Yosemite National Park: Protecting Wilderness, Perpetuating Race

Tourists drive their automobile on through a tunnel carved in the Wawona tree Mariposa Grove Yosemite Valley California. June 15 1918. LC-USZ62-62098

When I think about the first experiences I had with nature, I think of the trips I took with my family to local parks. We lived in San Francisco, California for the first seven years of my life, and during those formative years we often visited Yosemite National Park. When I think back, I remember one time we pulled the car over and took out a paper map for directions, and I looked up to find a skinny waterfall hundreds of feet above me in the distance. I think of throwing pebbles at a tree with my older brother, Charlie. We stood with my parents in our bathing suits for a photo, me only a few feet tall, toddler tummy sticking out, grinning. I felt so happy, as if the world had given me a little piece of heaven. It all seemed so perfect.

Many people in California find pride in its natural beauty. However, not many people talk about how these spaces can maintain a way of perceiving race. It may seem counterintuitive. Yosemite National Park was created to conserve a beautiful natural space. Presently, anyone is allowed to visit the park, and there are few man-made structures that could enforce or create racial imbalances.

And yet still, it remains a majority white space. More white people visit American national parks in general than people of color. For example, in 1990 Black people made up 2% of the federal and state park visitors while representing 11.7% of the U.S. population (Hartmann & Overdevest 1990, cited in Krymkowski et al 2014). Many researchers site cultural differences, discrimination, and marginality (such as economic factors) as reasons for this disparity. However, the space perpetuates racism in ways beyond visitor representation. It is vital that we look deeper into the park’s history, surrounding culture and laws, and discourse regarding the park. With this knowledge, we can better understand the intersection between race and natural space.

Yosemite National Park works to reinforce white superiority and Native exclusion. Those throughout history who influenced the park’s identity promoted a mindset that nature and humans are separate, that Native peoples were inferior, and that the space must be improved to become civilized. Even more recently, these mindsets survive in the undercurrent of brochure language and other tourism media. Today, the park service has made more efforts to better include Native narratives and ownership in the space, but there is much work to be done. Therefore, even though Yosemite National Park is a preserved space, it acts dynamically to reinforce white domination.

Written Work About Yosemite

Yosemite National Park, established in 1890, is centered around a landmark, called Ahwahnee, or Yosemite Valley, in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Ahwahneechee tribe lived in Ahwahnee for at least 8,000 years (George 2018), but following two violent removals, one in 1851 by the military and another in 1969 by the fire fighting squad, nobody now lives in the space. Members of the tribe continue to fight for Federal Recognition and the right to use the land for cultural practices.

Since the discovery of Yosemite National Park by white people, writers have interpreted the space as if it is something to be conquered. Non-Ahwahneechee writers also denied the Ahwahneechee their complexity as people. As Isaac Kantor describes in his article, “Ethnic Cleansing and America’s Creation of National Parks” (2007), national parks provide people with the illusion that they are experiencing the continent as it was: uninhabited (43). However, the landscapes were inhabited for thousands of years previous to when Europeans saw it. In order to turn a space into a national park, it was necessary to treat the landscape as uninhabited.

In the late 1800s, well-known writer and activist for the park conservation John Muir wrote about the separation of nature and people, enforcing the idea that America should exclude Indigenous peoples from national parks. In his essay, The Mountains of California (1882), he excludes significant mention of Native people. Instead, he describes an encounter with a group of Mono people, who live in the region, describing them as “hairy as bears,” “ugly and hideous”, and having “no right place in the landscape” (Section 91). For such an influential and famous writer to only include these descriptions in his writing means that mainstream audiences would have viewed Native people as such. More importantly, he outwardly expresses his opinion that Native people should be removed from the Yosemite landscape.

Robert Scharff enforces a white dominating mindset in his book, Yosemite National Park, written in collaboration with the National Park Service in 1967. He compliments Muir, saying that Yosemite Valley is a “monument to his fight and foresight” (9). In his chapter about Yosemite’s human history, he briefly describes the wars and fighting that caused the Native people to leave. However, he denies them complexity and sovereignty. For example, he says that Yosemite Valley is “believed” to have been inhabited, and that one individual, a descendant of the Chief of the Ahwahneechees, wanted to return to what he “considered” his homeland, thus undermining the validity of Native land rights and perspectives. Additionally, Scharff denies the tribes complexity, never describing their culture or way of living in detail. When he describes the battles that the military initiated to force the tribes off of their land, he does not describe their violence but instead identifies the military majors and battalions, which only humanizes the white side of the story.

