Foregrounding art's influence on the nation—from early far Western photography and painting, as well as work by contemporary California Native American artists—Tyler Green reveals the origin of the national parks.

  In Claiming Yosemite art critic and historian Tyler Green presents the invention of national parks within a broad and complex national history influenced by early artworks of Yosemite. This art was made and shared across the Union only after the state of California and the US Army engaged in a genocidal campaign against California Native peoples, including within Yosemite Valley. In the East, that art was first exhibited in the context of some of the most consequential moments of the Civil War, building an association between Yosemite and Union triumph that motivated Congress and President Abraham Lincoln to establish the first national park there.

  Drawing on extensive new research, Green explains how the Awahnichi and their ancestors anthropogenically created the Yosemite that the settlers came to love through a sophisticated fire practice that the settlers misunderstood so thoroughly that it motivated their drive to "preserve" the valley. Across a dramatic biographically driven narrative, Green reveals how transcendentalist minister Thomas Starr King, photographer Carleton Watkins, painter Albert Bierstadt, and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted helped create what became perhaps our nation's most beloved institution, the National Parks Service, and how Congress and Lincoln, who signed the bill establishing US Yosemite, went along.

  Balancing investigation and truth with appreciation, Claiming Yosemite provides an essential reckoning with our complex past that might yield a better future for the land, the Native people who never ceded Yosemite Valley or the surrounding land to the US, and everyone else.