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A DISEASED CONDITION
Outdoor Recreation as a Settler-Colonial State Apparatus
By: Jack Hughes
We must make use of Nature sparingly. Spending your time amidst Nature without any work, you may easily fall into a diseased condition; you are seized by something like a fever.
- Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner (1958)
The ideological fever Brecht describes contains a double articulation: on one plane, it points towards the ideology produced by a surplus of non-labor time; on another, the spontaneous ideology emerging from the practice of outdoor recreation itself. In the American west, this spontaneous ideology produces the conditions for an affective orientation of settler belonging on Indigenous lands, simultaneously normalizing and reproducing the social and material conditions that sustain the colony. This paper seeks to excavate this spontaneous ideology along with the myths that come to mediate it in order to inform an analysis of outdoor recreation, positing its structure as an Ideological State Apparatus, an institution that shapes societal subjectivities to reproduce the hegemonic relations of production. This practice will illuminate several aspects of ideology: the process of scripting, the distinction between spontaneous and mediated ideology, and the production of subjectivity to understand not only capitalist social relations but settler-colonial ones. This project is urgent if we are to produce the concepts necessary to recreate recreation into a practice of producing new subjectivities capable of thinking and acting within the socioecological catastrophe of settler-colonialism.
In this analysis I will employ the conceptual apparatuses of Louis Althusser and Yves Citton, both of whom are crucial for our modern understanding of ideology and take seriously the Spinozist political and ontological commitments: immanent causality, materialism, and a critique of subjectivity. I will discuss these conceptual frameworks and then employ them in a conjunctural analysis of the central location in the imaginary of outdoor recreation in the American west: Yosemite. My hope is to show that outdoor recreation, while seemingly a neutral practice, must be interrogated and transformed if we are to move towards new social relations capable of metabolizing the history of settler-colonialism and breaking with the ongoing violence done to indigenous people and their lands here in the American west.
Louis Althusser’s historic essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus” produced a rupture not only in Marxist theory but in the whole of social sciences and philosophy. Prior to his intervention, discussions around the theory of ideology contained within it an almost Cartesian dualism: The base (the economic foundation of society) and the superstructure (the social, cultural, legal and political formations built upon the base) were seen as two separate yet related spheres of activity. In this formulation the culture of a given society reflects the base economic structure underlying it and is always influenced in one direction. The orthodox Marxist analysis of base and superstructure followed by means of expressive causality, the Hegelian formulation of causality in which the given historical conjuncture is produced by the expression of its spirit. In Hegel, it might have been that the French spirit produces the post-revolutionary French legal system because the spirit of the French people is egalitarian and freedom seeking. In orthodox Marxist theory, this logic is inverted and materialized; for example, the legal system built within 21st-century America is understood as an expression of the economic conditions of late neoliberal capitalism and its need to securitize itself against the destabilizing exterior. While this is a useful pedagogical assessment, and may have good use in mass education, this notion of causality that is produced through a misreading of Marx-à-la-Hegel has profound consequences for the effectiveness of the theory. Even after Marx had turned Hegel on his head, the logical structure of causality persisted in the Hegelian form. The dualist, unidirectional and expressive notion of ideology fails to understand that ideology is always immanent, material and producing the subjectivities necessary for the functioning of the economy. This Hegelian contraband in Marxist theory produces a practical deviation called economism, the belief that to transform society we simply need to transform the economy, and the culture of the society will follow. But, as we are informed with the aid of Spinoza’s immanent causality, however, a transformation of the former necessitates the simultaneous transformation of the latter, and vice versa. Immanent causality, the backbone of Spinoza’s ontology, is the concept that every finite mode is at once an effect and a cause. Employing this on the question of ideology, we find that under capitalism, what used to be thought of as a pure effect of the base (ideology), is simultaneously a cause, since the whole structure does not function unless the workers are ideologically committed to participating in capitalism. The “base” and the "superstructure" are really inseparable structural components of one totality. The ideological realm is always being heteronymically produced as an effect of the specific material conjunctures and at the same time causing the production of subjectivities and material structures that constantly reproduce the conditions and the actualization of capitalism. The base is not primary over the superstructure or vice versa but rather both elements are necessary determinations en milieu.
