What Comes After the Wilderness Act?

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Sep 25, 2024 06:00 PM EST

The Wilderness Act protects 112 million acres of land across the United States from the ravages of industrial development. But for the Indigenous Nations, bands, and tribes that harvested from, cared for, or otherwise managed these so-called “wilderness areas” before they were designated so by the federal government, the Wilderness Act can feel like yet another instrument of settler-colonial dispossession—a means of enforcing settler law on stolen land. Not only is the legislation’s vision for a landscape “untrammeled by man” built on the racist and genocidal fantasy of terra nullius, but, codified in law, it outlaws the very practices of cultivation and care that nurtured the “wilderness” for untold generations before settler-colonialism took hold. What’s wrong with the Wilderness Act, and what would it mean to rewrite it today? How might a revised Wilderness Act serve the movement for land rematriation? And how might it guard itself against the libertarian right, which is prepared to exploit any loophole in the law? Bringing together historians, legal experts, and impacted community members, this roundtable conversation asks how we should understand the Wilderness Act on its 60th anniversary—a moment both of Indigenous resurgence and a rising far right. SPEAKERS *Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet/Métis), Professor of History at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Red Natural History Fellow *Heather Whiteman Runs Him (Apsaalooke/Crow), Director of the Tribal Justice Clinic and Associate Clinical Professor, University of Arizona Rogers College of Law *Christen Falcon (Amskapi Piikani/Blackfeet), Blackfeet gatherer/hunter, Traditional Diet/Land Tenure Research Coordinator for Piikani Lodge Health Institute, and co-owner of Backpacker’s Ferry *Karl Jacoby, Allan Nevins Professor of American History at Columbia University This event is made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations  and 4Culture.

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