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“Conditions in British Columbia are to say the least uncertain. The game wardens are an idle, irresponsible lot, who are afraid of the Indians and make no effort whatsoever to control their movements during the hunting season, with the result that during the two weeks I was in the Kootenay Country I didn’t see a ram, a goat, a deer or a bear. And by the time I got back to Wilmer where I was in permanent camp on Horsethief Creek, the Indians had cleaned out all the goat and deer in the neighborhood and I was advised that to attempt to do any hunting there would be a waste of time. And all of this in the face of a hundred dollar hunting license fee.” Frothingham writing to Jimmy Simpson IMG_9666.JPG

Frothingham to Simpson IMG_0067.JPG; other related letter IMG_9710

About Us

Banned from Banff https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985800

Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant

The conservation movement’s regulatory framework, for all its ecological vision, was built on a foundation of exclusion. The sport hunter — the movement’s moral ideal — was almost invariably wealthy, white, and educated, and the laws he championed were written in his image. Bag limits and licensing systems that appeared neutral on their face fell heavily on rural subsistence hunters, recent immigrants, and indigenous peoples, for whom game was not a recreational quarry but a dietary necessity. Indigenous communities bore the sharpest edge of this contradiction: the landscapes being “preserved” were in many cases ancestral hunting grounds from which native peoples had already been displaced, their centuries of wildlife stewardship ignored or dismissed as primitive. The market hunter, cast as the movement’s chief villain, was frequently a working-class or immigrant figure hunting to feed his family — rendered criminal not because his methods were more destructive, but because he lacked the standing to participate in the gentleman’s code of fair chase. Conservation, in this sense, was not simply an ecological project but a social one, inscribing into law a particular vision of who belonged in the wilderness and on what terms.

The land conservation movement was, for Native Americans, another chapter in a long history of dispossession. The creation of national parks and forests proceeded on the founding myth that the landscapes being “preserved” were pristine wilderness — empty and untouched. They were not. They were homelands and hunting grounds that had been actively managed by indigenous peoples for centuries. Yellowstone set the template: the Shoshone, Bannock, and other nations who had lived in the region for generations were forcibly removed so the park could be maintained as a wilderness fantasy for white visitors. The cruelest irony was that the ecological conditions conservationists found worth protecting — healthy game populations, open landscapes, rich biodiversity — were largely the product of indigenous land management practices, including controlled burning and selective hunting. Conservation did not preserve a wilderness untouched by human hands; it erased the human hands that had shaped it, replacing indigenous stewardship with federal management. For Native Americans, the conservation movement was not preservation — it was dispossession with a new vocabulary.

Bison

  • Buffalo – hunted for meat, sometimes just hump meat, trophies, hides for leather tanneries; destroying American Indian major food source -> defacto “Indian policy” – destroy their food supply (RB 140-41)
  • Time on in the Dakota badlands – 1883, the immediate purpose was to kill a buffalo – “quintessential symbol of the passing of the frontier” (143)

Figure in the Movement

White Supremacy & Classism

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c2612592&seq=589&q1=%22Leonard+Sugden%22

Nativism influenced pro-enviromental thought. The nativist movement flourished in the 19ths and 20th centuries; “strongly associated with promoting Anglo-Saxon heritage and securing great  privileges for whites.” (RAC Doreceta Taylor 21-22)

Colonialism 

Nativism influenced pro-enviromental thought. The nativist movement flourished in the 19ths and 20th centuries; “strongly associated with promoting Anglo-Saxon heritage and securing great  privileges for whites.” (RAC Doreceta Taylor 21-22)