Undeveloped
atualizar: 2024-08-20
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What do you mean by "undeveloped" — weren't there people living here?
We're wading through rivers in the nation's first wilderness in New Mexico's Gila National Forest to learn how the idea of capital "W" Wilderness came to be.
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We're wading through rivers in the nation's first wilderness in New Mexico's Gila National Forest to learn how the idea of capital "W" Wilderness came to be.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
NPR Privacy Policy
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Transcrição
00:00:00
On the Ted Radio Hour, MIT psychologist Sheri Terkel, her latest research into the intimate relationships people are having with chatbots.
00:00:10
Technologies that say, I care about you, I love you, I'm here for you, take care of me.
00:00:17
The pros and cons of artificial intimacy that's on the Ted Radio Hour from NBR.
00:00:24
I once heard the historian Phoebe Young say something that stuck with me, that you have to be careful where you start a story.
00:00:30
Because wherever you assign the beginning, everything before that becomes stasis.
00:00:35
- So my spiel, well, we just came up over the mountains, the black range of mountains.
00:00:43
- It's really pretty.
00:00:44
- That's why I'm with archeologist Chris Adams today, driving into the Heila National Forest.
00:00:50
Because the Heila is special, and I want to tell you the story of this place.
00:00:54
So I'm trying to start back as far as I can.
00:00:57
If you go back to prehistoric times, people have been using this since they were chasing the large megafauna.
00:01:06
- As in mammoths and giant sloths, so, you know, a long time ago, we're in the southwest corner of New Mexico, only a few hours drive from the Mexican border, and we're driving through a beautiful valley,
00:01:17
the hillsides dotted with pines.
00:01:20
But Chris is seeing something else, something I'm not.
00:01:23
- We've driven by a 300 site so far, and so when you get out here and start walking the landscape, there is a lot out here.
00:01:30
- When you said we passed 300 sites, what exactly is a site?
00:01:34
Is that like the equivalent of a house?
00:01:36
- It could be a house.
00:01:37
It could be a club, a room, or a pit house, which a small family lived in.
00:01:43
- We turn off the highway and follow a dirt road into the National Forest, just at the edge of the wilderness boundary.
00:01:48
We get out of the car, it looks like just a random rise in the middle of a pine forest.
00:01:57
- This would look like an ordinary hill to you.
00:01:59
So you're actually walking up.
00:02:01
What I think is probably maybe upper story, two story rooms.
00:02:06
- Chris has surveyed this site and found evidence to show it was a pueblo, like a village site, from the members people who lived here starting over a thousand years ago.
00:02:17
And there's still evidence of them if you know how to look.
00:02:20
- Well, this was on the road here.
00:02:21
- And what is it?
00:02:23
- Pottery.
00:02:24
- Oh, look at this.
00:02:27
- So that's part of the broken pottery that literally is a site one of pot bricks.
00:02:30
- If you have an image in your head of southwestern pottery, you might be thinking of the members work.
00:02:37
They're known for making beautiful bowls with intricate black and red geometric lines, and often an animal in the center, a jackrabbit, a deer, a bird.
00:02:46
- And you got a little bit of black decoration, and then this one, you can see the line work.
00:02:51
But these are what we look for when we come up upon these sites.
00:02:55
- That's incredible.
00:02:56
I mean, yeah, I can totally see how this is a puzzle piece of what you were showing merely the white background with the black design.
00:03:03
- Chris studies the layers upon layers of history here.
00:03:06
And Sustres of today's Zuni Pueblo, Akima Pueblo, and Hopi traveled through this area.
00:03:12
The Apache, who also call this place home, were here when settlers, first from Spain, then Mexico, then the U.S., began colonizing the area.
00:03:20
Chris found bullet casings in this same spot that he traced back to an Apache battle with U.S.
00:03:26
soldiers.
00:03:27
- They were fighting for what they believed in.
00:03:29
This was their home.
00:03:30
- He finds this kind of evidence of history all over the Hila National Forest.
00:03:35
- So no difference in the wilderness if you were to go hike into the wilderness, and look, it's the same idea, same premise.
00:03:41
- He's talking about the official wilderness here.
00:03:45
What I call capital W wilderness.
00:03:48
What do you picture when you hear the word wilderness?
00:03:51
Maybe it's a thick lush jungle.
00:03:53
There are moat, arctic, or dramatic mountain peaks.
00:03:57
There's wilderness as a concept, but it's also a legal definition.
00:04:02
Capital W wilderness areas are parts of public land, like national parks and forests, that are set aside to have this even higher level of protection.
