Conservation's White Supremacy

[Note to reviewers: Not sure if this is the right image to go with these ideas--I want to bring forward these ideas but am not sure about the visual piece yet.]

This image shows people preparing posters at the annual Outdoor Industry Association Summit shortly before a public lands rally in July 2017. This rally was held during former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s review of national monuments created since 1996, which was largely believed to be a performance of review meant to specifically meet the requests of conservative stakeholders and leaders in Utah. When Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and Bears Ears National Monument were the only monuments subject to significant changes following the review, this belief was strengthened. Individuals engaged in and adjacent to the outdoor industry gathering together to protest changes in land management that favor extractive industries over long-term conservation can be read as an effort pushing to prevent the contamination of spaces with the toxics of oil and gas extraction and uranium and other mining. However, the majority of the posters displayed during this rally emphasized rights to public lands for outdoor recreation and Romantic notions of wilderness, a longstanding foundation of conservation in the United States. This activism event included motifs common to contemporary American conservation while predominantly ignoring Indigenous histories and ties to these space. Although a few signs communicated to “respect Indian sovereignty” and “Stop White Man’s reign on Tribal Lands,” the majority of pro-preservation, pro-conservation, recreation-centered discourse about public lands management conveniently erases Native histories and much contemporary Native presence. Conservation organizations are realizing the necessity of elevating Native perspectives with regard to public lands, but the dominant messages about the need for protecting public lands sidestep the ways that these public lands came into existence and the factors shaping who, in the present, gets to access these lands. Thus, even environmentally-minded discourse about public lands trends toward another kind of toxicity, the latent white supremacy of American conservationism.