Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands

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Joseph Whitson

Marketing the Wilderness

Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands

Joseph Whitson

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English

University of Minnesota Press
27 August 2025

History of the Americas; Social & cultural history; Indigenous peoples; Environmental economics; Conservation of the environment

How outdoor industry marketing promotes an image of ""the wilderness"" as an unpeopled haven

Marketing the Wilderness analyzes the relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, public lands in the United States, and Indigenous sovereignty and representation in recreational spaces. Combining social media analysis, digital ethnography, and historical research, Joseph Whitson offers nuanced insights into more than a century of the outdoor recreation industry's marketing strategies, unraveling its complicity in settler colonialism.

Complicating the narrative of outdoor recreation as a universal good, Whitson introduces the concept of ""wildernessing"" to describe the physical, legal, and rhetorical production of pristine, empty lands that undergirds the outdoor recreation industry, a process that further disenfranchises Indigenous people from whom these lands were stolen. He demonstrates how companies such as Patagonia and REI align with the mining and drilling industries in their need to remove Indigenous peoples and histories from valuable lands. And he describes the ways Indigenous and decolonial activists are subverting and resisting corporate marketing strategies to introduce new narratives of place.

Through the lens of environmental justice activism, Marketing the Wilderness reconsiders the ethics of recreational land use, advocating for engagement with issues of cultural representation and appropriation informed by Indigenous perspectives. As he discusses contemporary public land advocacy around places such as Bears Ears National Monument, Whitson focuses on the deeply fraught relationship between the outdoor recreation industry and Indigenous communities. Emphasizing the power of the corporate system and its treatment of land as a commodity under capitalism, he shows how these tensions shape the American idea of ""wilderness"" and what it means to fight for its preservation.

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By: Joseph Whitson
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 12mm
Weight: 312g
ISBN: 9781517915117
ISBN 10: 1517915112
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 27 August 2025
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Contents Introduction: Wildernessing 1. This Land Is Our Land 2. The Frontier Wilderness 3. Wilderness Untrammeled 4. #Explore 5. The President Stole Your Land 6. Indigenizing Instagram Conclusion: The Earth Is Our Shareholder Acknowledgments Notes Index

Joseph Whitson is a marketing strategist and earned his PhD from the University of Minnesota. His writing has been published in American Quarterly and The Public Historian, and he is founder of Indigenous Geotags, an environmental and decolonial justicefocused blog.

Reviews for Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands

""Joseph Whitson’s brilliant book—methodologically innovative and forcefully narrated—presents a stinging critique of the ‘recreation industrial complex’ and the methods by which it has perpetuated wilderness myths that serve the ongoing dispossession of Native cultures. This is cutting-edge scholarship and a powerful political intervention that centers Native resistance to neoliberal corporate capitalism and the thoughtless conflation of recreation with social justice and conservation.""—Mark Fiege, Montana State University