A couple of years ago, when I could afford a lot more magazine subscriptions than I currently do, I read a lengthy essay in The Atlantic, an essay that made an argument for returning the national parks to the tribes.
Unlike the old days when I was in graduate school, I no longer have to commit to memory the name of the author and other details. As long as I can recall the main message, the thesis, of anything that I read, Google effortlessly helps me track down the essay or the book. I wonder how my different my graduate school education would have been had something like Google existed back then, and how different a student I would have been.
With Google’s help, I quickly pulled up that three-year old essay. It begins with a powerful image:
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.”
And then the came the sucker punch:
The Mariposa Battalion had come to Yosemite to kill Indians. Yosemite’s Miwok tribes, like many of California’s Native peoples, were obstructing a frenzy of extraction brought on by the Gold Rush. …
By the time the militia’s campaign ended, many of the Miwok who survived had been driven from Yosemite, their homeland for millennia, and forced onto reservations.
Thirty-nine years later, Yosemite became the fifth national park. (Yellowstone, which was granted that status in 1872, was the first.)
The author of that essay, David Treuer, is an Ojibwe Indian, through his mother, and is from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. Perhaps another reason why I remembered the essay is a rather trivial one: He teaches at the university where I earned my graduate degrees.
Treuer writes in that essay:
The national parks are sometimes called “America’s best idea,” and there is much to recommend them. They are indeed awesome places, worthy of reverence and preservation, as Native Americans like me would be the first to tell you. But all of them were founded on land that was once ours, and many were created only after we were removed, forcibly, sometimes by an invading army and other times following a treaty we’d signed under duress.
I was reminded of that essay about national parks when I read this commentary in Nature on the daunting uncertainties of climate change, in which the author writes:
The writer Amitav Ghosh is one of the world’s most insightful thinkers on climate, and a friend of mine. He has argued that existential fears about climate change are actually Western fears about the end of colonial power, because in much of the rest of the world — especially for Indigenous people — “catastrophe has already happened”. For people in richer countries searching for the right way to feel about the climate crisis, it’s worth pondering this.
The California gold rush and the ethnic cleansing of the Miwok from their homelands in Yosemite are a colonialism that is slightly different from the colonization that happened in, say, Indonesia or South Asia, in that here in the US it was settler colonialism. The same flavor was found in a few other places too, like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the former Rhodesia, Brazil, and Canada. (Am I forgetting any other country?)
Settlers, unlike the natives, have no real ties to the land, to the ecology. The indigenous people, on the other hand, lived in places like Yosemite by carefully tending to the ecosystem that helped them flourish for thousands of years. As David Treuer reminded us:
[John] Muir described the entire American continent as a wild garden “favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.” But in truth, the North American continent has not been a wilderness for at least 15,000 years: Many of the landscapes that became national parks had been shaped by Native peoples for millennia. Forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked plentiful to white settlers because American Indians had strategically burned them to increase the amount of forage for moose and deer and woodland caribou. Yosemite Valley’s sublime landscape was likewise tended by Native peoples; the acorns that fed the Miwok came from black oaks long cultivated by the tribe. The idea of a virgin American wilderness—an Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin—is an illusion.
Colonizers, settlers, do not have that kind of a relationship with the nature that is alien to them. In 2021, in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ghosh noted that “the settler-colonial models of violence and extraction are responsible for environmental collapse.”
Looking at Brazil, we have to remember that Brazil was a settler-colonial state. Of course, the model of settler colonialism in South America was somewhat different from that of North America. It was perhaps somewhat less interventionist with the landscape and so on. But Brazil was very much a settler-colonial country, and those practices and states of mind exist there in a very powerful way. Bolsonaro, and what he is doing in the Amazon, expresses that settler-colonial mindset just as much as Trump’s policies did in America. We can’t forget these realities and how they have been shaped by colonial pasts.
Consider this in The Guardian from two years ago:
Spanning horrific incidents of European settler colonial violence carried out across Asia, America, Australia, New Zealand and Africa, Ghosh maps out how the pillaging of those lands hundreds of years ago – and the systematic extermination of their indigenous people – laid the foundation for the climate crisis that threatens the world today.
