Lia Schifitto is a heritage preservationist from Upstate New York but has lived across Tuscany, Rome, and Toronto. She currently is working for Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California. Lia earned her M.A. at the American University of Rome, studying Sustainable Cultural Heritage. She completed her BA at the University of Toronto, specializing in American and Soviet Cultural History.
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The American Outdoorsman has in many ways been manufactured by the societal and racial anxieties bred in modern industrial expansion. Faced with the need to re-establish cultural superiority, turn-of-the-century Americans borrowed an identity from whom they considered the 鈥榝irst Americans,鈥� Native Americans, in creating the All-American Boy. This adoption of indigenous rituals and material culture continued throughout the 20th Century as environmentalism evolved, ironically in an attempt to form a purely Anglo-American image.
Falling in between the Gilded Age, Prohibition, two world wars, and聽the disorder of the Vietnam War era, the tale of the American Outdoorsman begs the listener to uncover growing class divides, economic transformations, and the racial paradigms behind them in the 20th Century. However, this story need not end in misfortune; telling the history of the American Outdoorsman can highlight the fascinating way American identity has formed by acknowledging the vital role of indigenous Americans.
The origin of the American Outdoorsman
Revisiting the story of the American Outdoorsman challenges assumptions and rewrites historical narratives. American culture has always been a blending of ideas, beliefs, ethnicities, and traditions, but rarely is it told from this melting pot perspective. Interestingly, the concept of connection to nature and rugged masculinity is often associated with the Frontier. Yet this is an archaic way of understanding American culture鈥檚 modern association with the outdoors.
In actuality, Native American appropriation and stereotyping plays a large role in shaping what today seems 鈥榥atural鈥� to American culture. The adoption of Native American traditions and practices within Anglo-American beliefs created an admiration for nature, yet the acknowledgement of this manipulation of indigenous culture is continually misrepresented and under researched by academics and citizens alike. This has resulted in the invisibility of Native American communities, revealing a tale of colonialism which to some, may seem unnecessary to retell. However, we must learn that overlooking the past only reinforces issues in American society today.
The Gilded Age & Threatened Masculinity, 1830s-1920s
Americans did not always appreciate the outdoors. To most, wilderness was frightening, an entity to be conquered. Settlers had to survive the elements every day of their lives. Nature-minded American culture evolved just over a century ago聽at a time of industrial expansion and urban chaos known as the Gilded or Golden Age. The invention of railroads moved materials and people across the country.
With the advancement of manufacturing technology and factory infrastructure, cities swelled rapidly in population as rural communities flocked to urban centres. Since wages were much higher in the U.S., the population also surged from immigrants arriving from Europe and then Asia in search of opportunity. The shift in population but also in economics, threatened the working man鈥檚 capability to provide for his family in a world where women and men toiled side by side and cities were no longer White and Black. Disease and germs were weakening young men, morality was vanishing in chaotic times, and the American man was becoming only a distant memory in the eyes of a changing nation.
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