00:04:12
They're supposed to be natural, untramult, and undeveloped.
00:04:17
But obviously, that hasn't always been the case.
00:04:21
- To say that it's undeveloped, people have been there before us prehistoricly.
00:04:27
To have a place where nobody's been, that would be interesting, but we don't have that.
00:04:31
- I've spent the last 20 years hiking in wilderness, and while I love these areas, I've never been comfortable with this implication that there are places that were uninhabited.
00:04:41
That's one of the most common critiques of wilderness.
00:04:44
It erases the history of the indigenous peoples who are on these lands.
00:04:48
Another common critique is that wilderness furthers the idea that humans are separate from nature, just visitors.
00:04:55
As opposed to these lands having been managed by people for millennia.
00:04:59
So when there are debates, like in Sequoia National Park, about how much to restore wilderness in the face of severe fires or climate change,
00:05:09
people draw on these critiques.
00:05:11
Why not restore wilderness?
00:05:13
People have been managing these places for forever.
00:05:16
So I wanted to learn, how did capital W wilderness come to be?
00:05:21
We have National Parks and Forests, how is a wilderness different from that?
00:05:26
Who decided that we needed to set aside lands where humans are just visitors?
00:05:31
This is How Wild, a podcast about wilderness, how it's changing,
00:05:41
and what that says about us as humans.
00:05:43
Episode two, undeveloped.
00:05:48
You know, you think, "Oh, this is beautiful."
00:05:51
And you go around the corner, it's like, "Oh, this is beautiful."
00:05:54
And it just keeps going.
00:05:56
The next day, I'm hiking up a trail with Henry Pervincio, who at the time was the Helanational Forest wilderness district ranger.
00:06:03
Chris and I were talking about history on the scale of hundreds or thousands of years.
00:06:08
But Henry and I are hiking to see some more recent history.
00:06:12
Oh, the first crossing, I guess, we're going to do it.
00:06:17
We're hiking through this beautiful sandy bottom canyon and we get to a wide shallow river.
00:06:22
The only way across is through.
00:06:24
You are not kidding about the river crossing, okay?
00:06:28
Yeah, I should have put on my other shoes, but I'll be fine.
00:06:30
I just want to stop and take off my boots.
00:06:32
But Henry has to get back for a meeting and he's totally humoring me by even going on this hike at all.
00:06:37
Let's do it.
00:06:38
Because there's something on this trail I really want to see.
00:06:49
So this trail, how far could we walk on it?
00:06:53
To Canada?
00:06:58
You could connect up with the continental divide trail.
00:07:03
This will take us completely through the Helan wilderness and we just continue to follow.
00:07:08
It's beautiful here.
00:07:09
The river is carving through a soft red rock canyon.
00:07:13
There's juniper trees on the canyon walls above us.
00:07:16
It's not necessarily as charismatic as a place like Yosemite or Yellowstone.
00:07:21
We don't get the crowds or somewhere like Yosemite and thank goodness for that.
00:07:26
But for wilderness nerds like me, it's its own kind of landmark.
00:07:31
Finally, we get to this big flinstone-looking wooden sign marking the entrance to the Helo wilderness.
00:07:38
Here we are at the wilderness fountain.
00:07:41
I've seen a lot of these signs and they look the same whether you're in California, Alaska, or Georgia.
00:07:46
But I wanted to see this sign because it's special.
00:07:49
Helo wilderness is the first designated wilderness in the world.
00:07:53
And that whole concept of wilderness was really born right here.
00:07:59
The concept of capital W designated wilderness.
00:08:04
In 1924, the nation's first wilderness was established here.
00:08:08
It sparked the movement that led Congress to pass the Wilderness Act 40 years later.
00:08:14
Today, there are over 800 wilderness areas in the US that are protected by law.
00:08:20
So how did the idea of capital W wilderness come to be?
00:08:25
That is a great question.
00:08:26
And I don't think there is a single answer to that.
00:08:30
This is historian Phoebe Young who wrote the book "Camping Grounds" about the history of camping in the US.
00:08:35
She's the one who told me, you have to be careful where you begin a story.
00:08:39
So how far back should we begin?
00:08:42
Like archaeologists Chris Adams told us, there were waves of people living here going back millennia from the members culture to the Apache and other indigenous peoples.
00:08:51
And they didn't view this land as wilderness.
00:08:53
It was home.
00:08:54
North America, when settlers from Europe arrived, was in fact an intensely peopleed place.
