Imagining Wilderness: The Wilderness Act's Sixty Years of Modern Indigenous Dispossession

Abstract

The Wilderness Act of 1964 turns 60 in 2024. It preserves a problematic legacy of Indigenous dispossession in its core text, which seeks to manage designated wilderness lands “without permanent improvement or human habitation… [so that] the imprint of man’s work [is] substantially unnoticeable.” After discussion of the history of “wilderness” conservation strategies, which places their origins in the era of the United States’ ethnic cleansing of the land of its Indigenous stewards, the negative ecological and cultural impacts are analyzed in context of the limited flexibility of agencies to adapt the narrowly construed Act. The case of Big Cypress National Preserve, in which yet another study seeking to effect a wilderness designation has been proposed atop Miccosukee and Seminole Tribal reserved rights, will be discussed as a case study. After demonstrating that the Wilderness Act creates systemically inequitable outcomes for Indigenous peoples, a means forward, through amendment of the Wilderness Act to accommodate Native land rights, is proposed.