Narratives About People and Nature in the U.S. National Park System
By
Elena Zifkin
Antonia Foias and Natalie Vena, Co-Advisors
A thesis submitted in the partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Arts with Honors in Sociology
WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, MA
May 17, 2016
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Center for Environmental Studies for providing me with the funding that made this entire project possible. I would also like to thank everyone who has helped me throughout this process, especially my advisors, Antonia Foias and Natalie Vena.
They have read every draft and provided thoughtful and useful comments at every step of the way, and always made sure I stayed sane. Professor Nicolas Howe also offered wonderful insights and support as my third reader. I have a ton of gratitude for all of the rangers who talked to me and let me interview them, I could not have done this project without their help and generosity. I also want to thank Josh for accompanying me on the summer research road trip. I wouldn’t have survived the trip without him! And to my friends and family, thank you for your unrelenting support, it means so much to me.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER 2. MAKING CONNECTIONS: PROCEDURES AND PRINCIPLES IN NPS RANGER PROGRAMS 19
CHAPTER 3. NATIVE AMERICAN REPRESENTATION IN THE NPS 42
CHAPTER 4. NON-NATIVE SETTLERS AND NATURALISTS 65
CHAPTER 5. CLIMATE CHANGE: NORMS AND AVOIDANCE 87
CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION 104
APPENDIX I 109
BIBLIOGRAPHY 113
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Chapter 1. Introduction
One night, I was talking to my mom on the phone, and she told me that she had been watching Ken Burns’ documentary series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009).
She was horrified at the images of poachers killing bison in Yellowstone before it was adequately protected by the National Park Service (NPS). To imagine these big, beautiful animals being murdered to the point of endangerment, only to be sold was utterly reprehensible. While I do not disagree, I was struck by my mom’s statement. Ken Burns, who worked closely with the NPS in making this documentary, successfully conveyed the same dualism that the NPS promotes: that humans should live outside of nature. The image of magnificent animals being killed out of greed is not only misrepresentative of the people who hunted for their livelihood, but it also helps the NPS develop a moral platform. The NPS promotes the separation of humans and nature time and again through its representation of
Native Americans, its celebration of conservationists, and its hesitance to discuss anthropogenic climate change.
Almost a century ago, Congress established the NPS, and in enabling legislation, directed the NPS to preserve and manage areas of “superb environmental quality… for the benefit and inspiration of all people of the United States.”1 In doing so, the NPS also took on the great responsibility of educating America’s public. With nearly 300 million visitors in
2014,2 the NPS is in a unique position to influence how Americans consider our country’s history, especially in its centennial year.
1 "National Park Service Organic Act," (1916). 2 National Park Service, "Frequently Asked Questions," National Park Service, accessed April, 2015, http://www.nps.gov/aboutus/faqs.htm.
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In this project, I am looking at how the NPS presents human history alongside natural history in their interpretive ranger programs, visitor centers, and museums. National parks are emblematic of our country’s most cherished natural resources, but they are also home to important historical narratives about the relationship between humans and nature. I was interested to see which histories the NPS prioritized, which they excluded, and how patterns of silence and recognition emerged throughout the different parks. My main focus is the
NPS’s educational programs and the interpretive rangers who lead them. By learning about the development of ranger programs and understanding what interpretive rangers choose to talk about and why, I was able to understand the values that undergird the NPS. To date, there have been no sociological studies that have researched the NPS’s educational programming despite its reaching such a wide audience base.
Over the years, the NPS has gradually included more social history in the parks’ educational programming. However, my research revealed that in spite of top-down initiatives to include human history in their park narratives, in practice, this has been done unevenly and problematically. Until recently, the NPS excluded humans from the landscapes preserved by the Park Service, in order to conform to the “national park ideal.” This ideal, termed by Mark David Spence, presents the parks as uninhabited wildernesses, sometimes including indigenous people, but only as part of the “notable curiosities of the landscape,”3 instead of as humans or separate beings at all (See Chapter 3). Rural white settlers are completely written out of the accounts, as they do not fit into the ideal of parks as untouched wildernesses (See Chapter 4).
3 Laura A Ogden, "Searching for Paradise in the Florida Everglades," Cultural Geographies 15, no. 2 (2008): 101.
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The Structure of Educational Programming in the NPS
Stephen Mather, the first director of the NPS, advocated for educational programming in the national parks—an unpopular idea in Congress and beyond. Determined, Mather sought outside sponsors who eventually helped create the National Park Association, which still exists today. By 1919, many parks were offering educational interpretive programs, hosted by outside parties. But in 1920, Yellowstone and Yosemite were the first parks to offer “reasonably comprehensive interpretive programs directed by the Park Service.”4 These included guided hikes, campfire talks, and lectures.
Today, ranger programs are fixtures in the NPS, with dozens of options available at each park everyday.5 Ranger programs are the primary platform through which interpretive rangers interact with the public. With programs designed for Junior Rangers and adults alike, the NPS appeals to a wide range of visitors. Most of the programming is meant to be relevant to a certain landscape, feature, or ecology, but it can also depend on rangers’ preferences.
As I explore how, or whether, the NPS has changed its narratives about the human and environmental history of its parks, it is important to keep in mind that the NPS has limited funding. As one of my contacts explained, there are undifferentiated pools that finance everything from roadside signs to maintenance workers’ and law enforcement officers’ salaries. Because clean bathrooms inevitably trump updated content on remote signage, it can take up to two years to install a new sign. As such, many of the signs discussed herein are dated. While this is not an excuse for the NPS, it does help illuminate
4Barry Mackintosh, Interpretation in the National Park Service: A Historical Perspective, (National Park Service, 2009). https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/mackintosh2/origins_nps_assumes_responsib ility.htm 5 The programs at each of these parks are mostly NPS-sponsored, while some are backed by other organizations.
Zifkin 6 some of the structural issues that impede their stated quest for changing and diversifying their narratives.
My research examines how rangers produce human history in educational programs, a theme that is often overlooked by scholars due to the NPS’s ecological and geological focus.
In an effort to include social history in its programming, the NPS held a two-day forum called “Co-creating Narratives in Public Spaces” in September 2014 for administrators and interpreters as well as for academics and historians. The NPS sought to “leave attendees better prepared to develop more diverse and complex narratives and to share their successes—and failures—with the larger community committed to increasing the relevancy, diversity, and inclusion in the National Park Service.”6 By diversifying the narratives presented in educational programs, the NPS wanted to help “visitors make connections with the people, events, and places that the National Park Service commemorates and preserves.”7
The NPS demonstrates its commitment to highlighting human history through initiatives like the “Co-creating Narratives” forum, along with a vast array of “cultural resources” offered through the NPS website. In response to changing views of what history is and who it should include, the NPS has largely re-written its historical narratives, at least on its website. I wanted to see if there was a shift in the practices on the ground that mirrored the shift in theory at the upper levels of the NPS.
6National Park Service, "Narratives in Public Spaces," National Park Service, accessed April, 2015, http://www.nps.gov/history/narratives_in_public_spaces.html. 7 Ibid.
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Scholarly Basis
Anthropologists and historians have highlighted the extent to which national park administrators have erased human history from their narratives, as they have indeed removed people from the landscapes of the parks. For example, historian Karl Jacoby notes, “the authors of the early accounts of the Yellowstone region literally wrote Indians out of the landscape, erasing Indian claims by reclassifying inhabited territory as empty wilderness.”8
Around the same time, the U.S. Army forcefully relocated Native American tribes to reservations, which “eliminated any Indian presence from the Yellowstone landscape.”9
Although Yellowstone was the first national park to engage in these practices, it was surely not the last. I contribute to this literature by analyzing the contradictions in the NPS’s recent efforts to restore each landscape’s social history, especially in an educational context. For example, I discuss at length in Chapter 3 how the NPS’s representation of Native Americans has changed in some ways, but remains problematic in others.
My research builds on anthropologist Laura Ogden’s insight that natural resources conservation can be understood through the lens of the politics of naturalization, “which entails a kind of selective vision that is blind to nature’s humanity.”10 Ogden explains how the politics of naturalization has played a major role in the founding of national parks because it encourages a view of nature as untouched, even though humans have played an integral role in shaping the landscapes and the narratives that have come after. In other words, the creation of national parks cannot be separated from the “politics of nature that requires the cooperation of humans (visiting naturalists, local hunters, funding agencies, and
8 Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Univ of California Press, 2014), 85. 9 Ibid. 10 Ogden, "Searching for Paradise in the Florida Everglades," 95.
Zifkin 8 others) and nonhumans [the features of the parks themselves].”11 This pushes back against the fundamental idea that humans and nature are diametrically opposed, and acknowledges that wilderness areas are inherently socially constructed.
Throughout this project, I decipher the ways in which the NPS turns landscapes into sociologist Bruno Latour’s concept of “smooth objects,” which Ogden discusses. She writes,
“smoothing out” or “‘generification’ of [a] site’s ecology and its peoples into intelligible, stable, and generalizable categories of the world,” sterilizes the environment from human touch, and disconnects landscapes from “their inherent material ideological conflicts, incongruities, and biosocial entanglements.”12 This rhetoric ultimately shapes the popular narratives about the national parks that are present in ranger programs, park signs, and museums. These narratives promote shallow representations (or erasure) of human history and deepen the void between humans and nature. Without acknowledging the profound impact that humans and nature have on each other, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to understand history in the broadest sense, while also ignoring the acute influence that we as humans have on the environment today.
By researching the educational programming at national parks, I aim to understand the ways in which the NPS has confronted the problematic gap, if at all, between humans and nature created by our cultural understanding of wilderness as “other.” In his essay, “The
Trouble With Wilderness,” William Cronon argues, “There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of
11Ibid., 96. 12 Ibid., 101.
Zifkin 9 the very history it seeks to deny.” 13 Cronon exposes the contradictions upon which the national parks were founded and continue to be maintained. The traditional view of wilderness as an escape from civilization encapsulates this paradigm, and it has created the
“flight from history,” a term that Cronon uses to describe how people are removed from the narrative of natural history because wilderness is seen as unchanged and unchanging.14 In practice the NPS enforces this separation instead of challenging it, as exemplified by the figures it celebrates (see Chapter 4) and its de-historicizing of Native Americans (see Chapter
3).
As I discuss throughout this project, the dichotomy that separates humans and nature prohibits people from gaining a holistic understanding of our nation’s past, with Native
Americans and rural white settlers, and our nation’s future, with climate change. As Ogden says, the (social construction of) nature, in this case the national parks, “stand[s] for the wild freedom of America’s past and seem[s] to represent a highly attractive natural alternative to the ugly artificiality of modern civilization.”15 As a result, the national parks were predicated, from before their birth, on the seeming opposition of humans and nature. As Cronon describes, this false dichotomy has biblical roots that stem as deep as Eden, the land of the
Original Sin, and continues to dominate today.16 But this “dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the
13 William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 79. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 15. 16 Ibid., 71.
Zifkin 10 end of the twentieth century.”17 I was interested to learn how the NPS presents human history and the implications it has on conceptualizing wilderness and environmentalism.
I extend Cronon’s and Ogden’s argument by questioning if by introducing new perspectives and narratives, the NPS acknowledges the “politics of nature.” I believe that in perceiving humans as abstracted from nature, we fail to grasp the dialectical relationship that humans and the environment have with each other. In this thesis, I explore how the NPS encourages conservationism, but without incorporating an understanding of the “politics of nature,” the NPS ultimately fails to promote “responsible environmentalism.”
Once we discard such myths as the “national park ideal” and the idea that humans and nature are diametrically opposed, we can begin to better understand the impact that humans have had on our environment in the past. But more importantly, engaging in such debates forces us to accept that humans are “shapers of environmental history,” who are altogether entangled with nature. 18 This understanding will enable us to practice “responsible environmentalism” in a way that is not conceivable otherwise.
I also argue that the intimate connection between American national identity and the national parks can be a threat to a sustainable future. Using sociologist Kari Marie
Norgaard’s analysis of Norway’s national identity, I would like to draw a comparison with
American identity, in regards to the national parks. Norgaard argues that “discourses of national identity reinforce a notion of Norwegian essentialism and exceptionalism…because they are pure and close to nature, and so forth.” The American identity surrounding the national parks as “America’s best idea” reinforces the notion of American exceptionalism
17 Ibid., 81. 18 Eric Alden Smith and Mark Wishnie, "Conservation and Subsistence in Small-Scale Societies," Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (2000): 496.
Zifkin 11 through its connection with nature. Also, Norgaard says, “stories of national identity connect to the past, to tradition, and to a sense of continuity of time and culture, thereby reaffirming a sense of stability of the traditional order and worldview, the sense that all is well.” The NPS embraces this sentiment by promoting itself as a tranquil escape rooted in American ideals.
And so, for an American, returning to and protecting the parks reinvigorates a sense of all- around wellbeing and makes it ever more difficult to discuss problematic issues.
The first component of Norway’s national identity that Norgaard discussed was a
“connection to nature.” While a connection to nature is not unequivocally part of American life, it is a fundamental part of the dialogue surrounding national parks. In fact, national parks exist as a testament to how much value Americans place on wilderness. One sign in the
Grand Teton visitor center is titled “In Search of Wilderness,” and it encapsulates the essence of American identity that the NPS puts forth:
Many people journey to Grand Teton National Park in search of wilderness, where life remains unfettered, rich in primeval character. Untrammeled by humans, wilderness holds tangible resources—the plants, the animals, even the clean air and water—that we strive to preserve. Wilderness also encompasses intangible values, offering a place of inspiration and solace; providing opportunities for solitude and contemplation that allow us to escape from the burdens of modern life. The desire to preserve wilderness is a deeply rooted American idea that has shaped both our culture and our spirit.
The notion that wilderness protection is deeply American is aligned with Norwegians’ connection to nature. Norgaard says, “Relationships to nature are a way to legitimate
Norwegian ‘goodness’ in the face of antienvironmental behavior,” which is similar to
Americans’ perspective. Visiting a national park, or doing anything “nature-y” is considered innocent and inevitably good for the planet. But perhaps the most important element of
Americans’ connection to national parks and Norwegians’ allegiance to nature, is that nature becomes ahistorical: “If you wish to define something as either pure or inevitable, a good
Zifkin 12 starting place is to tie it to that which we do not recognize as having a history: nature.”19 So, talking about climate change or humans within nature in an ahistorical, exceptional place is doubly difficult.
Methodology
In the spring of 2015, I received a grant from the Center for Environmental Studies that allowed me to pursue my research the following summer. Over the course of seven weeks, I visited five national parks: Grand Canyon in Arizona, Yosemite in California,
Glacier in Montana, Grand Teton in Wyoming, and Mesa Verde in Colorado, and I stayed at each park for about a week. While I was at each park, I used mixed methods of research, including interviews, participant-observation, and collection of archival material. Each of these methods revealed different aspects of the NPS and helped inform and contextualize the others. I chose to do a comparative study because I felt that it would give me a broader understanding of the NPS as an institution, and would allow me to discern overarching patterns.
Each of the parks I visited is huge! Grand Canyon is 1,902 square miles, Yosemite is
1,190 square miles, Glacier is 1,583 square miles, Grand Teton is 484 square miles, and
Mesa Verde is about 81 square miles. With the exception of Mesa Verde, they are all divided into multiple districts, many of which cannot be reached by car. Upwards of 90% of these parklands are designated wilderness areas. At the beginning of my research, I was not prepared to navigate sites of this magnitude. I thought that camping outside of Grand
Canyon’s boundaries in the bordering Kaibab National Forest would allow me easy access to the park’s visitor center and headquarters. Of course, “close” can mean anywhere from thirty
19 Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011), 150.
Zifkin 13 minutes to an hour and a half by car. Even within park boundaries, I was often shocked by the lengthy travel times. From Wawona District to Yosemite Valley, it was about a forty-five minute drive. In Glacier, it took about two hours to get from Lake MacDonald Valley to
Many Glacier (and you have to exit the park and then re-enter). Because of this, it is unusual that visitors would go back and forth between districts in one day. For me to drive from Lake
MacDonald Valley to Many Glacier (and then back) to attend the “Where Have All the
Glaciers Gone?” talk was slightly impractical, but it allowed me to attend programs that were offered in other parts of the parks where I was not staying.
Over the course of my fieldwork, I was a participant-observer of sixteen formal interpretive programs. These programs ranged anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours long. I went on a guided hike in Grand Teton, an historical walking tour in Glacier, a tram tour in Yosemite, a fossil walk in Grand Canyon, and structured tours of cliff dwellings in
Mesa Verde.20 Some of the programs were in amphitheaters, while others were in museums, around campfires, or in small clearings with wooden benches. Attending these programs allowed me to gauge what interpretive ranger-visitor interactions look like. By going to the programs, I was able to observe if rangers’ actions matched their words. I could also pick up on patterns of interpretation, and see what messages interpretive rangers were imparting on visitors.
I also conducted seventeen semi-structured interviews. While I had an interview guide, I would often let my interviewees direct the conversation. I asked about the training they received, the challenges they had in interpretation, and what they wanted visitors to get
20 See Appendix I.
Zifkin 14 out of their time in the parks, among many other things.21 The interviews lasted anywhere from twenty-five minutes to an hour and forty-five minutes. One of my interviews was conducted over the phone, while the other sixteen were held in person. My questions were geared primarily towards interpretive rangers, so when I interviewed chief interpreters and district managers, my questions were less structured.22 Most of the people I was put in touch with were more directly involved with human and cultural history at the parks than they were with natural history. While most of them led their districts’ ecology and geology programs, very few specialized in the hard sciences. It is possible that this skewed my data, especially when I asked if rangers talk about climate change in their programs. Through interviews, I was able to better understand what challenges rangers have in interpretation and the tools that they are given to cope with the difficulties. I learned that many of the rangers I interviewed cared about the controversial topics of Native Americans and climate change, but were scared to acknowledge them in their programs without a clear go-ahead from visitors. I also gathered that interpretive rangers rely on other rangers for some of their information, which is interesting because it produces slight discrepancies in detail, but also generates clear patterns of silence and recognition.
I also visited all main visitor centers, and as many other museums and smaller visitor centers as I could. At these locations, I took photos of almost every sign and exhibit. I photographed or took home any text I could get my hands on from the NPS, including maps, newsletters, and pamphlets on various subjects. The signs were the most informative of these materials, in that they clearly outlined the ideals that the NPS supports. In some ways, the
21 Interview questions can be found in Appendix I. 22 A breakdown of interviews by position is included in the table in Appendix I.
Zifkin 15 exhibits expressed what rangers were afraid to in their programs, but they also reinforced the
NPS’s conservation message more strongly than any other form of communication.
The parks I chose are iconic elements of American identity, and they all hold places on the list of top-ten most visited national parks, with the exception of Mesa Verde.23 More details about each park follow below.
Grand Canyon National Park: The Grand Canyon welcomes almost 5 million visitors a year, making it one of NPS’s most popular destinations. Aside from its unbelievable geologic formations, the Grand Canyon holds a rich store of human history. With well- preserved archeological artifacts that date back to 10,000 years, and a history that includes numerous human groups from the ancestral Puebloans, to explorers, miners, entrepreneurs, and numerous CCC enrollees,24 Grand Canyon is an ideal (and iconic) park to analyze the
NPS’s efforts to integrate human and natural history.
Yosemite National Park: First protected in 1864, over fifty years before the NPS’s establishment, Yosemite National Park is home to a rich natural and human history. The
European settlers and miners, many of whom came looking for gold, displaced the
Ahwahneechee tribe who lived there for generations. The archeological artifacts are as well preserved as the natural resources are in Yosemite, allowing for a rich discussion surrounding the dialectical relationships between humans and the environment. This is especially pertinent because a number of environmental issues that are caused by humans such as drought, the aftermath of fire suppression, and global warming affect Yosemite. I explored
23 National Geographic, "Top 10 Most Visted National Parks," National Geographic Partners, LLC, accessed April, 2015, http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/national-parks/most- visited-parks-photos/#/glacier-national-park-hidden-lake_89495_600x450.jpg. 24 National Park Service, "Grand Canyon: People," National Park Service, accessed April, 2015, http://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/historyculture/people.htm.
Zifkin 16 the ways in which Yosemite explained, or did not explain, the ways that humans have shaped the landscape for generations.