00:09:00
Indigenous peoples across the continent had complex social and environmental systems, but they weren't organized around land ownership.
00:09:08
So when the first Europeans arrived, who came from a system driven by property rights, they saw this as open land, even if indigenous people were using it for sustainable purposes.
00:09:19
And they saw it as their right to colonize the land.
00:09:22
First in the east, but then as cities there became crowded, Anglo-Americans were encouraged to go west, settle the open land.
00:09:30
This is the era of manifest destiny.
00:09:33
The government went into the business of taking land from indigenous peoples and briefly turning it into public land that could then be sold off to homesteaders or developers.
00:09:44
Here in the Hila, as the area was colonized for Spain, Mexico, and the US, the Apache fought to defend their homeland.
00:09:52
Many were killed.
00:09:53
By the late 1800s, some of the surviving Apache were captured and imprisoned before being forced to live on a military reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
00:10:04
Meanwhile, not all of the land the US took from indigenous peoples was suitable for farming.
00:10:10
Think Yellowstone, right?
00:10:11
This is this incredible landscape of weird geysers and bubbling mud holes.
00:10:17
And you can't really imagine planting a corn and wheat there.
00:10:22
So some areas get preserved as places of wonder and what become national parks.
00:10:27
And some areas were conserved as national forests.
00:10:30
And that's about managing forests essentially as farms, as an agricultural product to sustain forests over the long haul.
00:10:39
To be able to harvest timber, the predecessors of the Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management also started at this time.
00:10:47
The national parks and forests became tourist destinations.
00:10:51
At first, visitors came on horseback or railroad, which was expensive and required a lot of time.
00:10:57
Then something came along to change all that.
00:10:59
Well, the 19 teens and 20s saw an explosion of interest in the national parks and other areas, particularly because of the invention of the automobile,
00:11:10
right?
00:11:10
Or the Model T, Ford's Model T, which became an affordable automobile for the masses.
00:11:16
The Model T, stone, sturdy, with a will of its own.
00:11:22
Phoebe says that the car made a camping trip to a national park or forest possible for many families.
00:11:28
People, and let's be clear, mostly white people, were coming to public lands in droves to hunt and fish and hike and camp.
00:11:38
This is the era of the drive through giant Sequoia or Redwood.
00:11:42
If you haven't seen one, it's just that.
00:11:44
A giant tree with a tunnel carved into it so tourists can drive on through.
00:11:49
They think it's kind of remarkable experience to take their modern car and drive it through an ancient Sequoia, that something that you see postcards, photographs by the hundreds.
00:12:03
All the cars driving through and over tree roots and grasses were starting to kill the forests and meadows.
00:12:10
So what you start to see by the mid-1920s is overcrowding.
00:12:14
National parks particularly are ill-prepared for the onslaught of visitors.
00:12:21
That had some environmentalists worried.
00:12:23
Specifically, some employees at the National Forest Service in the Southwest.
00:12:27
They had to figure out a way to both accommodate the visitors and try to make sure that they didn't damage the grass, the meadows,
00:12:37
the trees, the views.
00:12:39
One of these concerned forest service employees was a guy named Aldo Leopold.
00:12:43
If you've heard his name before, it's because he later became famous for writing a book called A Sand County Almanac.
00:12:50
But before then, he was just working a forest or job here in the Southwest.
00:12:55
I told you where we found this, right?
00:12:57
Sitting on top of the ice box in our break room.
00:13:00
So I didn't just come to the helot to see a wooden sign.
00:13:04
I also came to see a box of papers.
00:13:08
What's inside?
00:13:09
That's after a very quick break.
00:13:11
We all hear things differently.
00:13:18
And that can be tough when there's so much noise.
00:13:20
This election year, we're a space to speak up and to listen.
00:13:24
Listen to 1A for the latest on election 2024, only from NPR.
00:13:28
This message comes from the Kresge Foundation.
00:13:37
Established 100 years ago, the Kresge Foundation works to expand equity and opportunity in cities across America, a century of impact, a future of opportunity.
00:13:47
More at Kresge.org.
00:13:49
OK, so I didn't just come to the helot to see the wooden sign.
00:13:59
I also came to see this box of papers, Henry, the wilderness ranger, first told me about over the phone.
00:14:06
I meet up with him a few days after our hike at the National Forest Office.
00:14:09
Now it was just cleaning up the office.
00:14:11
And luckily, my recreation staff was sitting there with me and put him down and he started reading.
00:14:17
And he's like, do you realize what this stuff is?
