In the National Parks and other public lands (which in itself is a thorny term), there is a reckoning with the "rewilding" of these lands, achieved by conquest and ejection of the people who lived there. There is a lot of baggage in the terms "wilderness" and "wild" and "nature" and "natural" that hails from late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Romanticism and its success Transcendentalism (so Rousseau, Emmerson, Thoreau and ultimately Muir). It basically saw no role in "wild" places for the people who had inhabited them for thousands of years and portrayed them in writing as vast, empty spaces.
Thus the Blackfeet were promised hunting rights as long as the land was "public land," but they lost half their hunting grounds when Glacier National Park was created (which from a legislative and legal perspective stopped being "public lands" and became "federal lands" and thus the courts ruled that the Blackfeet had no right to enter the park).
You can say similar things about the poor white people who lived in what is now the Adirondack State Park (Karl Jacoby has a nice book, "Crimes against Nature," about the invention of the crime of poaching in America and how that was all tied up to, essentially, rewilding northern New York for very wealthy hunters at the expense of the people who lived there who quickly went from upstanding residents to criminals overnight).
So in my mind, ideas of "wild" and "wilderness" and "nature" have become very complex since the naive days when I came to Yosemite and saw an open space that had been set aside for future generations as a wild place.
