We can, to take just one example, see many of the tropes through which colonized peoples were pictured, drawn on in modern tourist photography. Like colonial photographers they stress the indigenous nature of people, their settled lives,picturesque or exotic appearance and timeless existence (Price2015, 105).

Parameswaran (2002) reveals how several decades ofNational Geographic images have depicted non-white cultures as exotic, backward, dirty, poverty-stricken, sexual or asexual, colorful, and otherwise ‘different’ from or inferior to Western culture. These images, she argues (2002), simultaneously emphasize liberation through Westernization (via cliches of modernization–especially of non-white women) and celebration of white cultural appropriation(i.e. white celebrities or white women adorned in ‘cultural’ attire). Yet, the tourist-gaze itself as we know it today, emerged during the colonial era.

Indigenous mapping and cartography have largely been ignored contributing to the erasure of indigenous people’s connections to landscape (Lucchesi 2018, 11):‘This rhetoric, which has now become canonized as disciplinary creation story, tells us that Indians don’t make maps and cartography is a Western science.’Yet, indigenous people did have a history of mapmaking and engaging with landscape that Western knowledge has purposefully and intentionally overlooked.

Notions of author John Muir, for example, as the ‘father’ of environmentalism, preserving ‘wilderness,’and influencing the creation of the national parks, have been perpetuated for more than a century, even though Muir and the origins of environmentalism were steeped in blatant racism (DeLuca and Demo2001; Purdy2015). Many indigenous groups have been sustainably taking care of land now claimed by national parks for centuries, yet when white men become involved in landscape the language of that discourse shifts to ‘preservation,’even if this‘ preservation’ resulted in incredibly violent and forced removal of indigenous people(DeLuca and Demo2001; Gilio-Whitaker2019a; Chavez2020). Preservation of ‘wilderness’ is often at the forefront of environmental policies, but ‘wilderness’ itself was created through violence.

The lingering result of the Yellowstone story is that coded within the language of preservation,‘wilderness’ landscapes—always already in need of protection—are, or should be, free from human presence. But this logic completely evades the fact of ancient Indigenous habitation and cultural use of such places (Gilio-Whitaker2019b,3).

Landscape preservation was also tied to ‘God-ordained’ ‘manifest destiny’ to spread Western civilization and democracy. As DeLuca and Demo (2001,544) highlight:

The most obvious example, well documented by environmental historians, concerns the forced removal of native peoples from Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks between the 1870s and 1930s. The ‘justifying myth’ or ideological narrative that rationalized government policy toward native people from the antebellum era forward characterized Indians as “primitives” obstructing the progress of the nation’s destiny.

Removal of indigenous peoples through ‘manifest destiny’ created modern images of ‘ideal’ American landscapes, which art and photography helped shape. Art movements like the Hudson River School, influenced by European Romanticism that ‘reified the rural idyll’, perpetuated ‘natural’ landscapes through painters like Cole, Bierstadt, Gifford, Durand, Kensett, Cropsey, and Church, whose images of pristine landscapes pushed the Western ‘gaze’ of manifest destiny (A. Miller2001; Patin1999; Wells2015a, 333).

As Patin(1999, 58) suggests, nature takes on a political edge when we realize that the use of ‘nature’ has been, historically, the preferred technique in justifying and naturalizing authority.

Nineteenth century landscape ‘offered a view of nature as therapeutic, a pastoral release from commerce and industry’ and the American West specifically, was‘ characterized by vast, open spaces’(Wells2015a, 333). Even Hudson River School painter Albert Bierstadt, for example, whose paintings of Yosemite Valley did show indigenous people or land-scapes filled with American settlers moving West, nevertheless, had a significant number of paintings that were barren and void of humans pushing a national (white American) landscape and simultaneous ‘natural authority’(A.Miller2001). These barren landscapes erased entire lives and histories of real people who were intricately connected to the land, legitimizing subsequent takeover and appropriation of their land for white consumption.

Landscape art and photography have historically silenced indigenous histories and perpetuated manifest destiny by portraying landscapes as untouched wilderness (Gilio-Whitaker2019a).‘Wilderness’ was built through painting, literature, photography, or film that frequently represented land-scape scenes as untouched and without humans. Photography, and photo-graphic landscapes of the American West were inspired by Hudson RiverSchool art and the writings of John Muir. Muir among other artists and writers, used literary imagery to conjure Yosemite and other American land-scapes as ‘sacred places of white civilization’(DeLuca and Demo2001, 541).