Nov 5, 2025 2:30 PM | Indigenous Peoples in National Parks: An Alternative History
Posted in: Resources and Past Events
Most histories of national parks and Indigenous peoples have focused on dispossessing the wilderness, 鈥榝ortress conservation鈥, and the creation of human-free wilderness zones. This talk instead examines the history of a parallel and similarly problematic conception of protected areas 鈥- as spaces meant to preserve peoples imagined as 鈥榳ild鈥, who were to be saved alongside wildlife and wilderness. Tracing the history of this paternalistic, primitivist, and romanticist model is vital for understanding not only the experiences of Indigenous peoples鈥 in national parks, but also the ongoing struggles of Indigenous movements against conservation-induced dispossession around the world.
Speaker
Ezra Rashkow is a scholar of modern South Asian history, environmental history, and the history of anthropology. Much of his work engages with the experiences of indigenous peoples in modernity, and global debates over the relationship between biological and cultural diversity. In particular, the concept of 鈥渆ndangerment鈥 has become a unifying strand throughout his body of work to date. His research thus explores historical discourses and policies that project biological and cultural diversity as similarly endangered, and in need of similar or simultaneous forms of conservation. Working in western and central India, he collects oral histories of Bhil, Gond, Baiga, Kurku and other Adivasi communities facing conservation- and/or development-induced displacement. He then situates these oral histories in dialog with the colonial archive, anthropological accounts, and activist engagements with these communities鈥 histories.