Glacier National Park: Glacier National Park, at its founding, had effectively erased the stories of the Blackfeet and other Native American tribes that had inhabited the land for around 10,000 years before European settlers stepped foot there. 2526 Although there is no specific reference to the old narratives of the park, it seems as if the NPS is using physical history (archeological artifacts and formations) to tell the integrated story of humans and the land. With its rough and beautiful terrain, Glacier was at the center of many romantic tales of exploration and bravery, and served as a prototype for the national park ideal. “To this day,”
William Cronon says, “the Blackfeet continue to be accused of ‘poaching’ on the lands of
Glacier National Park that originally belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with the proviso that they be permitted to hunt there.”27 This (ironic) criminalization of the
Blackfeet indicates how strongly the national park ideal is still felt. In this project, I discuss the extent to which the NPS continues to conform to this narrative, and how it confines and obscures Native American history.
Grand Teton National Park: Unlike the other parks that I researched, Grand Teton
National Park was a destination for wealthy Eastern tourists to have “an authentic ‘cowboy’ experience” in the early twentieth century. 28 Home to dude ranches and a great abundance of human history that dates back over 11,000 years, Grand Teton encapsulates how human relationships with the environment have changed over time. Interestingly, there are no
25Ogden, "Searching for Paradise in the Florida Everglades," 99. 26 "Glacier: History & Culture," National Park Service, accessed April, 2015, http://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/historyculture/index.htm. 27 Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," 79. 28 National Park Service, "Grand Teton: Cultural History," National Park Service, accessed April, 2015, http://www.nps.gov/grte/learn/historyculture/cultural.htm.
Zifkin 17 accounts on the NPS website of contact between Native Americans and the white explorers who came after. I am curious to see how they present this narrative on the ground.
Mesa Verde National Park: Mesa Verde is the only park in my sample that focuses solely on human history. It protects a vast amount of natural and cultural resources in its
5,000 archeological sites and 600 cave dwellings, which are some of the best-preserved sites in all of the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt originally established Mesa Verde to “preserve the works of man.”29 This is a perfect example of the convergence of human and natural history, as the ancestral Puebloans created their homes and cultural artifacts out of the natural resources found in the rest of the park.
Chapter Overview
In Chapter 2, I explore how the NPS’s procedures for interpretive ranger training and interpretive program development aim to foster a sense of connection between the visitors and the parks. I found that these same procedures also facilitate a connection between the rangers and the NPS. While standard procedures guide interpretive programs, they also allow for ranger autonomy and discretion. As a result of this autonomy and the NPS’s emphasis on creating connections between the visitor and the park, rangers often stray away from difficult or controversial topics.
In Chapter 3, I discuss how the NPS represents Native Americans and Native
American history at the parks. The NPS confines and sequesters Native American narratives into separate and dated exhibits, because it has not fully acknowledged its role in Native
American displacement and dispossession. Interpretive rangers also avoid discussions about
29 "Mesa Verde: Places," National Park Service, accessed April, 2015.
Zifkin 18
Native Americans in their programs for fear of misrepresenting them, which perpetuates the cycle of Native American under-representation and erasure.
In Chapter 4, I examine who and what the NPS celebrates, and who they erase in the process. Each park has its “heroes,” as I call them. Heroes can be people such as John
Wesley Powell and John Muir, but they can also be landmarks, like Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park. I discuss how the celebrated figures and landmarks promote an idea of wilderness that presumes a separation between humans and nature. Rural white settlers who did not conform to this conception of wilderness and instead depended on the land for hunting, grazing, and fishing are excluded from NPS narratives. Conservation and tourism are celebrated, while manual labor is condemned and erased.
In Chapter 5, I explore the NPS’s norms surrounding the communication of climate change. Many NPS employees accept the reality of climate change, yet they are reluctant to mention it in their programs, for fear of offending their visitors. Moreover, the celebrated idea of wilderness as separate from humans makes discussing anthropogenic climate change in the NPS difficult.
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Chapter 2. Making Connections: Procedures and Principles in NPS Ranger Programs
“While all NPS employees may address visitor needs in a variety of ways, employees in the professions of Interpretation and Education [interpretive rangers] represent the face and voice of the NPS[,] its parks and special programs to the public, connecting people to parks.”—NPS Essentials, NPS website30
The production of interpretive ranger programs in the NPS is governed by a set of principles that aims to facilitate connections between the public and national park values and resources. The NPS’s original mission, which was established by former President Woodrow
Wilson in the Organic Act of 1916, stated that the NPS, not just the parks themselves, should provide for the “enjoyment,” “inspiration,” and “benefit”31 of all people of the United States.
His message has since been adapted to the NPS’s present-day mission statement, which reads:
The National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations. The Park Service cooperates with partners to extend the benefits of natural and cultural resource conservation and outdoor recreation throughout this country and the world.32
The NPS’s goal to create connections underlies its mission, since “enjoyment, education, and inspiration” are all contingent upon creating a sense of connection between people and place.
This guiding principle is evident in the interpretive training that all new rangers receive and
30 National Park Service, "Nps Essentials: Interpretation and Education," National Park Service, accessed April, 2016, https://www.nps.gov/training/essentials/html/interp_edu_topic.html# 31 "National Park Service Organic Act." 32 "What We Do," National Park Service, accessed November 13, 2015, http://www.nps.gov/aboutus/index.htm.
Zifkin 20 the documents that they are given to help develop their programs. Moreover, these same principles function to connect the rangers to the NPS institution. As I observed during my fieldwork, interpretive rangers receive little direct oversight from their supervisory rangers, allowing them a significant amount of freedom in program development. Rangers’ discretion is structured by the procedures, documents, and training which are put in place to generate indirect oversight of interpretive rangers and further connect them to the NPS institution.
These standardized procedures, then, both connect interpretive rangers to the organization and constitute the organization itself. This dynamic, wherein standardized procedures generate oversight yet interpretive rangers are afforded a high level of discretion, produce a bureaucratic paradox called “organized anarchy.” The NPS bureaucracy, understood as a form of organized anarchy, institutes consistent documentary and procedural standards that lack substantive unity, thereby allowing interpretive rangers to maintain a sense of autonomy and produce ranger programs that vary in content and style.
Ranger Ubiquity and Significance: They’re Everywhere
Ranger autonomy in the NPS is all the more striking because of the powerful roles they play both in the representation of the NPS as a government agency and in the representation of the United States’ history. Anyone who visits a national park in the United
States would be hard-pressed to avoid an encounter with a park ranger. Most parks, excluding those without entrance fees, have entrance stations which are manned primarily33 by park rangers who collect admission fees, hand out the park’s monthly newsletter and map, and ask if you have any questions. Once inside, park rangers are everywhere. They work at the visitor centers; they lead educational programs, host informal chats, and establish a
33 Volunteers work the entrance stations at some parks.
Zifkin 21 strong, uniformed presence throughout the park. And, if you are either unlucky or irresponsible, a law enforcement ranger might pull you over for speeding or fine you for starting an illegal campfire. Even for a backcountry excursion, you must first pick up your permits from a Park Ranger, and you might encounter one surveying the remote trails. While that all may seem unexceptional, consider the fact that, of the 22,000 NPS employees, only
3,600 of them are Park Rangers and 580 of them are Park Police.34 And then, consider that almost 293,000,000 people visited at least one national park in 2014.35 And of all the different type of rangers, many of whom are administrative, it is the interpretive rangers who work visitor center shifts and lead ranger programs. They represent the entire NPS to the public.
The most substantive interactions between rangers and visitors materialize in the form of ranger programs, in which interpretive rangers have the responsibility of prioritizing what
(and how) information gets shared with the public. Not only do they get to decide which narratives are told, but visitors consider them to be authorities on the subject. As a seasonal ranger at Grand Canyon told me, “I think they did a study when I was in school, [about] people who are trusted by the public, and park rangers are pretty high on the list, so people trust what we say. [So] you have to be careful and make sure that you’re doing a good job.”
Interpretive rangers recognize their position to define what the public learns when visiting national parks, and they take this responsibility seriously. In spite of the standards produced through formal documents and training, interpretive ranger programs often vary greatly in their content and quality. Notwithstanding the enormity of interpretive rangers’
34 "Work with Us," National Park Service, accessed September 27, 2015, http://www.nps.gov/aboutus/workwithus.htm. 35 "Frequently Asked Questions."
Zifkin 22 responsibilities, which are potentially more crucial if they are as trusted by the public as my interviewee believes, the NPS continues to enforce standardized procedures which produce variability in practice.
Bureaucratic Types: From “Modern Officialdom” to “Organized Anarchy”
The NPS’s standard procedures, instead of producing Max Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy, actually produce what can be called an “organized anarchy.” Weber’s ideal type is characterized by a clear hierarchy, an efficient division of labor, written rules, expertise in official fields, and neutrality—all governed by “rational-legal authority.” 36 The NPS bureaucracy both mirrors and diverges from Weber’s ideal type of “modern officialdom.” On the one hand, the NPS relies on consistent principles—a widespread agency philosophy (their mission statement), a two-week training program for rangers who are new to the park, standardized documents for program development, and a uniform shift in mentoring practice—but rather than producing uniformity, these guidelines produce variability. This paradox is best described by the term “organized anarchy,”37 which has been used by Helen
Schwartzman in her discussion of an “alternative mental health center,”38 and has been alluded to in other ethnographies on bureaucracy, like Ilana Friedman’s study of civil service in the Gaza under the British Mandate and the Egyptian Administration, where she observed
“both continuity and rupture, both stability and crisis, in bureaucratic practice.”39
One way to better understand how organized anarchy is generated by the NPS is through a discussion about standardized procedures and how their creation and enforcement
36 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1978), 956-58. 37 Helen B Schwartzman, The Meeting (New York: Springer, 1989), 89. 38 Ibid., 90. 39 Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917– 1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 2.
Zifkin 23 do not ensure consistency. Stefan Timmermans and Steven Epstein “define standardization as a process of constructing uniformities across time and space, through the generation of agreed-upon rules.” 40 Standardization is crucial to the coherence of the NPS—an organization that controls over 400 units, 58 of which are national parks, all with individual governing bodies and superintendents.41 Through the implementation of standards, which manifest themselves in training programs, program development guidelines, and mentoring policies, the NPS has “construct[ed] uniformities across time and space,” in name, but not necessarily in practice.
This tension demonstrates one way that standards can be inconsistent, despite their being standardized. As Timmermans and Epstein explain, “the trick in standardization appears to be to find a balance between flexibility and rigidity and to trust users with the right amount of agency to keep a standard sufficiently uniform for the task at hand.”42 By supplying interpretive rangers with basic guidelines and goals for their programs, through the
Interpretive Development Program (IDP) and universal themes (see further discussion below), the NPS walks the fine line between “rigidity and flexibility,” which allows for ranger autonomy. Where specific standardized procedures allow for ranger autonomy, they can also produce variability.
Examining the ways in which the NPS utilizes documents can contribute to understanding how certain standardized materials can create inconsistencies. Anthropologist
Matthew Hull writes that,
40 Stefan Timmermans and Steven Epstein, "A World of Standards but Not a Standard World: Toward a Sociology of Standards and Standardization," Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 71. 41 "Frequently Asked Questions." 42 "A World of Standards but Not a Standard World: Toward a Sociology of Standards and Standardization," 81.
Zifkin 24
documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, and even the organizations themselves.43
In the NPS, the worksheets that interpretive rangers are given to help develop their programs use vague wording, which is reflective of the documents, but also the institution itself. The subjective language of a document, then, understandably produces subjective outcomes.
Training and the IDP: Rangers’ First Connection to NPS
All interpretive rangers who are new to a park undergo a two-week training session, which is their first formal introduction to NPS standards for public ranger programs. At each park, the two-week training period, organized by permanent rangers in the Division of
Interpretation, consists of park orientation, interpretation training, introduction to park resources, tidbits about procedures and policies, and cultural sensitivity training sprinkled throughout. Each park has additional park-specialized sections as well: Glacier National Park has a training segment on climate change, Mesa Verde focuses on archeology, Grand Canyon highlights geology, etc. Each of the parks invites speakers to come in during training. Often, people from their Resource Management Divisions come in to talk about how to navigate the archives and access different informational sources, and park “specialists” come in and offer ecological information, focusing on certain endangered species or other park-specific points of interest. And, significantly, most training programs include a session or more with Native
Americans whose ancestors used to live in the park, or who live in neighboring reservations to share their perspectives on the park. But because there is so much to learn in this short
43 Matthew S Hull, "Documents and Bureaucracy," Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 253.
Zifkin 25 period of time, new rangers receive “lots of books and resources for self-guided learning,”44 while the training serves more as a cursory introduction to any and all park-related things. At the end of this two-week period, the interpretive teams set goals and expectations for the season, which again, vary from park to park.
While the two-week training session is in itself an NPS standard procedure, it varies from park to park and year to year, which means that not all interpretive rangers who lead programs have received the same training. Depending upon the size of the incoming group of rangers, scale of park operation, and feedback from previous seasons, training changes.
Different people are in charge of designing training each year and at each park, which naturally leads to variation in presentation and outcome. Additionally, because it is only required for new rangers to attend the two-week training, not everybody I interviewed had received updated training since they began, which could be over three years ago. Some of the newer returning staff may be sent to attend sections of the two-week training for specific refreshers or practice, but otherwise returning rangers attend a two-day brush-up course that focuses on park updates and developments. In order for returning rangers to receive substantive training on interpretive techniques or broader concepts, they are encouraged to take online courses from the Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands, which has partnered with the IDP to create its courses. Eppley is home to the Interpretation and
Education Career Academy (I&E Career Academy), which works specifically with the NPS and the Department of the Interior to provide interpretation training and certifications to
44 Kristen Dragoo (lead interpretive ranger, Grand Teton National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015.
Zifkin 26 aspiring and veteran interpretive rangers, each with its own set of benchmark standards. Both
Eppley training courses and the NPS promote the IDP, which has its own vague principles.
The IDP has three central “tenets of interpretation” that are all vague and overlapping.
In spite of this, they have provided the basis for interpretive training within the NPS since
1993. Interpretation, as defined by the NPS, is “a catalyst in creating opportunities for the audience to form their own intellectual and emotional connections with the meanings and significance inherent in the resource.”45 While one could broadly conceptualize this idea, there is nothing concrete about this definition. This ambiguity reflects the difficulties in analyzing standards in interpretation because it is inherently subjective and highly personal.
“Intellectual and emotional connections” can manifest themselves differently to everyone, which makes any method (within reason) of “catalyzing” them fair game. The language used to define interpretation is no clearer than the three tenets of which it is comprised: “1.
Resources possess meanings and have relevance. 2. Visitors are seeking something of value for themselves. 3. Interpretation facilitates a connection between the interests of the visitor and the meanings of the resource.”46 These principles may be understood as guidelines for interpretive rangers’ programs without providing substantive instruction.
During any given program I could identify the presence of the three tenets, but I could not necessarily distinguish one from another. This indicates that the tenets, while central to the interpretive project, do not display themselves consistently and indeed are up for individual interpretation. For example, one of the Ranger Programs I attended at the Grand
Canyon was called “Geology Glimpse,” which was geared towards Junior Rangers (who are
45 National Park Service, "About Interpretation," National Park Service, accessed November, 2015, http://idp.eppley.org/about-interpretation. 46 Ibid.
Zifkin 27 generally under the age of 12, although anyone can be a Junior Ranger). In 30 minutes,
Ranger Laura wanted to teach kids the entire geological history of the Grand Canyon (which has been around for a third of the Earth’s history). In order to connect with her audience,
Ranger Laura asked people in the crowd who their favorite teacher is, and then compared the
Grand Canyon to a teacher, naming it her favorite. She described how it taught her lessons, and therefore made the Grand Canyon itself “meaningful and relevant” (tenet #1), placed value on the audience and their role in the program (tenet #2), and connected the visitors to the Grand Canyon, as it seemed more important and relatable after her description (tenet #3).
Each of Ranger Laura’s main points could have been characterized as fulfilling any or all of the tenets of the IDP—and they were all clearly memorized. One of her later points, among many others, of the Colorado River being described as a “liquid jackhammer” and being “too thin to plow, but too thick to drink” by John Wesley Powell could be considered either an
“emotional or intellectual connection” in that it described physical properties of the river itself (intellectual), while also implying that any journey down it would have been enormously difficult (emotional). Ranger Laura was (kid-)friendly, peppy, and followed a clear script that she had written for herself, ensuring that she hit all the tenets and made all of the connections possible.
There is a wide range of accuracy of information and messaging among ranger programs, despite there being a consistent format and founding principles. For instance,
Ranger Addie, who was leading an Evening Program in Grand Canyon called “Ranger
Rendezvous,” said that Joseph Christmas Ives, a pre-Powell explorer, had described the
Grand Canyon as a “scene of utter desolation” after not being able to raft the whole river. I cannot confirm that this quote was correctly attributed to Ives, or that it was ever said about
Zifkin 28 the Grand Canyon.47 Also, at Grand Canyon one of the rangers incorrectly stated the width of the canyon during a program.48Although it was hard to ascertain exactly which tenets were being utilized and which type of connections were being made in Ranger Laura’s program, she achieved the goal the IDP had set forth: getting her audience to care about the Grand
Canyon while teaching them a little something about it. But non-specific language, as put forth by the IDP, has non-specific results and leads to inconsistencies among programs. The range in interpretation of the IDP is exemplified by the comparison of Ranger Laura’s
“Geology Glimpse” to “A Walk Through History,” led by Ranger Marty, also at the Grand
Canyon. Due to predictions of lightning, Ranger Marty’s program was changed from a walk along the canyon rim to a stationary program on the porch of the Yavapai Museum. First, there was no real backup plan in case of weather-related changes, so Marty turned his formal program into an informal Q&A session. Ranger Laura’s program, which had also been moved inside, maintained the structure of her original program. Ranger Marty was clearly knowledgeable, but also skeptical and sarcastic. He was critical of the NPS’s past practices regarding wildlife management and suggested that we “take an elk home” because there are too many wandering around the park. His many quips were witty, but ill-suited for his audience of children with over-protective parents and international visitors with an uncertain grasp of English. Yet, he answered all questions thoroughly, shared an emotional personal story about the significance of the Grand Canyon, and left positive impressions on program- goers whom I ran into later in the day. Ranger Marty, although somewhat unconventionally,
47 Upon preliminary searches, I have not found any evidence of this quote in relation to Ives or the Grand Canyon. 48 Geology Glimpse, June 9, 2015.
Zifkin 29 could still reasonably be operating under the tenets of the IDP, even though his program bore no semblance to Ranger Laura’s.
Interpretive Themes: Parks’ Standards and Discretion
During the two-week training period, every ranger receives a binder including a list of the specific park’s universal themes and concepts,49 which are meant to dictate and inspire the central topics of all of the ranger programs. While the lists themselves are finite, they are hardly restrictive. For instance, one of Glacier’s themes is “Cultural Resources” which includes “activity of humans, interactions, experiences, and the American West.”50 Like most of the NPS’s standards, these are vague too. Under this theme a ranger could develop a program about pretty much anything from homesteading to railroad construction to gambling for land. One of my interviewees said, “If I was really interested in like beavers and pelts that people came here to hunt, I would probably write a program based on that.” This program could highlight beaver ecology, the lifestyle of a fur trapper, or both. At Glacier I attended three programs that could be inspired by the “cultural resources” theme: a program about a man named Louis Hill, the son of James J. Hill, the famous railroad executive, and his promotion of the National Park System; a guided walk through the historic Lake MacDonald
Lodge, a national historic landmark in Glacier where people can still stay during their visits; and a program about the construction of the Going-to-the-Sun Road, a 51-mile road through the crest of the mountains considered to be one of the greatest cultural landscapes in the
United States. Each of these programs differed in focus and style, in that they used photos as props in front of a small group, walked through the very subject of the talk, and had a power point presentation, respectively. Yet, they all fit under the same universal theme.
