Choreographing Climate Migration in the Wilderness/Rural Corridor: Yellowstone’s Invisible Boundaries Exhibit

Michelle Comstock, University of Colorado Denver 

(Published November 10, 2020)

In 1871, a year before Yellowstone became the country’s first national park, geologist Ferdinand Hayden, photographer William Henry Jackson, and painter Thomas Moran produced a multimedia exhibit of photographs, paintings, and geological specimens documenting Yellowstone’s “unique geology” and arguing for its conservation (McWhorter 9). The collection was pivotal in persuading senators, representatives, and then president Ulysses S. Grant to preserve the 3,500-square-mile park. A more recent 2016 multimedia exhibit—Invisible Boundaries (IB)—both honors and challenges the wonderland images of its 1871 predecessor by producing a wider, more ecological perspective on the park and its surrounding rural areas. One of the key drivers of this shift was climate change and its effects on the park’s seasonal animal migrations. Shorter winters and longer springs have prompted animals to migrate further north and spend longer swaths of time on the region’s high plateaus. Biologist Arthur Middleton (who tracked these shifting migrations), photographer Joe Riis, and illustrator James Prosek hoped to convince park visitors that Yellowstone’s boundaries and conservation efforts should be determined by the changing climate and the shifting elk and pronghorn migration, not vice versa.

This article discusses how IB, housed at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center just outside the boundaries of the park, invited Yellowstone visitors to experience and reconceptualize the park’s boundaries, as well as its migration-based time tables and temporalities, during an age of rapid climate and environmental change. Through its interactive migration globe, close-up animal photography, and multispecies field guide illustrations, IB not only challenges isolationist “wilderness in a box” and static place-based representations of Yellowstone, but also puts into relief what writer Kathryn Schulz calls our “temporal parochialism”—a sense of time that doesn’t account for seasons or deeper shifts in climate, geography, and geology. Schulz writes, “The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own” (“The Really Big One”). The exhibit’s high-resolution motion cameras and tracking collars recorded and represented individual migrating animals’ daily expenditure of energy as they moved in alignment with a deeper cyclical timetable along pathways increasingly disrupted by land development and rising temperatures. Instead of simply relaying big data statistics about threats to the park’s animal populations or eulogizing particular endangered or threatened species within the park, IB asks visitors to imagine land management practices and policies that preserve not just the park land, but also the corridors around and through it.

The material-rhetorical power of museums to reimagine landscapes and the culture/nature divide is a growing focus in rhetorical studies. As “public memory places” (Clary-Lemon) and popular pedagogical tools, museums influence visitors’ relationship to landscapes and identities through crafted exhibits, simulations, and architecture. Kenneth Zagacki and Victoria Gallagher, for example, analyze the way parks and museums stage “rhetorical enactments” of natural and built landscapes, as well as how these enactments are “translated into discursive environmental argument” by and for the people who encounter them (171). They use the term “spaces of attention” to move the discussion of rhetorical impact away from visual and representation-based frameworks and toward a multisensory account of how visitors experience the public space of a museum. Instead of simply noting how particular pieces symbolically represent, they demonstrate how these same pieces invite visitors to experience the landscape in new and more embodied ways while simultaneously invoking “a sense of civic and cultural understanding” and responsibility (172). Similarly, M. Elizabeth Weiser argues that museums are the “cultural glue” and “cultural goad” for a nation, where “materiality and narrative intertwine as bodies move through crafted space, inventing modified civic experiences out of aesthetic encounters” (6). She shows how the material displays can concretize “a people’s communally valued heritage” and promote a “narrative” and “identification experiences for individuals who move through the crafted [museum] spaces and back to the civic community outside the walls, a world of which the museum is also a part” (7). Greg Dickinson, Brian Ott, and Eric Aoki also position museums as “constitutive elements of landscapes” (e.g., the terrain, towns, and cities surrounding the museum) rather “than as discrete texts” (“Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting” 30). According to Aoki, Dickinson, and Ott, the “directed movement” through the museum is a “major rhetorical/material mode” that can “literally shape visitors’ practices of looking” at the larger landscape and environment and, thus, privilege certain subject positions (e.g., “master naturalist”) over others (Aoki et al. 249; Dickinson et al. 30).

