[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi folks, my name is Emma. We are going to be starting the Right on radio program here on KFAI 90.3 FM, streaming on
[email protected] today. I have Joseph Whitson and his new book, Marketing the Wilderness, Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands.
Marketing for Wilderness analyzes the relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, public lands in the United States, and Indigenous sovereignty and representation and recreational spaces. Combining social media analysis, digital ethnography and historical research, Joseph Whitson offers nuanced insights into more than a century of outdoor recreations in outdoor recreation industries, marketing strategies, and unraveling its complacency and settler colonialism. Welcome to the show, Joseph.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Thank you, Emma. It's really great to be here.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: All right, so I'm just going to start out with the first question is what inspired you to create this novel and how does it correspond with your research to the university?
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Yeah, so this actually comes from two separate kind of inflection points.
The first was some jobs that I had right out of undergrad.
I was working, and I talk about this in a book, but I was working both for Three Rivers Park District, which is a local state run public lands service here in the Twin Cities. And then I was also working as an Instagram influencer with outdoor recreation companies, some local, some national, doing some writing and photography.
And so one of the things that really struck me from that experience was with Three Rivers, we were working closely with Dakota tribes with the shocking doctn, thinking about federal regulation around collaboration and storytelling and making sure we were really responsible about the way we were talking about in narrating public land. I was in the heritage department there, and that's not something we were doing without the recreation. So the original part of the project came out of just trying to understand the blindness that outdoor recreation had towards the history of indigenous people on the lands that they were using and they were representing.
But the second piece came out of the 2017 moment around bears Ears and especially. So this is the first Trump administration in kind of a well publicized attack on public lands at national monuments in particular.
And in 2017, we saw this real rapid politicization of the outdoor industry, something we hadn't really seen before. So while I was doing this research, at the same time we were seeing companies like Patagonia, rei, the North Face, suddenly putting out political statements about their investment in public land, about why it was so important about what their consumers could do to protect it.
And at the same time, there was still this kind of blindness towards indigenous people not always, but the way that was represented was problematic. And so I kind of realized there wasn't just an ignorance to this colonial history of public lands. There was also an ignorance to the outdoor recreation industry's own complicity in that history.
So the book kind of takes up those questions and those thoughts and kind of weaves them into a history of wilderness, public land, and the way that those fit into Indigenous activism and policy.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Phenomenal. That's a great answer. And that's one of the reasons why it kind of like, parallels almost my career a little bit too, where as a geologist, my undergrad program actually never really mentioned Indigenous people at all. And it's kind of shocking because I graduated with my undergraduate degree in 2019, and geology is just absolutely a cornerstone of Indigenous tribes land management and everything else. And it just was not brought up anywhere in my degree program, which is fascinating and also very upsetting. But there are movements within certain colleges to try to bring in Indigenous and scientific research to correspond with our owns.
Next question I have is, your book talks about the concept of wildernessing. Can you elaborate on our listeners on what that means?
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So wildernessing is the realization of an idea. It's the way that an idea, this idea that our land is untouched, is pristine, is. Is unpeopled, was made into a reality through policy, through the shaping of behavior.
So, for example, you might have a company that represents. And it wasn't just outdoor recreation companies that are part of this process, but this is what it looked like. Look at in the book, represent land as having no human history. As you as the consumer, being the explorer in this space, being able to see land as it was from the beginning of time, that's not a real representation of the land. These lands have rich, dynamic human histories. They've been shaped by Indigenous people and tribes since time immemorial.
But when we have that representation, we get. And people believe it, all of a sudden, policy, the Wilderness act, and the way that people interact and move through space is shaped by that representation and then shapes the land. So wildernessing is the way that wildernesses, which is a constructed concept, came into being through representation and policy.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: All right, That's a phenomenal answer for that.
Yeah. So the concept of wildernessing is pretty much baked into the concept of this novel throughout the entire. It's the entire book.
The next question I have is, what I love about this book in particular is the pictures of ads.