49 Complete list can be found in Appendix A 50 Aleta, NPS Volunteer, Glacier
Zifkin 30
Both the IDP and the list of universal themes give rangers a high level of discretion when designing their programs. When I asked a supervisory ranger at the Grand Teton about the park’s interpretive themes she said, “It is a general list and staff are allowed a lot of creative freedom in which concepts they choose to incorporate into their programs.” So the standards that are implemented and handed out in every training binder are designed to give interpretive rangers “creative freedom.” While this creates variation, it also ensures that interpretive rangers will be able to easily and willingly adhere to the standards. Ranger Katie explained the process of being assigned a program and then developing it this way:
I mean, there are certain parameters to the program, like [the ranger] will be talking about a critter for 30 minutes on the porch and it should be Junior Ranger-friendly... But I get to pick the critter. I get to pick the format. So like my wolf program, for example, has some wolf ecology, but I chose to focus it a little on human-wolf interactions and those stories too, so it's not just like "they den here, they have this size packs, they have this many pups" but it's about kind of the controversy [about the reintroduction of wolves] and how we portray them too. So that was kind of up to me.51
Not only does Ranger Katie, cited above, have the freedom to choose the critter and the direction of the program (i.e. human-wolf interactions vs. wolf ecology), but she can also use any sources she pleases. Ranger Katie used examples of wolves in popular culture, such as
“Never Cry Wolf,” and other iconic wolf moments that she found on the Internet and children’s books.
In Katie’s program, just like all others, interpretive rangers are free to incorporate whatever sources they please. They are encouraged to use park resources, as they receive a tutorial from resource management staff and park specialists during training, but they have no limitations. When I asked one of my sources where he got most of his information he
51 Katie Tozier (seasonal interpretive ranger, Grand Teton National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015.
Zifkin 31 replied, “I got it off the Google, basically got it out of Google.”52 Other interpretive rangers were more enthusiastic about working with primary sources they found in park archives, which contain “permanent, paper-based materials” 53 such as documents detailing NPS business or legal dealings (concessions records, land management records, and otherwise), photos, and other documents, like letters or diaries. Most of these primary source materials were either generated by the park or donated to it. Both Ranger Emily and Ranger Jill emphasized the value of primary sources, respectively:
No matter what, I like to have access to a lot of primary source documents. For example, I do a program on the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] and for that I've looked at a lot of the letters that—we get a lot of things donated to the park, to our archives, from people who were in the CCC—letters that they've written to their parents, journals that they kept while they were here, photos.54
And:
I prefer to work with primary sources-- the documents themselves. Reading the reports, and that way you get a good sense of who these people were. And to me that’s super important, to get that idea when you’re an interpreter. Because you’re trying to help people make personal connections with people who lived 200 years ago. And if you can get a good sense of their life and what they went through on an everyday basis, then you can kinda find those connections much more easily.55
These rangers specifically favored the archives for the human-touch. A little earlier in our conversation, Ranger Emily noted that she was in charge of the archives in her last job in the
NPS, and now has a little bit harder time gaining access, but she still uses them regularly.
52 Bill Schustrom (seasonal interpretive ranger, Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015. 53 Bridgette Guild (chief curator, Grand Teton National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015. 54 Emily Nelson (seasonal interpretive ranger, Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015. 55 Jillian Staurowsky (seasonal interpretive ranger, Grand Canyon National Park), in an interview with the author, June 2015.
Zifkin 32
Interpretive Background: “The Father of Interpretation”
One of the many books that all incoming interpretive rangers receive is Interpreting
Our Heritage, by “Father of Interpretation,” Freeman Tilden. Along with the IDP, Tilden’s six principles comprise the foundation for interpretation—indeed Tilden was one of the inspirations for the IDP.56 Almost every interpretive ranger I interviewed mentioned Tilden with respect and reverence, and everyone expected me to know who he was (which I learned quickly). Tilden’s six principles are more in-depth and reflective than the IDP’s, and potentially more useful in determining effective ways for interpretive rangers to interact with their audiences.
1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile. 2. Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based on information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information. 3. Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable. 4. The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction but provocation. 5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase. 6. Interpretation, addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program57
Tilden is also more spiritual and in-touch with the practice of interpretation, which he displays throughout his book and with his qualifying statements about his own dictionary definition: “an educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than
56 National Park Service, "About Interpretation." 57 Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage: Fourth Edition, Expanded & Updated (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 34-35.
Zifkin 33 simply to communicate factual information.”58 But more importantly for his pupils (new and old interpretive rangers) are his concrete examples of good versus bad interpretations and his dissection and explanation of them. He also has many wise quips to further explain his principles, like “he [the adult visitor] does not so much wish to be talked at as to be talked with.”59 Through Tilden’s thorough, spiritual, and direct explanation of interpretation, new rangers can become acquainted with interpretation’s greater goals even before their first training session. Nevertheless, even with the more extensive explanation of interpretation afforded by Tilden’s book, it is still a broad method allowing for substantial variability in interpretive ranger programs.
Interpretive Program Plan (IPP): Up for Interpretation
One of the main products of the IDP is learning how to develop a program using the
IPP (Interpretive Program Plan), which is another example of a set of guidelines that creates an opportunity for ranger discretion. The IPP is an outline/worksheet that needs to be filled out for every program a ranger leads, and it exhibits itself much like the IDP’s three tenets: it seems specific but is ultimately ambiguous in the language and standards it puts forth.
Headings like “Theme/Central Idea,” “Interpretive Aids and Props,” “Interpretive Moments,”
“Primary Resource or Tangible,” “Concept or Intangible Meanings,” and “Details of
Interpretive Methods” are all specialized terms within the IPP, but they carry unspecific meanings which are difficult to implement. One person said, “To me, the hardest thing to understand is what the ‘intangible’ is because that’s more like peoples’ feelings and beliefs and things like that.” Especially when dealing with children: “How do you get them to think about it [the intangible], when all they want to look at or touch is the beaver pelt, and, you
58 Ibid., 33. 59 Ibid., 36.
Zifkin 34 know, they’re just excited. So the intangible to me is the tricky part.”60 The “intangible” in this example was “how beavers adapt to their environment.” But, in an alternative program, beavers adapting to new environments could be the “tangible.” So these headers, while potentially useful for organizing information, do not necessarily make programs consistent.
They confuse rangers who have undergone training, making them less effective as standards.
The IPP perhaps poses the greatest challenge to interpretive rangers trying to maintain standards because it simultaneously requires specific attention while also providing elusive guidance. Regardless of the fact that the standards contained within the document are dubious, the implementation and enforcement of the IPP is regular and has become stricter over the years, as Ranger Bill describes:
They'll give you a grace period when you can do your program a couple times, but after the first couple times, then they DEMAND a program thing [IPP]. They demand one of these outlines. And so they can keep track. Actually, I balked against that! I told them when I first started, they said, "just put together a program and go do it!" You know, I've taught biology forever, and I've been public speaking forever, and I thought and NOW they say well now you gotta do this? You don't trust me anymore!61
Ranger Bill, who has worked at Glacier for over 40 years, complains that he has experienced an increase in the regulation of ranger programs and the enforcement of their rules.
Interestingly, I had thought it lenient to give rangers a “grace period” before handing in the
IPP, but apparently this amounts to an increase in oversight, according to Ranger Bill. At any rate, the NPS’s standards, as ambiguous as they are, are enforced—perhaps because they are the only reliable means of oversight, albeit indirect.
60 Aleta (Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015. 61 Schustrom, interview.
Zifkin 35
Structure of Supervision
Supervisory rangers must rely on program and interpretive standards as an indirect means of oversight because they cannot personally supervise their rangers’ programs. At most of the parks I visited, supervisors had anywhere from 15-25 interpretive rangers reporting directly to them. This means that they were putting together the schedules for each of them, dealing with administrative responsibilities, and attending “as many programs as possible.” At most parks, interpretive programs range anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours, not including the full or half-day guided hikes. And, depending on the amount of time an interpretive ranger has worked in the park, he might lead anywhere from 2-8 programs a season. Now multiply that by 15, and consider the fact that, ideally, the supervisory rangers would see a program towards the beginning of the season, write a report, and then do a follow up later in the season. Needless to say, that’s impossible. Not every program that every ranger presents gets observed by a supervisor: as one of the supervisory rangers at
Mesa Verde admitted, “I’m happy if I can get to one of everybody’s.”62
As far as direct oversight goes, the NPS seems to have adopted a “do the best that you can” strategy. Where at Mesa Verde, Glacier, and Grand Teton they have Lead Interpreters observing interpretive programs and providing feedback, at Grand Canyon they have adopted a peer-review system, where each ranger is assigned a partner, and they each have to go to all of the other’s programs and give each other suggestions and comments. That is not to say that the Grand Canyon does not also have formal coaching, but they insert an additional measure of informal oversight that the other parks do not. Parks also have a specific position
62 Murray Shoemaker (supervisory ranger, Mesa Verde National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015.
Zifkin 36 called Interpretive Coach designated to, reasonably, coach interpretive rangers. At some parks, the Lead Interpreter doubles as the Interpretive Coach, whereas at other parks they have separate people filling the positions. The Interpretive Coaches are responsible for writing more elaborate reports on the programs, and it is generally their only responsibility, so they fill in where the supervisors cannot. Even so, not every program gets attended by a coach or a ranger—a reality that makes standards all the more important.
In order to justify their reliance on standards and the lack of direct oversight, supervisory rangers display a high level of confidence in their staff, implying that they do not require strict oversight in the first place.
You know, we hire great staff and we know that our rangers are awesome, so really it's [coaching is] out there to help them make their programs more impactful. So there is that part that's like are we looking good? Are we representing the Park Service well? But the bulk of it's for that [helping them improve their programs].63
This lead interpreter at Glacier de-emphasizes the role of coaching and concentrates mostly on her trust in her staff’s abilities in order to compensate for not having the time or resources to coach more thoroughly. That is not to say that her rangers are not “awesome,” but her relentlessly positive language and minimizing of the importance of coaching reinforces the notion that their system is working well. She can trust the training and coaching that they do receive to be sufficient enough not to warrant any concerns about quality or professionalism, at least not serious ones.
Even though there is not thorough or consistent oversight of programs, every interpretive ranger has at least one coaching session with their y Ranger—a session whose
63 Amanda McCutcheon (supervisory ranger, Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015.
Zifkin 37 goals are amorphous. In recent years, the NPS has shifted from a formal observation and evaluation program called auditing to a more support-based coaching:
In the early days they used to call it auditing and it was the scary thing that people did to the staff when I was a seasonal, like, “Ahhh, they're coming to audit me and evaluate me!” We've evolved it more into a, you know, we're here to help each other be better, that's what we're shooting for. It's not that I'm going to crucify you because you've left out a transition in your program. It's, “We're gonna talk about it and just make it so that it's a better, it's a better program for you and for the visitors.” So that's what we're shooting for. 64
The transition from a less disciplinary method of coaching, as supervisory ranger Murray describes, to a more supportive model indicates that audits were either unsuccessful or unnecessary, but it also makes the goals and outcomes of the new style of coaching more unclear. We just want to make it “better” does not bode well as a strategy with consistent outcomes. The shift in coaching style is another manifestation of the trend of supervisory rangers believing in and demonstrating confidence in their staff. There seems to be an underlying assumption that all of the interpretive rangers are doing the best they can, and the coaching is just there to help them improve. Coaching, then, appears to be less about oversight than about support and improvement. One supervisory ranger describes her coaching sessions like this:
I'll meet with them from anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour about what was really great about the program, what was really strong, where I saw that emotional, intellectual connections were being made, and also where I see an area where a really great opportunity that's not being seized to make a connection… And there is a part of it that's making sure that our rangers are in uniform, they're presenting information appropriately, but I think that's the smaller section of it.65
There are some concrete standards as far as dress code and “appropriate” demeanor are concerned in program presentation. But “seizing opportunities” and talking about what was
64 Shoemaker, interview. 65 McCutcheon, interview.
Zifkin 38
“great” and “really strong” are not quite as concrete. How can one enforce a standard that does not have a clear meaning? What does making a program “more impactful” look like?
Questions like these emerge from all of the NPS’s aforementioned standards, and they are difficult to answer, but they are not burdensome to the supervisory rangers. Rather they are the natural outcome of setting standards that are easy to follow and easy to enforce—a necessity at the NPS.
Crafting Their Own Narratives
As a result of the flexible nature of NPS standards and the autonomy they afford, interpretive rangers have the power to craft their own narratives about the park’s cultural and natural history. There is one conversation I had with an interpretive ranger at Mesa Verde that illuminated just how much influence she has over the “facts” to create her own narrative.
We were talking about a data sheet the NPS gave her that included the numbers of rooms and other numerical data about a particular cliff dwelling that she gives tours of. She said that archeologists had offered numbers that have ranged from 94 to 150, even though the data sheet said 150. (I am the speaker in bold).
What number do you use?
-Yeah, what number do you use? And so, exactly.
But actually what numbers?
-I say 130, I just hit it right down the middle. Actually I think I go lower, I think I use 110 for Long House, 130 is... yeah you have to remember all this data. Yeah I think I use 110 for Long House, I just hit it down the middle, but I don't dwell on the number of people. Because it's such a foggy area, I'll just go, "eh, about a 110 people," so yeah.
That's super interesting. Just to avoid that sort of discussion [about the disputes among archeologists]?
Ultimately, that isn't the important part of what we're conveying to the visitor anyway. It isn't the data. Because we want them to understand the value of these cultural resources and their connections to the descendants. And so this is the heritage of the Puebloan people in the Southwest, and it was
Zifkin 39 important to preserve and protect these places, and so telling the story so that these people appreciate and understand—that is more important than knowing exactly how many people lived there.66
At first I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of this information. Surely, I thought, the NPS would want its interpretive rangers to use the data they gave them. But instead I was told:
“whether or not we use that data is completely up to us. As long as we're giving a consistent, clear representation of the sites that are within the bounds of the data then it's okay, you know what I mean?” So this is another example of the freedom that the interpretive rangers have in designing and presenting their programs. Of course their information has to be
“within the bounds” of facts, but it is completely at their discretion to decide how they use it.
Personal input constructing public narratives can replace small details with overarching sentiments. For instance, at Yosemite, their main ranger program is a two-hour
“Valley Floor Tour” in an open-air bus. The ranger has the floor for two straight hours, and there is very little room for audience interaction because the Ranger sits in a seat in front with a microphone and any other communication aside from raised hands is difficult. Ranger
Ben, who is Mountain Maidu of Northern California and Turtle Mountain Chippewa of Great
Lakes Region, led my Valley Floor Tour. Most of the anecdotes he shared were based on
Native American culture, and he gave all of the names of the important landmarks in their original native form. He barely mentioned John Muir, the star of most Yosemite shows, and talked very little about white people at all. In this way, Ranger Ben presented an interpretive narrative of the Yosemite Valley in a way that was, reportedly, different from anyone else’s despite covering the same ground and seeing the same landscape. Choice of stories, emphasis
66 Cindy Cooperider (seasonal interpretive ranger, Mesa Verde National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015.
Zifkin 40 or de-emphasis of facts, in addition to the many other means of telling narratives that suit individual interests all highlight the autonomy and the range of Interpretive Programs.
Conclusion
Interpretive ranger programs are responsible for presenting the public narratives of the national parks. As such, interpretive rangers are the most important actors in providing
“new” narratives about the human history of the landscapes that the NPS protects. The training of these rangers and the control that they have over their programs seemed of utter importance, because they reach almost 300 million visitors a year. Transmitting a unified message about NPS principles to national park visitors is essential. But my study of both ranger training and program development showed that in spite of NPS standards and standardized procedures, rangers have significant autonomy in constructing their programs, which leads to small inconsistencies in the NPS’s public narratives.
As a huge bureaucracy with limited funds, the NPS presents and enforces standards for ranger programs because its existence is contingent upon them. As an “organized anarchy” with both “rigid and flexible” standards, the NPS can persist despite the occasional inaccurate fact at a ranger program without expending unnecessary energy to make sure that everything is perfect. In many ways the NPS’s Interpretive Division embodies what is called a “garbage can style”67 of organization because everything is contained neatly in one uniform package, but what is inside is a complete jumble. But even though it is a mix of different things (stories, styles, and facts) it is all where it is supposed to be.
Interpretive rangers undergo a two-week training program when they are new to a park. Most of these training sessions focus on orientation in the park, learning about the
67 Michael D Cohen, James G March, and Johan P Olsen, "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice," Administrative science quarterly (1972).
Zifkin 41 park’s resources, and practicing interpretation skills and leading programs. Before they start leading their own programs, rangers must fill out an IPP (Interpretive Program Plan). This document outlines the program and requires introductions, transitions, and “tangibles” and
“intangibles,” which are flexible terms. At the end of the two weeks, interpretive rangers start giving their own programs to the public. Most of their programs are unsupervised, and the
IPP is not collected until the program has been offered three times. While these procedures are enforced, they also allow for a high level of autonomy among interpretive rangers.
Success of ranger programs is measured by how well interpretive rangers connect with visitors and how much those visitors connect to the park resources. Sticking to a script or meeting a checklist are not valued as highly as creating connections. As a result, interpretive rangers avoid including challenging or uncomfortable topics, such as Native
American dispossession, rural white settler erasure, and climate change, in their programs.
The focus on connections in combination with the interpretive ranger autonomy ends up producing notable patterns of silence.
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Chapter 3. Native American Representation in the NPS
“If anything, national parks serve as a microcosm for the history of conflict and misunderstanding that has long characterized the unequal relations between the United States and native peoples.”—Mark David Spence68
The relationship between Native Americans and the national park lands has been fraught with dispossession and erasure, both physical and historical. Confronting this brutal past in America’s most cherished places can be difficult, and for many years the NPS avoided it. The “national park ideal,” Mark Spence’s concept, is central to the founding of the national parks. Laura Ogden adopts Neumann’s words, saying it is a “particular vision of nature…as Edenic, unhinhabited wilderness” that “presupposed and supported the dispossession” of Native Americans from lands that became national parks.69 Through the lens of the national park ideal, humans were to be erased from natural history. The history of the national park ideal, Ogden notes, “is both simultaneous with and contingent upon the encroachment of white settlers on traditional indigenous lands, as well as the genocides [of
Native Americans] that made these dispossessions possible.”70 The image of pristine human- free wilderness was both responsible for and a result of the dispossession of Native
Americans.
From the 1870s to the 1930s the U.S. federal government routinely displaced Native
Americans from national park lands and moved them onto neighboring reservations that seemed to get smaller by the year. Some parks, notably Glacier, Yosemite, and Yellowstone were established before the official removal of Indians from the parklands. When faced with
68 Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8. 69 Ogden, "Searching for Paradise in the Florida Everglades," 99. 70 Ibid.
Zifkin 43 the decision between removal or assimilation, Americans decided that the former was a more favorable option, as expansion was inevitable. Spence says, “Ultimately, removal would seem an ideal panacea for America’s chronic ‘Indian problems,’ and its visionary appeal would supersede all arguments to the contrary.”71 And that is what happened—Native
Americans were systematically displaced from their rightful land. Though many tribes resisted Americans’ efforts with force or law, they were eventually removed, creating the conditions for the parks to seem immaculately void of human presence.72
The physical erasure and manipulation of Native Americans was mirrored by the
NPS’s problematic narrative that either excluded Native Americans or considered them to be
“curiosities of the landscape.”73 The NPS has since sought to distance itself from the incriminating closed-mindedness of the “national park ideal,” yet it still struggles to incorporate a balanced depiction of Native Americans, and it selectively ignores the direct connection between their displacement and the establishment of the parks. As long as the
NPS maintains this vision of nature, which it does, as discussed in this chapter and the next two as well, it will continue to struggle. The challenges that the NPS faces in interpreting that history result in an imbalance of Native American representation in the parks, embodied by the temporal and spatial confinement of Native American narratives in visitor centers, museums, and interpretive ranger programs.
71 Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, 15. 72 Ibid. 73 Ogden, "Searching for Paradise in the Florida Everglades," 101.
Zifkin 44
Ecological Fame-Making and Settler Colonialism
Neumann and Spence’s “national park ideal,” Ogden’s “ecological fame-making,” and settler colonialism can all help to explain the long history of physical and narrative dispossession of Native Americans from national park lands.
In her study of the Florida Everglades, anthropologist Laura Ogden coined the term
“ecological fame-making,” which is a social process that separates humans from nature. By deeming certain ecosystems as worthy of protection, environmentalists and conservationists sought to emphasize a “site’s ecological worth and rarity” while “exclud[ing] indications of the site’s human life.”74 Indeed, a site’s ecological value was contingent upon its separation from anything human, a notion that reinforced the national park ideal. As such, part of the mystique of these lands, many of which became national parks, was found in their
‘untouched’ beauty. The perceived ecological worth of these lands provided the ‘excuse’ for displacing its inhabitants by claiming that they were destroying its ecosystem, while also resulting in the blatant and purposeful erasure of their narratives.
