I also think that one of the commentators is Native American. I also forget his name but I think that he is a Park Superintendent somewhere.

And I thought last night’s episode did an OK job of discussing the commodification of Indian culture. It also mentioned how some parks made it illegal for Indians to hunt and fish on their Native Lands.

I’ve been thinking about that too. Ultimately, I think Burns makes a conscious effort to include non-white individuals (and women) as commentators so that he can create a documentary about mostly white men without being critiqued for having made a documentary about mostly white men.

In the case of the black ranger, I think it is one way in which Burns can buttress his argument (Democratic Parks!) without addressing how certain parks have represented of white, middle class values.

However, I also feel like the black park ranger is getting a raw deal. I mean, we don’t get to see his whole interview. So we don’t know how his views might have changed while working for the NPS or if he believes NPS policies were once racist. We also don’t know what questions that were asked, but it seems unlikely that Burns asked him how his identity as a black male has impacted his job.

You can’t think that Burns would let McClurg look heroic for getting in the way of “America’s Best Idea!” She and her old biddies should just have handed the park and all their work over without a struggle, like good girls, and kept her mouth shut. That’s the American way!

The episode once addressed the difficulty rangers faced in telling longtime residents of Yosemite Valley they could no longer subsist off the park’s lands. However, any mention of class was overshadowed by a quick reference to race—the park ranger mentioned that black rangers faced especial difficulty in getting poor white men and women to follow the park’s new rules.

Gender was absolutely ignored in the discussion about Mesa Verde. Instead, Virginia McClurg was portrayed as greedy for wanting to keep Mesa Verde under the control of clubwomen. One of the commenter’s stated that McClurg had come to see Mesa Verde as her park instead of America’s park. God forbid that a woman who spent 20 years of her life preserving a site might actually want (or deserve) to have some say in how the federal government would run it. All patriotic American women are self-sacrificing you know.

As predicted, most of the time was spent discussing conservation’s geniuses—Muir, Roosevelt and Pinchot. So all and all, I would say this episode was more disappointing than the first but this may because I’ve spent the last year and a half critiquing some of the arguments it made. I may or may not tune in tomorrow.

Yes, there’s another ten hours. Five more episodes which play all week. I hope to catch at least the next two. The preview for tonight’s episode really highlighted Roosevelt’s role, so like you, I’m not super optimistic that Burns includes a lot of information on women, but he certainly can’t ignore them at some parks. I guess I’m more interested to see how he portrays them women he does include. I have a feeling that he’ll revert back to the whole genius theme, but we’ll see.

I’ll keep you updated.

Interestingly, Burns has of course made documentaries in which race was central (the baseball and jazz documentaries, for example), and he even did one brief film about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and the women’s suffrage movement. But these movies too suffer from the same Burns treatment: as with his other biographical movies, he posited Anthony and Stanton as “geniuses” without whom American feminism never would have happened, and in the Baseball movie, he makes the integration of major leagues a kind of transformative moment that solves all problems and erases all injustice. So, once again history happens only because of the occasional “genius” who shows up to change everything totally and completely and without whom this change never would have happened, and massive, complex histories of injustice and exploitation are atoned for in one great moment of heroic vision (integration of MLB) or sacrifice (the Civil War.)

Awesome!