Popular music reflects this American sentiment of having the assumed birth right to explore all land. Woody Guthrie spreads this message in his 1944 song, “This Land is Your Land,” which many Americans know and can sing today. The famous chorus goes, “This land is your land and this land is my land / From California to the New York island / From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters / This land was made for you and me.” Guthrie was a white man and he was actually using these lyrics to make a commentary on socialism. However, decades later many do not know this history and simply think of the song as one of inclusion and awe for natural American beauty. This speaks especially to Yosemite National Park because Guthrie mentions California and redwood forests. However, the idea that the land was “made” for a majority white citizenry enforces the European idea that white people deserve and can control a natural space that they forcefully took from Native peoples.

Photographs

By creating a national park out of Yosemite Valley, the park service imposes the mentality that land must be changed and improved for it to be both legally owned and valuable. This can be seen with both the practice of cutting automobile tunnels through trees and with the passing of a more formal park legislature. By transforming this space into one of a productive national park, it affirms a European and white hierarchical power.

One of the more famous images of Yosemite National Park is that of an old automobile driving through a tree. This image symbolizes the possession and manipulation of land by white people. This symbol has white roots because it was influenced by European ideas of ownership and productivity.

One can see this with the example of a photograph taken on June 15, 1918 (Tourists Drive Their Automobile on through a Tunnel Carved in the Wawona Tree). Based on the description, the photo shows tourists driving through a tunnel carved in a wawona tree in the Yosemite Valley. There are six white-passing nicely dressed individuals sitting in the car, and another standing at the side of the tree, hand on its massive base. The people who built the tunnel are disrupting the space and are permanently imposing their cultural norms onto the space. Not only do they impose values of efficiency, in being able to drive through the tree instead of around it, but they are also producing a tourist attraction out of the tree in order to make money. The sign beside the tree shows that it is a tourist destination, and the fact that it was photographed means that they were advertising it as an enticing place to visit.

When visitors to Yosemite National Park cut a tunnel through a tree, they were actually engaging in behavior that was reflective of the settler attitude of improving land. Inspired by Locke, settlers from England often claimed authority over a space once they had “improved” it. Thomas Jefferson said that American Indians were different in that they did not engage in agricultural practices to create tradable goods when Anglo-Americans did. According to Jefferson and many European thinkers at the time, one had to labor on the land in order to create property (Palmer 2020). Therefore, in the act of cutting the tree, these individuals had announced their ownership over the space and denial of Native land rights.

Similarly, the individuals in the photo of the tree tunnel were commodifying the Yosemite land. They changed the land in a way that produced a profit: tourism. Not only did non-Native individuals impose a new economic role to nature that was distinctly European, but they stole possession of the land by imposing their new rules onto it about improvement, productivity and profit. They have also declared the space as a protected park, thus making it more civilized now that it has economic value. Now, the land is no longer a distinct Native space, and it is also no longer a wilderness untouched by humans, as Muir desired. Instead, it is a space embodied by Euro-American rules.

Laws

In the early 1900s, the Congress passed laws to further confine the park to white ideals. The Organic Act of 1916 mandated that the park should be developed as a “national playground system” (Spence 170) that is accessible to everyone. This meant that the park service had to construct roads and other structures for tourists. It also meant that the park service could destroy animals and plants if they were in the way or a threat to the tourists (16 U.S.C. § 535). Here, even though they claim that Yosemite is a conserved space, they can change it however they want to make a profit. National parks seem to be first and foremost a space for tourists to visit and enjoy, and secondly a space for Native people and wildlife to live.

Congress passed the Wilderness Act of 1964 which denied human habitation in all protected areas. This act cemented the idea that wildernesses were separate from humans, contrary to Native beliefs. The act stated that a wilderness is a space “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” (11 U.S.C. § 1131). It is telling that Congress used the word Wilderness for their act because this word has a historical and racial weight. In Euro-American settler discourse, the idea of wilderness was considered “savage and unhealthy” (Palmer). Settlers, whose methods of overworking the land led to illness, cleared land to what they considered a more “tame” state. As Hugh Williamson wrote in 1770, a tree-filled land would create an inferior race of people (Palmer). Therefore, by separating wilderness with spaces where people can inhabit, Congress marked the park as improper for humans to live in while it remains in its uncleared state. They have also indirectly labeled the space as savage and unhealthy, thus racializing the space as that associated with misinterpretations of Native lifestyles in the 1700s.

Publicity

Writers and advertisers used Yosemite National Park to enforce a narrative that parks are meant to be explored by white people. For example, public posters advertising Yosemite promoted the ideal of an uninhabited wilderness which excluded a native presence and perspective. These posters often featured white-passing figures in an established position among the mountains, looking beyond the frame.