Native American dispossession happened as part of the process of ecological fame- making. The national park ideal positioned nature in such a way that made humans the ultimate enemy. As Historian Karl Jacoby puts it, in Yellowstone,
perceptive nineteenth-century observers found the landscape saturated with traces of Indian groups…Despite such encounters, park backers nonetheless persisted in describing the region as existing in ‘primeval solitude,’ filled with countless locations that ‘have never been trodden by human footsteps.’75
This does not only indicate the loyalty that park backers had to the national park ideal, but it reveals how the process of ecological fame-making unfolded. Landscapes that “have never
74 Ibid., 98. 75 Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, 84.
Zifkin 45 been trodden by human footsteps” seem exotic and valuable, and they warrant fame and protection.
A third process that also supported the erasure of Native Americans from the parks is settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is a historical process in the American expansion westward whose goal was land dispossession instead of labor expropriation. As a settler colonialist society, the United States has embodied certain conceptions and ideas that are byproducts of this process. The national park ideal is but one example of a “settler conception of wilderness,” as Jessica Cattelino explains in her analysis of settler colonialism.
She argues that “thinking about settler colonialism can help illuminate the coproduction of nature and indigeneity in settler states like the United States.”76 This in turn can help us understand the ways in which indigenous people were either erased or seen as “curiosities of the landscape.” She writes,
Indeed, settler conceptions of wilderness are haunted by the spectre of indigenous peoples, whether representing American Indians as natural environmentalists, expropriating and ‘reclaiming’ land without regard for indigenous owners because their use of it was deemed ‘unproductive,’ or by protecting nature by expelling indigenous peoples in order to create national parks and preserves.77
The NPS, founded under the premises of the national park ideal, internalize these settler conceptions of Native Americans, and continues to advance them.
Cattelino suggests that by embracing an anthropology of settler colonialism, which
“structures all American lives,”78 we would be better prepared to confront the complicated issues that arise when figuring out how to “claim national histories and territories when
76 Jessica R Cattelino, "Thoughts on the U.S. As a Settler Society (Plenary Remarks, 2010 Sana Conference)," North American Dialogue 14, no. 1 (2011): 5. 77 Ibid. 78 "Anthropologies of the United States," Annual review of anthropology 39 (2010): 282.
Zifkin 46
[they] are laced with traces of invasion, and [there is] pressure on the crafting of shared futures.”79 Currently, the NPS fails to grapple with settler colonialism. The justification for
Native American displacement is automatically undermined by the common trope of classifying Native Americans as one with nature, which the NPS frequently employs.
Moreover, the NPS favors the idea of a “shared future” with Native Americans but without wanting to acknowledge past injustices. By avoiding responsibility for its role as the settler colonialist, the NPS remains unable to provide an honest depiction of Native American history and continues to offer only empty gestures of reconciliation towards people it has displaced.
Co-Producing Nature and Indigeneity
One of the ways that the NPS currently represents Native Americans is through the description of their connection with nature. Through this trope, Native Americans become non-humans, and a part of nature. In fact, Native Americans aided many of the initial explorers and naturalists by helping them navigate the unknown land and teaching them useful survival skills. Their contributions can only be overlooked so easily if they are ignored or “collapsed into” the landscape.80 In almost every visitor center, sign, or museum that mentions Native Americans, there is also a description of resourcefulness or spirituality. This quote from Charley Bulletts, who is a member of the Kaibab Band of Southern Paiute, lines the wall of the North Rim Visitor Center: “This is where we come in the summer because it is high and cool. This is where we gather cedar, cliffrose, buffalo berries, and willow.” The
St. Mary Valley sign at Glacier, describing the location says,
79 Ibid., 286. 80"Thoughts on the U.S. As a Settler Society (Plenary Remarks, 2010 Sana Conference)," 5.
Zifkin 47
Native American oral traditions tell of hunting mountain bison and bighorn sheep here, fishing the valley lakes and rivers, and collecting plants for food, medicinal, and spiritual use… Bordering the lake, huge mountains with names like Red Eagle, Mahtotopa, Little Chief, and Dusty Star reinforce the significant cultural history and presence of Native Americans and their traditional tribal lands here.81
These images and descriptions create a sense of serenity and pureness that appears as a not- so-distant cousin to the national park ideal. Emphasizing and romanticizing the hunter- gatherer lifestyle is another way that people equate Native Americans with nature. It is also important to note that hunting and fishing were the reasons the U.S. government provided for justifying Blackfeet removal from Glacier. While this sign was not intended to be ironic, the fact that names of mountains, instead of the people themselves “reinforce the significant cultural history and presence of Native Americans,” in the park seems too obvious to overlook.
The framings of Native Americans as akin to nature and/or as frozen in time are the two most common tropes that the NPS (and greater American society) regrettably reinforces.
Indeed, whether or not Native Americans were actually conservationists does not impact the fact that they interacted closely with their environment and held the natural world in high esteem. But, the risk in pairing the two manifests itself in the problematic idea of the
“ecologically noble savage,”82 and it plays directly into the hands of those who used to
81 Sign outside St. Mary Valley Visitor Center 82 Co-producing nature with indigeneity has also created the image of the “ecologically noble savage,” which implies tribes’ conservationist leanings. This notion has come into debate in the last decade and half. Since the reintroduction of Native narratives, many have been claiming that they were conservationists, an argument that would undermine their initial erasure. But, studies have shown that while many tribes were ecologically savvy, few were deliberately conserving their land. Indeed, some may argue that they were pre-conservation, and there was no use for it. But, the fact is that they lived sustainably, had an advanced knowledge of ecosystems, even though they set up no systems with the intent to conserve.
Zifkin 48 consider indigenous peoples “curiosities of the landscape.” In short, portraying Natives as one with the earth strips them of their personhood, and places their worth solely in their perceived treatment of the environment, implying that if they did not cherish the land as is believed, they should not have rights to it.
Avoiding Conflict in Historic Overlap
The NPS rarely mentions contact between Native people and non-Native people. In the rare times that it does, there is no indication of conflict between the two groups. In fact, some examples imply a positive relationship between the two. At the Grand Canyon’s North
Rim83 visitor center, which is in a small, log cabin-like building that also houses the bookstore and information center, there is one exhibit that occupies half the space, while a bookstore occupies the other half. The exhibit is a general overview of North Rim history, and it starts with a sign about the “People of the North Rim.” They were the Kaibab Band of
Southern Paiute Indians who had been there for over 900 years, before John Wesley Powell mapped the Colorado River, calling the canyon home. They have an interactive map titled
“Home to many tribes,” that overlays the former resident tribe’s name over the geographic area. And right next to it, they have a series of four cubes that spin, with each face representing one of the four North Rim plateaus: one cube shows a photo of the canyon, the
Natives’ impact on the environment was considerably lower than the first Euro-Americans, but it is considered no more than a by-product of their small population size and “low” technology—not a sign of conservation[ism]. See Cattelino, "Thoughts on the U.S. As a Settler Society (Plenary Remarks, 2010 Sana Conference)," 5. 83 Grand Canyon National Park has two separate locations: the North Rim and the South Rim. When people say they are going to the Grand Canyon, they usually mean the South Rim. It is bigger, warmer, and has more infrastructure than its North Rim counterpart, which is only open five months out of the year (May-October). While the two are only twenty-two miles away from each other “as the crow flies,” it takes about four and a half hours to drive from one rim to the other. On the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which is also the less visited of the two, there is only one visitor center.
Zifkin 49 second shows the English name, “Kaibab Plateau” for example, the third shows the Paiute name for the canyon, “Kaivavitsi,” pronounced “Kai-va-vits,” and the fourth block discloses the meaning of the names, in this case “mountain lying down. The faces of the cubes are color-coded, and the visitor can spin the cubes to match up each of the four components (see photo).
At a certain point, the exhibit shifts focus to John Wesley Powell, the great explorer who mapped the Grand Canyon. In two parts of the exhibition, the curators indicate that
Powell and the Paiute encountered one another in neutral, or even favorable, circumstances.
For instance, they depict Powell standing up and talking to four men—one of whom is Native
American. The four men are sitting down around a blanket, eating a meal and listening to
Powell. In the second illustrated encounter, the curators present a sign entitled, “Powell
Needed a Guide.” It explains “John Wesley Powell mapped Grand Canyon with help from
Zifkin 50
Kaibab Paiute guides. Chuarrumpeaka was one of them.” It then implores the visitor to lift up the wooden flap to see a photo of the two of them together, standing side-by-side, smiling.
While these signs implicitly acknowledge that there was overlap between Native Americans and early explorers, there is no indication of conflict. Not only was the North Rim’s depiction of Native Americans and Powell uncontroversial, but it is framed as a non-issue at worst and a beneficial relationship at best.
The Grand Canyon also tried to focus on their positive relationship with the neighboring tribes, saying things like “they still live here,” or “they’re still in the Canyon.” I was surprised to hear that the different tribes had not been displaced from the park. It was not until somebody drew the explicit distinction between the Grand Canyon and Grand Canyon
National Park that this made sense. But it was obvious that most people were not trying to point out the difference, making it seem as if the NPS were a benevolent force to Native
Americans and that, even though it was a national park, they had allowed the people who had lived there for thousands of years to remain. Thus, the NPS avoided mentioning any negative historic encounters between Native Americans and early settlers.84
It might seem radical for a national park to foreground Native American history.
However, Mesa Verde, the first national park established for the protection of manmade structures, focuses solely on fourteenth century Native American history, before Europeans first arrived on this continent. Mesa Verde is an archeological site containing some of the best-preserved Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings in the United States. Cliff dwellings are elaborate stone structures that are built into caves, cliffs, and niches, and they look like small
84 Then again, the NPS does not discuss early settlers for the most part. See Chapter 4 for further examination. Additionally, there is no suggestion of when exactly Native Americans were officially displaced from Grand Canyon National Park.
Zifkin 51 cities carved out of the sides of canyons. Balcony House, Cliff Palace, and Long House are the three biggest cliff dwellings that Mesa Verde protects, and they can only be accessed during a tour. Since the Ancestral Puebloans, who inhabited the cliff dwellings at Mesa
Verde, left around 1300 A.D., the NPS has no challenging or incriminating history to confront, although it does struggle to avoid representing Native Americans as relics of the past. Mesa Verde’s main subjects left before Christopher Columbus set foot on this continent, eliminating many difficulties that the NPS usually faces when representing Native
American history, and alleviating any pressure of portraying a violent encounter between white settlers and Native Americans.
Mesa Verde’s focus is necessarily on the past and the people who lived there, but the rangers make an effort to remind visitors that Ancestral Puebloan descendents still exist.
Ranger Murray said if there was one thing he wanted visitors to take away from their trip to
Mesa Verde it would be: “People who lived here are STILL out there. They're still here.
Because many years ago on the tours, [rangers would say], ‘they disappeared—the ancestral
Pueblo people disappeared!’ Well they didn't disappear, they moved.” During my tour of
Balcony House, Ranger Lara was careful to reinforce Ranger Murray’s point: “The tribes did not get abducted by aliens, they did not just disappear.” Although the reasons for their departure from the cliff dwellings remain unsettled, archeologists hypothesize that they left for reasons related to overpopulation and drought, while some Ancestral Puebloan descendants assert that it was common for certain tribes to migrate for spiritual reasons. Still, claiming the continued existence of Ancestral Puebloan descendants is a less challenging reality for the NPS to confront than other historical narratives of Native American removal and dispossession.
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Contradictions in Representation
The NPS’s unwillingness to fully acknowledge its unsavory past with Native
Americans often results in contradictory representations throughout the national parks.
Yosemite National Park, which is named for displaced Native Americans, for example, has made an effort to be straightforward about Native American dispossession. By stubbornly adhering to the narrative of the unspoiled greatness of the NPS, it struggles with the success stories of the park’s establishment, which was contingent upon the (somewhat delayed) removal of Native Americans. For example, in a sign in their Yosemite Valley Visitor
Center, the NPS acknowledges that in 1851 the Yosemite Indians’ villages were burned by a band of state-sanctioned volunteers called the Mariposa Battalion who were to “rid the area of the perceived threat of Indians.” The end of the sign reads:
When they [the Mariposa Battalion] entered Yosemite Valley, they systematically burned villages and food supplies and forced men, women, and children away from their homes. When the Indians returned, Yosemite was no longer theirs. New settlers had claimed it as their own. The Yosemite people did whatever they could to survive in this strange world in which they found themselves.
While this sign is unusually straightforward about the violence inflicted on the Yosemite
Indians, it does not place any responsibility on the NPS for its role as the beneficiary of this raid. Just thirteen years later, in 1864, the land that was stolen from the Yosemite Indians became the first land to be federally protected for public use through the Yosemite Grant.
One of the areas that was protected was called the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias,
Zifkin 53 sharing the name with the Battalion that forced the Native Americans out. 85 As one interpretive ranger said, this is “part of history here that gets challenging to interpret.”86
On June 30, 2014, Yosemite celebrated the 150th anniversary of the 1864 Grant.
There were signs throughout the park, in every visitor center and building. Even though I was there one year later, there were still some hanging in entryways and forgotten bulletin boards.
The NPS celebrates the Yosemite Grant as one of the first significant victories for conservation in the United States—legislation that Abraham Lincoln signed. It was John
Muir’s first contribution of many to the protection of Yosemite, and is considered the birth of the NPS (even though the Park Service was not officially created until 1916). One of my interviewees said, “we had a big celebration of that, but I think we all acknowledged that it doesn’t feel like a celebration for everyone.” Even so, all of the marketing for this anniversary was positive, celebratory, and one-sided.
Additionally, there are a number of signs that explicitly confront some of the more incriminating aspects of turning Native American lands into national parks. For example, at
Glacier, one such instance is referred to as the “Ceded Strip.” The “Ceded Strip” fiasco is featured in an exhibit in the St. Mary Valley Visitor Center, and it is one of the few exhibits that focuses on Native Americans from their own perspective. But in separating these stories from the rest of the visitor center, there is a sense that these narratives are only relevant to
Native Americans, and not the NPS, because the antagonist remains unnamed and the NPS does not respond to the claims.
85 Mariposa was/is also the name of the county in California where present-day Yosemite is located. 86 Sarah Carter (seasonal interpretive ranger, Yosemite National Park), in an interview with the author, June 2015.
Zifkin 54
The Ceded Strip was a stretch of land east of the Continental Divide that was part of
Blackfeet ancestral territory. In 1895, the federal government wanted to take back the land and reduce the size of the Blackfeet Reservation to its current size. Blackfeet spokespeople say, on the sign in the visitor center that, “we contest various parts of the 1895 agreement that transferred the ceded strip…to the US Federal Government” which eventually became part of Glacier National Park.
Before going to the visitor center, I had heard this story twice: once during a program, and once during an interview with a ranger who says that she includes this story “briefly” in her evening program. The latter described the story as “tricky.” In all accounts, there seemed to be a level of deliberate miscommunication on the side of the federal government. As the story goes, the Blackfeet were not willing to sell their land, especially not for the offered price of $1 million. Negotiations went on for days, with the Blackfeet refusing to budge. And then, “according to Joe McKay [a Blackfeet tribal member], in the wee hours of the night, when no one else was around, somehow a deal was cut.”87 Ranger Bill said that there was a rumor that the Blackfeet translator got drunk and made the deal, which reflects racist stereotypes of Native Americans. Ranger Amanda said that George Bird Grinnell, a prominent conservationist, “was involved in the negotiations on behalf of the Blackfeet. And some people say that he did them a disservice.” The sign in the exhibit does not present an alternative version to either of these possibilities, but it certainly “contests” various parts of the agreement, (including sale vs. lease, scope of the land, and rights to the land).
Ranger Amanda explained that the NPS’s relationship with the Blackfeet is complicated, but mostly positive. On the one hand, Ranger Amanda said, “there is a general
87 Amanda McCutcheon (supervisory ranger, Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015.
Zifkin 55 consensus [that the Blackfeet are] happy that it didn’t end up like everything else,” and on the other, “there is a feeling that they should have more rights on the land.” The understanding that the park was not protected for their purposes adds another layer of complexity. One excerpt from the Kootenai tribe on a sign titled, “Glacier National Park/
Bittersweet Meanings” explains,
We are thankful for the preservation of an area that has 500-year-old cedar trees who listened to our ancestors sing and dance long before the Kootenai were aware of Europeans. Yet, we are also aware that this place has not been preserved because of its significance to us. It is preserved because of the many visitors that come to the area.
Even though the sign is straightforward, the NPS does not quite seem to be the guilty or responsible agent in the situation. The remaining signs in this exhibit continue with other slightly unfavorable descriptions of the realities and opinions of the tribes that were forced to leave, who now live in reservations outside the park.
Segregation and Confinement of Narratives
Although the NPS admits that indigenous people lived on the lands that are now parks, the most in-depth representation of Native American history is confined to separate and/or dated exhibits in visitor centers and museums, like the one just described in Glacier.
While the NPS generally acknowledges the existence of Native Americans, there are still some examples of complete erasure throughout the parks. For instance, in the Verkamp’s
Visitor Center on the Grand Canyon South Rim, there is a guide on the floor in the form of an arrow, like in Candyland, where each square represents a different historical event, and it leads you throughout the whole visitor center. It is called “Your Walking History Tour,” which “highlights moments in local, national, and international history.” The first square is the 1870s, and begins with three major events: “Prospectors explore Grand Canyon.
Zifkin 56
Yellowstone established as first national park. Major John Wesley Powell makes second trip down Colorado River through Grand Canyon.” Despite tribal groups having lived in the canyon for thousands of years before then, “history” began in 1872, and there was no mention of Native Americans in the entire visitor center.
While it was not unusual for “history” programs at all parks I visited to begin in the late 1800s, this was the only example I saw of complete erasure of Native Americans in a visitor center. Typically sectioned out into “history” and “Native American history,” as one of the supervisory rangers put it, (“you need to know the history, you need to know Native
American history,”88) this Candyland walking tour was not that surprising.
At the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, one can find Native American representation in designated Indian museums near the Tusayan Ruins, 800-year-old Ancestral Pueblo ruins that are considered one of the most important archeological sites in Arizona. The museum attached to the Ruins is tiny and dark. Its cases are stuffed with artifacts and large, black placards overwhelmed by small, white print. In the middle of the Tusayan Museum, a freestanding glass box displays the same artifacts and signs twice. I walked around the case to see what was on the other side, only to realize that it was the exact same material.
Moreover, peering in from either side, I could see the back of the signs that faced the other way. This cluttered, dark museum left much to be desired. While the placards themselves were thoughtful, they were nearly impossible to read, and after ten minutes in the museum I yearned to leave and see sunlight again.
This is the same feeling in the Indian museums in Yosemite, Grand Teton, and Mesa
Verde. The Chief Curator of the Yosemite Museum explained that they have a permanent
88 Marc Neidig (district manager, Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015.
Zifkin 57 exhibit, “most of [which] was developed by the Curator of Ethnography, [who] retired about ten years ago.”89 Nothing about the exhibit had changed in over a decade. And as in the
Tusayan Museum, all of the explanations of the exhibit were written on large placards, white instead of black, with print so small it was barely legible.
Native American history is not only confined to outdated cultural museums, but is also separated from other content within visitor centers, like at St. Mary’s in Glacier. Here, there was an entirely separate room designated specifically to Native Americans. It could be argued that the Native tribes got their own room as a sign of respect, so that they were granted adequate space and representation. Or, it could be seen as another example of the
NPS sequestering Native narratives and keeping them separate from the rest of the information at the visitor center. Nevertheless, before it was Glacier National Park, it was home to four main tribes: Blackfeet, Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and Kootenai. In this room, there are video testimonies of tribal elders discussing the park, their ties to the land, and their opinions about what has happened since the park’s establishment. In contradiction to the inclusion of Native American voices, this exhibit was supplemented with sculptures of animals like wolves and grizzly bears—a common trope which equates Native Americans with nature, erasing them from humanity altogether.
