The Scripture of Nature
The Last Refuge
The Empire of Grandeur
The sixth episode, The Morning of Creation, gives us only a few Native tidbits:
Stewart Udall and the Expansion of the Parks
The land was to be divided up: some for the state to open for development if it wished; some for the tribes; and a portion to be withheld in the "national interest" for all Americans. As the discovery of vast oil deposits and the construction of the Trans-Alaska pipeline demonstrated, the stakes were enormous.
The fight over what to do with the federal lands would quickly become a national battle. Powerful commercial and industrial groups allied themselves against the Alaska Coalition, a collection of fifty environmental groups that ultimately represented 10 million Americans. It was the largest grassroots conservation effort in U.S. history.
Sand Creek and Washita on the Great Plains, where peaceful Cheyenne villagers were massacred by American soldiers in the 1860s.
Alaskans complained about the taking of their land to create national parks and monuments. They bitched and moaned about what a terrible burden, loss, and tragedy it would be.
As usual, the conservative naysayers turned out to be wrong. They were wrong about anti-trust and labor laws, Social Security and Medicare, and civil rights, and they were wrong about preserving Alaska's natural heritage, too.
In fact, the boom in tourism made the parks and monuments a big financial success. Finally, the anti-government crybabies had to admit the feds knew what they were doing.
Back to the series as a whole. Once again we see that Ken Burns and company are better at remembering our tragic past than explaining our conflicted present. You have to read between the lines to infer that Indians are still a presence in the parks and in America.
Who has been at the forefront of commemorating Washita and Sand Creek...incorporating a Native perspective at parks such as Yosemite and Mt. Rushmore...and protecting parks such as the Grand Canyon and the Everglades from exploitation? Yes, Indians.
For more on the subject, see Review of Burns's National Parks and Burns on Our National Parks.
Below: "Mt. McKinley above Wonder Lake, evening, Denali National Park, Q.T. Luong photograph."