Desirée Valadares: Dispossessing the Wilderness

the tonic of wildness
Cultural constructs of North American identity have long hinged on wilderness, the mythology of uninhabited nature, and the vastness of a virgin landscape. The idea of national parks as spaces of ecological purity and sources of national pride relate to the search for an authentic and unspoiled landscape. In 1995, William Cronon stirred controversy with his article, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’. He declared the time had come to rethink the very notion of wilderness which had served as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest.

Wilderness environmentalism originated with ideology embedded in two intellectual movements: the Romantic Sublime and the Post-Frontier (Primitivist) philosophy. Western preconceptions of nature underwent sweeping changes in the nineteenth century; environmental philosophers — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopol and painters such as George Catlin from the Hudson River School (1820-1880), were instrumental in shaping cultural values and attitudes toward wilderness conservation. Their collective sentiments loosely informed The Wilderness Act of 1964, a historically important event in American environmental politics —
”A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognised as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

The Wilderness Act of 1964 became a powerful legislative instrument to memorialise America’s wilderness heritage and to enshrine vignettes of a primitive America symbolic of a once-virgin land.

For Canada and the United States, the acquisition of territory for the creation of national parks remains a complex and deeply contested narrative that is virtually neglected. It is often overshadowed by the cultural rhetoric of wilderness, ecological integrity and associated landscape aesthetics – the picturesque, sublime and pastoral.  Park histories often minimise race, class and gender consequences in order to promote national parks as a physical and political construction of the nation-state and as an imagined national unity that further silences alternative and difficult histories, including the bitter, emotional conflict and contentious debates over land use in heritage sites, protected areas and conservation districts.  

dispossessing the wilderness
“The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him…It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia and Siberia should pass out of the hands of the red, black and yellow aboriginal owners and become the heritage of the dominant world races”
          —Theodore Roosevelt. The Winning of the West, 1904

Sociologist Joe Hermer describes the ‘emparkment’ of nature associated with the creation of North American national parks as a vivid paradox. Conservation policy typically excluded the inhabitation of these landscapes and managed encroachment by strict law enforcement.  This ‘pleasure ground ideal’ emerged not only from a twentieth-century tourist culture but was also deeply embedded in the institutions of colonialism and Western power, failing to recognise ‘wilderness’ as ancestral and often sacred homelands for indigenous aboriginal peoples who were viewed as an unfortunate blight and an affront to the sensibilities of tourists.

Policies of aboriginal displacement gained traction in the founding of America’s first national parks, namely Yosemite, Yellowstone and Glacier, from the 1870s until the 1930s. These established precedents for the exclusion of native peoples from other holdings within the national parks system in the rest of North America. The rhetoric of cultural superiority, which stemmed from feudal principles of land ownership, resulted in the placing of differential values on the landscape and consequently, the study of national parks is one way to understand the evolving framework of the Canadian state, conservation thought and practice and its political character.

conservation-induced displacement
While the establishment of national parks in Canada had adverse consequences for First Nations, Inuit and Métis land, hunting, fishing and timber rights, other groups were also affected.  Land exchanges and expropriations of private landholdings as a park-creation tool, particularly in Canada’s Atlantic provinces, was revealed by Boyce Richardson in his 1985 National Film Board documentary For Future Generations which profiled growing opposition to expropriation in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The creation of Cape Breton Highlands National Park (1936), Prince Edward Island (1937), Fundy (1948), Terra Nova (1957) and Kejimkujik (1960) left many landowners with no choice but to accept the government’s meagre financial offers and to relocate to nearby communities. Many were angered by the arbitrary way they were treated and forced removals fostered negative relationships for years, sometimes generations. Particularly contentious was the case of Kouchibouguac National Park in New Brunswick where the 1969 expropriations disrupted and dismantled the lives of more than 1,000 Acadians whose families had fished and farmed the land for generations.  Settled communities and villages were uprooted followed by a swift and violent erasure of traces of human habitation despite organised resistance. A year later in 1970, Québec’s first national park, Forillon, also resulted in the forced displacement of over 225 Gaspésiens. Though most signs of human occupation were erased from Forillon National Park, certain buildings and landscapes in the Grande-Grave sector remain to this day.

Eventually, Parks Canada’s policy was amended to prohibit the use of expropriation to create or enlarge national parks. Parliament subsequently amended the Canada National Parks Act in 2000 with a similar legislative prohibition. Now, land that is required to establish national parks is acquired only on a willing seller-willing buyer basis.  However, policy towards either erasure or preservation of the history of occupation within any national park is not always clear.

peace building and reconciliation
In many countries, state-supported cultural heritage management policies pay little attention to difficult histories, preferring to ignore and selectively edit them to tell more comfortable or self-affirming tales to bolster national and community pride. The violent history of dispossession through forced displacement and expropriation, associated with the establishment of Canada’s national parks, was silenced and ignored to hide the less palatable parts of the national park narrative that involved the systematic exclusion of people from their ancestral lands. These unwanted, dark memories were so irreconcilable with the country’s sense of national identity that they were selectively erased from public consciousness. By default, the material heritage testifying to these unsettling events was often physically removed, neglected and over time, obliterated entirely from public view and civic space. As a result, these distorted narratives and sensitive histories prove to be challenging to interpret and reconcile due to their potential to further constrain, disadvantage and oppress already silenced and marginalised groups.

Parks Canada’s recent nation-wide reconciliation efforts to acknowledge expropriated citizens through official apologies, special access passes and commemorative memorials reflect changing Canadian attitudes toward wilderness. This has been an opportunity for environmental peace-building initiatives that integrate natural resource management with conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution, reconciliation, redress and recovery to build resilience in communities affected by loss and displacement, trauma and conflict.

In 2010, Parks Canada’s national entry fee was waived for families whose land, now inside a national park, had been subject to regulatory takings and expropriations. The entry pass was an important step towards healing community relations and keeping the memory of these communities alive. In 2011, this measure was expanded to apply to all expropriated owners (including land, lumber lot and cottage owners) to give three generations the right to access cemeteries, former family house sites, expropriation monuments and memorials and to take part in commemorative events organised or supported by Parks Canada. In 2010 the federal government allocated 1.3 million dollars to Kouchibouguac National Park for the ‘enhancement of the visitor experience’, and almost a million dollars to Forillon National Park for a permanent exhibition ‘as a record of the life of the families’ who were expropriated. The House of Commons issued a formal apology to Forillon’s expropriated residents and established a Forillon Expropriated Persons Commemorative Committee in 2011 to actively shape the direction of Forillon’s strategic plan and interpretive strategies.

National parks serve as a microcosm of the history of conflict and misunderstanding that has long characterised the unequal power relationships between dominant state-building legislation and more vulnerable native and local populations. To remain both truthful and relevant, national parks must reconsider changing perceptions and frame themselves within the broader canon of social, cultural, political and environmental histories. National parks have the potential to be common ground and an arena to resolve and mend broken relationships with peoples who once inhabited and tended to these lands.  

Desirée Valadares, landscape architect and urban designer, is currently a PhD student in architecture at University of California at Berkeley where she studies reconciliation, redress and transitional justice through the lens of memorials, monuments and commemorations.