(The Hill) In the summer of 2020, amid America’s national reckoning with its white supremacism and systemic racism, lovers of nature and conservation began to ask questions about how our national parks and other public lands fit into this reckoning.
They took a closer look at beautiful, nationally prized landscapes, like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park, that reflect the work of early conservationists who envisioned vast protected swaths of pristine, untouched wilderness for future generations to enjoy. And then they saw the truth. When conservationists claimed these lands, they were already richly inhabited by Indigenous Peoples who had had been cultivating, conserving, and connecting with them since time immemorial.
But conservationists’ vision for these landscapes did not include Indigenous Peoples. Armed with this belief and other racist ideals, white people and government leaders embarked on the violent, forcible removal of Indigenous communities from their ancestral homelands.
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