In the instance where histories are not separated, per se, they disproportionately feature the non-Native figure. One of the greatest attractions on the South Rim is the Desert
View Watch Tower, a structure built to mirror and incorporate Native designs. This is ironic because, although it was meant to celebrate Hopi tradition, it stands as a monument to its
89 Barbara Beroza (chief curator, Yosemite National Park), in an interview with the author, June 2015.
Zifkin 58 designer, Mary Colter: a white, female architect. In her design, she consulted with many tribal members, yet she is still the star of the building. She is celebrated on signs all around the area, while few mention specific Native Americans by name.
Cultural Sensitivity and Fear of Misrepresenting
As I mention in the first chapter, every ranger who is new to a park (regardless of whether or not they were part of the NPS before) undergoes a two-week training program, part of which is designated to cultural sensitivity training. During this section of training, a
Native American from a neighboring tribe or a tribal liaison speaks with the group about respectful representation. One of the supervisory rangers who organizes training at Glacier explained that they had a Blackfeet tribal member come during training, “and we didn’t tell him what to say, we just said, ‘Can you come speak to our seasonal interpreters?’”90
Many of the interpretive rangers take this training seriously. At Mesa Verde, tribal members lead tours of the cliff dwellings, emphasizing the stories that the descendants of
Ancestral Puebloans have about the structures. Most of the interpretive rangers I interviewed found this aspect of training incredibly helpful because it allowed them to incorporate non- archeological perspectives into their programs, and because it provided them with a script that they could be comfortable using. For instance, during the program, interpretive rangers would say, “Archeologists think this ______, but one Zuni man said this ______.” This way, interpretive rangers could properly attribute the stories and have no fear of misrepresenting them.
Indeed, the fear of misrepresenting Natives’ stories loomed large in the hearts and minds of interpretive rangers and resulted in the near-complete absence of Native American
90 McCutcheon, interview.
Zifkin 59 representation in any of their programs. During cultural sensitivity training at Yosemite, the interpretive rangers learned that in certain Native traditions, storytelling was considered a privileged skill that required training. So, one needed to receive training in order to rightfully tell it. After learning this, many rangers became over-cautious about telling stories that were not theirs to tell: “I mean, a lot of stories are printed in books and in theory you can tell them, but I wanna respect that idea that you don’t tell a story unless you’re trained,”91 so she referred curious visitors to the Indian Cultural Museum instead. “We’re very sensitive about how we interpret the Native American story, and when you go down in the Valley [Yosemite
Valley], we do have an Indian Cultural Museum and we have Native American Park
Rangers,”92 Of course, it was not just this one fact that kept people from discussing Native
Americans, but the inherent difficulty of talking about uncomfortable topics. And the reality is that it is an uncomfortable topic. Interpretive rangers are tasked with spreading the message of preservation and enjoyment of national parks, while they are also responsible for educating the public about their natural and cultural history, and in relation to Native
Americans, one task directly undermines the other. Because of the discretion afforded to interpretive rangers in their programs, they could avoid the discomfort if they pleased—and most of them did.
The interpretive rangers are doubtlessly aware, if not hyper-aware, of the fragile dynamic between the Park Service and Native Americans, and as a result they often fail to incorporate Native Americans into their programs. Because of what one of my interviewees called the “somewhat sticky situation of the American Indians on this land”93 and interpretive
91 Carter, interview. 92 Carter, interview. 93 McCutcheon, interview.
Zifkin 60 rangers’ discretion in their programs, Native American representation is sequestered into specialized programs and exhibits or mentioned in passing. In my fieldwork, I observed a tendency for interpretive rangers to mention Native Americans peripherally, acknowledging their rightful claims to the land and (sometimes) the fact that it was stolen, but without much elaboration. Usually, it was no more than a one-off claim: “Oh yeah, it was theirs before ours,” or, “They were here first,” but notably missing from most acknowledgements was any sense of agency or accountability. It was as if the Native Americans willingly moved, and white men took over the empty land. In instances where there was some agency attached,
(“Unfortunately, we asked them to leave,”94), there was very little follow-up discussion.
Ranger Marty who lead this program did not elaborate on his point, but he had an air of sarcasm in his tone. He went on to explain how “white guys were the new kids on the block” and were alternately seen as both “protectors” and “robbers.” And of course, we did not ask the Native Americans to leave. But what is important to understand about these inadequate confessions is that they help form the public’s perception about the park’s cultural history, they help determine the public’s view of Native Americans, and they perpetuate the idea that they no longer exist.
The Few Who Can Talk Freely
Although most rangers feel uncomfortable broaching the topic of Native American history in the parks, a few parks have programs that give voice to Native Americans themselves. While these programs are important, they highlight the contradictions in the
NPS’s attempts to represent Native Americans without confronting the dynamics that underpin their relationships. At Glacier, there is a multi-weekly, NPS-sponsored program,
94 Marty Martell, “A Walk Through History.” Grand Canyon National Park. June 9, 2015.
Zifkin 61 called Native America Speaks, in which someone from one of the neighboring reservations comes and talks about pretty much whatever she wants. One of my interviewees described it by saying, “we pay them to come up and speak about, you know, their take on the park.
Because it was theirs before us [sic].”95 There is no script or formal preparation necessary, and the NPS is proud to say that they are open to all of the speaker’s opinions and ideas
(even if they are not flattering to the Park Service). Many Rangers are fond of this program,
“I think it’s really cool because it’s actually American Indians telling, in their own words, their story…they’re not having their story told by me, who’s not part of that culture.”96
Although this seems like an opportunity for completely autonomous self-representation of a
Native American, an interpretive ranger introduces the program. And while this is not necessarily problematic, it happened to be at the program I attended.
There was a distinct sense of otherness attributed to Regina before she had even arrived, and Ranger Doug simultaneously exploited and diminished her experiences. Ranger
Doug, a white man in his late eighties who had been with the NPS for over 55 years, was a beloved character who roused more laughs and appreciation than any public speaker I had seen before. Regina Mad Plume, the Native speaker, was over twenty minutes late, and in the meantime, Ranger Doug made a number of comments that were inappropriate because of their cultural insensitivity and use of stereotypes: “If someone who looks Native doesn’t show up…” “None of you in the crowd look Native...” And there was the insinuation that
Native people were always late, or that anybody in the crowd could tell the story that was going to be told.
95 Bill Schustrom (seasonal interpretive ranger, Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015. 96 Emily Nelson (seasonal interpretive ranger, Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015.
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Eventually, Regina arrived, kid in tow. She graduated from a tribal college and would be attending University of Montana for graduate studies in anthropology. She identified as a
“mixed-blood Native American Indian,” and had thought deeply about her identity. She was overall happy that the park existed, it seemed, but she somewhat self-consciously expressed her belief that her people should have more rights to the land, much like the testimonies and signs in the visitor center. She mentioned a lot of the current names in the park that have
Native American inspiration (i.e. Going to the Sun Road was inspired by Going to God, a
Blackfeet phrase). She also talked about the Native names of other renamed waterfalls or natural resources.
While Regina’s story reached a captive audience, one could not easily separate
Ranger Doug’s introduction from her story. And although Ranger Doug was particularly offensive, the setup of the whole program inhibits the speakers, perhaps for no other reason than it being sponsored by the NPS. How can Native people and Native stories be self- represented when they need to be invited back by the very system that displaced them originally?
So, if non-Native interpretive rangers do not feel comfortable talking about Native
American history in unspecialized programs, the onus falls on Native American interpretive rangers, of which I encountered one. Ranger Ben, a cultural demonstrator and Native
American interpretive ranger at Yosemite, was the only person who incorporated Native
American stories into a program that was not about Native Americans. On his Valley Floor
Tour, the catchall ranger program in Yosemite Valley, Ben seamlessly weaved facts and stories based in Native culture into his description of the landscape. As we passed elderberry trees, Ben explained how the wood and the berries themselves were used for making
Zifkin 63 anything from instruments to baskets, while encouraging visitors to attend his demonstrations at the Indian Cultural Museum. He shared the Native names of many of the valley’s landmarks, like how El Capitan is called “inchworm rock,” and how the Ahwahneechee word for Bridalveil Falls means “evil wind or huffing wind.” Ben effectively educated all of the visitors about the history (cultural and natural) of Yosemite Valley, making pointed, but important remarks indicating that there was a history before the NPS like, “What we now call
Yosemite.” He was especially keen on picking fun at the name “Yosemite” which could either be derived from the Ahwahneechee word “Yohemite,” meaning “some among them are killers” or “Ozemate,” which means “grizzly bear,” implying that the joke was on us (the
NPS). Ranger Ben was also disdainful of visitors who disobeyed speed limits and ended up killing wildlife. There was an underlying tone to his program that he thought the park would be better off if either it was not a park, or if there were not so many visitors. He spoke honestly in a way that few other rangers did, all while maintaining the educational integrity of the program.
Ranger Ben was hired through a program at Yosemite that aims to integrate Native
Americans into the NPS as cultural demonstrators and/or rangers. As a cultural demonstrator,
Ben carves arrowheads and makes and plays different instruments, among many other things.
This program, while different than Native America Speaks at Glacier, potentially poses some of the same problems. But, in this case, although he was hired by the NPS, as an interpretive ranger, Ben can fully represent himself as he pleases, as all of the other Rangers can as well.
But Ranger Ben is one of few Native American Rangers in the Park Service, and if it is only they who can represent Native Americans fairly and fully, then the sequestration of Native
Zifkin 64
American history and narratives perpetuates itself as long as the racialized divide of NPS rangers continues.
Conclusion
During my research, I found that the NPS erased Native American history or sequestered it through multiple means: 1) by co-producing nature and indigeneity, which
“collapses” Native Americans into the landscapes; 2) by portraying historic overlap between
Native Americans and white Americans as friendly and non-confrontational; 3) by presenting human history as beginning in A.D. 1870 with the first European explorers and settlers; 4) and by confining Native American narratives to separate and dated exhibits. The few interactions between non-Native settlers and Native Americans that the NPS depicts are all positive. Otherwise, the separation of the historical narratives (into Native and non-Native) gives the impression that the two histories did not coincide nor collide.
In its attempts to include Native American representation, the NPS sometimes highlights the natural resources utilized by the Native Americans instead of focusing on the people themselves. In the rare programs where Native Americans are allowed to speak for themselves, their opportunities are either so fraught with contradictions (like Native America
Speaks at Glacier), or so rare (like the Native American Ranger Program at Yosemite), that they ultimately reinforce division, prejudices, and erasure. Now, we have to ask: how can the
NPS better incorporate and acknowledge Native American history? By taking responsibility for its role as a settler colonialist, the NPS can begin to present balanced and honest depictions of history that give Native Americans the prioritization and respect they have long deserved.
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Chapter 4. Non-Native Settlers and Naturalists
“I think for a long time humans have been left out of whatever's natural. And so there's been a disconnect in that, when we talk about the natural system, humans automatically aren't involved. And I think there does need to be a shift back to ‘we are a part of this system, and we have had impacts over time.’”—Amanda McCutcheon,, Supervisory Ranger, Glacier
“The first buildings here were homesteads, but the early trappers, loggers, and miners quickly realized the opportunities of tourism.”—NPS website97
Every national park I visited has its beloved heroes and cherished stories. After spending a few days in each park, I became familiar with these narratives. This was not particularly challenging, as the same stories were repeated over and over again in the visitor centers and the ranger programs. While specific details became more indistinct with each park, the overall narrative became clearer. With the exception of Mesa Verde, all of the parks boasted their own version of an archetypal story. In this story, a valiant white man travels through difficult terrain to reach an “untouched” landscape. He recognizes its splendor, and he decides to work tirelessly to get the land protected by the federal government—often against the encroaching evils of civilization. Each park may emphasize a different part of the story, indeed each park has its own version, but the general narrative stands. Save for a couple peripheral mentions, the people who used to live or work on the land are erased from
NPS history. The NPS’s celebrated figures are usually explorers or conservationists, and their stories dominate the NPS’s human history representation in the parks.
Park heroes conform to what historian Mark Spence calls the “national park ideal” vision of nature, which places humans outside of anything natural. By focusing on non-native conservationists in its representation of human history, the NPS ignores and erases the
97National Park Service, "A Brief History of the West Side of Glacier National Park," National Park Service, accessed March 22, 2016, http://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/education/west_side_history.htm.
Zifkin 66 histories of white settlers who previously lived on the land. Through this imbalanced depiction, the NPS creates a dichotomy between conservationists and laborers, and moreover nature and people, that reinforces a vision of wilderness that perpetuates itself.
My findings about present-day ranger programs build on the insights of anthropologists and historians who discuss the ideological and material displacement of white settlers, and laborers in general, from protected land. Historian Karl Jacoby specifically details the criminalization of white laborers in and around Yellowstone National Park near the beginning of its establishment. Although the Park Service had allotted significant resources to displacing Native Americans onto reservations, they were less equipped to deal with the “lawless whites” who, “rather than establishing prosperous, independent farms… seemed to devote much of their time to illegal hunting or trapping in Yellowstone.”98 In order to keep the “human vultures”99 off the national park land, the Department of the Interior needed to cut a deal with the Wyoming territorial assembly, which put Yellowstone under
Wyoming jurisdiction. This was an unusual solution, because it blurred the lines about whether the federal government or Wyoming had “ultimate control.” But it gave Yellowstone superintendents’ words the force of law, instead of them being empty threats. Soon after this arrangement took place, “Yellowstone authorities boasted of having made the first arrest of a poacher in park history.”100
Despite this small victory in 1884, the park continued to lack the supervision necessary to enforce the new regulations. The town of Gardiner, which popped up on
98 Ibid., 92. 99 Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, 92. 100 Ibid., 93.
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Yellowstone’s borders after its establishment, posed a particular threat to the park, and was regularly depicted “as a nest of poachers and outlaws.”101
With Gardiner’s arrival, issues long dormant in the federal management of Yellowstone—the setting of boundaries; the prevention of timber stealing, squatting, and other unauthorized uses of the park’s environment; the arrest of wrongdoers—all acquired a sudden urgency.102
The urgency was met with the institution of martial law in 1886—nine years after the idea was first proposed by army officer William Ludlow.103 Conservationists, like John Muir and others, “rejoiced” at the idea of “military discipline” in the parks, while local residents found the military presence “unwarranted” and “profoundly distasteful.”104 Moreover, it directly impeded their livelihoods. The newly monitored park boundaries included most of the grazing land in the area, so local ranchers were left with limited options for feeding their livestock. Other subsistence practices, like “timbering, hunting, and foraging,” 105 also became illegal under the park’s militarized regime.
While conservationists treat Yellowstone as a success story, it has made the white settlers’ stories obsolete, a process which anthropologist Laura Ogden terms the “politics of nature.”106 In creating specific park boundaries and criminalizing subsistence activities, the
NPS marginalized rural white settlers as much as it has their stories. “Not only were Euro-
American inhabitants of wilderness abstracted from nature, but they were also constituted as out of place.”107 Their very presence compromised the “pure” vision of wilderness and made
101 Ibid., 95. 102 Ibid., 96. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 97, 98. 105 Ibid., 99, 100. 106 Ibid., 101. 107 Laura Ogden, Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 3.
Zifkin 68 their erasure acceptable. This process, the dehumanization of nature in the name of conservation or “wilderness,” Ogden argues, prohibits us from “hop[ing] to create (or imagine) sustainable futures.”108 By problematizing this current conception of nature, Ogden
“seeks to redress these monocular visions” and offer an accurate account of the conservation practices that have historically displaced people and their histories from landscapes.
Historian Richard White also criticizes the ideology that laborers must be excluded from the land as counterproductive to conservation efforts.109 “Environmentalists,” White says, “have come to associate work—particularly heavy bodily labor, blue-collar work—with environmental degradation.”110 Conservation has an exclusive elitism to it, which helps explain why and how their narratives became privileged over others. The dichotomy between laborers and conservationists created a cycle that reinforced class differences and kept so- called naturalists in power. And, typical of many power struggles, the winner gets to tell the story, disregarding laborers’ relationships to park landscapes. By criticizing the elitism of the environmental movement, White also denounces the idea that nature is meant exclusively for play:
And if the world were actually so cleanly divided between the domains of work and play, humans and nature, there would be no problem. Then environmentalists could patrol the borders and keep the categories clear. But the dualisms fail to hold; the boundaries are not so clear.111
White condemns the notion that work and play are separate in everyday life, while also questioning the implications that physical boundaries could have on neighboring residents.
108 Ogden, "Searching for Paradise in the Florida Everglades," 101. 109 Would Ogden say that this is because of ecological fame-making, where White suggests a cultural bias? 110 Ogden, Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades, 4. 111Richard White, "‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature," Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature 172: 172.
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Reserving “wilderness” for those who play instead of work paradoxically makes nature itself exclusive.
As I will discuss in the rest of this chapter, the people who garner the most attention in exhibitions and interpretive programs are those who dedicated their lives to fighting for the parks’ protection. Notably, few of these people actually lived in the parks, and those who did had an express purpose of conserving them. I will not include Mesa Verde in this discussion for two reasons. First, the park was built to protect man-made structures, so conservation and environmentalism are not central parts of the conversation there. Second, there is no significant representation of human history after 1300, when the Ancestral Puebloans left the cliff dwellings. As such, Mesa Verde’s programming focuses on the cliff dwellings and their inhabitants, not the people who helped establish the park centuries later.112 I will discuss how the NPS crafts dichotomous narratives through their exhibits in visitor centers and museums, signs throughout the park, and ranger programs.
Grand Canyon
“In 1869, John Wesley Powell called Grand Canyon the ‘Great Unknown’ and became the first to fill in what had been a blank spot on the map. In the 1890s, he wrote vivid accounts of his Colorado River Expeditions. His firsthand experiences made him an advocate for the wise use of natural resources, particularly the limited water resources in the Southwest.” – biography of Powell on a sign titled “Lasting Achievements”
Grand Canyon National Park’s most famous figure is John Wesley Powell. 113 I learned about Powell through signs and exhibits at both the North Rim and the South Rim of
112 The CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) did play a big role in setting up all of the museums and exhibits, and I went to an evening program that detailed their contribution to the park. 113 I chose to talk about JWP because he was featured in two of the programs I went to. JWP is prominent across the board, but there are other figures who would fit the archetypal role. These prominent figures include Mary Colter, a female architect who designed Desert View Watchtower and Hermits Rest; Steven Mather, head of the NPS; and C. Hart Merriam, self- proclaimed “philosophic biologist” who later became interested in anthropology. He was also
Zifkin 70 the Grand Canyon, the visitor center welcome video, and through two of the programs I attended at the South Rim. Through this range of sources, this is the story I came to understand. The NPS casts Powell as ingenious, brave, and determined.114 Powell was a
Union major in the Civil War who lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh. Despite having lost his arm, Powell remained a dedicated soldier, geographer, professor, and explorer of the
American West. He is most famous for leading the Powell Geographic Expedition. Referred to as “a rugged trip into canyon wilderness,”115 it was the first successful trip down the
Colorado River. 116 A geographer by trade, Powell was responsible for mapping the
“uncharted”117 Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, a task that seemed nearly impossible because nobody else had been able to survive their trips through the canyon. In fact, a sign at the North Rim Visitor Center quotes Jack Sumner, one of Powell’s crew members as saying:
“Heretofore, all attempts in exploring the Colorado of the West, throughout its entire course, have been miserable failures. Whether our attempt will turn out the same time alone will show.” Ranger Addie, who was leading an evening program called “Ranger Rendezvous,” said Joseph Christmas Ives, a pre-Powell explorer, had described the Grand Canyon as a
“scene of utter desolation” after being unable to raft the whole river. While I cannot confirm that this quote was correctly attributed to Ives, or that it was ever said about the Grand
credited with “laying the foundations for the science of ecology.” Unfortunately, I did not go to any programs that discussed them in depth, nor was I specifically paying attention to the representation of white people at this point in my research. 114 My words. 115 South Rim Visitor Center welcome video 116 Not including Native Americans, who are generally excluded from stories about Powell’s successes. 117 “Mapping the Canyon” sign in North Rim Visitor Center
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Canyon,118 Ranger Addie emphasized Grand Canyon’s treacherous landscape to highlight the valor of Powell’s expedition. Indeed his bravery, “ruggedness,” ingenuity (in his boat design), and intelligence are well recorded and celebrated throughout the NPS.119
In addition to Powell’s brave exterior, the NPS strives to create an image of Powell that transcends physical toughness and encapsulates his openness to other cultures, specifically Native Americans. Powell lead two trips through the canyon, the second of which was in 1872. According to Ranger Marty who led a program called “A Walk Through
History,” Powell returned because of his “fascination with the Natives,” while Ranger Addie insisted that he returned because “he wanted to get the map right.” Both scenarios are plausible, and it was most likely a combination of both—as Powell went on to be the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the first director of the Bureau of
Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institute.120 But Ranger Marty was not the only person who mentioned Powell’s relationship with Native Americans. A sign at Desert View, the first major landmark when entering the South Rim from the east side reads, “Powell’s interest in
American Indians of the Colorado Plateau led him to become head of the Bureau of
Ethnology. He strived to understand the tribes, their languages, and their world.” Powell’s friendliness and partnerships with Native people is further emphasized at the North Rim. One sign written on a small, hinged panel reads: “Powell Needed a Guide: John Wesley Powell mapped Grand Canyon with help from Kaibab Paiute guides. Chuarrumpeaka was one of them,” and prompts the visitor to open the panel and see a photo of the two of them together
118 Upon preliminary searches, I have not found any evidence of this quote in relation to Ives or the Grand Canyon. 119 Powell is a “park hero” at Zion National Park as well. 120 White, "‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature," 172.