The original analysis was focused solely on the reproduction of capitalist social relations, but as Fanon reminds us, in the colonial situation Marxist theory must be stretched. The society in which the American state presides over is not a European industrial capitalist one like mid-century France, but a settler-colonial society which shapes the relations of production in a specific manner. It must produce not only the subjectivity of a worker, but of a settler. In America, Israel, Canada, Australia and so on, the subjects of these societies must be made to feel at home in lands on which they are otherwise ungrounded. There are Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) in these settler colonies, for example the police that brutalize colonized subjects and the carceral system that ensure the reproduction of colonial spaces of dispossession and cheap racialized labor. But there are also Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) specific to the settler colony, for example the public schools that teach us about manifest destiny or the culture industries that produce the cowboy westerns. There is a physical violence done to bodies as well as the creation of structures of mediation that create an affectual attachment to the land (and the national project). It is through an analysis of both forces within a specific material conjuncture that produces a theory capable of grasping and intervening in the current situation.
Alongside Althusser, I am employing a more contemporary French theorist working in the same tradition, Yves Citton. Citton’s concepts of mythocracy and scripting take the existing Spinozist and Althusserian theory of ideology and strengthen the analysis of the forms of mediation that are produced through storytelling. Citton says that we live under a Mythocracy, a term he borrows from Sun Ra, which is a regime of power where myth, story, and narratives play the dominant role in shaping how we think and ultimately act. Capitalism produces a dynamic where even forms of hard power (RSAs) have to be mediated through forms of soft power (ISAs). If we are to produce a theory of society which equips us for its transformation we have to take this relationship of power seriously, and with the proliferation and acceleration of media technologies in the 21st century this soft power has only become more saturated and powerful. Not only do we come to experience the violence done to others through these mediations (look at the ongoing Palestinian genocide), we experience the violence done to us through these soft power mediations as well. The prisoner, while experiencing the hard power of the state, has their relationship with the situation mediated through an apparatus of stories. The laws they broke, their sentence, that they deserve the punishment, and so on are all collective fictions that the RSA necessitates to be able to harness power. Even when we see behind the curtain, like in instances of bare police brutality, the RSA needs the ISA, for if the story of police protecting our communities were not dominant, they would not have the authority to terrorize.
Foundational to Citton’s analysis of the imaginary of power is Spinoza's assertion that, “we neither strive for, nor will, neither want nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it or desire it.” This frames the fact that desire is always historically produced by forces that are determining us, and that the individual will is always an effect of a prior determination, rather than a ground zero for the production of the imagination. In Citton’s conceptual apparatus, the particular act of the production of stories in a mythocracy is called scripting: the use of storytelling to shape what people see as desirable, possible, or even conceivable. To take a prescient example we can look at the rise of Donald Trump and the so-called post-truth era. A large portion of Donald Trump’s power comes from his ability to script reality for millions of Americans and produce the subjective constraints that only allow them to think of the conjuncture around them in his way. For example, when Trump frames immigration as an invasion through the structures of mediation available to him (Twitter, Fox News, official press conferences, rallies and so on) he is determining the imagination of his base and the thresholds of their perception of the world around them. Because of his institutional power, his narratives are overdetermined to hegemony and create a closed loop of signification for a large portion of Americans. This scripting of reality goes on to determine how people think, feel and act in real situations. Those myths have a productive capacity within society not only in telling stories that shape our desires, but also in producing the thresholds and capacities of our own imaginations.
