“Spring is here. It’s warm. We want to be outside, but we also know for some groups of us, being outdoors is a little bit more complicated,” said Harvard lecturer and postdoctoral research fellow Marya T. Mtshali, kicking off a recent Ash Center talk on structural racism in America’s national parks.
Mtshali was joined by Tyrhee Moore, founder and executive director of the outdoor recreation nonprofit Soul Trak, and Reginald Chapple, division chief for the National Park Service.
The 84-million-acre national park system that Chapple’s agency oversees — famously referred to as “America’s best idea” — was inspired by a rejection of urbanization and made possible by confiscating Native lands, said panelists. Leaders in the movement for the parks’ creation included Madison Grant — a well-known conservationist and eugenicist — and John Muir, the Sierra Club founder whose documented racism against Indigenous and Black people has forced the organization into its own reckoning.
“The spaces themselves were created almost like a space for purity and cleanliness, because urban spaces were seen as dirty and populated by immigrants and people of color,” Moore said. “For a long time, Black people only had access to eight national parks and, still, many marginalized Americans don’t have a connection to nature.”