“Why has this crisis come about?” said Ghosh. “Because for two centuries, European colonists tore across the world, viewing nature and land as something inert to be conquered and consumed without limits and the indigenous people as savages whose knowledge of nature was worthless and who needed to be erased. It was this settler colonial worldview – of just accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, consume, consume, consume – that has got us where we are now.”
By the time the colonizers left, the natives who formed the government and took over continued on with the same model, which is why, for instance, India’s Prime Minister after its independence, Jawaharlal Nehru proudly referred to the massive dam projects across the country as “temples of modern India.” The world, including India, had shifted from worshiping nature to worshiping everything that destroyed nature and human coexistence with everything all around us.
As Ghosh said: “In India especially, governing elites have completely accepted the settler colonial models, and are now trying to impose them upon indigenous forest dwellers, adivasis,”
In this blog-post in 2018, in the context of the modi government’s pursuit of economic growth at all costs, I noted the impact on India’s original peoples, the adivasis, and their ways of life.
Purnima, whose born name is Pukutti, comes from a hamlet deep in the forests of Niyamgiri, where her tribe has lived for centuries, rarely venturing beyond the market towns at the foot of the range. As a small child, she helped her mother sow the dongar, the shifting hillside plots from which the Dongria take their name. They grew millet, bananas, and beans, and at night the children watched for animals—wild dogs, bison, sloth bears, and sometimes tigers. For the Dongria people, “the mountain is God’s abode,” Purnima told me recently. “For many generations, we’ve worshipped these hills, streams, and trees.”
Worshiping nature used to be integral to the Hindu faith too, as I wrote in a more recent post:
In the traditional approaches in the various strands of Hindu faith, and among indigenous peoples across the world, there is plenty of nature worship. Mountains are sacred as are rivers and trees. Like how Mount Kailash, and the nearby Manasarovar Lake, are sacred to Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and the traditional Bon faith of Tibetans. Even killing the damn roaches troubles the really faithful ones. It is a tragedy that despite such messages in the religion, the devoutly Hindu nationalists care less about pollution and are far more interested in the pursuit of absolute power.
That kind of a relationship with nature is quite a contrast with the government actively encouraging bauxite mining in those very lands where the Dongria have lived forever. I ended that 2018 post with this:
It is a tragedy that the lands where indigenous people have lived for centuries are also the lands that are rich in resources that salivates the profit-seekers. Another resource curse!
Ghosh took the resource curse, a familiar economic concept, to a whole new level:
The people of the Banda Islands were among the first in history to experience this resource curse, but not the only ones. The Banda Islands had a botanical resource, but the people of the Americas had other resources — land, but also minerals and so on — and they were devastated by these resources in the same way that we see in the Banda Islands, where people were exterminated for them. This is when we see the rise of a particular kind of extractive ideology for which the whole world, the whole planet, is nothing but a series of resources. It’s not just botanical goods, it’s not just minerals, it’s human beings — and in fact I think it starts with human beings. It is when European colonizers find that they can dominate and control, buy and sell, large numbers of human beings that they extend this ideology to the entirety of the earth. What we see now is that the climate crisis or, if you like, the planetary crisis, is really nothing other than the global extension of the resource curse.
In 2024, where do we go from here?
Back to the Nature commentary:
The important thing is to remain engaged. That means recognizing that doom is a state of mind, and that uncertainty about the planet’s future is now just part of the human condition. It means doing our best to keep both the climate crisis and the many other dimensions of human and planetary well-being in our view at the same time, both in their global and local dimensions. It means trying to live our values in ways consistent with those realities, as well as we can understand them. And it means recognizing that science has a crucial part to play — but that science can only take us so far.
We have no choice but to be engaged. We also need to learn how to live within limited carbon budgets in our own personal lives, which means we need to rethink our consumption patterns. Finally, we need to get ourselves geographically rooted enough that we behave less like settlers and more like people who have lived in the area for thousands of years. It is not a bad idea to worship the mountains, the rivers, the trees, and everything in nature around us and consider them sacred, right?
Powerful message!