Zifkin 72 in 1873. Another sign is a drawing of Powell talking to four white men and one Native
American man, as if he is giving them directions of some sort. While this is a subtle sign, it indicates that Powell included Native Americans on his expeditions and seemingly treated them with respect. The fact that the NPS emphasized a positive relationship between Powell and Native Americans reveals that it is an important quality to have as a park hero.
Powell’s impact on the Grand Canyon can also be seen on maps. As he was a mapmaker, he was responsible for (re)naming many landmarks that presumably already had names assigned by the Native Americans who were living in the canyon. Two of the biggest landmarks, Bright Angel Trail and Boat Beach, were named by Powell. The Bright Angel
Trail, which leads from the South Rim of the canyon to Phantom Ranch, an “oasis” in the middle of the Canyon near the Colorado River, was named for the first time that Powell saw clear water. A religious man, Powell felt like he had been sent an angel after days of dehydration and dirty water, according to Ranger Marty. Powell also informally named the
Colorado River the Grand River, which evidently did not stick. While I only learned about the naming of landmarks and Powell’s influence during Ranger Marty’s program, it is nonetheless valuable to understand the far-reaching legacy that Powell, as a park hero, has left on Grand Canyon National Park.
Although I heard and read about a couple of other attempts at conquering the
Colorado River, Powell dominated the conversation of non-Native human history in Grand
Canyon. I heard nothing, though, of the local opposition to Grand Canyon’s establishment.
Local ranchers and miners vehemently opposed the establishment of Grand Canyon, delaying it for over eleven years before it became a national park in 1919. Today, the thought of using the canyon for extractive purposes seems ridiculous and perverse. The miners’ and ranchers’
Zifkin 73 stories are thoroughly erased, making the creation of Grand Canyon National Park seem like a self-evident good and inevitability.
Yosemite
The NPS at Yosemite produced one of the most well rounded exhibits on human history in any of the parks, which fully integrated narratives of human influence on the park’s landscape and Native Americans’ previous presence on the land. Unfortunately, Yosemite’s ranger programs are woefully underfunded, so the NPS only led around 30% of the programs offered on any given day, leaving the rest to their “partners.”121
Yosemite has divided up its history into the three most important parts: “1855-1900:
Pleasure Resort,” “1900-1950: Nation’s Playground,”122 and “1950-Present: Protecting the
Wilderness.” The titles themselves are an interesting look into the transition that Yosemite underwent in the last 160 years, with a shifting focus to conservation. Even though Yosemite made the leap from being a “pleasure resort” to “protecting the wilderness,” these titles expose the integrally human aspect of what we consider nature. Indeed, Yosemite always has been a cultural landscape, and it always will be. The exhibit displays short stories paired with photos of notable people in an exhibit that starts in 1855 and continues to the present. It includes a range of people and professions, from Black stagecoach driver George Monroe in the 1850s to (White) schoolteachers David and Jennie Curry in the 1920s. But separate from these little vignettes is another section of the visitor center that pays special tribute to the
“Faces of Yosemite.” These are Galen Clark, Yosemite’s first guardian; the Buffalo Soldiers,
121 The concessioner Delaware North, the Yosemite Conservancy, the Yosemite Fund, the Ansel Adams Gallery, are all partners with the Yosemite branch of the NPS. 122 See Richard White
Zifkin 74 the Black cavalrymen who acted as Yosemite’s first rangers; 123 Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Yosemite Grant—the first time land was protected for public use; American
Indians, the “first caretakers” who helped create the “magnificent beauty that impelled early tourists to create a park;” and Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who “wrote a groundbreaking report outlining how the government should manage and reserve land of scenic value for its people.”
The “faces of Yosemite” are featured in some way or another throughout the park, not just in this exhibit. Whether it is through signs, the memorializing of old dwellings, cameos in the visitor center twenty-minute welcome video (which included all of those people and groups, plus Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir),124 or representation in programs, these people occupy most of Yosemite’s depiction of human history. But I would be mistaken if I did not give John Muir his own section just like the Yosemite Valley Visitor Center does, as he is the most important “hero” of this park.
John Muir, the beloved naturalist who devoted his life to the protection of Yosemite, is an iconic figure even outside of the park. Known for hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California (part of which is protected by Yosemite), with only bread, tea, and a blanket, Muir has captivated the hearts and minds of many nature-loving folk with his writing and his advocacy. The story about Muir at Yosemite, as told by a large, framed sign in the visitor center titled “John Muir” is remarkable125: he came to Yosemite as a sheepherder, fell in love with its beauty, and became an “expert naturalist and passionate advocate for Sierra Wilderness.” He dedicated his life to conserving and preserving nature—
123 Yosemite’s park management was militarized as well as Yellowstone’s. 124 It was an excerpt of Ken Burns’ multi-part documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. 125 His pre-Yosemite life is worth looking into as well
Zifkin 75 especially Yosemite Valley, the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, and Hetch Hetchy
Valley. “Ultimately,” the sign reads, “he helped create Yosemite and four other national parks, launched the Sierra Club, guided presidents [Teddy Roosevelt] and dignitaries, and influenced the nation on the importance of preserving wilderness.” 126
As one of the best-known figures and conservationists at Yosemite, and in the NPS in general, Muir is well remembered not only for his accomplishments, but also for his adventures. The NPS promotes the image of Muir as a spiritual and contemplative man by reproducing photos of a bearded Muir sitting on a large rock, wearing a hat and leaning on a walking stick, looking out with wonder into the distance. A quote that lines the visitor center wall above the section that is dedicated to him captures Muir’s spirituality: “Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give us strength to the body and soul alike.”127 Indeed, as one of my interviewees said, “his spirit shows up in a lot of different places and in the stories we use to connect ourselves to this place.”128 His stories are reproduced in various ways, through different media, including plays. There is a theater at Yosemite that employs one of the only licensed John Muir impersonators, Lee Stetson. Fittingly, I saw a play there called “The Spirit of John Muir,” which detailed some of his most daring encounters, complete with various near-death experiences. Known for being able “to do whatever he wants,” one of my interviewees says that she tells her interns at the park “No John Muirs!” because she wants to make sure they stay safe.
126 A sign at Yosemite visitor center says he helped establish four others, although I could not find which ones. The NPS website says he helped establish two: Yosemite and Sequoia. Perhaps “helped” is used loosely, as he championed protection of most land. 127 Large sign, titled “John Muir” in Yosemite Valley Visitor Center 128 Carter, interview.
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John Muir’s charisma and commitment afforded him (and Yosemite) a great privilege: a one-on-one camping trip with then-President Teddy Roosevelt. This perhaps is one of the NPS’s favorite stories, as I heard it told over three times during my visit to
Yosemite.129 In 1903, Muir and President Roosevelt spent three days in what is now protected as Yosemite National Park. Although the park already had National Park status, the
Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias were still under the state’s control, instead of federal NPS control. Muir believed these areas needed to be part of the national park to receive the conservation and protection they deserved. “So,” Ranger Sarah said, “he had a famous camping trip with Teddy Roosevelt when he was president, and they camped at
Glacier Point and Bridalveil Meadow, and John Muir had the president all to himself.”130
Although Muir and Roosevelt had different opinions, (Teddy was a big hunter—an activity
Muir found abhorrent), Muir convinced the president to protect the Yosemite Valley and the
Mariposa Grove. This was a “huge deal,”131 according to Ranger Sarah, and Roosevelt became one of the foremost champions for conservation of his time.132
Muir did not win all of his battles for conservation. Hetch Hetchy Valley, a valley of equal, if not greater splendor than Yosemite Valley was at risk of being dammed. After devoting his life to the protection of natural spaces, with a special affection for the high
Sierras, Muir waged one last fight, sometimes considered the first great fight of the environmental movement. Unfortunately, the construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam was authorized in 1913, with Muir’s death following one year later. Many people say Muir died
129 I heard it in an interview, during the play, and saw it written on a sign. 130 Carter, interview. 131 Carter, interview. 132 Although, controversially at times. See State of Wyoming v. Franke.
Zifkin 77 of heartbreak.133 There is tremendous effort to dispel this theory throughout the park. By including this as a central part of Muir’s legacy, the NPS is encouraging people to continue with their conservation efforts even if they are not always successful.
We are all encouraged to find the (not reckless) John Muir in ourselves when we visit
Yosemite National Park. This widespread endorsement of Muir, which positions him perfectly as an archetypal park hero, helps to reinforce the dichotomized representation between naturalists and laborers. At Yosemite, Muir is celebrated as a vegetarian, an avid environmentalist, and a man who has a religious appreciation of nature. Muir and his sense of wonder at the natural world are cast in strict opposition to anything that destroys the land, be it human or animal. For example, he called sheep “hoofed locusts.”134 Laborers were the people who Muir fought to protect wilderness from, and are therefore the enemies. Muir’s position as a conservationist is praised as moral, which implicitly frames laborers as immoral. This dichotomy helps explain the narratives that the NPS values most, in the sense that it unilaterally supports environmental efforts and, not only does it erase the plight of a laborer, it condemns him.
Glacier
At Glacier National Park, I did not find any one character that was as pervasive as either John Wesley Powell or John Muir, although George Bird Grinnell would be considered an analogous figure. However, in this section, I will discuss how a collective cast of early figures and structures at Glacier create the same dichotomy that the park heroes represent in the other parks. Glacier is as proud, if not more, of its cultural structures as it is of its cultural
133 He died of pneumonia. 134 John Muir sign Yosemite Valley Visitor Center
Zifkin 78 figures. Here, structures are park heroes, too, and they promote an ethic of tourism that complements the established dualism between humans and nature.
The main visitor center at every national park shows a 20-25 minute welcome video, usually running on the hour or the half hour. By paying close attention to that video, one can get a taste of what lies ahead. But more importantly, the video formulates what the NPS wants you to get out of your visit. The language and stories presented in this video are curated, a little bit corny, and filled with beautiful scenery and smiling multi-racial groups of people. After the obligatory opening that features Native Americans (either as the narrator, or by sharing the creation story of one of the tribes who lived there), the story skips ahead.135
After being reminded that Native history “lives on” at Glacier, we shift our attention to the early explorers.
By this point in my fieldwork, I realized that in order for early explorers or settlers to be mentioned, they must have conformed to a lifestyle that the NPS now deems appropriate.
This was true of the explorers in Glacier’s introductory video. These early explorers had a good eye, and they “realized the importance of expanding here [Glacier].” And, “most importantly, they brought tourists.” The beginning of tourism and commercialization began with Milo Apgar and Charlie Howe—the first homesteaders. Apgar Village, a central attraction in Lake McDonald Valley is named for Milo, and it was built up around their homestead. Charlie and Milo realized quickly that the land was not suitable for farming, and that tourism presented more opportunities than trapping, so they began offering services for tourists. One sign reads, “The challenges faced by early homesteaders still exist today, but what were perceived as difficulties then, are now used to lure visitors away from modern
135 Every visitor center welcome video I saw followed this format
Zifkin 79 comforts.” This sign fits in with the ethic that nature is a reprieve to be enjoyed—harkening back to Cronon’s statement that wilderness has come to “represent a highly attractive natural alternative to the ugly artificiality of modern civilization.”136 Soon after the Apgars began catering to tourists, the Great Northern Railway was brought to Glacier, and with it, many lodges, hotels, and the historic Going-to-the-Sun Road.
At Glacier, the man-made landmarks are nearly as important as natural ones because they promoted tourism. The Going-to-the-Sun Road is a 50-mile stretch of road that allows visitors to “traverse [the] spectacular resource known as the ‘Crown of the Continent.’”137 It is also considered a National Historic Landmark. This iconic road was the subject of one of the programs I went to, in which it was described as a revolutionary feat of engineering and one of the greatest things to happen to the park. One of my interviewees described the importance of this cultural landscape to Glacier:
Our Going-to-the-Sun Road has a really strong presence. So you're seeing all these geological features and these high alpine areas and a lot of these amazing natural resources while you're traveling the Going-to-the-Sun Road. But the Going-to-the-Sun Road itself is one of the largest cultural landscape areas recognized in the National Park Service, and in the nation, being 50 miles long. And the whole thing is considered a cultural landscape.138
Part of the reason the Going-to-the-Sun Road is a central part of Glacier’s identity is that it made the park accessible to many people, not just the rich. As Ranger Bill said in his program about the Going-to-the-Sun Road, “Roads accommodate people!” (Not just those who can afford it). This development, along with the lodges and the homesteads, were built
136 Powell Museum, "The Life of John Wesley Powell," Powell Museum, accessed April, 2016, http://www.powellmuseum.org/museum_powell.php. 137 Sign in front of St. Mary’s VC titled “Travel Through Glacier.” Crown of the Continent refers to the mountain range protected by Glacier. 138 McCutcheon, interview.
Zifkin 80 to welcome a whole generation of Americans to the park to “See America First”139 instead of going to Switzerland.140 Stephen Mather, the director of the NPS, was “an advocate for the common person” and was instrumental to the building of the Going-to-the-Sun Road.
It could be argued that the Going-to-the-Sun Road not only promotes tourism, but it sends a clear sign that separating humans from nature takes precedence over protecting it. It is ironic that the Going-to-the-Sun Road is one of the most celebrated features of Glacier
National Park, given the fact that people go there to revel in nature. Building a fifty-mile road on the crown of a mountain range is a clear example of industrializing nature and shaping the landscape, yet Glacier, like the rest of the national parks, refuses to fully see the role that humans and nature have on each other.
Lake McDonald Lodge, the only lodge in the park not built by a railroad company, was another topic of discussion during my time at Glacier. Ranger Emily led a group on a tour through the historic lodge, which she called “A Walk Through Time.” In 1895, Gary
Snyder built the Lake McDonald Lodge, which was originally called the Snyder Hotel.
According to local legend, Ranger Emily said that Snyder “met his match in a poker match,” and lost the hotel to John Lewis. (Many suspect that he simply purchased it.) John Lewis and his wife Olive built it into the lodge that it is today, replete with luxurious game lodge trophies, a fireplace with pictographs, and gigantic red cedar tree columns. When asked where the game was shot, Ranger Emily replied, “outside the park, of course.” She also made
139 This was the million dollar catchphrase coined by Louis Hill, the son of Great Northern Railway owner James J. Hill. Louis funded much of the construction for the Going-to-the- Sun Road and built the Many Glacier Hotel. Louis Hill was the featured in two programs I went to during my time in Glacier, but he was not mentioned anywhere else in the park. He is said to have had a bad relationship with the NPS, but it is not exactly clear why. 140 Many well-to-do tourists thought that they needed to go to Europe in order to have a glamorous vacation, without realizing that America has some breathtaking resources itself. Glacier was promoted as the “American Switzerland.”
Zifkin 81 a point to say that John and Olive Lewis were friendly with both “fur trappers and American
Indians.” And emphasized that the lanterns inside the lodge represent “the meeting point of cultures,” just like Glacier National Park is.
The messages communicated in this program promoted the idea that Lake McDonald
Lodge was built on the principles of the NPS. It made tourism more accessible and enjoyable, and it allowed people to appreciate different cultures, while they enjoyed nature from an enclosed perch. It is also interesting that Lake MacDonald Lodge was a game lodge, even though its trophies were killed outside the park. With wild animals, and pictographs that could be found outside, Lake MacDonald Lodge provided things from the great outdoors inside, making nature more hospitable—but only temporarily.
Grand Teton
The final park I studied, Grand Teton, has two park hero families: the Rockefellers and the Muries. The Rockefeller name can be found on landmarks and structures throughout and beyond the park. John D. Rockefeller Memorial Highway runs in between Grand Teton
National Park and Yellowstone National Park. Laurance S. Rockefeller has a nature preserve named after him in Grand Teton. The Rockefellers, to say the least, have left a lasting legacy in the Jackson Hole area where Grand Teton National Park is located. In a facilitated dialogue program I went to at Grand Teton,141 the group was asked, “What’s required to make a legacy?” Together, the group decided that “dedication, making an impact, and wealth” are imperative to creating a legacy—all things true of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The idea that one needs wealth in order to create a legacy is both elitist and undemocratic. It is also worth noting the hypocrisy that people who cannot afford to buy and donate the land
141 A more interactive design for interpretive programs
Zifkin 82 have to live off of it and are criminalized for doing so. The NPS unabashedly promotes the exclusivity of wealth, as long as it benefits the parks.
A Family’s Gift: John D. Rockefeller, Jr., instilled in his children an appreciation of wild places and the importance of living in harmony with nature. After Rockefeller purchased the JY Ranch in 1932, it became a treasured family retreat where his son Laurance nurtured his own deep personal connection to the land. In 1945, Rockefeller transferred JY Ranch ownership to Laurance, who later donated 1,106 acres to Grand Teton National Park as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve. This generous gift serves as an exemplary model of conservation stewardship, and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve embodies Laurance’s belief that nature uplifts and renews the spirit.142
The NPS’s depiction of Rockefeller and his contributions to the park are so positive that it is hard to imagine that detractors are anything other than nature-hating devils.
The Antiquities Act of 1906, which acknowledges the public importance of archeological sites, also notably “authorizes the President to protect landmarks, structures, and objects of historic or scientific interest by designating them as National Monuments,”143 even at the displeasure of local residents or congressmen. Sixteen presidents have used this executive power to turn land into a “national monument” and put it under the protection and jurisdiction of the NPS, but none so controversially as President Teddy Roosevelt did with
Grand Teton National Park.
As told by the NPS, the current-day Grand Teton National Park was not always so big, its biodiversity not always so protected and conserved. In 1945, the State of Wyoming brought a lawsuit against an appointed official of the Department of the Interior, Franke,
(State of Wyoming v. Franke) accusing unlawful usage of the Antiquities Act in establishing
Jackson Hole Monument. The plaintiff asserted that excluding the State from control over the
142 Sign in Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center in Grand Teton 143 Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," 15.
Zifkin 83 land, or “from the boundaries of such designated area” would “interfere with the rights of the plaintiff in its jurisdiction over fish and wild game from which it receives a large and lucrative revenue.”144 Moreover, “it is threatened that gates and guards will be placed at such boundaries” in such a way that would hinder the use of grazing land, and, again, keep the
State from earning the revenue from such activity. The people of Jackson Hole, Wyoming would be forced to alter their livelihoods and the state would be deprived of a reliable source of revenue, obvious reasons to oppose turning the land into a National Monument.
In order to refute the use of the Antiquities Act, Wyoming argued that the Jackson
Hole area did not contain “objects of historic or scientific interest.” The court, though, interpreted “historic and scientific interest” broadly, citing areas used for hunting and fur trapping as historic (which is ironic because Grand Teton hardly mentions them today), and glacially formed structures and indigenous plant life as of “scientific interest.” In the end, the court decided that sufficient evidence of “scientific interest” was more important than state sovereignty. And that, “such discussions are of public interest but are only applicable as an appeal for Congressional action,” leaving it to Congress to disagree over the issues of creating a “national playground” or fighting “an encroachment upon the State’s sovereignty.”145
The land officially became Jackson Hole National Monument, which was then turned into Grand Teton National Park, leaving Historian Robert Righter to comment that,
“Although there is no question that parks, properly understood, were established for the
144 “State of Wyoming v. Franke” (1945) 145 Ibid.
Zifkin 84 people, whether they were established by the people is another matter altogether.”146 Again though, I am pushed to wonder which people, exactly, were the parks established for?
