Stephen Corry: Tribal people displaced in the name of conservation

In 1929, an elderly Awahneechee woman, Totuya, was taken on a tour of her former homeland, 40 years after it had been transformed into the Yosemite National Park. She gazed disapprovingly at where her people had once lived, declaring it, “Too dirty, too bushy.” The land her people, her ancestors, had cared for over thousands of years had, she felt, been wrecked in a generation.

For 150 years, conservation has been kicking indigenous peoples off their homelands, rebranding them as “wildernesses,” and claiming that it will do a better job of “preserving” them than the peoples who had lived there for generations. But it didn’t! Because it didn’t even look at how the land was already successfully managed, conservation was set up to fail in its own aims. When it then changed the landscape – usually to make money from tourists – it left these supposedly “protected” areas newly scarred by roads and hotels, and marred by unrestrained undergrowth stifling much of the biodiversity. In a nutshell, conservation hurt both people and the environment.

The problem started with the northern European conviction that they, “the Aryans,” were a superior “race,” a view “scientifically” endorsed by Darwin. His bigoted views about American Indians were published in 1859, just a few years before the national park movement began to take root in Yosemite and Yellowstone – places where of course the Indians had already been, or were about to be, pushed out.

In the United States, this belief in racist eugenics was widely accepted for a century. As well as seeding the ideas that led to conservation, it underpinned immigration controls, trying to keep southern and eastern Europeans, and Mexicans, out of the country. It also led to the widespread compulsory sterilization of “undesirables,” legal until recently (but which may in fact still occur). And it was the reason behind the outlawing of “inter-racial” marriage until as late as 1967.