Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
government)…a magnificent park', which preserved the Animal and the North American
Indian 'in their pristine beauty and wildness'. 'What a beautiful and thrilling specimen
for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in
future ages! A nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of
their nature's beauty!' Catlin's seminal call for 'a nation's park' highlighted the new
mood in America towards wilderness. Almost exactly forty years after Catlin's journal
entry, President Ulysses S.Grant signed an Act establishing Yellowstone Park, creating
the institution of which Catlin desired 'the reputation of having been the founder' (Catlin
1968:8, 9).
Similarly, John Matson (1892) compared the efforts made in New Zealand to protect
wildlife
with the absence of such attempts in the Australian colonies and appealed for the creation
of 'indigenous parks' in order to preserve the animal and bird life of Australasia.
Significantly, Matson quoted a New Zealand 'poet', George Phipps Williams, to
conclude his case for the preservation of wildlife and their habitat, in a manner which is
reminiscent of Catlin:
Out in the wilderness is there no desolate space,
Which you may spare to the brutes of indigenous race?
Grant us the shelter we need from the pitiless chase.
Gone are the stateliest forms of the apteryx kind,
Short is the space that the kiwi is lagging behind;
Soon you shall painfully seek what you never shall find.
(George Phipps Williams, A Plea
of Despair, in Matson 1892:359)
Williams' comments, along with those of Catlin, may seem ill at ease with political
and cultural sensibilities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, in the late
nineteenth century such sentiments were commonplace. Maori, along with other
aboriginal peoples, were seen as the remnant of a dying race and placing them in parks
and reserves, so long as the land was not required for other economic purposes, was often
seen as the most appropriate course of action. Despite the initial Romantic sentiments
which helped create the momentum for the establishment of parks, humans, including the
aboriginal peoples who had often created the park landscapes through their hunting and
food-gathering practices, were excluded from the parks through loss of ownership and
access rights, management and regulatory actions and policing strategies. Such measures
were the result of ecological and cultural blindness at best, and outright racism and
cultural imperialism at worst, with park boundaries serving as the demarcation between
the natural and the cultural in European eyes.
Although the political status of aboriginal peoples is still a highly contested issue in
many societies, substantial shifts have occurred in management practices with respect to
aboriginal peoples and their role in national parks since the 1890s. A number of broad
social and political factors in relation to the overall rights of aboriginal peoples have
contributed to these changes, including
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