Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors

by Kyle Boggs

Overview

In Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors, Kyle Boggs chronicles the struggle between Indigenous peoples who have rooted religious and cultural ties to outdoor sites across the US and elsewhere and the settlers who claim the right to freely recreate in those same places. Synthesizing theories of rhetoric, environmental studies, and settler colonialism, Boggs confronts the ways that settler colonial experiences and expectations have been narrated through rhetorical practices on these so-called public lands. Fusing journalism and personal narrative with scholarly research, Boggs’s argument comes to bear on his central case study of a northern Arizona ski development on a mountain held sacred by at least thirteen Indigenous tribes. In illuminating the striking ways that settler imaginaries are accommodated, performed, and sustained in the everyday, Boggs offers a powerful reminder that even during leisure activities (in this case, sports such as ultrarunning, rock climbing, and skiing), complex webs of power control who can access resources and land and who has the right to protect histories and cultures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814284148
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	05/14/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	246
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Kyle Boggs is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Community Engagement in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Boise State University.

Read an Excerpt

“Recreational colonialism” attends to the ways in which place-based belongings are constituted by settler people through outdoor recreation; it also invites us to confront and challenge white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism as they have been narrated through rhetorical practices on so-called public lands. I deploy “recreational colonialism” provocatively to disrupt the idea that outdoor recreation is politically innocent or that good intentions somehow counteract the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism which continue to benefit settlers in direct and indirect ways. By forging new connections between material-discursive theories of rhetoric, environmental studies, and settler colonialism, I examine some of the striking ways that settler imaginaries are accommodated, performed, and sustained in the everyday to reveal outdoor recreation and its spaces to be not just recreational but deeply entangled with the ongoing processes of settler colonialism.

This book examines the often unarticulated ways in which outdoor recreational discourses function as a new language of colonialism. Some of this language is propagated by the outdoor recreation industry, in promotional materials, websites, and events. Some is woven into the writing of individuals as they recount their outdoor recreational experiences and desires; more is produced through public, legal, and policy driven discourses about controversies that involve outdoor recreation on lands held sacred in different ways by a variety of Indigenous tribes and nations. Part of this language is embedded in the landscape itself, where settler belongings are narrated through frontier myths that show up in the names of trails, mountain peaks, historical landmarks, and other land designations. In this way, recreational colonialism, like all manifestations of settler colonialism, regardless of intent, wields outdoor recreation in ways that tokenize or try to erase Indigenous people from the landscape.

Though extractive colonialism and settler colonialism can be described as different frameworks for analysis, they often work in tandem materially and discursively to produce and sustain one another. Recreational colonialism forces us to confront this co-constitutive relationship. While resources like timber may be harvested for profit in the process of building ski runs, trails, and other infrastructure on stolen Indigenous lands, for example, these same resources become sites of extraction that are defined more conceptually through recreational colonialism. Feelings of self-reliance, independence, and freedom cultivated through outdoor recreational practices not only reflect the mythology of the frontier, but are also often emphasized by extractive energy companies, lobbyists, and politicians when they talk about “energy independence,” “energy self-sufficiency,” and other such terms. Outdoor recreational discourses mobilize Indigenous lands to extract experiences, eliciting performances, myths, and ideologies that sustain settler colonialism. When politicians, government agencies and offices, industry leaders, and municipal officials collaborate to support outdoor recreation projects in defiance of Indigenous opposition, the promise of wealth is extracted from Indigenous lands to settlers and settler communities. As is often the case with resource extraction, Indigenous peoples do not benefit, but they have everything to lose.

In my journalism and academic writing, both woven through this book, I am mindful not to replicate what Eve Tuck refers to as “damaged-centered research,” which “operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation.” “Without the context of racism and colonization, all we’re left with is the damage,” writes Tuck. Throughout this book, while I do recount stories of harm, those stories are always rooted in the myriad ways settlers sustain the colonial structures that maintain this damage. As I forge new pathways for settlers to understand themselves in the context of settler colonialism and a new framework from which Indigenous peoples may connect the harm caused by recreational colonialism to broader decolonial movements, ultimately readers may find that I position settlers as the damaged ones: damaged in their inability or unwillingness to implicate themselves, damaged in their compulsion to feign innocence when confronted with harm, limited in their capacity to confront their role in the harm to Indigenous communities and the stolen landscapes in which they engage. It is my hope that by highlighting the pain caused by settler colonialism and expanding our conception of its ongoing effects in ways that are grounded in analysis of its sustaining structures, both settlers and Indigenous peoples might be better positioned to recognize and work against it.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction The Peaks Are Everywhere

Part 1 Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetoric of “the Outdoors”

Chapter 1 Settler Rhetorics of “the Outdoors”

Chapter 2 Bikepacking: Rhetorical Landscapes and Settler Placemaking

Chapter 3 Rock Climbing: Frontier Authenticity, Whiteness, and “Desert Pioneers”

Chapter 4 Ultrarunning: Settler Imaginaries and the Born to Run Effect

Chapter 5 The Ski Resort: (Re)Creating Space and Selling Recreational Colonialism

Part 2 Protect the Peaks, Resisting Recreational Colonialism

Chapter 6 “No Desecration for Recreation! Save the Peaks!”

Chapter 7 The Pipeline as a Site of Indigenous Resistance and Solidarity

Chapter 8 Community Listening, Relationality, and the Public Art of the Peaks

Coda “Becoming Complicit”

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

“Boggs not only theorizes and critiques a new form of colonialism but also offers pathways, through reflexivity and comradeship, for outdoor enthusiasts to resist colonialism and support Indigenous sovereignty. An essential read for both scholars and practitioners of outdoor recreation.” —Danielle Endres, author of Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting

“Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors is a welcome addition to scholarship on settler colonialism in the US. Boggs doesn’t simply rely on arguments of governance jurisdiction or simple racism but instead interrogates relationships to land and place.” —Adam J. Barker, author of Making and Breaking Settler Space: Five Centuries of Colonization in North America

From the Publisher