{Eagletail Mountains Wilderness originally posted by the BLM @mypubliclands} Eagletail Wilderness is on traditional Yavapai Land. The Yavapai had lived in the area between the Colorado and Gila Rivers in what is now southern Arizona for hundreds of years before European contact and Indigenous people had lived in the area for thousands of years. The Yavapai were known for their fierce resistance to the illegal white settlement on their land, eventually resulting in a forced march from their homelands to the San Carlos Reservation hundreds of miles away. Today, the Yavapai retain three reservations near or on their homeland around Prescott and Phoenix, AZ.
I’ve talked about wilderness areas before, but it’s worth revisiting. Eagletail Wilderness in no way acknowledges the Yavapai history - it cannot acknowledge recent human history and still maintain the fiction of a wilderness. Wilderness is constructed, in this case through a physical forced march of people from the region, resulting in hundreds of deaths. This land is not untrammeled, but rich in history and culture. Accepting it as wilderness is to accept the continued erasure of Indigenous people and the continued colonial policies of the United States.