Like these researchers, I focus on how IB, through its crafted displays and constitutive architecture, enacts arguments regarding the park’s boundaries and who gets to cross them. However, I find the term “choreography” provides a more useful framework than “directed movement” for analyzing the ways exhibits move people rhythmically, collaboratively, and ritualistically through museums and their landscapes. IB’s choreography, for example, poses a powerful interruption to visitors’ routinized, itinerary-driven movements through the museum and the park itself. Tourist visits to the park can be highly ritualized and informed by past intergenerational visits, guidebooks, Yelp recommendations, and a cultural memory of Yellowstone as both an island of conservation and a wilderness amusement park. The exhibit’s attempt to reenact large-scale seasonal animal migrations potentially interrupts these condensed and constricted rhythms and induces an experience of more cyclical and circannual movements through the park, as well as the forces—climate change and land development—that are blocking them. 

Choreographing Seasonal Migration

Because of its focus on the park’s iconic elk and buffalo herds, I expected to find IB next to the Center’s large wildlife art gallery, or near the Buffalo Bill holograms to the right of the front entrance. Instead, a tour guide directed me to the Whitney Western Art Museum. Located in the Center’s basement, the museum houses all the archival photographs and paintings of Yellowstone (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Entrance to IB exhibit. Photo by the author. 

I suppose such a location was fitting given the exhibit’s attempt to redraw the physical and aesthetic boundaries of Yellowstone. As I made my way through the exhibit, one of the curators explained the intricate technology involved in installing Middleton’s large interactive migration display—or rather, choreographic rendering—at its center. Entitled “Meet the Elk Herds of Yellowstone: The Beating Heart of Yellowstone,” the topographical globe digitally projects Middleton’s nine major elk migrations onto the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) (see Fig. 2). Visitors can select one or all of the migrations together, following the herds through time-based animations as they navigated rivers, snowlines, and mountain passes. “As you watch the herds,” a prompt asks, “do you see areas they prefer, or avoid?” Plaques around the base of the globe identify the various obstacles elk encountered along the route—highways, fences (though many ranchers now use wildlife-friendly geo-fencing), hunters, tourists, and climate change. One plaque displays the following inscription: “As the climate changes in the Rockies, scientists expect warmer winters, reduced snowpack, earlier snowmelt, and drier summers. Choose one or two of the herds and watch how closely they follow the snowline and the ‘greenup.’ Which of these changes could affect the migrations? How?” (Wall text).

Figure 2. A portion of Middleton’s animated migration display. Photo by author.

According to the various plaques, the IB collaborators hope visitors will help remove migration obstacles, participate in land use discussions in the Wyoming and Montana regions, build eco-fencing around ranches and residential areas, reconsider the “threat” of bison to cattle herds, and revere the complex, large-scale elk and pronghorn migrations that rival those in the Serengeti. What the display enacts, however, is the very experience of migration itself—a collaborative and highly ritualized movement inside and outside the so-called park boundaries, interrupted and co-constituted by housing developments, highways, and a warming climate. Although the 1871 exhibit directed visitors to experience Yellowstone as a contained box of wilderness, IB asks them to reconsider conservation and preservation in terms of migration pathways and networks of interspecies dependency. Outlining the movements and struggles of individual animals and herds helps concretize this more abstract, complex understanding of Yellowstone and the effects of climate change.

