As a black park ranger, I’m often
asked why more minorities don’t visit national parks or
participate more in outdoor activities. That’s a short
question with a long answer, and one part of it involves the
perpetuation of historical inaccuracy, since the victors get to
write what passes for history as portrayed in movies and on
television.
We all know that cowboys, homesteaders,
pioneers and mountain men have become American icons. Their images
are everywhere, selling cigarettes and SUVs. But almost always,
those images are white. From Marlboros to Patagonia, Coleman, North
Face, Outside Magazine, and every ski resort in North America,
it’s white people on white snow. People of color, blacks
especially, don’t find themselves in these images.
There’s a message there, probably unintentional, but
it’s a message nevertheless, and we get it. We get it so
thoroughly that we even believe it’s true. That’s the
other part of the answer.
Over the years, I’ve
learned something about the boxes that stereotype people and the
roles they play in un-coloring history. When I worked as assistant
director of outdoor programs at Dartmouth College, black students
who participated in “white” activities were referred to
by their peers by a nasty slur — “incognegroes.”
Not surprisingly, that made it tough for me to recruit black
students to come out into the wilderness with me for a simple hike.
I was often told that “we” don’t do that.
But historically, black people did do that; we were all
over the West. The early cowboys, Indian fighters and fur trappers
were not all white; they included a robust red, brown and black
population, not to mention the Asians who came West to build
railroads. The popular rodeo event of bulldogging — steer
wrestling — was invented by a black cowhand by the name of
Bill Pickett in the late 1800s.
Few people, black or
white, know that the first armed “rangers” of our
national parks were the all-black 24th Mounted Infantry Regiment.
Some of the first smokejumpers in this country were the all-black
555th Parachute Infantry Battalion. Black Americans drove cattle
into the West, and, as soldiers and scouts, helped drive Indians
from the West.
Former slaves migrated westward and
founded and settled entire towns such as Tumwater, Wash., and
Dearfield, Colo. Black Americans led wagon trains over the plains
and fought in all of the Indian Wars. They fought in front of Teddy
Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and they helped win the battle for
San Juan Hill. They trekked in front of Admiral Peary to help
discover the North Pole, beside Lewis and Clark to explore the
Northwest, and alongside Custer to lose the Battle of the Little
Big Horn. The trapper and mountain man James Beckwourth found new
routes over the Colorado Rockies, became chief of the Crow Indian
Nation, helped found Pueblo, Colo., and has a mountain named in his
honor.
Yet you don’t usually see people of color in
the rural West today, and you don’t see them visiting the
backcountry. You also don’t see many blacks or Hispanics
working for environmental groups or public-land agencies, even
though nonprofit groups and federal staffers will tell you that
they want very much to employ more diverse people.
Why is
there this disconnect between good intentions and reality? One
reason is confusion about what diversity means, with some thinking
the term implies something about being sensitive, or that
it’s more along the lines of another entitlement program
— as in something “for them.” The real question
is what diversity can do for all of us.
The most recent
U.S. Census indicates that sometime around the year 2050, people of
color in this country will outnumber the current white majority. If
the emerging future majority doesn’t find intrinsic value in
our birthright of publicly owned lands, how much tougher will it be
to fund and protect these special areas?
Programs such as
affirmative action were about righting past wrongs. Promoting and
believing in diversity in the outdoors is about all of us working
together to savor and protect what we have left, from our national
parks to our national forests, Bureau of Land Management lands and
wild rivers.
A friend of mine, during a discussion about
the lack of diversity in the Western outdoors, said, “Well,
of course! This is the West. You’re social
engineering!” as if the myth of only white people moving
across a blank landscape were so powerful that the story could
never change. In the last seven years, I’ve talked to
hundreds of people in the backcountry about the value of diversity,
and what it might take to make it happen in hiring, education and
understanding. I usually end by saying that diversity is worth
pursuing because it’s the future of this country.
Wayne Hare works as a ranger for the Bureau of Land
Management at McInnis Canyons Natural Conservation Area in western
Colorado and can be reached at
waynehare@earthlink.net.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Natural diversity.
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