Conquering Sacred Ground? Climbing Uluru and Devils Tower

Abstract

By comparing the climbing controversies at Uluru and the Devils Tower, this paper seeks to examine how visitors may be engaging in, if not re-enacting, different kinds of history stories. These remarkable landscape features were each proclaimed part of ‘national parks’ in two settler-coloniser nations, Australia and the United States. Indeed, in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt declared Devil’s tower in Wyoming the first United States national monument. Before that, it was a sacred site for many American Indians, reportedly known also as Mato Tipila or Bear Lodge. However, despite the protests of indigenous custodians, both rocks remain popular climbing destinations, although the Devils’ Tower demands more intrepid climbers. While Uluru was only declared a national park in 1977, ‘national ownership’ heightened competing assertions of sovereignty. As non-urban icons, the sites seem to stand outside colonialism and possibly outside modernity, evoking the relative ‘timelessness’ of geological time. Yet, as contested sites of cultural authority, the impulse to ‘preserve’ them and ‘conquer’ them have become curiously entwined. James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and translation in the twentieth century (1997) provides a valuable reflective starting point, as do Indigenous journey stories. One of the main aims of this paper is to consider how different historical and contemporary journeys in place reinforce both shared and divergent interests in landscape, and how these might play out in mapping historical practice into the future. Albeit briefly, this paper thus touches upon Indigenous and non-Indigenous ideas about travel, history-making, landscape and nation in two ‘New World’ nations. By moving through landscape, the traveler potentially reinserts herself into a meaningful narrative of history and heritage. However, although tourists crave authentic experiences of ‘cultural tourism’, including those signifying longer Indigenous histories of connection, it appears that they strongly resist having their ‘discovery’ activities curbed by any such beliefs.