Clearly not for the people who lived or worked on the land in the pre-Park days.
One sign in Grand Teton’s visitor center makes a feeble attempt at discussing the lawsuit evenhandedly. It is called “Conservation in the Valley,” and it reads:
Drawn to this land for homesteading opportunities and majestic scenery, some early settlers grew concerned about the pace of development. Although residents wanted to protect this landscape as a scenic oasis and recreational playground, they initially shied away from government help. Some feared government protection would close lands due to activities such as logging, hunting, and grazing. Tensions mounted over the fate of the Tetons and the sweeping valley beneath the jagged peaks. Ultimately, heated arguments forged a compromise that created the park you enjoy today.147
The only other words on this wooden panel are a quotation from Struthers Burt in 1994, saying: “Anyone who knows anything of conservation knows it is not a partisan matter. It is a nationwide movement conceived for the benefit of the nation as a whole…”
Despite the great counter-efforts to prevent the establishment of the Jackson Hole
Monument, which eventually turned into Grand Teton National Park, Rockefeller did everything he could to buy land and donate it to the NPS. He even created a makeshift company, called Snake River Land Company, to buy land so that he could secretly give it to the NPS. In the eyes of the NPS and every uninformed visitor, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. is the best type of hero. He was a philanthropist deflecting the wreckage of “greedy poachers,” all for the sake of beauty, conservation, and wilderness. Although the NPS does not explicitly characterize the “enemy,” nor does it mention the State of Wyoming v. Franke lawsuit or the reasons for the fierce opposition to the park, the NPS implies that Rockefeller was
146 National Park Service, "Antiquities Act: 1906-2006," February, 2016, http://www.nps.gov/archeology/sites/antiquities/about.htm. 147 Sign in Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center
Zifkin 85 advocating for unrequited good. There are no two sides to the story that is told at Grand
Teton, which makes it hard to favorably imagine the people who opposed Rockefeller. I do not mean to suggest that Rockefeller’s motives were impure, but rather to demonstrate that the NPS provides a one-sided story that implicitly demonizes the townspeople and laborers and celebrates those who could afford to enjoy wilderness without profiting from it.
The Muries, Olaus and Mardy (Margaret) are also celebrated figures at Grand Teton.
The Muries’ contribution to conservation and wilderness protection is paramount, as described on a sign outside their ranch house:
The Murie Ranch became a basecamp for conservation leaders. These passionate advocates met here to discuss and campaign for the protection of American wilderness. The Muries’ conservation work culminated in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. The Act legislated and defined wilderness as a place ‘untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor and does not remain.’
Indeed, they were instrumental in codifying the national park ideal into law. Although the
Act did not pass until after Olaus’ death, Mardy continued to be a wilderness warrior. She is responsible for protecting 100 million acres of land in Alaska, which doubled National Park land, and tripled designated wilderness land in the United States. She won what Ranger Sean called the “Freedom Award,” which is officially known as the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. The Muries are the ultimate good guys of the NPS, and their contributions are valued and treasured throughout the agency. As Ranger Sean said, “just remember [the
Muries’ influence] every time you visit a national park.”
Conclusion
Throughout my fieldwork, it became clear that all of the NPS’s park heroes were similar. While they played different roles in and for the NPS, they all held the same conception of nature and wilderness. All of the Johns (Powell, Muir, and Rockefeller) are
Zifkin 86 admired for their naturalist tendencies and their commitments to protecting and establishing the parks. Throughout the NPS, the switch from labor to tourism, (or to labor for tourism, as demonstrated at Glacier), is outwardly praised. The only acceptable version of manual labor is building roads or lodges for tourism. Through the NPS’s crafting of narratives—either about humans or human-made structures—I came to understand which values the agency espoused: nature as something to be enjoyed and protected. By emphasizing the value of conservationists, the NPS both condemns and erases the narratives of rural white settlers and laborers.
Stories about homesteaders, fur trappers, and hunters are nearly absent from NPS visitor center exhibits and ranger programs. The only time they are mentioned is if they made the valued conversion from labor to tourism. Otherwise, they are cast as the nameless “other” in the fight against the undeniably good conservationists.
In this unilateral depiction of the people who affected the landscape, the NPS reinforces the notion that nature is exempt and ahistorical. By portraying park heroes as unwaveringly moral, the NPS implies that people who worked on the land and who shaped the landscape are the opposite. This has important implications for how we perceive the relationships between the parks and society today. Although the parks are some of the best places to witness the effects of climate change, the NPS’s promotion of the parks as untouched and protected wilderness makes it difficult to discuss the role that humans play in shaping the landscapes we cherish.
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Chapter 5. Climate Change: Norms and Avoidance
“We as the Park Service are very hesitant to adopt controversy. Yes, very hesitant. And even when we finally, as an agency, say ‘Okay we're gonna say, yes climate change is real and it's happening,’ we’re usually kicking and screaming. [We don’t want] to adopt any negative story because we're used to being loved. Everybody loves the parks; we don't want their visit to be a bummer!” –Carol Sperling, Mesa Verde
Despite widespread recognition from the scientific community, human-caused climate change remains a source of controversy in today’s political world, leaving supposedly apolitical institutions like the NPS to struggle with representing the single largest issue that faces our planet today. Aside from its fear of politicization, the NPS is in a uniquely challenging position to address climate change because of its espousal of the national park ideal. The curated image of the parks as exceptional and unspoiled spaces, which I have described in-depth in Chapters 3 and 4, encourages people to visit the parks in search of a reprieve from the surrounding the world and its problems. Furthermore, the national park ideal frames the national parks as ahistorical and exempt from human influence, which logically challenges the idea of anthropogenic climate change. As a result, climate change was hardly ever mentioned by name in interpretive ranger programs. And in discussions with interpretive rangers, we rarely talked about climate change; rather, we talked about not talking about it.
Conversational Norms and Denial
In her book Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard explores the ways in which climate change is detached from everyday life. Responding to the notion that “information is the limiting factor in the non- response” to climate change, Norgaard argues instead that a series of social norms and
Zifkin 88 patterns are better fitted to explain the complex and nuanced ways that people understand and communicate (if they do at all) about climate change.148 Interpretive rangers exhibit what
Norgaard calls a “double reality,” a phrase that she adapted from psychologist Robert J.
Lifton’s “absurdity of the double life.”149 By double reality, Norgaard is discerning how people live in one way and think in another. In Norgaard’s words, it is the “disconnect between abstract information and everyday life” that is evident in the way many people behave, even with their knowledge of climate change lingering in the background.
This disconnect is a product of denial, but denial in Norgaard’s work is not limited to the “outright rejection of the notion that certain information is true.”150 Rather, using sociologist Stanley Cohen’s framework of three varieties of denial (literal, interpretive, and implicatory), Norgaard explains how “implicatory denial,” is an apt description of how people confront climate change, especially in environmentally sensitive places. Implicatory denial is not literal denial of facts or the use of euphemistic language (“interpretive denial”151), but rather the minimization of the “psychological, political, or moral implications that conventionally follow.”152 For instance, one might assume that the NPS, a science-based institution whose director has publicly spoken about the realities and impacts of climate change,153 would seize every opportunity to educate visitors about climate change. Instead, one can observe the NPS’s implicatory denial of climate change in the silence that interpretive rangers embody when they choose not to talk about it in their programs.
148 Robert W Righter, "National Monuments to National Parks: The Use of the Antiquities Act of 1906," The Western Historical Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1989): 281. 149 Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, 1. 150 Ibid., 5. 151 Ibid., 10. 152 Ibid., 11. 153 Ibid.
Zifkin 89
Norgaard complicates the idea of a “double reality” by considering the collective roots of the phenomenon. Norgaard uses the term “socially organized denial,” which she adapted from sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel, to describe “the process by which individuals collectively distance themselves from information because of emotion, conversation, and attention and by which they use an existing cultural repertoire of strategies in the process.”154
This is especially relevant to the cultural norms of being a “good ranger” in the NPS.
Interpretive rangers are determined to maintain their beloved place in society, so they veer away from anything that could instigate disagreement.
The norms interpretive rangers need to, or feel they need to, abide by in their programs and conversations (performances), in order to be a “good ranger” result in a collective distancing from anything political or controversial, in this case climate change. As one of my interviewees put it: “in the past maybe the Park Service has shunned away from controversial and sticky topics, and we've just played the good ranger and always been kind of politically correct.”155 Being a “good ranger” and being political or controversial are still considered by many to be mutually exclusive. The NPS also frowns upon its rangers offering personal opinions. As Ranger Sarah says, “We're giving the point of view of the park and then telling stories. We can tell personal stories, but we don't have a personal opinion on climate change. So there's always that [to consider].”156 Many “good rangers” are also loath to alienate visitors. Ranger Emily previously worked at a national park in North Dakota, where they led programs about the night sky. Because North Dakota is in the middle of an oil
154 National Park Service, "National Park Service Director," National Park Service, accessed April, 2016, https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/director.htm. 155 Amanda McCutcheon (supervisory ranger, Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015. 156 Sarah Carter (seasonal interpretive ranger, Yosemite National Park), in an interview with the author, June 2015.
Zifkin 90 boom, many of the park’s visitors were part of the energy industry, and she said, “You just have to be very aware of the fact that you're talking to a diverse group of people. And be respectful.”157 By being respectful, but also not mentioning the political controversy of climate change, interpretive rangers avoid the risk of being yelled at. And, as Ranger Laurel put it, “It’s not fun to get yelled at.”158
Programming and “The Poster Child for Climate Change”
While allusions to climate change are present in interpretive ranger programs, the term itself is almost entirely absent. One of the programs I attended referred to “global warming” peripherally, saying, “it’s not a new concept… it’s been around a long time.” This
Yosemite ranger was implying that global warming exists today, but he only brought it up in reference to the geologic formations in Yosemite, saying that periods of global warming caused the melting of glaciers, which then created the geologic structure we were passing on our yellow open-air tour bus.
The only time that climate change was mentioned explicitly during a program was after a visitor coerced the interpretive ranger who was leading the program into talking about it. The program was called “Where Have All the Glaciers Gone?” in Glacier. When I read that title, my immediate response was, “they melted due to climate change.” Of course, a 45- minute program would have to elaborate on this claim, but the focus on climate change seemed inevitable. Up to this point in my journey through national parks in the West, the ranger at Yosemite was the only person who came close to explicitly naming climate change in a program. Now at Glacier National Park, which is considered the “poster child for climate
157 Emily Nelson (seasonal interpretive ranger, Glacier National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015. 158 Laurel Westendorf (seasonal interpretive ranger, Mesa Verde National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015.
Zifkin 91 change” by its superintendent Chas Cartwright and supervisory ranger Amanda, I was positive it would be different.
The program was held at Many Glacier Hotel in the Many Glacier District. Known for its many glaciers (which now are not so many) and the grand hotel bearing its namesake,
Many Glacier is an iconic part of the park. It is a prime space for backcountry hikes and horseback rides, and it is one of the easiest places in the park to see the effects of climate change. In 1967 there were 70 glaciers in the park, and now there are only 25. The room where the program was being held had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a great mountain that used to boast some of the park’s biggest glaciers, which now look like little patches of snow from afar. Ranger Bob, a seventy-something year old man with white hair and a dry personality was leading this program. Having been with the Park Service for over forty years, Ranger Bob had his ways. He started offering this program decades ago, before climate change became a hot topic, and seemed to stick to the same script he used in the nineties. He spoke to common misconceptions about weather and climate, saying that you use the term “weather when you’re talking about a specific period of time,” implying that he was not talking about climate (change). For the most part, this program is exactly what you would expect: time-lapse photos of glaciers, many of which are now lakes, a few facts about glaciers (i.e. what they are, exactly; how you measure the thickness of the ice; how they grow and recede) and stories about the valorous expeditions that charted some of the biggest glaciers in the world.
Zifkin 92
But then, Ranger Bob did something unexpected: he ended his account of glacial recession in 1991. His omission of the most recent twenty-four years was startling to me.159
At this point in the program, I presumed that he would not initiate a conversation about climate change with the visitors either.
He did not, and towards the end of the program a visitor interjected with a question:
“Well, what about climate change?” She seemed to be in her late forties, and she was wearing a purple hiking shirt and hiking boots. She was apparently not trying to give Ranger
Bob a hard time, but she was firm. It was clear that she was disappointed by his conspicuous avoidance of the topic. Ranger Bob bumbled around for a few minutes, offering some statistics about how there are more days above 90° F earlier in the summer and fewer days below freezing (32°F) later in the winter. These changes, which he did not refer to as changes in climate, propelled a “faster rate of change” in glacier size. Norgaard might say he was using his “existing cultural repertoire of strategies” to find a response that would satisfy this visitor while not offending others. Grasping for cautious optimism, he reminded us that,
“there are a lot of things we can do for our planet, but maybe just not for our glaciers.”
Ranger Bob maintained personal distance from climate change by abstaining from sharing his own opinion on the topic, and instead presenting an example of Blackfeet discontent with carbon emissions. He half-heartedly started to sing the chorus of “Fossil Fuel
Sinner,” a song by Blackfeet tribal member Jack Gladstone,160 which went something like,
“Repent you fossil fuel sinners.” While this song makes no explicit mention of climate
159 The links on the NPS website (www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciers.htm) direct you to the USGS page on different glacial studies (www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/research/glacier_research.htm) where the study called Glacier Retreat (www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/research/glacier_retreat.htm) includes information about changes up through 2005. 160 Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, 9.
Zifkin 93 change, it is sardonic about automobile use and petroleum consumption: “I was roaring down the Interstate in my petro-holic Chevrolet/ smilin’ at the progress made in our jungle of consumption/ Piously, I blew on past a Prius car, sippin’ gas/ cussin’ and a fussin’ at his go slow speed.” Ranger Bob used this song to demonstrate that people who are connected to
Glacier have talked about issues related to climate change, but that he was not going to insert himself into the discussion. He expertly danced around the question in such a way that made it seem like he was engaging with it, even though he was not.
The woman in the purple hiking shirt, though, was unsatisfied by this inadequate response. She pressed Ranger Bob a little harder, saying, “You can separate the science from the policy—but 97% of scientists agree…What’s the park’s policy on climate change?” He said, “We used to stray away from it because people were on vacation [and we did not want to offend anyone], but now we have a new policy.” He then added that 97% of scientists
“believe” in climate change, but immediately juxtaposed this with the evidence that there is one glacier in Patagonia that is actually growing. This comparison exposed Ranger Bob’s hesitance to endorse climate change and his inclination to veer away from controversy.
After the program was over, the lady in the purple hiking shirt approached Ranger
Bob, imploring him to say, “evidence shows” rather than “believe.” He nodded politely, acknowledging her point but not engaging her further. The woman in the purple shirt accepted his response and thanked him graciously for his time. I watched on with interest, finding it hard to believe that the interaction had just occurred at Glacier National Park, the
“poster child for climate change.” While some interpretive rangers may embrace this title in theory, Ranger Bob’s program was emblematic of rangers’ treatment of climate change.
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Avoiding Climate Change
Many interpretive rangers, informed and passionate about the environment, professed to love the opportunity to talk about climate change, but they were reluctant to carve out those spaces for themselves. Most interpretive rangers I encountered are in their late twenties or thirties. They seem to have liberal sensibilities, and they are smart and thoughtful. They work for the NPS because they care about history, natural sciences, anthropology, and public land management. They feel inspired by their workplace, and they spread the message of protection and preservation to any visitor they can. And every single ranger I talked to believed in climate change. And every single ranger knew it was human caused. Norgaard says that this silence on climate change can be seen “in United States and around the world[, and] is not in most cases a rejection of information per se, but the failure to integrate this knowledge into everyday life or transform it into social action.”161 The Rangers are not so much rejecting the reality of climate change, as they all profess to believe in it and find it concerning, but they are characteristically reluctant to present that knowledge in their programs.
When I recounted the confrontation at Many Glacier Hotel to other interpretive rangers throughout the Park Service, I got various reactions. But most seemed mildly surprised, if not disappointed by the lackluster response from their fellow ranger. One Chief of Interpretation even went so far as to call Ranger Bob’s response “embarrassing.” With that said, another Lead Interpreter thought that Ranger Bob did a good job of starting conversation—although he wished that the entire interaction had been played out during the
161 Jack Gladstone, "Fossil Fuel Sinner," Jack Gladstone - "Montana's Troubadour", accessed March, 2016, http://www.jackgladstone.com/fossil-fuel-sinner.html.
Zifkin 95 program and not afterwards. (I only knew what happened, because I stuck around after the program.)
For months, every time I thought about this incident I too found it surprising. I was positively baffled that a program about glacial recession in Glacier National Park did not mention climate change—especially if the NPS formally recognized climate change as real and human-caused. My surprise was further solidified by the fact that many Rangers seemed to disapprove of Ranger Bob’s response; moreover, every other ranger I talked to made it seem like they were begging for the appropriate opportunity to talk about climate change during their programs. So did I just happen upon an unusual incident in the NPS? Was
Ranger Bob an outlier? At first that seemed to be the case, but the more I think about it, the more unlikely I believe it to be. This is where Norgaard’s “social organization of
[implicatory] denial” comes into play.
In order to better understand the ways in which Ranger Bob’s program illuminates a pattern within the NPS, I needed to look at the ways that climate change was excluded from, not included in, Ranger Programs. As I already mentioned, only two programs out of the sixteen I went to explicitly addressed climate change. All others ignored it. Even the science programs I went to failed to acknowledge climate change—but they did not attract a response like that of the woman in the purple hiking shirt. Why? People do not expect (or want) to hear about climate change unless it is a program about climate change. As Norgaard notes,
“although global warming was an issue that people knew and cared about, they didn’t seem to want to know about it.”162 The NPS is creating a climate change program specifically
162 Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, 11.
Zifkin 96 devoted to the topic and working to implement it at each park,163 but otherwise does not mention it. This is similar to how the NPS only discusses Native American history and culture in designated programs. The NPS’s separation of climate change from other science- based programming casts it as an issue that is unrelated to other aspects of our environment.
When I asked interpretive rangers about whether or not they brought up climate change in their programs, many of the responses were ambiguous. For example, “Yeah, I try to do it subtly.”164 And, “[Climate change is] definitely addressed, but in a very overarching way.”165 Or, “It’s the word climate change. That in itself can scare people, so we try to approach it differently. Just human impacts on the environment.”166 And, “It’s more implied here… it’s more indirect, more subtle.”167 All of these Rangers thought that climate change was one of the biggest issues facing the parks, yet most interpretive rangers were reluctant to initiate a conversation about it in their programs.
Interpretive rangers produced a litany of reasons (or excuses) why climate change was an unsuitable topic for their programs. Among them were: “it’s a topic that tends to be a little more scientific than what I can get into with my Junior Rangers,”168 “there’s just really
163 Although the NPS is working to develop and implement a Climate Change Program for every park, it is unclear how often it will be offered. There is also the matter of the parks being vast spaces. Parks are often broken up into separate districts with their own semi- autonomous governing bodies. The programs from one district to another can vary greatly, and it is unlikely that an average visitor will attend a program in more than one district (As they are generally ~hour+ drive away from one another). So, even if a Climate Change program is instated at every park, the frequency and accessibility of it remains questionable. 164 Westendorf, interview. 165 Alex Romenko (seasonal interpretive ranger, Grand Canyon National Park), in an interview with the author, June 2015. 166 Jillian Staurowsky (seasonal interpretive ranger, Grand Canyon National Park), in an interview with the author, June 2015. 167 Murray Shoemaker (supervisory ranger, Mesa Verde National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015. 168 Romenko, interview.
Zifkin 97 a lack of time,”169 and “you have to be careful, even with climate change.”170 Careful, in this instance, means careful not to offend anyone. There is a widely shared fear of reproach among interpretive rangers because they are “used to being loved.”171 Which is why, even if
Ranger Bob’s motives were not the same as some of the younger rangers’, it is not at all surprising that he left out climate change until a visitor challenged him. And even then he was reluctant to make any “opinionated” claims.