And from the late 1800s, which late 1800s to the early 1900s, which would have Indigenous Folks as like the backdrop. And then towards the 19th century, 20th century, we have the removal of them completely. And normally for like, more recent Patagonia REI ads, you just normally have white guy on a mountaintop. Can you explain the history of that and basically through the marketing experience, why that occurred?
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a big story.
Basically two or three chapters of the book.
I wanted to narrate the idea that wilderness is not static. Today we think about wilderness in the way I just described it. Untouched, uninhabited, pristine, untrammeled is the word that they use. But that's not always how wilderness was understood. In the book, I lay out essentially four different versions of wilderness that people went through.
This kind of hostile wilderness that was pre 19th century. The wilderness was a scary place. It was a place to be tamed. It was a place to be conquered.
But then I start with the book thinking about this idea of a frontier wilderness. And this is a wilderness. That is where recreation kind of in the United States in particular, started with. So we look at companies like Abercrombie and Fitch, which of course, we think it was a very different company today than it was in the 1890s.
But this is a company that was using this idea of wilderness to sell its products for the first time. But this isn't the wilderness we see today. This is a wilderness that is inhabited. This is a wilderness that is deeply tied to Indigenous presence and actually want to walk back the idea of Indigenous presence. It's a wilderness that's deeply imbued with this idea of Indianness. So kind of a mythologized, romanticized version of Indigenous people, but one that doesn't actually have Indigenous people in it. Because by the 1890s or 20th century, we kind of moved towards containment. There had been removal of Indigenous people. Their Indigenous people were really surveilled and contained to reservations.
And so people could go into the wilderness, into these. These outdoor spaces with their Patagonia or with their Abercrombie fish gear with this idea of Indigenous people without actually encountering people that challenge that mythology.
But Indigenous people or Indianness authenticized wilderness. And wilderness was wilderness because it had Indigenous people in it.
That started to change in the mid to late 20th century. And one of the main reasons that change is because Indigenous people were not going to allow that to happen. We see a rise in Indigenous activism. We see Indigenous self determination. We see the Indian New Deal. We see this kind of resurgence of Indigenous sovereignty and policy in the United States.
One that makes it impossible for outdoor recreators to go into the wilderness on public lands and not have their mythologized, romanticized version of what an Indian is challenged. All of a sudden, there were actually actual indigenous people there to say, no, this isn't what we're contemporary people. We have treaty rights on this land. We're going to fight for these rights.
So that version of willingness just couldn't hold up. So at that time, starting the 1930s, but through the 40s, 50s, 60s, we see this shift. All of a sudden, wilderness is not a place where you're going to encounter indigenous people. It's a place where indigenous people, in fact, no people have ever been.
So you see the Wilderness Society kind of talking about this. You see the roadless laws, and then, of course, culminating in the Wilderness act, where wilderness is described as land that is untrammeled and untouched by humankind.
And then that was made real through these policies.
Indigenous people were in Yosemite national park up through the mid 20th century, indigenous people were present. And actually, you know, there was a military presence to prevent that in Yellowstone National Park. The boundary waters here in Minnesota had Indigenous people up into the early 20th century.
But then when this representation, all of a sudden, that was no longer a benefit, that was no longer a selling point. It was now undermining this new version of wilderness. So you can see how activism, policy, and representation are all kind of playing together to create the wilderness lands we see today.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: You can continue. Do you have any other thoughts on that, or.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I was just going to say. So I mentioned four wildernesses, and I had just kind of gone at three. I didn't want to go too long.
But the fourth is thinking about the future. Right. And so the book kind of ends thinking about the failure in the collapse of our current wilderness ideology. Is it possible to see wilderness today as untouched and untrammeled? And I would say no, partially because we see a. Again, another resurgence of Indigenous activism.
Specifically, looking at outdoor recreation, we saw that at Bears Ears. We see that, you know, on Instagram and some of these accounts that I look at in the book, but also because we have global environmental change, things like. Like global climate change, where places, even Antarctica, places that truly didn't have this human history are. You can no longer say those are untouched by humankind. Right. These are places that are deeply shaped by the impacts of man.
