness. As past tense Indians, those Blackfeet men and women who entertained tourists appeared to be living museum specimens who no longer used the Glacier wildernessif, indeed, they ever had. On the other hand, those Indians who continued to use the park illegally seemed simply un-American in their lack of appreciation for the national park and almost barbaric in their unwillingness to let go of traditional practices. The eastern half of Glacier National Park once was part of the Blackfeet reservation, and the tribe has long maintained that an 1895 agreement with the United States reserves certain usufruct rights within the park. Conversely, the Department of the Interior has argued repeatedly that the Glacier National Park legislation of 1910 extinguished all Blackfeet claims to the mountains on their reservation's western boundary. The impasse stemmed from two very different conceptions of Glacier's wilderness, both rooted in powerful ideas about national identity and cultural persistence.