Disability, National Parks, and Empire from the Nineteenth Century to the Present

• In Event: Rationalizing Tourism: Neoliberalism, Neocolonialism, and Self-Care Culture

Abstract

This presentation explores the intersections of disability and empire at US National Park Service (NPS) sites from the nineteenth to twenty-first century. It builds on the work of other scholars who have demonstrated the centrality of the idea of able-bodiedness to the US conservation movement and outdoor recreation industry. Additionally, it reexamines gains from the late twentieth-century disability rights movement in the context of ongoing colonialism. Lastly, it considers alternative ways of thinking about disability and nature spaces.

Promises of healing waters and air drove health tourism in the American West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Health seekers, searching for cures for existing ailments or preventative measures against disability and ill health, provided monetary incentives for the creation of tourist amenities around these natural wonders. Scholars, including Cynthia Wu and Daniel Chmill, have shown the importance of this type of tourism to the creation of numerous NPS sites, such as Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas. Furthermore, the growing tourist industries at these sites encouraged more permanent American settlement. The pursuit of health by certain Americans contributed to the accelerated removal and exclusion of Native peoples from national parks and surrounding areas.

This presentation also converses with the works of disability studies scholars such as Alison Kafer, Sarah Jaquette Ray, and Elizabeth A. Wheeler concerning how anxieties about disability have fueled the conservation movement and outdoor recreation industry historically and in the present. Along with pushing a “risk culture,” in Ray’s words, the outdoor recreation industry celebrates “supercrip” stories, which praise disabled individuals overcoming their disability through great personal effort. These stories reinforce the idea of the wilderness as a proving ground for nondisabled bodies and spirits. All together this culture promotes an ableist, and capitalistic relationship between Americans and the outdoors, including at US national parks.

The disability rights movement, a cross-disability movement originating in the 1970s that advocated for civil rights, social acceptance, and cultural pride for disabled Americans, fueled greater access across the United States. Using primary sources from Yosemite National Park, this presentation will wrestle with the ways, primarily white and affluent, disabled visitors challenged ableist notions of who belonged in nature and public spaces partly by upholding settler colonial ideas of US land ownership. Challenging a disability-based power hierarchy was wrapped up in a desire to lay claim to the benefits of conquest alongside non-disabled US settlers.

Yet some proposals for better relationships between people and nature can also be found in disability studies and disability activism. In Manu Karuka’s 2019 book, Empire’s Tracks, he defines a central feature of colonialism as a “failure to fulfill relationships” (25). He explains how US colonization is based around isolation, scarcity, and the breaking of relations. The last part of this presentation explores how disability culture might help forge new relations in nature spaces, including through the generative potential of failure and slowness, and a reliance on interdependence.

Author

• Ellie Kaplan, University of California Davis