Marginal Voices in “Wild” America: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and “Nature” in The National Parks

Abstract

Introduction The preservation of land as national parks has been arguably the most successful feature of nationwide increase in awareness, referred to as the greening of America. The many and varied units in the national park system provide collective reassurance that, despite excesses in other areas, the people of the nation understand the value of nature in its purportedly pure and wild form. At the same time the parks are viewed as both repositories and expressions of cultural ideals that illustrate U.S. Americans to be unified people: as one nation, under God as expressed in the spectacular majesty of American landscapes, and defined by democracy in the form of public ownership and collective wisdom. Americans have for generations drawn upon these values to promote cherished cultural mythologies of uniqueness and exceptionalism. This connection between nature and core American values is expertly presented in The National Parks: America's Best Idea, produced by renowned documentarian Ken Burns and presented nationwide on public television in 2009. The twelve-hour-long series, divided into six episodes, provides rich and detailed chronology of the emergence and development of the park system from its precursors in the mid-nineteenth century through the extensive Alaska additions to the system achieved by 1980. Two key themes run throughout the series and structure its narrative. First, while the national park system comprises variety of holdings that represent both natural and cultural/historical values, the major emphasis in The National Parks is on pristine and sublime landscapes and the cultural meanings generated by their preservation. As such, the portrayal is grounded in what cultural studies scholars Ziser and Sze call environmental nationalism, tapping into what they refer to as a longstanding American cultural celebration of pristine and wild environments (390). The second theme expresses that the national parks are created for and are available to all of the people of the U.S., asserting an explicitly multicultural image of park creation, management, and visitation. Borrowing historian Wallace Stegner's remark that the creation of the national parks is America's best idea, Burns goes to great lengths to remind viewers that America comprises social and cultural mosaic of multiple races and ethnicities that all made important contributions. Burns appears to want to shake viewers out of common preconceptions that only elite, white men acted to create parks, or that it was almost exclusively white, middle- and upper-class families that desired the pilgrimages to spectacular national park sites like Yellowstone or Yosemite. To this end, The National Parks presents the untold of women and men alike from Native-American, African-American, Hispanic/ Latino, and Asian backgrounds that contributed to park histories. These stories from the margins are woven into broader narrative that tells more familiar tales of better known characters like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. According to the film's narrative, this multihued collection of rich, poor, and middle-classes produced the national park system that U.S. Americans have come to appreciate, celebrating diversity while unifying America through the parks' connections of God, country, and family. Despite its compelling portrayal, however, the two themes in The National Parks, of sublime nature and of multiculturalism, are meshed together in manner that sidesteps more challenging engagement with race and ethnicity (see also Jacoby). The prominent placement of these issues in the series begs several questions that are left unaddressed. For instance: Why are these stories marginal to national parks history in the first place, or put another way, why are national parks viewed as the realm of the white, middle- and upper-classes? How does one explain persistent patterns of relatively low visitation by racial and ethnic minorities to the national parks and other wildland spaces? …