Yellowstone has long been in the business of curating “nature” and “wilderness” for half a million tourists each year. Rivaled only by Yosemite, Yellowstone evokes what philosopher Glenn Albrecht et. al. calls “solastalgia”—a homesickness for landscapes untouched by extreme climate change, extraction, pollution, and development (S95). These landscapes become much needed stable reference points during times of rapid change, like the one we’re experiencing now. Indeed, the steaming geysers and deep canyons offer visitors a sense of not only untouched landscapes, but also primordial emergence and constant re-birth. The popularity of Yellowstone souvenirs (e.g., bison mugs, elk pillows, ranger badges, stuffed grizzly bears) comes from a desire to horde this experience of untouched nature—evidence that one was there at the birth and re-birth of the wild, an event of nature within a large-scale geologic timetable. The IB artists and scientists had to explicitly challenge what illustrator Prosek calls this “wilderness in a box” and “event” mentality (“Yellowstone” 80) to create a more permeable, fragile experience of the GYE as a “corridor of continuous nature” (Lovejoy 6) and instill a sense that we are all intimately connected to what happens inside and outside park boundaries. Prosek is not the first to frame national parks as contained wildernesses; indeed, there is a rich academic discussion on the parks’ landscape designs and how these designs have protected small portions of land from developers, but also colonized and silenced Indigenous people’s movements and views of the land itself (see Mark Spence, Ethan Carr, Leroy Dorsey, Rachel Harlow, William Hagan, and William Cronon). Following this already robust academic argument, the IB artists want to demonstrate that Yellowstone is not just a place to visit and then leave, but is, in fact, a permeable landscape shaped by repetitive human, as well as animal, migrations.

More effective than a pamphlet about the deleterious effects of climate on the park as a whole, Middleton’s interactive display asks visitor-participants to “feel” the effects of early snowmelt and wildfires on migration. They can touch and move alongside the treacherous (if not impossible) detours each herd would have to take. In her widely-cited article on the material rhetoric of national park trail maps, Samantha Senda-Cook argues that trail maps “materialize tensions of access-preservation and safety-risk, functioning as mediators between recreators and nature” (355). Although Middleton’s migration displays are not formalized trail maps like the ones Senda-Cook studies, they do choreograph the struggle among the herds, highways, ranches, and the landscapes of Yellowstone. They also alter how visitors understand the often well-mapped boundaries between nature and culture. As Senda-Cook notes, our society tends to map nature as separate from culture and humanity, but Middleton’s displays challenge those discursive boundaries by demonstrating how the great elk migrations are informed by geo-fencing and land use policies, as well as food sources, predators, and snow melt. The migration displays also highlight the precarity of the containment model of preservation. If we fence in Yellowstone—our nation’s biggest natural amusement park—we put its inhabitants in jeopardy.

On a more corporeal level, the animated displays interrupt the routinized movements of visitors through the museum and park, attuning them to their own animal bodies and perhaps to a reflection on how gestures, comportments, movements, affects, and habits support or block important animal migration practices and routes. According to animal geography scholar Henry Buller, our bodies hold subtle knowledge of how animals react (378). Nervous impulses and muscle twitches form material-semiotic practices shared across species, and migration—whether human or animal—draws on magnetic senses (though relatively low in human animals), along with the senses of smell and sight necessary to navigate known and new routes to food and shelter. To navigate successfully, animals need a combination of at least one compass sense and inherited routes to find their way back to a known site and to measure their own movements relative to the starting point (Hansson et al.). Traces of these ancient migrations are in tension with visitors’ own inherited routes through Yellowstone, which are often day trips via car to the park’s more famous sites: Old Faithful, the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, and the Mammoth Hot Springs. Thus, Middleton’s animated renderings of the seasonal elk migration routes hold the potential to interrupt the rhythms through which visitors actually navigate, and thus interpret, the park and its boundaries.

