Theodore Roosevelt is often praised for starting the National Park system, but this also meant stealing land that had been promised to Native Americans. Considering Theodore Roosevelt advocated for killing Native Americans (Oluo), it’s not too hard to believe part of the motivation was to further exploit and undermine Native Americans in addition to any sort of conservation motive.
Roosevelt claimed for the United States tens of millions of acres previously promised to Native people, land that had been stewarded by Native people for countless generations. They became our national forests and parks. In an article published in the American Indian Law Journal, Native scholar and law professor Angelique Townsend EagleWoman noted that while Roosevelt is celebrated today as a great conservationist for his creation of national parks and forests, his actions were actually “an illegal, unconsented-to land grab from the Tribal Nations, and then a reappropriating of those lands owned by tribal peoples to the ownership of the United States on a might makes right basis.” — Mediocre, pg 29