00:14:19
Henry puts an ordinary bankers box stuffed with files on the conference room table.
00:14:24
So in this box, we just have a bunch of records.
00:14:30
And it was some of those original designations and management plans that people were considering for management of the wilderness.
00:14:41
Yeah, let's take a look.
00:14:42
Of course.
00:14:43
This is so exciting.
00:14:45
I told you I'm a nerd for this stuff.
00:14:47
As a forester in the Southwest, Leopold was concerned that the forest service was building too many roads to accommodate the onslaught of tourists.
00:14:55
He was a hunter, and he wanted himself and others to still be able to go on long-packed trips without running into roads.
00:15:03
So along with his colleague Arthur Carhartt, they came up with the idea of setting aside some roadless areas as what they would call wilderness.
00:15:12
What's this from?
00:15:16
Oh, I'm going to have polar district forester.
00:15:21
Leopold proposed his idea to the district forester, named Frank Pooler.
00:15:26
Leopold's pitch was this.
00:15:27
The forests are already managed for many uses.
00:15:31
Timber, mining, grazing.
00:15:33
Why not have wilderness recreation be one of those uses too?
00:15:37
And Pooler agreed.
00:15:39
On June 3rd, 1924, Pooler wrote up a work plan for the Hila that said, "We're going to restrict this area from roads and other developments."
00:15:49
And the nation's first wilderness was born.
00:15:52
We're enclosing a copy of the first recreational work plan.
00:15:56
Leopold and Pooler started writing to others in the forest service about what they'd done.
00:16:00
I guess this is from.
00:16:02
Oh, this is from Leopold.
00:16:03
Awesome, yeah.
00:16:04
Wow.
00:16:06
And the idea took off.
00:16:08
It's too Pooler.
00:16:09
I have your letter of February 25th.
00:16:12
I'm beginning to believe there is a real chance of public interest developing quickly enough to get at least some action on the idea of large wilderness areas.
00:16:19
I'm being asked to-- great many questions about the administrative ways and means to be followed and putting the idea into effect.
00:16:24
But they still had to figure out exactly what they meant by wilderness.
00:16:28
OK, no roads.
00:16:29
But what about allowing ranchers to graze their cattle on the land, which was a really big deal at the time?
00:16:35
Some of the letters you can see, they were corresponding back and forth trying to figure this stuff out.
00:16:39
Can we use tractors?
00:16:42
Can we use horses?
00:16:43
Can we use airplanes?
00:16:44
How do we get equipment and supplies and people into the wilderness?
00:16:48
When you read some of this, it makes me think right now about wilderness character, right?
00:16:53
So we're talking 1926.
00:16:54
We're still nearly 40 years before the wilderness sack.
00:16:59
And they're talking about what is the thing of wilderness mean?
00:17:03
While the wilderness idea is spreading throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the National Parks and Forests were still being developed with roads and buildings for tourists.
00:17:13
Meanwhile, activists were campaigning against some dams being put in on wild rivers.
00:17:18
More environmentalists joined Leopold and his concern about overdevelopment of public lands.
00:17:23
Leopold left the Forest Service and helped form an organization called the Wilderness Society.
00:17:29
And this is part of what leads into the lobbying for the Wilderness Bill.
00:17:33
Here's the story in Phoebe Young again.
00:17:35
Cars became the flashpoint.
00:17:38
Or certainly the vehicle, and the pun intended, to try to halt development.
00:17:42
That if you had areas without roads, areas where motorized equipment, whether that's cars or powerboats, were prohibited, that that would put a sort of natural break on other forms of development.
00:17:55
If you couldn't drive equipment into these spaces that you couldn't develop them in the same way, the kind of front country areas of National Parks had become.
00:18:05
Leopold died suddenly of a heart attack.
00:18:09
But a colleague of his at the Wilderness Society, a younger guy named Howard Zahnheiser, took up the reins to campaign for this National Wilderness System.
00:18:18
Okay, here we go.
00:18:20
We're attaching copies of correspondence with Dr.
00:18:22
Murray and Dr.
00:18:23
Mr.
00:18:23
Zahnheiser.
00:18:24
Henry and I find letters between Zahnheiser and the Heila National Forest Office.
00:18:28
So they're setting up a trip for them to visit.
00:18:31
We'll bring bedrooms.
00:18:33
So Zahnheiser came to visit, and the Heila Foresters took him on a horseback trip through the Wilderness.
00:18:42
Later, Zahnheiser wrote about the damage to the land he saw because of cattle grazing.