Migration is a particular kind of rhythmic, seasonal, and diurnal movement practice choreographed by both climate and landscape, such as a snowline or a river. Forging, dispersing, taking refuge, becoming stranded, beaconing, homing, enduring, and mapping are migration practices that are not only multisensory (olfactory, haptic, etc.), but also create what rhetoric scholars Nathan Stormer and Bridie McGreavy call “arrangements of addressivity” (8). Those arrangements are relations among nonhumans and humans—some of whom are more capable of being influenced than others—that allow particular modes of rhetoric to emerge and flourish. During migration, rising temperatures, ancestral migration routes, fences, and highways all address the elk herds, while the elk herds address each other and the predators and passes they encounter on the way. The herds, via media technology, also “address” the human visitors performing their own migrations through the IB exhibit, collaborating into a whole other choreographic arrangement. What could emerge from the IB choreography—a cyclical, yet dynamic, interaction among the herd and the human migrations—is a particular mode of rhetoric that is more embodied and movement-based, and thus more attuned to the migration corridors in and around the park.

Building on Samantha Senda-Cook’s research, Casey Schmitt notes that physical movements and trails through a landscape offer an interpretation of a place (425). And just as importantly, they offer a sense of the place’s vulnerability and permeability. When visitors participate in the interactive migration displays, they are offered, and possibly experience viscerally, the elk and pronghorn’s interpretation of Yellowstone—an interpretation very different from the official and cognitive maps. There’s no guarantee, however, that visitors are transformed by the (extra)ordinary migrations and stranded-ness of the herds. In fact, the shared sense of bodily fragility and struggle—the very ordinary, yet cordoned, seasonal and daily rhythms of vitality and death—could prompt further isolation and denial instead of an embrace of the ecological interdependence of the park. Indeed, the capacity to be influenced or to influence others is not located in individual knowledge or experience, but in the rhythmic relations and arrangements that constitute a given ecosystem.

While Middleton’s displays choreograph the Serengeti-scale routes of the region’s elk migrations, Riis’s motion-sensored close-ups of the elk and pronghorns navigating rivers, mountain passes, and fences resemble in situ “selfies,” thus interrupting visitors’ movements through the exhibit with more intimate modes of address. In one way, the photos serve as stand-ins for actual animals, blurring the lines between the real and photographed. In fact, Riis’s favorite photo, which shows a pronghorn fording a river with its life-sized shadow projected on a nearby rock, offers an additional layer of reality to the migration displays by leaving a trace of the animal on the landscape, a “been-thereness.” Most of Riis’s photographs situate the animal’s gaze toward the camera, often capturing a reactive gesture in response to the click of the motion-sensory camera. Thus, the focus is on the animal’s face instead of the grand landscape surrounding it.

Anthropologist Howard Morphy argues, “The way an animal is represented tells us something about how the animal is conceived and understood, for example through the parts that are selected to represent it or the contexts in which it is included” (2-3). Like all animal exhibits before it, IB works to domesticate, mythologize, and aestheticize animal universes. Indeed, Middleton’s intricate migration displays were partially an attempt to make herd behavior predictable and susceptible to human management. Riis’s encounters with individual animals, however, disrupt this impetus toward categorization. In an interview, Riis granted animals a great deal of agency in his photography: “By triggering the motion sensors on the cameras, they essentially took their own photos, sharing with me the secrets of their migration” (58). Riis’s statement is a fantastical reimagining of the role his motion-sensory technology played, as it startled individual animals and interrupted the herd’s movements over passes and across rivers. However, when held in direct contrast to Middleton’s display and Moran’s 1871 large-scale landscapes, Riis’s photographs did create a sense of proximity (if not intimacy) with the strength and vulnerability of individual animals. Such proximity may induce visitors to pause and sense a “shared embodiment” (Wolfe 8) with both of those individual animals as they navigate obstacles, including the camera technology itself.

