Tahoma and its People: A Natural History of Mount Rainier National Park. By Jeff Antonelis-Lapp

Abstract

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the cliché says, but Tahoma overlooking a verdant evergreen forest and a misty lake is a fitting visage for Jeff Antonelis-Lapp’s natural history of Mount Rainier National Park, because it visually conveys the mountain’s central place in Pacific Northwest ecologies. Antonelis-Lapp, a longtime environmental educator, has produced an engaging text that should be read by anyone with interests in Tahoma and the complex relationships that exist between its earth systems processes, regional ecologies, and human activities. Seven chapters are bracketed by an introductory essay, appendices, and a magisterial bibliography. Importantly, the introduction explores Antonelis-Lapp’s choice of toponyms. Antonelis-Lapp deliberately employs Indigenous toponyms throughout his writing to subtly destabilize settler-colonial assumptions about national parks as bastions of untrammeled wilderness. In doing so, he elevates Indigenous land use in park spaces as a persistent theme unifying the text, which is a welcome lesson for lay...