00:18:48
He was surprised, but he knew there was no way a wilderness bill was going to get through Congress that banned grazing.
00:18:55
Cattle renters held a lot of political power and he'd have to make compromises.
00:19:00
And that's what happened next.
00:19:03
Zahnheiser wrote and re-wrote the bill, tweaking language, taking stuff out, and then finally, after 66 drafts and 40 years after the first wilderness in the Heila was established by Aldo Leopold,
00:19:16
it happened.
00:19:17
Members of the Cabinet and the Congress, ladies and gentlemen, this is a very happy and historic occasion for all who love the great American outdoors.
00:19:27
Congress passed the Wilderness Act with overwhelming support.
00:19:30
An on September 3, 1964, President Lyndon B.
00:19:35
Johnson signed it into law.
00:19:37
The wilderness bill preserves for our posterity for all time to come.
00:19:42
Nine million acres of this vast continent in their original and unchanging beauty and wonder.
00:19:49
There are now over 100 million acres of wilderness in the U.S., about 5% of the entire country is designated as wilderness, equal to an area slightly larger than California.
00:20:01
Wilderness areas can be found on the lands of national parks, national forests, Bureau of Land Management, and U.S.
00:20:07
Fish and Wildlife.
00:20:08
They are these extra layers of protection superimposed on each of those four federal land agencies, islands of protection that cannot be developed, and they have to be natural,
00:20:21
untrammeled, undeveloped, with opportunities for solitude and primitive, unconfined recreation.
00:20:29
The Wilderness Act spells out what's prohibited in wilderness too.
00:20:36
Along with no roads, there's no permanent structures, no motorized equipment.
00:20:40
Like any law, it's open to some amount of interpretation and there are exceptions, so like helicopters are allowed to rescue someone in danger.
00:20:48
But in many wilderness areas, trail crews are still using old-fashioned crosscut saws to cut down trees instead of chain saws.
00:20:55
I call up someone who trains today's land managers about the Wilderness Act.
00:21:01
Hello, my name is Michelle Riley, and I work for the U.S.
00:21:07
Fish and Wildlife Service in my current position, which is the wilderness liaison for the National Wildlife Refuge System.
00:21:15
Michelle is a liaison for the Fish and Wildlife Service at the Arthur Carhartt National Wilderness Training Center.
00:21:21
I called her because she's done a ton of research on the Writing of the Wilderness Act.
00:21:26
She's combed through some of those 66 drafts of the bill.
00:21:30
So I was just doing research on my own to try to get myself more informed about wilderness history and just pursued it from there, really.
00:21:40
Michelle says you can see from the earlier draft some of the language and ideas that ultimately got left out of the bill.
00:21:48
Like there's this one draft from the 1950s.
00:21:50
It has Howard Zonheiser's handwritten notes in it, which I personally love.
00:21:55
And in one section, it defines wilderness as an area.
00:21:58
Where man himself is a member of the natural community.
00:22:02
A wanderer who visits but does not remain.
00:22:04
But in the final version of the bill, it defines wilderness as an area.
00:22:09
Where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
00:22:13
So we lost that brief little section where it said man is a member of the natural community.
00:22:19
This is surprising for me to learn because one of the big critiques of wilderness is that it promotes this idea that man, humans, are separate from nature that were just visitors.
00:22:32
So to see the original writers of the act, thinking about humans being members of the natural community was kind of neat.
00:22:39
Why did that get left out?
00:22:41
I don't know why that was removed, but I think it is very interesting.
00:22:47
That just provides a little more context and it also helps us reduce the dichotomy between man and nature.
00:22:55
It really helps show that the intentions of the authors were that we are members of the natural community.
00:23:03
Michelle's research also revealed some of the word choices that went into the bill.
00:23:08
Like the word untrampled.
00:23:10
It's a seldom used word.
00:23:11
A trample is a shackle or hobble, sometimes used on a horse.
00:23:15
To be untrampled means to be free, unshackled.
00:23:19
Sun has heard the word from the activist Polly Dyer who was fighting against a road being built on the rugged wild coastline of Washington State.
00:23:29
She had suggested that he used the word in his drafts of the wilderness bill because it really did encapsulate all the things he was trying to convey that were important to wilderness.
00:23:44
The problem is a lot of people confuse the word untrampled with untrampled.
00:23:50
Untrampled is definitely not the same idea as what the authors were trying to convey.
00:23:55
Some of Zonheim's co-workers tried to get him to change the word to undisturbed instead.