While both have an immanent relation to each other, this intense mediated ideology must always be grasped alongside spontaneous ideology. Put succinctly, mediated ideology is the structure that Yves Citton is pointing to where scripting takes on a central importance, while the spontaneous ideology is the ideology which arises from a practice pre-mediation. Within the structure of immanent causality, both aspects are causes and effects of each other with neither being primary, however, sometimes one aspect has greater potency. This follows what Chantal Jacquet uses to describe the texture of parallelism, the logic of alternation. There is a co-constitution and fluctuation between two states immanent to each other so that there is not a synthesis of opposites but rather a constant modulation between them. In her original formulation she is using this logic to describe how Spinoza sees the relationship between mind and body, but it also applies here to the modulation between spontaneous and mediated ideology. It is important to note, as Etienne Balibar reminds us, “Spontaneous is only ever spontaneous in scare quotes.” This is because the spontaneous ideology of a practice is already thoroughly mediated through the institution in which the practice takes place, the ingenium (the individual character of a finite mode as determined by their particular affectual history) of the practitioner, the material conditions of the world around the practitioner that they come into contact with and so on. As Althusser notes:
Their practice, which they carry out in a framework defined by laws that they do not control, thus spontaneously produces an ideology which they live without having any reason to break out of it. But matters do not end there. Their own ideology, the spontaneous ideology of their practice (their ideology of science or the arts) does not depend solely on their own practice: it depends mainly and in the last instance on the dominant ideological system of the society in which they live. Ultimately, it is this ideological system especially that governs the very forms of their ideology of science and of the arts. What seems to happen before their eyes happens, in reality, behind their backs.
This points to an important aspect of the analysis of ideology: it is the employment of power, through the practical production of subjectivities. Both mediated and spontaneous ideology produce the subjectivities necessary for the reproduction of the hegemonic relations of production by shaping our practices around material institutions and limiting the range of possibilities our bodies are capable of. It is this profoundly materialist, immanent and embodied notion of ideology that Althusser brings to the table which allows us to analyse ideology with the necessary potency.
This theoretical framework can only retain its potency, however, if it is put into practice within a specific historical conjuncture. If ideology is the immanent material process of the production of subjectivities capable of continual reproduction of their society, we must now ask: through what practices does the settler colony reproduce its own affective grounding? There is a constellation of practices that serve this task, but in the American west, outdoor recreation is a central component. Outdoor recreation is the primary contact point between many Americans and nature and thus grounds our dominant understanding of the natural world. It is also an interesting case study because of the mass character of the practice, its grounding in desire, and its perceived freedom, freedom that has come and continues to come at a steep cost to some communities. It is a field in which the spontaneous affective constitution of the recreationist and the mediated myths of wilderness converge to produce a settler body that feels natural and legitimate. In this practice, the potentia (the body's capacity to act and feel) comes into harmony with the imperatives of conquest and the expansion of Euroamerican capital. The structures and institutions that determine the shape of this practice, and the ideology that radiates from them reproduce the social relations of the American settler-colony. Outdoor recreation thus serves as an Ideological State Apparatus, and a powerful one at that. To see how this apparatus operates in a concrete form, we will now turn to the material and symbolic center of the recreationist imaginary: Yosemite Valley.
Ahwahnee, or Yosemite Valley, has been inhabited for millennia by indigenous people, principally the Ahwahnechee but also the Sierra Miwok and Mono tribes. These groups maintained a complex political ecology within the valley, practicing prescribed burning, the nomadic use of food resources and an involved stewardship of the delicate oak and meadow ecological systems. These carefully balanced land relations continued into much of the 19th century, until the shimmering image of gold attracted Euroamericans into the valley. The discovery of gold in 1848 brought in a massive influx of miners and settlers from the east into the Sierra Nevadas, and into the ecological orbit of these indigenous groups. The rapidity of settler expansion brought with it the violence of coloniality, with a conflict between the Ahwahnechee and the settlers spiraling into the Mariposa War. The Mariposa War was sparked in 1851 when a volunteer settler militia, the Mariposa Battalion marched into the valley to force the Ahwahnechee off of their land. The campaign consisted of village burnings, seizure of food storage, the capturing of POWs and the eventual forced removal of the Ahwanechee from the land completely. The Mariposa campaign displays an event where the rush of capitalism and settler-colonialism were overdetermined forces that turned genocidal, as it often does.
