This commentary was written by Kristian Connolly of Montpelier.
Recently in Montpelier, three local entities held an author talk as a fundraiser for one of the organizations. The title of the book is “This Land Was Saved for You and Me,” and the event was held to benefit a regional land trust.
This event is a disturbing example of American settler colonialism’s ugliest methods (nonviolent division) of creating and reinforcing a white-supremacist, myth-imposing master narrative at the expense of the original inhabitants of “This Land.”
I’ve not read “This Land Was Saved for You and Me.” I likely won’t. Google makes the full text searchable, and about 50 pages (or 20%) readable. I find no mention of anything to do with the Indigenous peoples whose land it really is that was “saved.” Ancestral homelands and sacred sites that were at some point intentionally cleared of Native Americans before they later became tourist- and industry-laden national park and forest lands. Places that many American Indians still can’t appropriately access today.
I’m extremely disappointed that these entities would support such a disgraceful event.
North Branch Nature Center says it’s dedicated to “Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion.” How, then, do you celebrate a book that looks to be entirely about some wealthy, privileged white men who collaborated with the settler-colonial U.S. government in order to “save” the wilderness (for who? for what?)?
I can’t speak from direct experience with the Northeast Wilderness Trust, but with a mission to “Widen the Wild” and focus on Native Land Rights and DEI, it should be ashamed to fundraise off this book.
As for Bear Pond Books, my idea of it, its staff, and its book curation admittedly leads to my naivete that a retail business would not outwardly support the perpetuation of the white settler-colonial master narrative on this continent.
In short, who do they think the book means in claiming that land was “saved” for “you and me”? The history of racism and white supremacy (and capitalism) in environmental conservation/preservation surely means that “you and me” is not any Indigenous peoples (or non-white people, or even white people without “means,” in general). You can be near-certain that no Indigenous people are lining up to genuinely thank some moneyed, powerful, paternalistic, and/or white supremacist Christian men for “saving” some land that shouldn’t have been theirs to save in the first place.
We must be more intentional, truthful and better in telling the history of this place.
But this is not only an issue of the past. Instead of this book, go read about mineral extraction (including for “green” energy), fossil fuels, water, timber, Native food sovereignty, Native land loss, tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction, and the legacies of genocidal U.S. colonizing policies called treaty-making, removal, reservation, allotment, assimilation, tribal reorganization, termination and relocation. And much, much more.
This book lauds settler colonialists who couldn’t have “accomplished” anything if not for the eradication of Indigenous peoples on the land — land whose pre-contact “wilderness” was early and often used as a justification for the “civilizing mission” of settler colonization.
Gifford Pinchot was a prominent eugenicist, inspired by white supremacist and fellow noted conservationist Madison Grant. Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race” was a book lauded by Theodore Roosevelt. Hitler later called it his Bible. Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape architecture was instrumental in the displacement of Native Americans (Yosemite, for example) and African-Americans (New York City’s Central Park, for example). Olmsted and Pinchot were contemporaries of the (unfortunately) celebrated John Muir and Roosevelt, two notorious white supremacists of wealth, privilege and power.
You may know this Roosevelt quote: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”
Muir once literally wrote Indians off the land, observing during an encounter that “they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass.”
Benton MacKaye’s 1921 vision of an “Appalachian Trail” left out generations of Native Americans historically displaced by American settler colonialism across the 14 states and countless Native lands and sacred sites the trail traverses, instead boasting of a general need for wild lands, which “in America are fortunately still available. They are in every main region of the country. They are the undeveloped or under-developed areas.”
The American settler colonial project has been able to fashion stories, justifications and conclusions that have either ignored American Indians in its falsified history, or been told to the detriment of Indigenous peoples.
This book falls right in line with that effort. Celebrating it, and raising money off of it, is despicable.
