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Return the National Parks to the Tribes David Treuer
Image above: Glacier National Park, in Montana, as seen from the Blackfeet Reservation, near Duck Lake.
This article was published online on April 12, 2021.
I. The End Result of Dirty Business
In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view,” he later wrote. “A peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears.” Many of those who have followed in Bunnell’s footsteps over the past 170 years, walking alongside the Merced River or gazing upon the god-rock of El Capitan, have been similarly struck by the sense that they were in the presence of the divine.
The Pandemic Is Crashing Through the South and the West The COVID Tracking Project
Editor’s Note:
The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.
We’ll begin with the good news: In every midwestern state—and in several others—COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are declining. Elsewhere, however, the picture is mixed. In several large states, already large outbreaks appear to be rapidly worsening—and despite intense interest in how Thanksgiving gatherings affected reported cases, even public-health experts have found it difficult to interpret the numbers we’ve seen.
Other news this week is tragically easy to interpret: As of yesterday, December is already the deadliest month since the beginning of the pandemic in the United States. The 3,379 deaths states and territories reported yesterday pushed December’s total to 57,638 COVID-19 deaths, for an average of 2,506 deaths reported per day in December. For comparison, in April, when the country was still reeling from the pandemic’s initial surge, we saw an average of 1,842 deaths reported each day.