In one poster created by the Southern Pacific Railway in the 1920s (Logan 1923), a transportation company, a woman in a white collared t-shirt rides a donkey. The strap on her shirt shows that she is a traveller or explorer with a satchel. She looks off to the left toward the sun, likely to take in the view. The mountain behind the woman is grand, empty, and dark, and yet the woman stands courageously.

In another poster from 1955 (Perceval), two individuals with backpacks and hats pause, alone, to look at a grand Yosemite mountain. Assuming the individuals are white/non-indigenous, it is still enforcing the idea of foreign exploration of Yosemite for profit. Both Railways promote the idea of exploration of wilderness. The posters are the railway’s way of enticing foreigners to come and experience a sense of awe when being in a space that supposedly nobody else is in at that moment. Or perhaps they even want visitors to imagine discovering a space that they feel nobody else has touched or seen before.

Paul C. Taylor describes the ways that people can deny complexity for people of color within the visuality of an artistic work. He says that the denial or disregard of Black visuality, specifically, consists of a lack of presence, perspectives, and plurality (2016, 171). This can also be applicable when talking about Native or Indigenous visuality.

Native people in the Yosemite region were denied their presence, both in being able to be visible in the depictions of the space and also in the rhetoric of the space as a human-free landscape. Now, Yosemite is known as a space where the animals and plants are preserved but not the people, culture, traditions, and way of living. They have also been denied their perspective. The photographs were taken by white people and the historical narratives were recorded from the white person’s perspective. Even the figures in the posters are allowed to judge the land with their gaze, thus giving them power to interpret and control the park.

Tourism

Even today, the Park Service provides much information for visitors wishing to explore the space, but little information for Native groups hoping to use the space or for anyone hoping to learn about Ahwahneechee history and culture. On the Yosemite National Park website’s main page, the National Park Service provides only two sentences about the park. The first sentence complements the park’s tranquility and grandiosity. They also note that the park is a “shrine to human foresight” thus indirectly acknowledging Muir who helped establish the space as a park, protected against future development. In the second sentence, the Park Service highlights all the different types of natural landscapes that visitors can “find” within the 1,200 square mile space (Yosemite National Park). Again, the park is encouraging the exploration mentality, similarly to that of the white explorers of the past two centuries. They are telling visitors that the entire natural and wild space is there for them to use.

One can discover a lot about a space in its tourist brochures and educational sites. For Yosemite National Park, the Park Service provides some information about Ahwahneechee and Miwok culture and history, but it is not very extensive. Additionally, after knowing about the park’s history of excluding and exploiting Native peoples, the park should do more to acknowledge this.

For a significant portion of the park’s history, officials created “Indian Field Days” where they paid Native people to dress in traditional clothing for the tourists. They also set up crudely made tepees instead of the umucha dwellings that the Miwok people of the region used, since they were an “unpleasant eyesore” according to the president of the park at the time. The Park Service also made sure that Ahwahneechee dwellings remained out of sight from tourists throughout the many decades that they were allowed to live at Yosemite National Park (Spence 171-172).

Even today, there are no brochures on their website explicitly about current Native uses of the park. They do, however, have a full eight panel brochure on The Pioneer Yosemite History Center, full of descriptions of sketches of various cabins, offices, and difficult road-building efforts. Neither do they have any information on their website for Ahwahneechee or Miwok peoples who are looking to request permission to use the spaces for cultural practices, even though it says on the Yosemite guidebook that the Indian Cultural Village is still used for this purpose.

Tour guides have the power to encourage a visitor to invest emotionally in the people of their tour. Modlin et al. examined the role of guides at plantation house museums (2011) and found that even though guides may reference slavery or the enslaved people who lived at the site, they provided much more emotionally evocative accounts for the stories of the planter-class family than they did to the enslaved. Both discussions were also segregated in a way that one had to travel away from the main tour to receive more information about slavery at the site. This is known as affective inequality.

Yosemite engages in affective inequality by excluding Native stories from most tours. When they do provide opportunities for education, it is limited to the arts, such as basket weaving, or to the site of the Indian Cultural Village, which is notably located behind the main museum. Therefore, visitors must make deliberate efforts to visit these sites and become emotionally involved in the stories. They do not note any history of the park segregating African-American visitors, which was common for the National Park Service during the Jim Crow era (Repanshek 2019). Neither do they note on the website that they are an anti discriminatory and inclusive park, that they support racial justice, or that they acknowledge that parks are more generally visited by white people.