00:24:01
He was very resistant, and the reason he was resistant is because he did not think undisturbed gave the idea that he was trying to express.
00:24:10
So with untrampled, he was recognizing that there were areas that could have been previously disturbed, and those would still be wonderful wilderness areas.
00:24:21
I love that story.
00:24:23
Yeah, it's so interesting.
00:24:25
I've seen writings where he went to the Hila and he said, "Wow, this area is really disturbed because of grazing mostly."
00:24:32
You know, he's still supported it as a place to have a wilderness area.
00:24:37
It seems like then it's almost like a forward looking more about how we sort of think about the land going forward than if it's disturbed.
00:24:45
That's a good point.
00:24:47
It's how we teach it untrampled is more about the actions.
00:24:52
It can be an area that's disturbed, but it's not something we're trying to control.
00:24:58
This is kind of a revelation to me.
00:25:06
The wilderness act does not say that an area has to be undisturbed or previously uninhabited or pristine in order to be protected.
00:25:14
In fact, the word pristine gets used a lot now to talk about wilderness, even though it was never used in the act itself.
00:25:22
But to be fair, not everyone is as nerdy as me and has sat down to read it or delved into the history like Michelle has.
00:25:30
So a lot of times when people are talking about wilderness, they're talking more about wilderness as a concept and not really addressing the Capital W.
00:25:38
Wilderness Act.
00:25:39
For Michael Dero, though, a lot of times those distinctions are irrelevant.
00:25:45
It'd be nice if people knew that this was our tribe's home.
00:25:49
And the reason it's a wilderness now is it was taken from us and we had no choice in the matter.
00:25:58
Michael Dero is the tribal historian for the Chiricawa Warmsprings Apache, who were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma.
00:26:06
The tribe's original territory that included the area now known as the Hila Wilderness is really just in theory now.
00:26:13
It's like you drive past on the highway and say, "Oh, you see that area?
00:26:17
That's that's someplace where we used to live."
00:26:19
More non-native people are starting to really recognize this history, but I feel like it's often talked about like it happened in the distant past when really we're only talking about a handful of generations ago.
00:26:34
My grandfather, who was born in southwest New Mexico, was familiar with that entire area, but he liked the rest of our tribe, was shipped off his prisoners of war and kept away for 28 years.
00:26:47
In the late 1800s of the thousands of Chiricawa and Warmsprings Apache, who called the Hila Home, only about 500 survived defending their homeland.
00:26:58
They were rounded up and imprisoned by the U.S.
00:27:02
Michael says of that group, only half survived incarceration.
00:27:06
They were eventually relocated to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, more than 500 miles from their original territory.
00:27:13
Even though my grandfather would travel back there and visit that home, his home territory, a lot of that information was not passed on within the family.
00:27:25
There's a growing movement within the federal government to co-steward public lands with the tribes who call these places home.
00:27:33
The Bears Ears National Monument in Utah is one of the most well-known examples.
00:27:37
The federal government has partnered with a coalition of five tribes to manage the land.
00:27:42
Michael says that in the Hila, the Forest Service is starting to do a better job of consulting with his tribe, but the tribe is under-resourced, not to mention headquartered in another state.
00:27:53
Still, the Fort Sill Apache are a sovereign nation with ties to the Hila.
00:27:58
But even though we weren't there to say how valuable this was, at least some people were able to recognize that.
00:28:09
If as a country we start to acknowledge the fact that public lands were stolen from indigenous people, what would that mean for the Wilderness Act?
00:28:19
Nothing in the Wilderness Act negates the history of people on the land, but nothing in the Wilderness Act formally recognizes this history either.
00:28:27
But the narrative has been, this land was a blank slate.
00:28:31
Moving forward, maybe we need to rethink the concept of wilderness itself.
00:28:37
That's where we're headed in the next episode.
00:28:40
To an art museum, to look at where the concept of little W.
00:28:44
Wilderness came from, and who gets to participate in it.
00:28:47
How wild is created and executive produced by me, Marissa Ortega Welch.
00:28:58
It's edited by Lisa Morehouse, additional editing and sound design by Gabe Graben, Magic Making by Shrine Adel, fact-checking by Mark Armayo.
00:29:08
It's produced in partnership with KALW public media and distributed by NPR, and made possible with support from California Humanities, a partner of the NEH.
00:29:18
This podcast is produced in Oakland, California on the unseated ancestral homeland of the Alonie.
00:29:26
Learn more about the Indigenous communities where you live at native-land.ca.
00:29:37
[Music]
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