MUST READ - “John Muir in Native America: Muir's romantic vision obscured Indigenous ownership of the land—but a new generation is pulling away the veil”
John Muir in Native America: Muir's romantic vision obscured Indigenous ownership of the land—but a new generation is pulling away the veil by Rebecca Solnit via Sierra Club.
I like to hike and have been making efforts to get outside every spring and summer. I am going to be far more mindful of the land on which I stomp to enjoy some recreation.
Muir's spiritualized version of the natural world as a place of luminous order was something he could and did rally people like him to defend. It had a constructive side, but it is no longer possible to ignore its destructive side. If getting over the idea that much of this continent was wild in the old sense of untouched or uninfluenced by human beings feels like a loss for those raised on that vision, it brings with it a far greater gain: the realization that there is no inevitable nature-culture dichotomy and that the example of people living on the land—or of many peoples living on many kinds of land, from the Arctic to the Everglades—without devastating it has always been here.
An important part of this recognition for those of us who are the descendants of immigrants is understanding that the violence against Native Americans was not only literal but cultural. They were dismissed and disparaged and written out of the record as they were slaughtered and pushed out of their places and brutalized out of their cultures, and this led us to misunderstand them, ourselves, and the natural world of North America. I think that asking whether these long-gone figures such as Muir could have known better is asking whether the past itself could have been better. It could have been better, but now it can't; it's done and gone. But the future can be better, and we in the present are making that future now. And part of making a better future involves reexamining the past and trying to repair what was broken and hear who was silenced then.
