Page 51 - GIC Manifesto.m

There is a dark underbelly to what is accepted as “wildlife management” today. The rulings of
the Jacksonian US Supreme Court that enabled the so-called “North American Model of
Wildlife Conservation” rearticulated and were extensions of the Doctrine of Discovery. In the
first decades of the 20th Century, Madison Grant, who progressed from secretary to president
of the Boone and Crockett Club, became the “father” of what is accepted as “wildlife
management” today; theories that dominate management practices worldwide. The patriarchs
of the Boone and Crockett Club, the likes of President Teddy Roosevelt, General William
Tecumseh Sherman and General Phil Sheridan, shared a kindred spirit defined by their hatred
of tribal people, and the belief in white supremacy. Where Roosevelt put Native people to the
sword in the pages of his sensationalized and sanitized writings on the American West, Sherman
and Sheridan were the architects of “total war” that under their leadership was employed by
the frontier army and resulted in multiple crimes against humanity that culminated in the
massacre at Wounded Knee.
“No one who knew the true nature of the Indian felt any regret that they were driven off their
hunting grounds. This attitude was found wherever the Whites came in conflict with them and
explains why they were scarcely regarded as human beings,” was among the more temperate
of the vile assertions Grant made in The Conquest of a Continent. Roosevelt was a disciple of
Grant’s and embraced his eugenicist conjecture to rationalize acts of genocide on the recently
passed-frontier, and his attitudes towards immigrants and “race bastards” he feared would over-
run his America. Roosevelt gave Grant a glowing review for what history has condemned as
“the bible of scientific racism,” when Grant transposed his ideas on wildlife management to
human beings of color in his book, The Passing of the Great Race. It is time for Grant’s legacy to
end, not be rejuvenated by similar rhetoric in a different age. Our children and our future
generations deserve better than this. Like Grant’s legacy, it is time for these practices wedded
to 19th Century colonialism to end. In North America, the virus that carried the killing gene
down the immigrant trails westward is as potent in its transplanted domicile as it was where it

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