It is no wonder, then, that supervisory rangers, who do not lead programs or interact regularly with the public, had the easiest time talking about climate change. There were fewer norms for them to follow, and they were not engaging in a “performance” as the interpretive rangers were during their programs. They dropped it casually in conversation, without my prompting, and they talked about it more extensively than their interpretive ranger counterparts. At Glacier, a supervisory ranger said,
We need to be addressing climate change. And part of the NPS strategy for climate change is saying ‘we acknowledge that it's happening and that it is being accelerated by human events, by human cause, and that we need to be making adaptations, mitigations and science to do what we can to best preserve our parks.’172
She was less consumed by the worry of angering a visitor, and she was able to openly endorse the NPS’s stance without seeming too opinionated or political. One chief of interpretation at Mesa Verde also spoke frankly about climate change, saying, “It's a huge challenge [to interpret climate change, especially in time-sensitive programs at Mesa Verde].
So I think you may see some interpreters that meet that challenge really well, and then you
169 Westendorf, interview 170 Nelson, interview. 171 Carol Sperling (chief of interpretation, Mesa Verde National Park), in an interview with the author, July 2015. 172 McCutcheon, interview.
Zifkin 98 might see some that make you wish they had worked on it harder.”173 One of her supervisees agreed that it was indeed a challenge and added: “I mean, it's [not talking about climate change is] cowardly. And I can work on it, but, yeah…[trailed off].”174
Training and Signs
Increasingly, parks are incorporating climate change into their interpretive training programs, but many rely solely on written guidelines, while others refrain from mentioning it completely. The NPS’s climate change coordination program is working to offer training on climate change interpretation at every park, but it has yet to be instated. Like most of the
NPS’s training programs, this program will not necessarily reach all rangers. If it is part of the two-week training program for new rangers, seasoned rangers are not obligated to attend.
If it is an elective training, not all rangers will choose to attend. As it stands, Glacier incorporates climate change into a two or three hour section of the mandatory two-week training program. Additionally, interpretive rangers receive guidelines in their training binders that equip them to answer questions about “human impacts, and how we're measuring carbon, and then what the park is doing to reduce its carbon footprint.” I asked one interpretive ranger if they are trained to respond to disagreements about climate change, and she said, “We’re trained to just kinda deal with it,” and say, “I’m sorry that we don’t seem to agree.”175 At Grand Canyon, one interpretive ranger said, “We do have guidelines to talk about climate change in the park since it’s a main issue. It’s the biggest threat to the national parks there is out there.” But he did not elaborate further. (Nor did he talk about it in his programs. Junior rangers, he said, are too young an audience to discuss something as
173 Sperling, interview. 174 Westendorf, interview. 175 Nelson, interview.
Zifkin 99 serious as climate change). Some parks, like Mesa Verde, do not include training on climate change interpretation. I asked a supervisory ranger at Mesa Verde if there was a section of training on climate change, and he responded:
Not directly. [Laughs] We don't directly talk about [climate change]... would we ever? Sure. It's not like we don't want to, or we're afraid to, it's more… we talk about drought so much as being one of the causal effects [of the Ancestral Puebloans leaving the cliff dwellings] that everybody just gets it.176
This assumption, that talking about environmental issues directly (or indirectly) related to climate change is a sufficient substitute, governs decisions regarding training as well as content on signs throughout the parks.
As a peripheral topic throughout the NPS, the representation of climate change through signs and exhibits is sparse. There were an average of 2-3 signs at each park (not including Mesa Verde) that referred explicitly to anthropogenic climate change. Many others alluded to it, for example, by saying “in colder times,” or “due to a changing climate,” and some included global climate change without mentioning that it is human-caused. Most of the signs that do include human influence, though, emphasize their scientific authority, so as to prohibit space for doubt. One small blurb on a larger sign at Grand Canyon titled, “What
Effects Will Climate Change Have?” explains, “Even though science suggests that the Earth should be in a cooling trend, scientific evidence also shows that human activities and our lifestyle are steadily increasing the Earth’s temperature” (emphasis added).
No park had an exhibit dedicated to climate change, though, and some of the signs that did state climate change explicitly were scattered throughout the park in areas unlikely to be attended by a ranger. For instance, at Grand Teton, the only signs that mentioned climate change were outside of the Colter Bay Visitor Center, which is small and somewhat remote,
176 Shoemaker, interview.
Zifkin 100 with a focus on Native American art. The signs looked old and sun-worn, and one said,
“Lake Levels and Climate Change: The NPS is committed to reducing its contributions to climate change through conserving energy and water, promoting alternative transportation, constructing green buildings, and minimizing waste.”
On the other hand, the park’s main visitor center, the state-of-the-art Craig Thomas
Discovery and Visitor Center, did not mention climate change once. Not only is it the central visitor center with the introductory video, but its primary focus is natural history and conservation. I read every little sign, convinced that I had missed something, only to notice that one sign mentioned the “changing climate.” I went and asked a Ranger at the help desk if
I was mistaken. She said no. I asked why there was no mention of climate change. She said,
“It [the visitor center] opened in 2007.” At the time, I found this response unhelpful and uninformative. I only learned recently that the NPS did not develop a climate change response program until 2008. The content of the signs was probably approved around 2005.
Even so, this was one of the newest visitor centers in the national park system, so the other parks that did mention climate change most likely installed their signs before 2008 anyway.
Nonetheless, we asked her if the park offered any pamphlets on climate change. At first she said no, seeming annoyed that I asked. After a little bit, she said that they actually did have some, but she could not find them. When she eventually found them, I asked her if any other visitors come in asking about climate change, to which she responded, definitely not.
Grand Teton’s visitor center could be mirroring visitors’ lack of interest in climate change. During an informal interview, one of my contacts offhandedly mentioned that visitors often do not seem interested in learning about climate change, which the NPS considers when curating its content. I asked how she gauges visitor interest, but she did not
Zifkin 101 elaborate. The interpretive ranger at the help desk seemed reluctant to talk about it as well.
This further evidences that signs mentioning and outlining the effects of climate change are relegated to areas where rangers do not have to interact with the public. As Norgaard says,
“We need to realize that notions of what to pay attention to and what to ignore are socially constructed. We learn what to see and think about from the people around us.”177 The NPS ignoring climate change in the Craig Thomas Discover & Visitor Center allows the visitors to do so as well.
In contrast with the NPS’s sparing mentions of climate change, the organization is fairly straightforward about other conservation issues, such as drought, air pollution, and habitat loss, which, at Yosemite, they link to climate change. For instance, one section of the
Yosemite Valley Visitor Center’s exhibit opened with a sign reading:
Ripple Effect: What might happen if the habitat changes? Currently, the climate is warming again, but this time at an unprecedented rate. Scientists agree that human-created greenhouse gas emissions are causing the warming of the earth’s climate. Can we reduce these emissions in time to slow this trend?
Following this sign is a series of four signs, each of which focuses on a specific animal (pika, monarch butterfly, great gray owl, and rainbow trout, respectively) that is threatened by the warming climate. Only the sign about rainbow trout mentions humans or climate change:
Although humans once artificially introduced rainbow trout into hundreds of upper elevation lakes and rivers, they do occur naturally in some park waterways. Climate change could further reduce the natural distribution of rainbow trout in Yosemite’s rivers.
In others, the reference to climate change is implicit: “Pika: If climate continues to warm, the pika may run out of cool mountain habitat.” The others talk about changes in migration and
177 Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, 7-8.
Zifkin 102 weather patterns. Connecting climate change with other well-established conservation issues allows the NPS to subtly discuss climate change without making it the main focus.
Conclusion
The NPS, a science-based institution concerned primarily with issues of wilderness conservation, did not develop a climate change response program until 2008. In 2009, the
U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment of Jonathan B. Jarvis as the 18th director of the NPS.
Jarvis is the first director of the agency to speak publicly about climate change, and he has issued directives to the parks to encourage their involvement in the discussion. While all of this could be a step forward in the right direction, only one person I spoke to mentioned this directive, and very few seemed to take the sentiment seriously. Most of the conversations I had about climate change with interpretive rangers were about not talking about it.
In this chapter, I use sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard’s theories of “socially organized denial” and “implicatory denial” to help explain what might seem to be contradictory responses to climate change. On the one hand, most of the interpretive rangers I spoke with accepted climate change as a reality and felt it was an urgent issue facing our planet. On the other hand, most of the same rangers neglected to talk about it in their programs, with myriad explanations about why it would not be appropriate to do so. This phenomenon, “socially organized denial,” helps explain the collective (and consistent) distancing from climate change in ranger programs—even though there is no mandate to refrain from the subject, rather an explicit encouragement to incorporate it. “Implicatory denial,” which is not the literal rejection of information, but a process of acknowledgment and subsequent dismissal of the “psychological, political, or moral implications that
Zifkin 103 conventionally follow”178 further helps to explain how interpretive rangers could take climate change seriously and still prefer not to educate the public about it.
Interpretive rangers also respond to NPS norms of being a “good ranger” in which they do not talk about anything controversial, political, or involving personal opinions for fear of offending the public or getting yelled at. These norms, which keep rangers in the public’s favor, restrict them from talking about climate change in their programs.
While only slightly better, the signage depicting climate change in the NPS is often in spaces where rangers are unlikely to interact with visitors. This not only exposes the difficulties in communicating climate change verbally, but also hints at the NPS’s slow embrace of climate change discussion by incorporating it only a bit at a time.
Overall, the NPS still struggles to give climate change the stage it deserves, both because of emotional norms dictating communication techniques, and because of the values of conservation and wilderness mystique to which the NPS devotes itself. Only through honestly confronting human impacts on the environment (historically and currently) do we have any hope of creating a sustainable future. The social construction of the national parks as exempt, untouched spaces compounds the difficulties of addressing climate change sufficiently.
178 Ibid., 5.
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Chapter 6. Conclusion
Overall, the NPS is in an exciting position to change its role in sharing and shaping human history. Currently governed by emotional and conversational norms that promote comfort and connection, the NPS is not challenged to confront the more complicated and unflattering narratives that defined its past, nor the ones that will define its future.
Furthermore, the norms that interpretive rangers abide by are a direct product of the “national park ideal,” an ideology in which nature is considered unimpaired by human touch. Because of severe funding limitations, redesigning visitor centers and signs to include more diverse narratives is infeasible. As a result, interpretive rangers, who are on the front lines of communication with the public, have the best opportunity to augment these shortcomings by offering more well-rounded narratives in their programs.
Understanding the role of interpretive rangers and the standardized procedures that direct their program development can help explain how patterns of silence and inconsistency emerge. All rangers who are new to a park undergo a mandatory two-week training session.
There are general similarities among the trainings, but they vary from year-to-year, park-to- park, and even district-to-district within a park. The slight variances in training are implicitly justified by the fact that the NPS is consistently imposing its mission of “enjoyment and preservation” on its rangers. In matters of supervision and interpretive coaching, the same conditions apply. The nitty-gritty details get lost to the broader message of creating connections, both between rangers and the institution, and visitors and the parks. By focusing on a generalized end goal (what is a connection, really?) the NPS allows its rangers considerable autonomy when they are designing their programs—with creating connections as the only criterion. Interpretive rangers, then, are not encouraged to talk about difficult or
Zifkin 105 controversial topics. Rather, they are expected to talk about the topics that visitors will enjoy—leaving them feeling warm, fuzzy, and connected to the parks. This not only results in slight discrepancies, but it also produces patterns of silence whereby interpretive rangers collectively avoid certain topics—most pertinently Native American history, white laborer history, and climate change. Rewriting the principles that guide program development in the
NPS could help contextualize and supplement the information that is offered on signs in visitor centers and museums throughout the national parks.
Native American history, I discovered throughout my fieldwork, is a particularly complex topic for interpretive rangers to talk about in their programs. Plagued by an incriminating past in which the NPS displaced and dispossessed Native Americans from their land, the NPS is in a difficult position to adequately acknowledge this history. As it stands, the NPS relegates Native American narratives to specific programs and separate exhibits.
Most interpretive rangers are white, although a few parks have hiring programs that aim to employ Native Americans. The underrepresentation of Native American employees in the
NPS, along with interpretive rangers’ freedom to avoid difficult conversations both help to perpetuate the silence around Native American narratives. Many interpretive rangers who I interviewed were overly-conscious about not distorting or appropriating Native American history, so they chose the safest option: not talking about it.
More than simply a product of the NPS’s guiding principles, the erasure and confinement of Native American history that I observed is a result of the United States’ settler colonialist structure. The “national park ideal,” which the NPS is still steeped in, celebrates wilderness as “uninhabited” and “pristine,” and presupposes the displacement of
Native Americans or considers them “curiosities of the landscape.” Settler colonialism is a
Zifkin 106 structure that is contingent upon land expropriation, instead of labor exploitation, which is common to colonialist societies. Within settler colonialist conceptions, Native Americans were considered obstacles to overcome or ignore. This ideology manifested itself in the federal government’s forced relocation of Native Americans onto reservations, and in the co- production of nature and indigeneity, which stripped Native Americans of their humanity.
Unfortunately, the NPS still relies on the national park ideal to defend and celebrate its conservationist leanings and general value system. As such, it has not dismantled the underpinning structures that promote Native American marginalization. While the separation between nature and humans is a critical aspect of the NPS’s self-definition, it only allows for limited exploration of diverse historical and environmental narratives. In order to adequately confront and take responsibility for its role as a settler colonialist beneficiary, the NPS would have to reinvent itself. In doing so, the NPS would not sacrifice its integrity as an institution, but would instead be respected for its honest acknowledgement of its unfavorable history. As long as the NPS reinforces settler colonialist structures by remaining silent, it implicitly endorses the troubling and unequal treatment that Native Americans continue to receive in the United States. In recognizing this dynamic, the NPS could integrate aspects of Native
American history into their programs—even when they are not explicitly about Native
Americans—as a small step in the right direction.
Within common environmental discourse, wilderness is placed in diametric opposition to humans, which has a growing number of far-reaching consequences.
Throughout my fieldwork, I noticed that each park had its own ‘heroes,’ which are people or structures that are celebrated in signs and in programs. The archetypal human ‘park hero’ is a white man who advocated for the protection of the national parks. Men like John Muir, John
Zifkin 107
Wesley Powell, and John D. Rockefeller all contributed to the NPS by fighting to protect exceptional landscapes (Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Grand Teton, respectively). They all believed that wilderness was to be visited, not inhabited by humans, and they are revered for their spirituality, bravery, and generosity (respectively).
The NPS also promotes the separation between humans and nature through its widespread support of tourism. In commemorating people that could afford to visit the land, not live or work on it, the NPS implicitly condemns the white settlers who had to hunt, fish, or let their livestock graze. The criminalization and subsequent erasure of these activities and people creates a moralized dichotomy between environmentalists and settlers. Moreover, it denies the influence that humans had (and continue to have) on landscapes and the natural world.
Maintaining this one-sided narrative about conservation and its proponents not only does a disservice to the people who had valid reasons to oppose park establishment (namely, the loss of their livelihoods), but it creates a sterilized image of nature as fully protected and exempt. It also absolves humans from responsibility, and makes it seem as if the national parks are immune to the negative impacts of climate change. This, of course, is untrue. If the
NPS were to consistently credit humans with shaping landscapes, talking about current day human impacts on the environment would be an easy next step to take. At the moment, though, the NPS’s conservationist ethic negates the logical possibility of anthropogenic climate change. Throughout the parks, climate change is underrepresented on signs and in programs. Climate change is not mentioned in every main visitor center, but when it is noted, it appears on signs where a ranger is unlikely to be present. Unless prompted, most interpretive rangers will not talk about climate change with visitors, even though most of
Zifkin 108 them accept the reality of climate change and consider it a major threat to the planet. The difficulty of discussing climate change in interpretive programs is increased by the norms to which rangers feel they need to adhere. As a potentially apocalyptic topic, climate change does not fit within the NPS’s conversational boundaries. Climate change is felt to conflict with norms of being a “good ranger” which mean being apolitical, uncontroversial, and un- opinionated. As a result, interpretive rangers collectively distance themselves from talking about climate change, which is one form of Norgaard’s concept, “socially organized denial.”
While climate change is an understandably thorny problem to discuss in a typically optimistic environment, interpretive rangers should be paving the way for these conversations. As far as climate scientists are concerned, climate change is uncontroversial, and most likely visitors will respond with curiosity rather than rejection. To withhold climate change education from environmentally-minded visitors out of fear of offending a select few is to deny the national parks a fair chance at sustainability and survival.
In all, the NPS has a lot to offer in its programs, visitor centers, and museums. There are observable efforts to change the outdated narratives that still overrun the parks, notably the public training opportunity called Co-Creating Narratives in Public Spaces, which was co-sponsored by the NPS in 2014. I also had the privilege of meeting many park rangers, all of whom are passionate, thoughtful, and intelligent. If the NPS pushes these rangers to challenge boundaries in their programs, they will help visitors deepen their connection to the national parks. With a rich store of dedicated rangers, powerful and complex stories, and awe-inspiring cultural landscapes, the NPS has a great opportunity to redefine the way people interact and think about some of America’s most amazing spaces: the national parks.
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Appendix I
Programs
Program Park Ranger Time in NPS Fossil Walk Grand Unnamed- ? Canyon Female A Walk Grand Marty Martell 5 years at Through Canyon Grand History Canyon Geology Grand Laura Schultz Relatively Glimpse Canyon new to NPS? Ranger Grand Addie 2-5 years in Rendezvous Canyon NPS? Valley Floor Yosemite Ben ? Tour Cunningham- Going-to-the- Glacier Bill Schustrom 40 years at Sun Road Glacier Evening Program Amazing Glacier Bill Schustrom Animals: Owl Talk Ranger’s Glacier Bill Schustrom Choice: Louis Hill Native America Glacier Introduced by Forever Speaks Doug/ Regina Mad Plume speaker Where Did All Glacier Bob Schuster Over 40 The Glaciers years Go? A Walk Glacier Emily Nelson Around 8 Through Time: years Walking Tour of Historic Lake MacDonald Lodge Legacy: Grand Teton Sean Walsh- ? Facilitated Haehle Dialogue
Zifkin 110
Balcony House Mesa Verde Lara Lloyd ? Cliff Palace Mesa Verde Margaret Gray ? Long House Mesa Verde Lara Lloyd Remembering Mesa Verde Brian Forist 8 Parks, 40+ the CCC years
Interviews by Position
District Manager: Marc Neidig, Glacier National Park
Supervisory Ranger: Amanda McCutcheon, Glacier National Park
Murray Shoemaker, Mesa Verde National Park
Lead Interpretive Ranger: Kristen Dragoo, Grand Teton National Park
Chief of Interpretation: Carol Sperling, Mesa Verde National Park
Interpretive Ranger: Jillian Staurowsky, Grand Canyon National Park
Alex Romenko, Grand Canyon National Park
Sarah Carter, Yosemite National Park
Bill Schustrom, Glacier National Park
Emily Nelson, Glacier National Park
Katie Tozier, Grand Teton National Park
Cindy Cooperider, Mesa Verde National Park
Laurel Westendorf, Mesa Verde National Park
Zifkin 111
Shelton Johnson, Yosemite National Park
Aleta, Glacier National Park
Chief Curator: Barbara Beroza, Yosemite National Park
Bridgette Guild, Grand Teton National Park
Interview Questions
• Name
• Age
• What is your specific role in the NPS? What is your job title?
• What does your job entail? What are your responsibilities?
• What is your educational background? Before you joined the NPS, did you work in any
positions that helped you prepare for your work as a ranger?
• How did you get into this line of work?
• How long have you been an NPS employee?
• Did you request to work at this park?
• If so, why?
• Do you feel like the park has changed over time?
• Who or what has affected that change?
• What did your training as a park ranger entail?
• Do you still receive training?
• If so, have your trainings changed over time?
Zifkin 112
• What kinds of programs have you designed? If applicable, what kinds of exhibits have you
curated?
• How do you decide which topics to cover in your programs and exhibits?
• What kinds of research do you carry out to produce your programs and exhibits?
• How do you make your material accessible to the general public?
• How do you approach the subject of human history in the national parks?
• What challenges, if any, have you faced regarding how you present social history in
your programs?
• How has this park been affected by climate change?
• Do you acknowledge it in your programs?
• How would you characterize nature? What does it mean to you?
• Why do you think Americans visit national parks?
• What do you hope to impart to the people who visit this park?
*I altered the questions as I saw fit during fieldwork. I added in follow-up questions when appropriate, and I generally followed my interviewee’s lead, so my questions changed depending on where the conversations took me, and what position my interviewees held in the NPS. My questions were also be park-specific.*
Zifkin 113
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