And so the reality of, or the mythology around an untrammeled, untouched wilderness can't hold up anymore. So we're thinking about what is the future of wilderness? Where is this next shift happening? And I Kind of go into that a little bit at the end in the conclusion. But it's of course it's not set right now and the role that the outdoor recreation will play in that kind of has yet to be written.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: All right, My follow up question to that is I really want to go kind of step back and when you mentioned recreation, recreation in Minnesota is a huge deal. Boundary Waters employs a lot of outfitters.
Cabin culture is a big deal within Minnesota, particularly for mostly folks of like white, middle class, European descent. Most of them have a cabin up north.
How does that coincide with recreation and land? And I know rock climbing was a big portion of this book as well in the example in Yosemite. So can you elaborate on those thoughts that you have on there?
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the interesting. Well, I'll start with the rock climbing and kind of think about kind of the Minnesota and the lake life connection because I think that's really interesting as well.
The reason I focus on rock climbing so strongly in the book is because the companies that are most influential in the outdoor recreation space, Patagonia, North Face, Black diamond, started from rock climbing in Yosemite, rock climbing from rock climbers, from creating rock climbing gear. So it's kind of that community of climbers and the ethos and ideologies around land that they had that has shaped the way that these outdoor companies represent and advocate for land. Right. So rock climbing just has a very strong place in that. We also see kind of contemporary rock climbers. And of course this isn't everybody in the rock climbing community, but contemporary rock climbers are some of the most resistant to some of the changes that are trying to be put place. Put in place around outdoor recreation. So name changes, the idea of creating new runs or kind of bagging new mountains, these have kind of colonial implications behind them. The right to climb where you can and can't climb.
It's been difficult for some rock climb communities to kind of rethink what their place and rights are in nature.
So that's one of the reasons rock climbing. There's way more I could say about that. But for time, I kind of want to re switch and think about the Minnesota connections here. So I talk about the Boundary Waters. I mean, obviously here in Minnesota we're very connected to the Boundary Waters. And this is still today with the recent policies and kind of some of the bills that are moving through Congress right now. The boundary was still on people's mind. Right.
What is the value of the Boundary Waters?
What is the value of recreational land at Minnesota can that value of recreational land compete with extraction, compete with the economic value of the minerals that are beneath the soil?
And that's a hard argument to make. Right. There's never. There's so much money to be made by mining. It's going to be challenging to kind of continue to use outdoor recreation alone as a counter to some of those.
But I think Minnesota lake life, I think Minnesota is like understanding of kind of this nostalgic connection to land up north. Many of those cabins are carved out of indigenous reservations that came out through the Dawes act allotment. The. When these reservations are sold, and of course, all of it comes through trees that. That have or have not been fulfilled.
So one of the ways I think Minnesotans can think about their relationship to land and relationship to up north through this lens is to really understand themselves as party to the treaties that created these lands. So we often think about treaties, you know, that. That ceded the land from indigenous nations to the United States as something that affects indigenous people.
Right. You know, they're the ones fighting for these treaty rights. They have reserved rights on land. They, you know, the reservations were carved out of that. But those treaties were made by the United States on behalf of us as American citizens, on behalf of us as Minnesotans who have these lands. And so thinking about what does it mean to be a party to these treaties, many of which have not been upheld in these spaces, when you go up to your cabin, when you go up to the boundary waters, when you go to these outdoor spaces, how can you develop more complex relationships to the land? How can you think about supporting indigenous causes or concepts of repatriation in these spaces with the understanding that there was an agreement made beyond just your purchase of that land, but way back with the land being ceded that you continue to be a party to, and what are the ethics and responsibilities that you have under that agreement?
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's kind of. It's fascinating. So my family, my father, my grandfather, they do own a cottage in Canada terms. A cottage in Canada.
And it was bought out by the local.
It's. It was previously indigenous white settlers came in. So we do. So I do have some understanding of, like, cottage culture, cabin culture.