Although Middleton’s large interactive globe and Riis’s compelling close-up photographs loom large at the center of the exhibit, Prosek’s illustrations were actually the first to greet visitors. 6’ x 8’ versions of his paintings were posted at the entrance and exit of the exhibit, with a series of smaller illustrations in the middle. Serving primarily as field guides, Prosek’s paintings take iconic images of the American elk, the American bison, and the grizzly bear and reframe them within their eco-dependency on multiple micro- and macro-migrations. While animal art in the 1980s emphasized particular species worthy of preservation (e.g., polar bears, grizzlies, wolves, etc.), Prosek’s multispecies silhouettes enact the region’s complex ecosystems. One of these silhouettes, Grizzly Bear (Wyoming), centers a naturalistic color drawing of an iconic grizzly bear surrounded by black silhouette drawings of all the species that either provide food for the bear (e.g., moths, plants, etc.) or regularly feed on it (e.g., birds, insects, etc.). Although grizzly sleuths do not engage in the large-scale journeys typical of elk herds, their diets do depend on the cross-country migration of many smaller species (e.g., the army cutworm moth), and Prosek’s role on the team was to demonstrate this interspecies dependency on movement. Inspired by Alexander Wilson and other naturalist illustrators, Prosek created numbered silhouettes of multiple interdependent species, with the main species and migrators in color. However, unlike Wilson’s field guide drawings, Prosek’s numbers do not have a corresponding index, where one can match a number with a particular species name. He doesn’t used the numbers to identify specific species; instead, the numbers simply quantify the large number of species dependent upon each other within a given ecosystem. Through this somewhat ironic use of numbers and color, Prosek emphasizes and choreographs the interdependency of species within the larger ecosystem while highlighting the permeability of species categories themselves by parodically portraying a new hybrid species called the “cow-bison.” Over centuries of co-evolution and breeding, the cow and bison have become more similar, and Prosek’s painting Bison Cow, Hoodoo Ranch, Wyoming playfully marks what GYE cattle ranchers might call a “monstrous” hybridity. By taking visitors out of the conventional species taxonomies, this particular painting makes other animal hybrids, such as the pronghorn-elk and osprey-eagle, possible. If species and park boundaries are indeed so permeable, and thus influential, then what exactly are we conserving or protecting? According to IB, we need to encourage rather than restrict the permeability of the ecosystem and the vibrant diversity that emerges from it. 

Choreographing the Expedition

Before closing, I want to note several important ways the exhibit problematically reinforces the “manifest destiny” expeditionary movements central to its 1871 predecessor. Similar to the 1871 exhibit, IB relies upon expeditionary and hunting practices to capture and collect a series of wilderness artifacts, including the rare “close-ups” of the migrating animals and their predators. A significant portion of the exhibit describes the superhuman endurance required for the expedition, thus appealing to the scores of iconic images of the Western frontiersman peppering the museum and supporting the region’s booming tourism and recreational industry (see Fig. 3).

Figure 3. “Ultralight Living” diorama shows the equipment and frontier clothing needed to brave the elements. Photo by the author.

Like Hayden’s geological maps, biologist Middleton’s migration routes (based on GPS tracking collars) choreographed the expeditionary movements of the team of artists and scientists. After hiring local outfitters and loading horses with cameras, canvases, and camping equipment, the IB team intercepted and documented the migrations across the park’s mountain passes and surrounding ranches. While Riis positioned and checked his motion-sensitive cameras during the day, Prosek sketched individual species of plants and animals—many of which constitute small parts of his larger field guide illustrations (Nichols).

