by stan thayne
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I am often curious about what leads people to their topics
of study.
Often I don’t think we know just what it is that pushes us to the topics we
choose to study. It seems that for many of us who end up studying the American
West as an academic field, the impulse do so has something to do with having
left, often quite literally, the West we grew up in. Such reflection often involves
looking back, often with a westering gaze, and with new eyes. Laurie Maffly-Kipp
For some the decision to write about the West may come with
moments of disconnect between a new, historicized West and the West they grew
up with. Brandi Denison, my co-conspirator here at the RAW blog, begins her dissertation on
Ute land religion with a recognition that, for twentieth-century Utes who
traveled to Meeker, Colorado—from whence their ancestors had been removed and
relocated to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah—the site has quite a
different meaning than it does for many local Euroamerican kids who grew up
watching the annual fourth of July “Meeker Massacre Pageant,” which, as she
explains, “diminished the specifics of Ute removal in order to emphasize the
horror of the Meeker Massacre and the ultimate success of civilization” (12).
I imagine all of us have those moments, when suddenly
something we grew up with, or within, suddenly appears in a new light; at times
tainted, or haunted, or simply made more real by the sudden presence of a
disquietung past. And speaking of the Uintah-Ouray Reservation, I had this
realization not long ago when—I don’t remember the source—I came to the
realization that the reservation at one time encompassed a good deal of what is
now the High Uinta Wilderness Area, which was one of my favorite playgrounds as
a kid growing up in Utah. That realization made rather concrete for me just
what William Cronon meant—or, if it isn’t what he meant, it’s what it suddenly
meant to me—when he titled his essay “The
Trouble with Wilderness.” Our romanticization of wilderness as the
pristine, untouched, uninhabited, virgin forest (and recreation area)—nature—overlooks
the fact of human habitation and land use that European eyes have not always
been trained to see (or respect)—or which they chose to ignore.[1] Of
course, the Uinta Basin was not the exclusive site of Ute residence and land use
prior to European settlement. In the 1860s the federal government, with the
cooperation of Brigham Young, removed a group of Ute people from Sanpete and
Utah valleys in central Utah and relocated them to the Uinta Basin. Later Ute
people from Colorado were removed there as well. In the wake of the Dawes
Allotment Act of 1887, a lot of that land was opened to non-Ute settlement,
mining, or was taken into public domain as national forest land. In 1984,
twenty years after the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a large chunk of
the land was designated as the High Uintas Wilderness Area—the same land that
one hundred years before a settler had described as “one vast ‘contiguity of
waste,’ and measurably valueless, excepting for nomadic purposes, hunting
grounds for Indians and to hold the world together.”[2] A
far different estimation from that of Americans viewing the basin through
lenses that shaped the alpine romanticism that informed the Wilderness Act of
1964.
And it is here that I come to an ambivalence that often characterizes
such haunting. I have very fond memories of the times I spent in the Uintas
Wilderness; I feel a sense of attachment to that land, to that landscape. And, as
a product of the same impulses that created the Wilderness Act of 1964, I don’t
think that setting aside wilderness, to protect from privatization and
commercial development, is a bad idea. And yet, there still remains “the
trouble with wilderness,” the problem of the multiple removals that have taken
place, the whittling down of homelands and sovereignties through acts of force
and broken treaties that remain, if not always visible, somehow there, in the
landscapes, those intimate creations of human action and the land itself that
is somehow an accumulation—a palmipsest, as I called it earlier—of all who have
dwelt there or moved across, and of those who remain or return. Which brings me
to, if not a conclusion, an observation: If the realization that, as Jared
Farmer put it, there is “no such thing as an innocent landscape”[3] does
not suggest an immediate solution to the problem with wilderness—or agricultural
land, or mines, or national parks, or private property—such troubling of the
landscape does provide a greater context and a more complicated picture. It is
a place to begin.
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