Against wild enclosures: Michael Richard, Exceeding Enclosure: Indigenous Modernisms and U.S. National Parks, PhD dissertation, University of Colorado, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Against wild enclosures: Michael Richard, Exceeding Enclosure: Indigenous Modernisms and U.S. National Parks, PhD dissertation, University of Colorado, 2025

31May25

Abstract: This dissertation argues that Indigenous peoples use national parks both spatially and
imaginatively to maintain a continuum of place-based community and innovate tribal expression.
It thus restores the national park as a site crucial for exploring the intersections between
Indigenous and modernist studies. The Indigenous studies aspect inheres in how the parks were
territorialized by the U.S. government but Native Americans resided in them conditionally under
a rubric of Western ethnography and primitivism. Tribal interventions to stay on their ancestral
lands despite colonial enclosure expand Indigenous studies conversations about Native peoples’
self-determination and outdoor tourism. The modernist component is intrinsic inasmuch as their
self-determining efforts were creative uses of the epistemological, technological, and aesthetic
changes that national parks bring to their homelands. Within and/or with the park, tribal
communities innovate an Indigenous modernism that is part traditional or stemming from longheld practices, part adaptation based on settler influence. By highlighting the respective logics
and philosophies undergirding their conglomerate (hybrid settler and Indigenous) houses,
clothing, baskets, and poetry, we see that the national park operates as a zone of density where
settler and Indigenous epistemologies and praxes of nation, time, place, and health are enacted,
challenged, and appropriated. Tracing this density permits grasping Indigenous, relational modes
of conceptualization and praxis; aesthetic, imaginative elements of Indigenous agency in U.S.
colonial history; and how modernism existed outside of the metropole, at the confluence of the
American West and Indian Country particularly.

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