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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent case studies, great photographs and illustrations
Review: In Dispossessing the Wilderness, Mark Spence, an Assistant Professor of History at Knox College, Illinois, delivers a well-researched volume on a chapter of American Indian history that has gone largely unnoticed. The book tells the story of the National Park Service removing American Indians so that the landscape in each park could be more "natural and fit the common perceptions of nature. The conception of wilderness without natives was so powerful that early preservationists dismissed or ignored evidence of native use and habitation. For instance, Yellowstone National Park management of the 1870s and 1880s felt that the Native American threatened game even when government surveys revealed game numbers were on the rise.
Most national parks expelled Indians early on in their history. Yosemite proved the anomaly in NPS-tribal relations. Unlike Yellowstone and Glacier, the native populations remained long after establishment of the park. Early park management felt Yosemite Indians had a moral right to stay. Tourists expected and enjoyed viewing Indians in their "natural" state. For nearly 20 years the park gloried in its Indian past by hosting an "Indian Field Days" festival. The Indians made a living from tourists by selling their wares and working for the NPS or its concessionaires. After relative peace with the Park Service for over 50 years, the native population became a victim of the growing sentiment that creating a "natural" setting in national parks meant excluding of natives. Yosemite management effectively forced the natives to vacate their ancestral village site and move to small cabins. The NPS exercised near dictatorial control over cabin residents. When each family left, its cabin was destroyed to prevent another family from laying claim on it. In effect, relocating the Indians to the cabins was a long term-plan to wield more control over the Indians and slowly expel them in a way that would not raise a fuss among Indian advocates. The plan succeeded when the last Indian families vacated the cabins in the 1960s. Fortunately the Yosemite Indians still have a presence in the park, in the form of an Indian cultural center on the site of the former cabins.
The book relates much of the same information as Robert Keller and Michael Turek's volume American Indians and National Parks, but more succinctly and with better visual aids. Mingled with the narrative are excellent photos, illustrations and maps with thorough explanations in their captions. One such illustration fully demonstrates the bad blood that existed between the Blackfeet and Glacier National Park administrators by depicting then NPS director Horace Albright kneeling within the boundaries of the park with sharp claws extended trying to grasp the Blackfeet reservation (97).
For a volume focusing on Native Americans' relationship with NPS management, it also contains other pertinent historical information on national parks. The book's scope is narrow - it only explains Indian-white relations in Yellowstone, Glacier and Yosemite national parks. This confined breadth has its advantages in a detailed story of Native American-park management relations in each park, but may leave the reader wanting more. The book's epilogue does contain a brief summary of Indian situations in Grand Canyon National Park, Death Valley National Park, and a few parks in Alaska. For further reading on other parks, those interested will need to turn to Keller and Turek's volume as well as Indian Country, God's Country by Philip Burnham and Inhabited Wilderness, by Theodore Catton.
Rating: 
Summary: Things We Never Knew: Nat'l Parks, Muir and Native Americans
Review: Mark David Spence has crafted a fascinating look at three national parks: Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite through the filter, the lense as it were, of Native American presence. Citizens of the United States did not always see the national parks in terms of an empty wilderness, untrodden by human footsteps. Rather, early on in the 19th century Americans, such as Catlin for example, tended to look at the wilderness in its 'natural' state, that is, its condition before European conquest, advancement, and domination. This state, therefore, included the presence of Native Americans within these three national parks. This presence took on, at times, both a temporary or a permanent character. Although the book can read with a pace that only a historian would love, there are sufficient insights to enlighten even the armchair historian. Perhaps one of the most fascinating facets is the role that John Muir took in defining Yosemite as a region that should be absent of the Native Americans, the very people who had dwelt in the Valley for centuries. His comments could easily be construed as racist, naive, and bigoted. I cautiously recommend this book to you, although personally I found it fascinating.
Rating:
Summary: Things We Never Knew: Nat'l Parks, Muir and Native Americans
Review: Mark David Spence has crafted a fascinating look at three national parks: Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite through the filter, the lense as it were, of Native American presence. Citizens of the United States did not always see the national parks in terms of an empty wilderness, untrodden by human footsteps. Rather, early on in the 19th century Americans, such as Catlin for example, tended to look at the wilderness in its 'natural' state, that is, its condition before European conquest, advancement, and domination. This state, therefore, included the presence of Native Americans within these three national parks. This presence took on, at times, both a temporary or a permanent character. Although the book can read with a pace that only a historian would love, there are sufficient insights to enlighten even the armchair historian. Perhaps one of the most fascinating facets is the role that John Muir took in defining Yosemite as a region that should be absent of the Native Americans, the very people who had dwelt in the Valley for centuries. His comments could easily be construed as racist, naive, and bigoted. I cautiously recommend this book to you, although personally I found it fascinating.
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