This thesis examines the rhetorics of wilderness employees in Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks in an effort to better understand the relations privileged, cultivated, and honored in wilderness areas by the National Park Service. Specifically, this thesis seeks to trace the legacies of colonialism as they manifest in the rhetorics of wilderness employees and to find sites of anticolonial possibility within those rhetorics. Drawing on the work of Indigenous philosophers, environmental historians, and rhetorical theory, this thesis makes three moves: First, it discusses the ways that wilderness employees simultaneously reify and resist colonial logics in their articulations of what wilderness is and does. Second, it examines wilderness employees compositional practices—they ways in which they literally build, maintain, and craft wilderness lands for particular ways of being and knowing. Third, it delves into wilderness employees’ relationship with the lands they care for and suggests that these relationships are pushing against colonial notions of inanimate land, ownership, and the prioritization of settler desires over the sovereignty of land.Ultimately, this thesis finds that the rhetorics of wilderness employees indicate that there is great anticolonial possibility in the National Park Service.
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