The military incursion into the valley paved the way for further federal and state expeditions into the territory, where the indigenous residents experienced further rounds of armed removal and relocation until the settler military had thoroughly deterritorialized and reterritorialized the ecological system of the valley. After the depopulation had been completed, congress passed the Yosemite Grant Act of 1864, granting the newly renamed Yosemite Valley to the state of California for “public use”, formalizing and mediating the transition from the physical occupation of the land into the legal-political control of the land. During this time the valley was occupied by the United States Army, a show of the material militarity of colonization. The next major event happened with the granting of Yosemite Valley as a National Park in 1890, further cementing the rule of the federal government over this land. At this point in history, Yosemite Valley had experienced first the violent dispossession through military means, and then the official superstructural designation and symbolic control of the territory.
But still, the myth of Yosemite had not yet been produced in the settler consciousness until John Muir, the conceptual personae of American conservation, produced his stories and narratives of the valley. His writing and his organizational machine, the Sierra Club, performed a vital ideological labor: It scripted the cartography of Yosemite as a sublime and religious, that is Christian, site of unpeopled wilderness and moral renewal for the American people. Muir's prose translated the ecology of the valley into a cultural image of wilderness in the American imagination, and in doing so produced the desire for Yosemite as the natural ideal that his writings constructed. This produced alongside it the mass touristification of the valley, with it the consciousness necessary for the settler conservation project, and an image of national identity inscribed on this place that, in the not so distant past, was seen as hostile to the American project. His myth of Yosemite as an unpopulated and revelatory space scripted the possibilities and capacities for Americans interacting with the space. Through this mediation, Yosemite transformed from a sacred site for indigenous inhabitants, to one for the Christian American petit-bourgeoisie, now driving their cars to camp, hike and revel in the “untamed” wilderness of the valley (that, of course, had been thoroughly “tamed” through their state's military capacities).
Then came the building of trails, roads, hotels, signage, museums and other park infrastructure to accommodate mass tourism and complete the translation of the valley into a consumable narrative. These material infrastructures shaped the public experience of this space, socially producing the activities and imaginations desired by the parks department, which was the Yosemite of Muir's vision. Over continual practice of these guardrailed activities, what was once primarily myth becomes sedimented into routines of practice and then into heritage. This is a clear example of the alternation between mediated and spontaneous ideology. When Muir’s Yosemite writings are first getting published in the New York Tribune, the ideology of the readership around their ideas of nature are in a heavily mediated phase, however later, visitors to the valley may leave with very similar beliefs about nature without ever having read Muir's work as a result of participating in the spatial structure his ideas produced. The spatial ordering of Yosemite National Park trains bodies to experience the scripted space through a specific lens, which produces the particular subjectivity necessary for the intense feeling of belonging on this land. A subjectivity which, without the genocidal violence perpetrated by settlers in pursuit of the expansion of capital would never have been produced. The spontaneous ideology of the visitor is thoroughly mediated behind their backs by the whole history of the production of the space in which they are encountering the Earth.
The subsequent development of modern climbing culture on the stage that has been set for them by the historical development of Yosemite laid out above provides a glimpse at the further development of this ideological structure over a long period of sedimentation. Starting with the opening up of modern big wall climbing with Warren Harding's 1958 ascent of The Nose on El Capitan, Yosemite became the gravitational center of American (and arguably global) rock climbing. By the mid 1960s, Camp 4 was a subcultural mecca where climbers dropped out of American society to live in a new mode, pursuing a “pure” relationship to the stone around them. Yet this new society being formed around this curious activity only deepened the power of the settler attachment to the land. Royal Robbins and the post-Robbins tradition espoused ascetic and spiritual virtues inspired by the beat generation, but looking back on the history, their real legacy is their pioneering of new forms of commodity production. Three of the most important climbers in this tradition, Royal himself, Yvon Chouinard and Tom Frost, all quickly capitalized on their position at the forefront of this new activity, simultaneously opening up markets and then filling them with their own products. Perhaps the best example is Chouinard, who, as a trained blacksmith, quickly became the dominant producer of climbing gear in the valley. When his Robbinsesque ethics led him to believe that the pitons they were hammering in were affecting nature too much, he led the “clean climbing revolution”, using only forms of protection that left no trace behind them. His ethical stance and ideological influence produced a massive move away from pitons, and now only wedges and chocks were socially acceptable to use, gear that conveniently only Chouinard produced. This deterritorialization and reterritorialization of outdoor recreation markets was reproduced in all sorts of forms, but Yvon Chouinard and his subsequent ascendency to billionaire status provides perhaps the most potent example. Because of the Euroamerican capitalist ideology that participants came into outdoor recreation with, their relationship to the land reproduced the stratifications of capitalist America in new forms. Camp 4, which started as an absolute Other to American society, in the end became the birthplace of the new rock climbing equipment industry, led by the original cast that was supposedly rejecting American life. The desire for purity and connection to nature in the end led to the production of new markets, because the loop of signification that the climbers were stuck in determined their imaginations to reproduce settler-colonial social relations.