The park service had created a scenic facade at the cost of Native people’s livelihoods and acknowledgement of racist histories. Kryder-Reid unpacks this phenomenon of cultivating heritage in her essay about California Mission Landscapes (2016). Missions have similar histories to Yosemite National Park. They were both created by white people. They both forced Native or Mexican people to work for them while creating the appearance of a timeless and iconic heritage site. For mission landscapes, these white architects claimed ownership of the past. Their all-happy aesthetic “sanitizes” (154) any associations with struggles and injustices related to mission history while providing a quaint appeal of the “ethnic other” (162). They also commodify the space by selling paraphernalia at gift shops.

Similarly at Yosemite, the Park Service has claimed ownership over one of America’s most beautiful landscapes. They provide a perfect picture of nature while masking its violent history. When they do represent Native culture, it is intended as another piece of entertainment for tourists. These actions deny Native sovereignty over a space that was stolen, and it enforces European mindsets about the domination of the wilderness and a separation of nature and people. Even today, with its culture and tourism, Yosemite National Park continues to act as a racialized land.

Conclusion: What now?

Within the last few years, the National Park Services is doing more to center Native people and customs in the usage and education of the park. David Treuer, an Ojibwe writer, discusses this in his article, “Return the National Parks to the Tribes” (2021). Since the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, parks and other educational institutions have been working with tribes to better preserve Native spaces and objects. The Park Service is allowing Native people to harvest plants for traditional purposes and hunt or trap, but they often have to request permission first. Treuer argues that today, Americans no longer see the wilderness as untame but instead as a place of solace and refuge, which is more in line with Native values.

Treuer argues for the return of National Parks to tribes because they can use the space for cultural and community practices and have the experience and knowledge to preserve the space. Already the Indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand have control over the countries’ significant landmarks (Treuer), so this is not an unusual consideration.

For Native peoples, land is important to the formation of identity and to relationship building. According to Peter Kulhyski, when a colonized person is dispossessed of their land, this is considered oppression (Coulthard 62). To return spaces to tribes is to recognize the historical oppression and try to more equitably distribute land and sovereignty.

Yosemite National Park is working to return spaces to Native groups. Most recently, two individuals whose ancestors lived in Ahwahnee signed a 30-year agreement with the park superintendent to let nearby tribes build and use a wahhoga, or village, in the space where they and their ancestors used to live. Now, they do not have to ask permission to use the space and will be able to use their traditional methods to build the roundhouse (George 2018). As Bill Leonard, chair of the American Indian Council of Mariposa County said in response to trying to reclaim the Valley, “We’re fighting for our sovereignty” (Alexander 2019). By providing greater Native access to Yosemite National Park, the Park Service can work to untangle white racial dominance from the space and dismantle the racially oppressive forces that remain active.

By rethinking who controls Yosemite National Park, we may develop a more sustainable and deeper relationship with land. Philip Blake, Chief of the Dene Nation, said that the Indian nation should have control over their land because they have no desire to improve or destroy the land and instead hope to keep it in its same condition to pass on to the next generations (Coulthard 63). By giving Native tribes claims over national parks, they can still protect the parks in a way that has been practiced for thousands of years. According to Schlosberg and Carruthers, by acknowledging Native demands, the American institution is recognizing various cultures and races at the receiving end of inequality (2010, 14).

Yosemite National Park is meant to preserve. It is a space protected from development, deforestation, and misuse of nature. It brags of entry for all and is wildly loved by many Americans, including my family. However, we must not forget that a preserved space holds power and can change based on outside forces. Yosemite National Park acts as a reinforcement of white and Euro-American ideals. These ideals include white superiority, the separation of human and wilderness, and profit. Additionally, the Park Service publicizes the space as if it is meant for white, or non-Native, individuals to explore, and less meant for Native people. However, despite being preserved, the Park Service can change the park to better reflect a wider range of values regarding space and humanity. As these spaces represent our most iconic and “American” landmarks, when we change our national parks, we can change the way we perceive race across the country for the better.

This piece was written as part of a class, Architecture of Race, 2021

Citations

Alexander, Kurtis. “How the Miwuk Tribe Is Reclaiming Part of Yosemite Valley.” SFGATE, 27 Apr. 2018, https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/How-the-Miwuk-tribe-is-reclaiming-part-of-12866845.php.

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George, Carmen. “Decades after Destruction, Yosemite Welcomes Home Native Americans.” The Fresno Bee, 2 June 2018, https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article212274659.html.

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Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth. "Cultivating Heritage: Race, Identity, and the Politics of the Mission Landscapes." In California mission landscapes: race, memory, and the politics of heritage, 135-178. Architecture, landscape, and American culture series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

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Tourists Drive Their Automobile on through a Tunnel Carved in the Wawona Tree Mariposa Grove Yosemite Valley California. June 15 1918. 1918, www-bridgemaneducation-com.ezproxy.amherst.edu/en/asset/2938263/summary.

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