"one blunt aim: to rid Yosemite of its natives"
And no, my state schools or national park educational center did not tell us this:
"No natives allowed; Over the last century, the conservation movement has created some beautiful parks - and millions of refugees" by Mark Dowie | May 3, 2009
Mark Dowie is an investigative historian. This article was adapted from his seventh book, "Conservation Refugees: The Hundred Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native People," and portions of the article appeared in Resurgence, Orion, and Stanford Social Innovation Review.
LAFAYETTE BUNNELL, AMERICAN explorer and wilderness romantic, first rode into the bucolic stillness of Yosemite on March 21, 1851. He was on a voyage of discovery. Once in the valley he thought he had arrived, if not in heaven, in Eden. "I have seen the power and glory of a supreme being," he wrote in his journal, and "the majesty of his handiwork."
Bunnell's attitude toward the people who actually lived in the valley was decidedly more ambiguous. At times he romanticized the lifeways of the Miwoks who had settled there some 4,000 years earlier. But he also said there was no room for them in the West, calling them "yelling demons" and "overgrown vicious children." The whole territory, he wrote, should be "swept of any scattered bands that might infest it."
Accompanying him that day was one of the most ferocious militias in western American history, the Mariposa Battalion, commanded by James Savage. A veteran of Indian wars, Savage was there with one blunt aim: to rid Yosemite of its natives. Bunnell, who is remembered today largely for his lyrical prose about nature, stood by and watched while Savage and his men burned acorn caches to starve the Miwok out of the valley. Seventy were physically removed. Twenty-three were later slaughtered at the foot of El Capitan, the towering granite obelisk that has become a totem of California wilderness.
So there was Native American blood on the ground I was standing on, huh?
Although it took some years to complete the task of creating a fictional wilderness in Yosemite, all the valley's residents were eventually evicted, and in 1914 their land became a national park - no natives welcome.
Gee, WE STOLE LAND! No wonder the government feels a kinship with Israel!=
This tactic became known as "the Yosemite model" and was replicated around the country, and eventually around the world.
Going on right now in some places.
At most of the major parks created in America - Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Mount Rainier, Zion, Glacier, Everglades, and Olympic - thousands of tribal people were expelled from their homes and hunting grounds so the new parks could remain in an undisturbed "state of nature." In the century that followed, millions of tribal natives around the world were forcibly evicted from wildlife reserves and national parks such as the Royal National Park of Australia, Banff in Canada, and Tongariro in New Zealand. In East Africa, the Serengeti and Amboseli National Parks were formed this way; on the border of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Kenya, Batwa pygmy refugees still camp in hovels hoping one day to return to their forest homeland.
Refugees from conservation have never been counted; in fact they're not even officially recognized as refugees. But the number of people displaced from traditional homelands worldwide over the past century, in the interest of conservation, is estimated to be close to 20 million, 14 million in Africa alone. It is a sad history, and one that has forced conservationists to reevaluate the hero status of their movement's founders, and to reconsider the idea of protecting biological diversity by removing humans from the mix.
The conservation establishment desperately wants the world, particularly its funders, to believe it is working hand in hand with indigenous peoples - two august and ancient forces dedicated to protecting the world against the depredations of development. But in fact conservation and native people remain locked in a deep struggle over what it really means to "preserve" something, and whether that something should be nature or culture.
The conflict is also compelling the conservation movement to grapple with the effects of its own century-long blunder, and with its origins as an American movement driven largely by nature romantics and aristocratic men determined to protect their hunting grounds.
Translation: OFFICIAL HISTORY is a DISTORTED LIE!!!!
Our RUGGED ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDS were GENOCIDAL ETHNIC CLEANSERS!!!
And it is just a BLUNDER, not a HOLOCAUST!!!!!
Not only has it dispossessed millions of people who might very well have been excellent stewards of the land, but it has engendered a worldwide hostility toward the whole idea of wildland conservation - damaging the cause in many countries whose crucial wildland is most in need of protection....
Yeah, GLOBALIST PLANS don't go over to well, and INDIGENOUS PEOPLE WOULD KNOW MORE about the LAND USE!!!
--more--"
Next week they will be covering Palestine, right, because the same thing has happened to them.