Much of the public lands in the American west followed this pattern: military dispossession, military and then symbolic reoccupation, ideological scripting, the production of infrastructures around the ideology and finally into the spontaneous embodied practices that produce new subjectives. Each dimension within the parallelogram of forces operates both in mediated and spontaneous ideologies, but are alternated between depending on the composition of forces at each conjuncture. Each node in this process is an effect of the historical moment before it and the cause of the development after it. John Muir could not have produced the ideology of the unpeopled wilderness had his condition not been historically determined by the militarized removal of the indigenous people behind him, and the subsequent production of the infrastructure of the National Parks would have taken a materially different form if they had not been determined by the Muirian ideology: Men make their own history but not in conditions of their choosing. Yosemite is a textbook case of this dynamic interplay between ideological registers in the settler-colonial context, and can be a prism in which to extrapolate a broader theory of outdoor recreation in the American west.
If the analysis of Yosemite here clarifies anything, it is that the structure of outdoor recreation is not an accidental or natural cultural formation but the product of a long set of determinations, overdetermined by the colonial and capitalist axioms of displacement and accumulation. The spontaneous practice of recreation is shaped by the script that has been given, the structures that have been produced and the affectual determinations of the recreation machine. To grasp outdoor recreation as an ISA is to grasp how, concealed behind the seemingly benign act of hiking, climbing or skiing, there is a historical machine producing affects and subjectivities around interaction with nature. This hidden mediation is consequential, because if it is gone unrecognized, we are bound to reproduce and continue the chain of determinations that shape our currently insufficient environmental consciousnesses. In this moment of climate catastrophe, it is an increasingly urgent task to reorient our subjectivities into forms not only able to grasp the infinite interconnections of nature, but also to deal with acute moments of crisis with nature, a skill that can be sharpened through the practice of outdoor recreation, for example in situational awareness and risk assessment. Having a grasp of how weather patterns are developing, or being comfortable triaging tasks in moments of increasing danger are skills that are at least advantageous (if not necessary) to have in moments of crisis and they are also skills that can only be comfortably cultivated through long-term practice. Outdoor recreation provides a low risk (though not no risk) epistemological setting for long-term development of these capacities. Here again, we are presented with a double articulation of possibilities: a practice of recreation that can rehabilitate Euroamericans’ relationship with nature, and a practice of recreation that can build the capacities necessary to deal with an acute climate crisis.
For Althusser, much like Foucault, western academia has often inscribed a fatalist account of the determinations that he is theorizing. One of caricatures of late 20th century French structuralism is that it builds a cage of determinations around us and shows how our actions are never really our own. This misreading tragically misses the use of Spinoza in helping us live freely. Our freedom is always conditional, and our actions are always determined by the conditions in which we act. But this is not cause for despondency, it rather points us to the line of flight out of structures of domination. If our freedom is always merely conditional, but the conditions are always determined by the forces producing that condition, then our real freedom comes from producing the set of conditions that will determine future actions differently. If we are always both cause and effect, as immanent causality illuminates, then we can act within our set of determinations in order to determine the next set of conditions differently. We have very little agency in the moment, but in the moment we do have agency over tomorrow.
