National Public Lands Day, High Country News woke version

National Public Lands Day is a good day for celebrating our public lands, even though Ken Burns was wrong and they're NOT "America's greatest idea" or that close, and even though, as Olympic National Park shows, as I blogged earlier today, the Park Service looks good only when compared with the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service. I forgot that six years, ago, in the run-up to the NPS centennial, I had tackled various other shortcomings of the Park Service.

So, it's nice of High Country News to have staffers reminisce about access to public lands.

Or, when I clicked the link, I found out it was "nice."

Two problems with noting the American Indians who once had possession of the land.

First, as Al Runte noted years ago, and I blogged about, being American Indian is no guarantor of being a good environmentalist.

Second, the American Indians in possessions of the land at the time the U.S. government made treaties with them, then broke them, weren't always the possessors. In fact, in the case of Comb Ridge, it was NEVER part of any Navajo Reservation, not the main part and best known part in Utah, vs the southern tip in Aridzona. It's arguably got a better claim from Utes. And Sarah Tory should know that, and she specifically mentions the Utah portion.

Runte also tackled that, quoting T.H. Watkins:

In short, if compensation in 1974 was the proper policy, why limit it to people of European descent? For example, Watkins asked: “If the descendants of nineteenth-century white Americans have a moral obligation to the descendants of nineteenth-century Navajos, do not the Navajos have a similar obligation to the descendents of the Pueblo Indians, whom they forced from their lands in the thirteenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Chippewas (or Ojibways), do not the Chippewas have a moral obligation to the Lakota Sioux, whose lands they appropriated by warfare in the seventeenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Blackfeet, do not the Blackfeet have a moral obligation to the Shoshoni, who were driven out of their hunting territory by the Blackfeet in the seventeenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Cherokees, do not the Cherokees have a moral obligation to the Shawnees, whom they vanquished in the early nineteenth century in a war over which tribe would have a monopoly selling Indian slaves to the South?”

There you go.

I think this is about Reason No. 116 why I haven't, and won't, renew an HCN subscription that's been lapsed for years. (This also is not the first time it's gotten American Indian land issues wrong.)

Sidebar: I do NOT agree with everything Runte writes at National Parks Traveler and elsewhere about preservation in the modern U.S. in general and the modern NPS in particular. I do NOT want light rail, let alone light rail run by traditional rail companies, in the parks, contra his plea. Instead, I want more buses at sites that already have them, with smaller buses running more frequent routes, and buses at places that don't already have them, and I want these buses to be all-electric. No more propane buses. His critics are right that his idea almost certainly means "more development." They're also right about the worrisomeness of him first writing that piece for a "more development in the parks" site. Things like that undercut some of his other insights and make them look politically motivated.