And it seems like there's always this trend now within cabins where it's like, they want almost suburban, like, so. Like they have more like, grass. Like, front trees are stripped away. So it's almost like taking that American suburban landscape and then just plotting it onto the lake up north, which does mess up the ecosystem and the shorelines.
And it does not respect the land itself, mostly.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Right. It's a very colonial shaping of that space. Right. In a different way than wildernesses, of course, which is, of course, removing the idea or removing the presence of humans.
The cabin culture and the kind of private ownership of lakes, of lakefront and vacation homes reshapes that land for colonial purposes at the expense of indigenous uses. Even when treaties, you know, protect certain rights and uses of that land, it's made impossible through the kind of shaping of those spaces.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Yeah. I did have a question about the.
When writing this book and consulting Native Indigenous thoughts, what was that like working with those folks? What kind of feedback did you get? What did you learn?
Anything new, Anything challenging from your preconceived notions?
I just want to understand that process a little bit better.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So, as you know, if you don't know, I'm a white male, you know, settler scholar, and working, you know, with Indigenous people is always going to be a challenge in a. And a workforce. Self deconstruction. Right. And so just kind of approaching those spaces with humility and understanding that, you know, you. You don't necessarily know what's going on. You want to be able to elevate the voices of the people who have the knowledge of these spaces.
And so think about, like, what is my. Is a white person's role in this? Right. I'm, you know, there's folks doing really great activism work that I don't necessarily need to insert myself into, but there's also audiences that aren't being reached. Right. So to think about your. My role as a scholar and a writer as being kind of a translator and bringing some of these, you know, issues.
Indigenous people don't need to be told that there's an Indigenous history of this land. Right. Indigenous people don't need to be told that. There is 150 years or longer of really important Indigenous activism efforts that have shaped policy and continue to shape the land.
But outdoor recreators do. Right. Geologists do. Right. All the ways that, like, we, you know, we as white people, kind of encounter and learn about outdoor space and the environment, that's not part of the curriculum. And there's a reason that's not part of the curriculum. Right. It's part of the colonial project. So to be able to uplift these stories and bring, you know, these voices, these activists, and also my own analysis to a larger audience is kind of the way that I saw my work within this. Within these communities.
But it's shaped the way I see land. It's shaped the Way I see kind of communities, even urban spaces. Right. To have had conversations and had kind of been deeply embedded with some of these.
Not that online. Right. How deep can we be online? That's a different question. But involved or in conversation with some of these activists and communities, you really can't approach any land the same way. I think that's really important and it really kind of shapes the way that my relationship with land has evolved and hopefully the way that the relationships with land can evolve.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Yeah, that was the one takeaway big thing from this book was how do I interact with the land? And.
And like in our degree programs particularly, we do market our decree very similar to the way Patagonia REI market their outdoor supplies. It's like, hey, come do our geology degree, come market our environmental science degree. And I absolutely remember in my undergrad program, there was just a picture of the Tibetan mountains, and it was a picture of one of our students, all white, cisgendered, male bodied out in like, a very indigenous area, but with like, no mention of indigenous landscapes. So I'm really hoping that this book forces me to realize the type of land that I research on, where did it come from, and how to properly respect it, which is not something that's really common in my field, unfortunately.
I do want to touch a bit on the last chapter, Indigenizing Instagram and like, the current social movements towards reclaiming land and spaces.
And I wonder if you can elaborate more on that.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think that's a great chapter to be read kind of alongside chapter four, which is about the strategies, the digital strategies that outdoor companies have adopted. And this is before AI. Right. You know, which came around so quickly, you know, between the publication and production of the book. You know, you can't even get some of these new things in. But the way that, like digital photography and social media in digital spaces have been taken up by. By outdoor marketing to kind of reinforce their ideas. Well, chapter six, which is Indigenizing Instagram, looks at the way that indigenous people and activists have taken up those same strategies to push against these narratives. And the way that Instagram at this moment, of course, that's changing. Instagram is no longer the place it was in 2017, but hopefully new platforms that come up are flattening spaces. Right. Are places that activists can speak to power and have a more direct line to the people who are making these decisions than they might had under a traditional media landscape.