Now, what then do we make of the practice of outdoor recreation in a settler colonial context? We should not try to stop the practice from occurring, but rather we must transform the conditions of recreation towards a liberatory and ecologically conscious mode. We must convert the apparatus from one that reproduces colonial subjectivity into one that experiments with new sensibilities capable of confronting climate catastrophe, grasping ecological interdependence, and setting in motion the long and treacherous path of decolonization in the American west.
To start this process of transformation we need to first realize that the act of outdoor recreation itself, in its simplest form the act of movement through natural landscapes, is not ontologically committed to settler colonialism but is rather a set of practices that has been territorialized by the state apparatus in America. The form of the Ideological State Apparatus I have shown above, the signage, the parks, the visitors centers and so on, are all historically contingent mediations that can be rewritten, it is just a question of power. What is required, then, is a conscious retooling of the recreational apparatus: a new environmental pedagogy, new structures of land management, and the construction of a new apparatus of mediation in outdoor recreation discourse. Rather than continuing the fantasy of the unpeopled wilderness and the spiritual revival the outdoors gives us, we can turn outdoor recreation into a training ground for the awareness of historical political ecology, environmental responsibility and the creation of a collective capacity to survive tenuous situations with nature. The full fleshing out of this apparatus is much beyond the scope of this paper, but I can point to a pair of actions that can start us down this path.
Ideology, both mediated and spontaneous, always expresses power that has undergone various levels of saturation and sedimentation. The struggle to escape their grasp and produce new subjectivities therefore, will involve a direct struggle for power. What our analysis of the Ideological State Apparatus of recreation can offer us in this struggle is the explication of the doubly articulated terrain of struggle: mediation and the production of institutions. We must both struggle for the land and the myths surrounding these lands if we are to move towards a new form of recreation.
For Citton the act of scripting should aim at scripting what should-be rather than what could-be. As he explains:
As against a directionless growth of our could-be, indifferent to what will become of future generations (whether they turn out to be prosperous, starved, or flooded), the mythocracy of the virtual quidam puts back in place the demand for a should-be. This, even though it still leaves it up to each of us to discover the particular nature of this should-be within our own individual and collective becoming. However much one might want to hear a second-person plural in the mythocratic invitation to become ‘what you never came to be that you should be’ if ‘the left’ is to be able to reorient its political agenda, its starting point must be an intimate feeling for what links the individual becoming of each person to the fate of those around them.
If we are to produce the imaginations that strive for what should-be, it must start by scripting from below. He calls for a pluralist formation to engage in this act, raising the question of what forces can assemble into a composite body capable of reaching for power. In our conjuncture, it seems that this must come primarily from indigenous communities, supported by outdoor recreation advocacy organizations and environmental conservation organizations. These three forces have one important goal in common, to see this land be protected from the forces of American capital. However, especially in outdoor recreation, we must have robust pedagogical structures in place in order to educate people on why that is the case, since we will have to struggle against the spontaneous ideology of recreation to reshape a more desirable subjectivity. This will take a conscious effort to script and recompose the subjectivities of the recreationists into ones that understand the historicity of the land and the forces that have produced it.
This reconfiguration of the narrative can happen through the existing ecosystem of outdoor recreation media, and there are already forces struggling on this plane. One large force is NativesOutdoors, an organization explicitly focused on Indigenous storytelling within outdoor recreation discourse. Through the production of films, social media posts and political campaigns, NativesOutdoors is able to tap into the large coalition of outdoor recreationists to center their stories and importantly produce the subjectivities necessary to act in a new way. By producing films at the intersection between these two bodies of people, NativesOutdoors is not only centering Indigenous voices in the recreation landscape, but also actively engaging indigenous people in outdoor recreation as a mode of reconnecting to the landscapes that they were violently dispossessed from. As Skier and NativesOutdoors member Connor Ryan says:
Skiing is my dance and prayer, a ceremony of its own, one that offers a chance to center myself within nature and the Great Mystery of the universe surrounding me. Skiing brings me in touch with the deepest gratitude for life, but also the most earnest humility within the landscape. The lessons I’ve learned through ceremony are reinforced by my relationship with the mountain. The traditional ecological knowledge that comes from Lakota culture helps me to understand the true value of the sacred land and frozen water I ski on in deeper and more tangible ways.
