To be a person of color in the United States is, often, to have a different sense of geography, history, and the natural world. The tangible things in life, such as battlefields, waterfalls, and historic mansions, are known entities, but sometimes of less significance than the intangible--sacred places, safe harbors, no-go areas. We come by this knowledge intuitively (mostly), as though it were transmitted like eye color or pigmentation through the genes.
Naturally then, many people of color approach their relationships to the national parks at a similarly oblique angle. While I've never met a visitor to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or the Everglades who wasn't awestruck by the power and beauty of those special places, that "different sense of geography, history, and the natural world" often leaves some people of color feeling inexplicably unsatisfied. The lack of cultural diversity within the environmental movement, the historic preservation movement, and the parks conservation movement reinforces in many of us the feeling that history and the environment are things that belong to someone else. "Where," some of us have asked, "is the rest of the story?" The rest of our story?
The National Park System of the United States, some 388 units strong, comprises the most significant cultural, natural, and historic places in our nation's history--for better and for worse. Many of these sites more than adequately tell the story of the contributions, struggles, and accomplishments of people of color throughout the history of the United States. Far too frequently, however, the historical presence of Indian, Asian, African, and Latino Americans is omitted, distorted, or incorrectly rendered.
From the all-too-frequent portrayal of American Indians as a monolithic, "dead" culture to the number of Civil War battlefield sites that fail to adequately address the significance of slavery in their interpretation, to the absolute dearth of monuments, parks, and historic sites that celebrate the Latino presence in the United States, there is a sense among some that the current system of national parks damns people of color with faint or inaccurate (even non-existent) praise. This damaging perception is particularly unfortunate, given that the National Park Service is one of the largest curators of Indian, African, Asian, and Latino American history. If the Smithsonian is the "Nation's Attic," the Park Service represents the rest of the house--the farms, fields, main streets, churches, and factories, where the people of this country have grown up, worked, lived, fought, worshipped, and died.
Clearly, the Park Service has an image problem. While most Americans know of the Abolitionist movement, the struggle for American Indian political, legal, and economic rights, the displacement of Asian Americans during World War II, and the contributions of Latinos to all aspects of US history, few realize how many of these stories are told in our national parks. As long as the public , particularly people of color, continue to view the Park Service as the agency that maintains large western parks, our ability to create a truly diverse constituency of park advocates is jeopardized. Promoting the historic and cultural treasures found in our national parks is the key to broadening the parks conservation movement.
The purpose of this document is to expose some of the hidden treasures to be found among our national parks, to highlight the stories, places, objects, and accounts that reveal something about the historic and cultural contributions of people of color to the creation and development of this country. The descriptions will often focus on one element of a park (for instance the history of the Buffalo Soldiers that patrolled Yosemite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), as opposed to providing a travel log-style description of the park itself.
We hope this document will inspire more people of color to learn about, visit, come to care about, and advocate on behalf of a national park system that does indeed "tell their story." The history is out there. Let this paper guide you to a better understanding of our nation's past while offering examples of how our contemporary and future national parks might truly represent the face of America. |
