Hill Heat

The Wilderness Act protects 112 million acres of land across the United States from the ravages of industrial development. But for the Indigenous Nations, bands, and tribes that harvested from, cared for, or otherwise managed these so-called “wilderness areas” before they were given this designation by the federal government, the Wilderness Act can feel like yet another instrument of settler-colonial dispossession—a means of enforcing settler law on stolen land. Not only is the legislation’s vision for a landscape “untrammeled by man” built on the racist and genocidal fantasy of terra nullius, but, codified in law, it outlaws the very practices of cultivation and care that nurtured the “wilderness” for untold generations before settler-colonialism took hold.

What’s wrong with the Wilderness Act, and what would it mean to rewrite it today? How might a revised Wilderness Act serve the movement for land rematriation? And how might it guard itself against the libertarian right, which is prepared to exploit any loophole in the law?

Bringing together historians, legal experts, and impacted community members, this Zoom roundtable conversation asks how we should understand the Wilderness Act on its 60th anniversary—a moment both of Indigenous resurgence and a rising far right.

• Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet/Métis) is an award winning writer, ethnobotanist, environmental activist and Professor of History at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She/they work within Indigenous communities to revitalize Indigenous & traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), to address environmental justice & the climate crisis, and to strengthen public policy for Indigenous languages. The author of Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet (2017), she/they are a 2023-2025 Red Natural History Fellow. Rosalyn is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis.
• Heather Whiteman Runs Him (Apsaalooke/Crow) is the Director of the Tribal Justice Clinic and Associate Clinical Professor at University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. Heather served as Council of Record in Arizona v. Navajo Nation and Herrera v. Wyoming for amici Tribal Nations in support of Tribal interests before the United States Supreme Court. She has worked on cases in many venues to protect Tribal relationships to lands and waters. She teaches courses on Tribal Water Law and Tribal Courts and Tribal Law.
• Christen Falcon (Amskapi Piikani/Blackfeet) is a co-owner of a Blackfeet ecotourism transportation business ‘Backpacker’s Ferry’ located on the east side of Glacier National Park. She is a community engagement research specialist working in community wellness development utilizing Blackfeet methodologies and TEK traditional ecological knowledge through the Blackfeet non-profit Piikani Lodge Health Institute.
• Karl Jacoby is Allan Nevins Professor of American History at Columbia University. He has devoted his career to understanding how the making of the United States intertwined with the unmaking of a variety of other societies—from Native American nations to the communities of northern Mexico—and the ecologies upon which they rested. His books include Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation (2003), Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (2008), and The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (2016).

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