It is not just inserting native voices into outdoor recreation but the coproduction and constitution of subjectivities between the two groups. This production of new narratives, where Indigenous people are centered in telling the stories of outdoor recreation is essential to the production of new arrangements of power.
This composite body that is beginning to form between Indigenous communities and outdoor recreationists is not only happening on the plane of the co-production of subjectivities, but also materializing. The most striking and high profile case of this development is centered around Bears Ears National Monument. Bears Ears was designated as a national monument in 2016 when a coalition of tribal organizations and outdoor recreation organizations formed a power bloc, and lobbied for the federal protection of the land, and placement of the protected area in indigenous hands. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, composed of the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni and Ute Indian Tribe was formed in 2015 in order to attempt to exercise its right to self-determination over this culturally dense and historically pillaged territory. They further mobilized a coalition of outdoor recreation groups, conservation organizations and archeologists to engage in the struggle for protection from the state of Utah, who had a desire to open up the landscape to deregulation and drilling. The struggle is ongoing but the power of this coalition is undeniable. They won full national monument designation in 2016, only to have its range reduced under the Trump administration and then restored to the full size in 2021. The important aspect of this struggle is not only in the historically significant wins for Bears Ears, but in the crystallization and materialization of the new political terrain in the American west where Indigenous organizations have the power and coalition building capacity to form composite bodies powerful enough to determine the terrain of struggle.
These new social relations are the way forward for outdoor recreation in the American west. In the Bears Ears campaign the outdoor recreation political bloc encountered an indigenous struggle that refused to be subsumed by liberal conservationist discourses but rather set the tone and produced the discourse and institutions that the recreationists had to participate in. It was a massive unsettling of the ideological discourse of outdoor recreation, where public lands are often seen as innocent and apolitical. The encounter between the two forces generated a co-constitution of new subjectivities where recreationists learned to situate themselves as guests under indigenous stewardship and the tribal nations learned how to harness the outdoor recreation machine as a potential force in sovereign land defence. This is a concrete instance where the recreation ISA is interrupted, redirected and reorganized under indigenous leadership to reconstitute the affective and ideological terrain of outdoor recreation culture. It offers us a model for how we can move from the imagination towards a material transformation of land and social relations to produce a new decolonizing political ecology.
The demand here is not for the abolition of outdoor recreation in the American west, but rather the rational reproduction of the forces that determine it, for its recomposition. And here Spinoza’s concept of immanent causality becomes crucial: subjects do not transcend the relations that form them but can, through collective action, alter the very conditions that determine future effects and possibilities. If recreation today is entangled with an apparatus of colonial ideology, that entanglement is neither eternal nor uncontested. It can be retooled and redirected. The world is determined, but it is not a teleological absolute.
The project is thus the production of counter-subjectivities within the spaces that today produce the settler subjectivity. This requires that the practice of recreation is historically informed, collectively organized, and oriented towards the production of new politico-ecological compositions. It is going to require attention, a radical pedagogy, and a willingness to inhabit that contradiction that is determining this conjuncture. To use a practice and discourse forged in colonial violence as a means of dismantling that structure is not a very comfortable task, but this task is not merely desirable, it is urgently necessary. Recreation, if reoriented, can offer us a new way of training subjects for the material reality of climate change within a settler colonial context. It is capable of producing a new assemblage of sensibility, attuned to the multiplicity of forces, geological, ecological, political and historical, determining not just our actions in the mountains but in our daily lives as well. We must weaponize the contradictions inherent in the practice to produce a new becoming. This will not happen quickly or on an individual scale, but requires collective work, the production of new institutions, and a willingness of recreationists to grasp for power. We must take immanent causality seriously. Our freedom lies in shaping the conditions that will shape us, intervening in the apparatus that interpellates us and composing new practices that can produce subjectivities adequate to a world in crisis.
Brecht’s fever is heavy, but fevers are bound to break.
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