The emphasis on “capturing” individual animals via collars, cameras, and sketches plays directly into the hunting and collecting practices of the 1871 expedition, as well as those of the park’s thousands of visiting amateur photographers. Philip R. Goodwin’s 1925 painting, The Surprise (aka Reel Adventure), satirizes the park’s early reliance upon photo “hunting” and “capture” opportunities in order to draw both tourists and hunters. Since then, interest in amateur wildlife photography has only increased in the park, with an added urgency to capture images (souvenirs) of threatened and endangered animals, despite risks to individual beings and the eco-system. Riis’s photographic practice involved laying motion-sensory “camera traps” along the migration trails plotted by Middleton in order to stop animals in their tracks and capture close-ups, much like the iconic Carl Rungius paintings housed upstairs in the Whitney Western Art Museum. The portraits are stunningly detailed and can stop visitors in their own tracks, given their close proximity to a “wildness” humans don’t ordinarily experience. But the close-ups can also conflate proximity with intimacy, giving visitors a false sense of knowing the animal and its habitat, thus potentially directing conservation efforts toward individual species over ecosystems.

Despite its reliance on traditional expeditionary and “hunting” practices, however, IB does break with its predecessor’s focus on grand landscape paintings and volcanic rock specimens—all of which required mass exploitation of the land’s resources and inhabitants—and instead highlights the micro- and macro-migrations and adaptations of several regional animal herds. The new migration routes are the focal point of the exhibit instead of the expedition itself, with the opening plaque stating: “No matter what lies across each boundary, animals must move through them in order to carry on the business of living.” 

Conclusion

IB’s arguments for the permeability of Western landscapes have led to the construction of grassy highway overpasses and geo-fencing not just in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, but also in surrounding states like Colorado and Utah. While protecting elk and pronghorn corridors is a move in the right direction, little has been done legislatively to protect the migration routes of smaller species like the army cutworm moth, monarch butterfly, or hummingbird. Their migrations, like those of the big game herds, are choreographed by large swaths of connected habitats, a “permeable matrix” and a circannual schedule. Climate change is narrowing the time windows for migration; thus, more energy for speedier migrations, in response to a retreating snowline, is needed. When it’s not at hand, whole herds and entire species can become stranded.

Arguments and policies for the protection of migration corridors should emerge from an intimate understanding—if not experience—of the migration practices of a complex array of animals, including humans. These practices make up what Middleton calls “the beating heart” of any ecosystem (49). A rhetorical focus on what kinds of choreography emerge from humans moving in solidarity with seasonal and circannual animal migrations may lead to more sensible and sensitive wilderness corridors. Such a sensibility requires undoing old habits of simply “touring” a national park and “capturing” photos of animals, and instead requires a sense of shared bodily fragility and permeability, seasonal tempos and timeframes, and intimacy with changes in landscape that are driven by both climate change and the grazing animal herds themselves. Responding to migration (vs. simply conserving set park boundaries) requires monitoring the movements of animals—bison, elk, pronghorn, moths, birds—each year as they follow and engineer the spring green-up, and using these movements (which can vary up to 50 days each year) to choreograph tourism, hunting, and outfitting in and around the park. For a region so heavily dependent on tourism, shortening the time span for summer visits or moving visits to later in the fall would negatively impact the local economy in the short term, but would preserve regional migration pathways (including human movements) in the long term.

Tracing “invisible” migration corridors requires a new choreographic methodology for researchers and policy makers. In order to both recognize and respond to cross-species mutual vulnerability and stranded-ness, and support diversity, density, and connectivity of species, researchers might reconsider conventional road maps, hiking trail maps, and camping and fishing maps by creating a series of new renderings—sensuous, cyclical, multispecies inscriptions, collages, and photographs—that emphasize the routes and obstacles animals and humans face while moving together across our so-called park, city, state, and national borders. These inscriptions, as the IB exhibit demonstrates, will shift fairly dramatically each year in relation to climate change and herd behavior, and can thus better inform local, regional, and national decisions regarding housing, transportation, tourism, hunting, and ranching in the GYE. Last year’s great elk migration, for example, began 50 days earlier than the previous year’s due to changes in climate and the behavior of the park’s bison herds. This engineered an accelerated and prolonged spring green-up of both the low and high regions of the park. Such shifts should inform human migrations through and around the park, making them more adaptive and responsive to the foraging and homing of the region’s hoofed herds, along with all the species that depend upon them.