US national parks are known for spectacular vistas, and for wholesome recreation opportunities targeting contemporary middle-class (white) tourists, who are today encouraged to “find your park.” As argued in Chapter 2, cosmopolitanism serves as a lens that helps us to understand, contextualize, and evaluate many elements of the experience of eating in the US national parks. However, the enabling conditions of cosmopolitanism are obscured in most discussions of park foodways. This chapter attempts to illuminate how the Romantic consumption discussed in the Introduction occurs on the backs of displaced others, whose own forms of food production and consumption were, and continue to be, wildly disrupted and fundamentally transformed, manifesting a settler colonialist structure (Wolfe 2006). As such, this chapter explores the cultural history and the current situation of Indigenous food-ways in today’s parklands.
Worldwide, more than half of all national parks and protected areas occupy un-ceded Indigenous lands (Zeppel 2009, 259). It is little surprise that the lands of Indigenous people, whose rights to self-determination have been historically quashed by settler colonialism, have been prime sites for parks in the US, where the history of national parks aligns almost to the year with the US government’s divestiture of Indigenous people from their sovereign status: American Indian treaty making ended in 1871, just before the establishment of Yellowstone by Congress in 1872.
Parks remain sites of struggle for American Indian food sovereignty. In many cases, what made the lands worth fighting for by Indigenous peoples was not only their familiarity, their sacredness, or their beauty but also their status as productive foodscapes. Prior to settler contact, for American Indians west of the Mississippi River—in the parts of the country with the densest concentration of what is now US national parkland—the chief food use of these lands was hunting, fishing, and gathering, in line with various tribes’ awareness of local ecologies (Hufford 1986). Some bands, like the Tukudika Shoshone (Sheep Eater), lived in what would later become Yellowstone National Park year-round, while many other groups of American Indians, including the Bannock, Blackfeet, Crow, and Nez Perce, used natural resources in today’s parklands for hunting, gathering, and trading food during seasonal migration. They also used the land to make tools and weapons, and for spiritual ceremonies (Patterson 2022). These land uses in Yellowstone are representative of Indigenous people’s land uses in the West, and they manifest what Clayton (2020) has described as the connection between the individual and the wider natural world. Although today, many tourists imagine places like Yellow-stone as uninhabited, this vision obscures the reality that today’s parkland was used by Indigenous people and their predecessors for 11,000 years (Zeppel 2009, 263).
Wilderness and Restoration
The people of the US have long operated under delusions about wilderness that cloak the reality of these lands as historical foodscapes. European settlers first industrialized the eastern US in the early nineteenth century, rapidly building crowded, dirty cities from which they needed an escape. Expelled from the Gar-den of Eden, settlers in some ways understood their cheek-by-jowl lives in hostile cities as punishment for original sin (Meeker 1973, 3). They craved experiences of nature that made them feel sanctified, before returning to their polluted city lives. Frederick Law Olmsted, father of American landscape architecture and noted conservationist and social critic, popularized the notion of recreation as vital for the economy, in that it helped workers to be more productive. Olmsted argued for helping people “unbend” by giving them something different nature to look at and ponder, as opposed to industrialized spaces, convinced that such respites would contribute to the nation’s wealth—a seemingly necessary coping mechanism for the excesses of the Gilded Age. Olmsted emphasized the salutary psychological effects of this aesthetic experience and warned of the dire consequences of a nature deficit.
The want of such occasional recreation often results in a class of disorders the characteristic quality of which is mental disability, sometimes taking the severe forms of softening of the brain, paralysis, palsy, monomania, or insanity, but more frequently of mental and nervous excitability, moroseness, melancholy or irascibility, incapacitating the subject for the proper exercise of the intellectual and moral forces.
(Olmsted 1865, np)
The West was viewed as the ideal site for these restorative efforts. In fact, all but one of the first 15 areas designated as US national parks were in the West—and the one site chosen east of the Mississippi during that time period did not fare well, as Mackinac National Park in Michigan retained its designation for only 20 years.2 Not until nearly 50 years after the designation of Yellowstone as a national park in 1872 was another park east of the Mississippi, Acadia (then called Lafayette), designated. The striking east-west divide was attributable in part to population density, as more sparsely populated lands presented fewer political challenges for conservation. But it was not just population but also ideology, as the West was seen as a particularly tantalizing site for American self-making.
Western park visitors were not just escaping the busy industrial cities of the east coast and their workaday woes; after the Civil War, they were visiting a reinvented US, untarnished as the West was by the slavery, sectionalism, and states’ rights battles that had marred the South and the East. Per Hal K. Rothman, “The revised national creation myth gave the West primacy in American life and thinking that grew from innocence and potential for reinvention, a prestige further marking the region’s importance in a postindustrial world increasingly dependent on tourism” (1998, 14–15). The mythos of the West as a place to heal and revitalize from trials both personal and national has since fueled generations of national park tourism, but it depended—and still depends—on political subjugation. Olmsted argued that
the power of scenery to affect men is, in a large way, proportionate to the degree of their civilization and the degree in which their taste has been cultivated. Among a thousand savages there will be a much smaller number who will show the least sign of being so affected than among a thousand persons taken from a civilized community.
Like many of his colleagues who argued in support of the establishment of national parks, Olmsted believed that so-called “savages” were too uncivilized to appreciate the lands on which they had lived for thousands of years—that they were incapable of wonder, the very ideology that offered Olmsted’s ilk a way to imagine the lands of the West as an untouched “wilderness” devoid of human presence.
Although they were not European—and indeed they took great pains to set themselves apart from Europeans—bourgeois American national park founders and supporters employed representational strategies that allowed them to assert European hegemony, with conservation motives providing a cover of innocence. Described by Pratt as the “seeing-man,” the white male protagonist of European landscape discourse was “he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess” (Pratt 1992, 9). The national park founders were invested in a version of environ-mentalism that involved what Richard Grusin has described as “deployment of the ideology of nature’s intrinsic value to further the social, cultural, or political interests of a dominant race, class, gender, or institutional formation” (2004, 2). Inspired by wonder and fueled by curiosity, they leveraged conservation on the backs of Indigenous peoples.