So we look at, you know, sorry, there's a bug. We look at the ways that some of these Activists are. Are taking up strategies of, like, influencers, right? So having indigenous athletes be influencers who can talk about their own relationships and their own connections to land through outdoor recreation or through other means in the way that outdoor companies will have influencers and athletes who talk about their maybe less critical or more colonial relationships to land or. We have digital first communities, right? So we think about our relationship to companies. You know, we buy stuff. But a lot of these are digital through our consumption of digital media.
So indigenous people, like, for example, Jolie Varilla of Indigenous Women Hike, creating a digital community of activists who are all working kind of towards a goal of pushing against these narratives of wilderness that the outdoor companies are putting forward and then moving towards physical and embodied activism, Right? So it's this kind of switch that we saw from kind of early digital activism, which was bringing in digital spaces, physical spaces in the digital spaces, but creating digital communities and moving them into physical communities.
So I know personally, for me, I think it speaks to the ways that Indigenous activists are very good at adapting to power structures, something that we've seen, you know, for 100 years, all sorts of under different levels of surveillance and power structures and containment.
Social media has its drawbacks, of course. As an activist space, it's private.
It can be censored. We see all these things happening today, and yet Indigenous activists have experience and knowledge about how to counteract that and how to move through these very highly controlled spaces in order to push for change.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Perfect. All right, Joe, my last kind of question. It's in your book.
You wrote out a phenomenal answer that I would love for you to read out.
It's at the very end of its last couple of paragraphs within the book. The question is, we can't turn back the clock on colonialization.
So what does moving forward look like? If you want to read the rest of that excerpt.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: For sure. Yeah. So this is a really important question, so thank you for asking. I probably don't have a satisfying answer to it, but I want to try. I think the focus needs to be less about stewing on past wrongs and more about how to justly move forward.
The pervasiveness and long history of colonization, however, doesn't mean the consequences of these actions don't still impact different groups of people today.
And the inability to perfectly restore things to how they were doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to justly address these past wrongs.
In some instances, this can mean addressing specific past events. Like in the United States, we can uphold specific legally binding treaties that have been broken or pay for known thefts of land and property, fourth Amendment takings for example. But you are also right that this is not possible everywhere and cannot address longer histories of colonialism and genocide. So instead of just accepting this and saying I guess this is the way things are now, we move forward justly. What I mean by justice here is that we work to restore right relationships among different groups of people. And and yes to your point about taking land from animals, which was another question that came up earlier between people and the natural world. Right relationships are built on respect, reciprocity, equality and self determination. While this seems easy just in everyone be nice and love each other kind of thing, the problem is that it's actually pretty radical. It's radical on an individual level with people, especially white people like myself, having to address internalized racism and colonial worldviews.
And it is radical in a political and social level. How would American society have to change if we seriously accepted the idea that all people are inherently valuable and non exploitable and the natural world is not a commodity but a partner to us that we need to respect and give to as much as we take from with regards to repatriation. Sometimes this means land back in a western property ownership way. Other times it means political jurisdiction or in the recent Oklahoma case, sometimes it means full co management like at Bears Ears.
But in all cases, on all land, it means a fundamental realignment of a relationship with land and with each other from a colonial one that treats land as a commodity to be owned and exploited to one that treats land, animals and humans as connected community. You asked what is the solution? The answer is that there isn't a great one under a current political, economic and social systems because these systems were built on the exploitation of land and people. I see public lands as a place where we can begin rebuilding relationships and trust. But it has to start by addressing this history, acknowledging the contemporary consequences of it, and working together to imagine what a more just future looks like.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Thank you so much Joseph Winston for that last bit of reading.
For those listeners just tuning in, that was Joseph Winston and his new book, Marketing the Outdoor Recreation and Indigenous Activism and the Battle over Public Lands.
You are listening to 93F 90.3 FM KFAI in Minneapolis and St. Paul around the world and now this.
