As America struggles with its history of systemic racism, the environmental movement faces questions of its own over the extent to which policies that were racist, genocidal, or entailed ethnic cleansing played a role in early American conservation. Much of the western United States is federal public land, but all of the United States was once Indigenous land, much of it continuously occupied for as much as 24,000 years. The lands that became our nation – public and private alike – were cleared of their native inhabitants through warfare, genocide, and removal. More
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Erik Molvar – Marsha Small.