Parks as performance: wilderness and colonial ecological violence in ‘The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks'

ABSTRACT

In 2016, Google launched ‘The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks’, an interactive digital platform, hosted through Google Arts & Culture and produced in collaboration with the National Park Service, that offers virtual explorations of some of the most remote parts of several United States National Parks. In this article I argue that Hidden Worlds is more than an innocuous, interactive tour of fascinating geological and biological features. It is a performance ingrained with ideologies that have severe consequences for how we understand social and ecological injustice on the land that is now part of the national parks system. I use an ecocritical approach to examine the immersive experience of Hidden Worlds as performance and ultimately demonstrate that it enacts colonial ecological violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• wilderness
• immersion
• ecocriticism
• settler colonialism
• colonial ecological violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hereafter referred to as Hidden Worlds.

2 For more information about the aesthetic and technological curation of the National Parks, see Byerly (1996); Adam Sweeting and Thomas C. Crochunis (2001) and Richard Grusin (2004).

3 VR experiences could potentially serve as access equalizers by allowing entry for those who may be unable to physically, economically, or geographically access a space. While, I do not want to diminish these access possibilities within Hidden Words, issues of accessibility require detailed analysis and are beyond the scope of this article.

4 I use Indigenous Peoples to refer to the people who lived on the land that is now known as the United States prior to European colonization, and their descendants. When appropriate I use specific Band and Tribe names. This follows Michael Yellow Bird’s call ‘to signify the cultural heterogeneity and political sovereignty of these groups.’ I also follow his call to capitalize Indigenous Peoples ‘because they are used as proper nouns (particular persons).’ (1999).

5 In ‘The Wilderness Act,’ Congress presented four features that comprise wilderness: (1) [wilderness] generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value (The Wilderness Act of 1964).

6 For more detailed histories on the forcible removal of specific Tribes and Indigenous Peoples from land designated to become National Parks, see Kantor (2007), Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek’s Dispossessing the Wilderness and Mark David Spence’s American Indians & National Parks and.

7 Bacon (2019) notes that

the concept of eco-social disruptions as violence against Native peoples is nothing new, since Native people have long been making these types of claims, but [he hopes] that the term ‘colonial ecological violence’ will provide sociologists with a useful framework for considering the various harms and risks that settler colonial norms and practices regarding the environment generate for Indigenous communities. (65)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angenette Spalink

Angenette Spalink is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University. Her research examines the intersections of performance and ecology, specifically the use of dirt in contemporary performance. She recently co-edited the ‘On Dark Ecologies’ issue of Performance Research (2020). Her research has been published in Modern Drama, Theatre Annual, and the edited volume Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter.