Moving Beyond Muir, Part 2
Getting familiar with Muir's not-so-subtle racism, and why it still matters
Intro: Racism in the Legacy of John Muir
“Muir was a racist. It’s all right there in his own writing.” - Jolie Varela1
In our last post, I wrote about the need to right-size our heroes, and of the opening I see, given conversations with other hikers along the Nüümü Poyo, to right-size the environmentalist icon John Muir.
As I noted then, this is an important conversation for all of us to take part in, even those who may not hold Muir as a personal hero. We all carry around a set of ideas that he did a great deal to embed within the broader culture. And those ideas rest on questionable foundations.
What I’m sharing and emphasizing here about John Muir is nothing new, and has been discussed many times before. But attachment for some runs deep (as we’ll discuss down below); the broader public conversation certainly isn’t over.2 And for some of us, it will be something we just haven’t taken time to pause and think about.
I’m including some extensive quotes from Muir in this next section to help us do that pausing and thinking. Muir was a verbose Victorian, so these aren’t short, but I feel it’s important for those who haven’t seen it to witness the way in which he pulls out all the classic racist tropes (those dirty drunken sneaky savage Indians!) And I want it to be clear that these are whole chunks of thought for Muir, not fleeting phrases I’ve strung together to make a point. Hence the long quotes.
The passages below also help demonstrate—and this is key—how Muir uses those tropes to help construct his understanding of the pristine and uninhabited wilderness. Understanding this will help us to see how and why we might reevaluate our relationship to Muir and his legacy, and why it it’s reasonable to take corrective action like ceasing to plaster Muir’s name all over those areas he once traveled. And it will help us begin to deconstruct and move beyond our own conceptions of and attachments to an ideal of “wilderness” that is no longer useful.
Preferring the Society of Squirrels: My First Summer in the Sierra
Until this last month, I’d mostly read small quotes or excerpts from Muir’s writing. So I had not encountered the more notorious remarks he makes about the Indigenous peoples he meets on his travels. Or, more accurately, tries not meet; he attempts to avoid interaction if he can, as he describes in this journal entry from My First Summer in the Sierra:
August 21
A little higher, almost at the very head of the pass, I found the blue arctic daisy and purple-flowered bryanthus, the mountain’s own darlings, gentle mountaineers face to face with the sky, kept safe and warm by a thousand miracles, seeming always the finer and purer the wilder and stormier their homes.
Just then I was startled by a lot of queer, hairy, muffled creatures coming shuffling, shambling, wallowing toward me as if they had no bones in their bodies. Had I discovered them while they were yet a good way off, I should have tried to avoid them. What a picture they made contrasted with the others I had just been admiring. When I came up to them, I found that they were only a band of Indians from Mono on their way to Yosemite for a load of acorns. They were wrapped in blankets made of the skins of sage-rabbits. The dirt on some of the faces seemed almost old enough and thick enough to have a geological significance; some were strangely blurred and divided into sections by seams and wrinkles that looked like cleavage joints, and had a worn abraded look as if they had lain exposed to the weather for ages. I tried to pass them without stopping, but they wouldn’t let me; forming a dismal circle about me, I was closely besieged while they begged whiskey or tobacco, and it was hard to convince them that I hadn’t any. How glad I was to get away from the gray, grim crowd and see them vanish down the trail! Yet it seems sad to feel such desperate repulsion from one’s fellow beings, however degraded. To prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks to that of our own species must surely be unnatural. So with a fresh breeze and a hill or mountain between us I must wish them Godspeed and try to pray and sing with Burns, “It’s coming yet, for a’ that, that man to man, the warld o’er, shall brothers be for a’ that.”
This entry is about as self-reflective as Muir gets on this topic, noting his own repulsion and questioning its validity. But he never fully avows his first inclination, and he published the journal entries in My First Summer towards the end of his life, without commentary or critique of his earlier beliefs.
This is an important point, as defenders of Muir’s heroic stance in outdoor culture will often state that he renounced his racist remarks and came to have a change of heart. We do not have extensive evidence on this point;3 while Muir does mention the contrast in impact between White settlers and Indigenous communities on the land, and how the latter seem to be less destructive, it does not convince him that such people in any way belong with his squirrels and mountains: “But from no point of view that I have found are such debased fellow beings a whit more natural than the glaring tailored tourists we saw that frightened the birds and squirrels,” he writes later. Where we are to have Nature (with a capital N, as many will come to think of it because of Muir), the people must go. But especially the dirty people, who are nothing to Muir’s clean flowers and mountains.
Muir repeats this theme of the “clean wilderness” vs. its “dirty” inhabitants consistently throughout My First Summer. Here’s that last quote in fuller context:
July 17
We had another visitor from Brown’s Flat to-day, an old Indian woman with a basket on her back. Like our first caller from the village, she got fairly into camp and was standing in plain view when discovered. How long she had been quietly looking on, I cannot say. Even the dogs failed to notice her stealthy approach. She was on her way, I suppose, to some wild garden, probably for lupine and starchy saxifrage leaves and rootstocks. Her dress was calico rags, far from clean. In every way she seemed sadly unlike Nature’s neat well-dressed animals, though living like them on the bounty of the wilderness. Strange that mankind alone is dirty. Had she been clad in fur, or cloth woven of grass or shreddy bark, like the juniper and libocedrus mats, she might then have seemed a rightful part of the wilderness; like a good wolf at least, or bear. But from no point of view that I have found are such debased fellow beings a whit more natural than the glaring tailored tourists we saw that frightened the birds and squirrels.
And some additional entries:
August 12
A strangely dirty and irregular life these dark-eyed, dark-haired, half-happy savages lead in this clean wilderness, —starvation and abundance, deathlike calm, indolence, and admirable, indefatigable action succeeding each other in stormy rhythm like winter and summer. Two things they have that civilized toilers might well envy them, —pure air and pure water. These go far to cover and cure the grossness of their lives.
August 21
The Indians I had met near the head of the cañon had camped at the foot of it the night before they made the ascent, and I found their fire still smoking on the side of a small tributary stream near Moraine Lake; and on the edge of what is called the Mono Desert, four or five miles from the lake, I came to a patch of elymus, or wild rye, growing in magnificent waving clumps six or eight feet high, bearing heads six to eight inches long. The crop was ripe, and Indian women were gathering the grain in baskets by bending down large handfuls, beating out the seed, and fanning it in the wind. The grains are about five eighths of an inch long, dark-colored and sweet. I fancy the bread made from it must be as good as wheat bread. A fine squirrelish employment this wild grain gathering seems, and the women were evidently enjoying it, laughing and chattering and looking almost natural, though most Indians I have seen are not a whit more natural in their lives than we civilized whites. Perhaps if I knew them better I should like them better. The worst thing about them is their uncleanliness. Nothing truly wild is unclean.
If one reads these passages carefully, you can begin to see the unstable tension at the heart of Muir’s worldview, in which the Indigenous people he meets are simultaneously too natural (no proper clothing!) and not natural enough (why isn’t she wearing grass?). Despite his own stated preference for spending time with squirrels and his use of the very term “squirrelish” to describe the women he sees, he cannot stand their companionship. “Perhaps if I knew them better I should like them better,” he says, and then walks away, not bothering to know them better.4
Muir’s Consistent Prejudice: The Mountains of California
Following My First Summer in the Sierra, I picked up The Mountains of California. My First Summer is based on Muir’s journal entries from 1868, when he was thirty. The Mountains of California was written over twenty years later, in 1894, but we find Muir much the same:
At length, as I entered the pass, the huge rocks began to close around in all their wild, mysterious impressiveness, when suddenly, as I was gazing eagerly about me, a drove of gray hairy beings came in sight, lumbering toward me with a kind of boneless, wallowing motion like bears.
I never turn back, though often so inclined, and in this particular instance, amid such surroundings, everything seemed singularly unfavorable for the calm acceptance of so grim a company. Suppressing my fears, I soon discovered that although as hairy as bears and as crooked as summit pines, the strange creatures were sufficiently erect to belong to our own species. They proved to be nothing more formidable than Mono Indians dressed in the skins of sage-rabbits. Both the men and the women begged persistently for whisky and tobacco, and seemed so accustomed to denials that I found it impossible to convince them that I had none to give. Excepting the names of these two products of civilization, they seemed to understand not a word of English; but I afterward learned that they were on their way to Yosemite Valley to feast awhile on trout and procure a load of acorns to carry back through the pass to their huts on the shore of Mono Lake.
Occasionally a good countenance may be seen among the Mono Indians, but these, the first specimens I had seen, were mostly ugly, and some of them altogether hideous. The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified, and seemed so ancient and so undisturbed it might almost possess a geological significance. The older faces were, moreover, strangely blurred and divided into sections by furrows that looked like the cleavage-joints of rocks, suggesting exposure on the mountains in a castaway condition for ages. Somehow they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass.
It almost reads like Muir is plagiarizing his earlier self, given how similar some of the language is to passages from My First Summer; he hasn’t even really bothered to find new ways of disdainful objectification, and sticks with his old similes. This does not, to me, register as some ‘advancement’ in his views. And again, he published My First Summer in 1911, only a few years before his death, without bothering to clarify any change in perspective since his momentous first summer in the mountains.
So What if Muir was Racist?
So John Muir was clearly prejudiced against the existing residents of the High Sierra.5 So what? I’ve been surprised to hear this response said aloud by more than a few friends. “That’s just how White people were in the 19th century, right?” They say. Basically, “we know that already, so why make a big deal about it?”
This kind of shrugging away the topic is harmful, I think, in more ways than one.
First, it erases the long history of anti-racist activism, and seems to suggest that we can have no useful role models from the past, because “everyone was that way.” As though there’s no way of trying to choose to learn and honor those who more directly wrestled with the moral crises of their times.
The truth is: not everyone was “that way.” There was, notably, the whole abolitionist movement, which was multi-racial. If we want to go about naming natural symbols of freedom like mountain ranges after notable figures, why not folks who actually fought for freedom? Shrugging Muir’s racism away means we risk losing the opportunity to remember and learn from anti-racist figures who were his contemporaries. It keeps our curiosity and learning about that time in check. I want to know: were there naturalists who were also abolitionists, that we have ignored in our idolization of Muir? Abolitionists who were also part-time naturalists? Might they have other ways of thinking about what Muir called “wilderness” that would be useful for us today? When we accept racism in past eras as inevitable we forgo an opportunity to stick and look around and learn about paths that were not taken, or taken by so few that they don’t occupy a big place in our current history texts.
Second, this lack of concern about the racism evident in Muir’s thinking—or in the thinking of many other notable figures in our history—seems to conveniently allow one to quickly move on and avoid sitting with the specific impacts of Muir’s racism, or prevent any investigating of the connection between that racism and other aspects of his thought. There is a tacit assumption that the racism is separate, and unrelated; that we can just neatly excise it and move on with the rest of what is on offer. But what if this isn’t true? (As I’m sure you already gathered, when it comes to Muir’s wilderness ethics, I think it likely that his racism is foundational to the end result.)
Third, not sitting with the impact of Muir’s racism prevents us from repairing the harm that it caused, and continues to cause. The project of reparations (as we’ve highlighted in past posts) is about matching specific remedies to specific harms. By not wrestling with the way Muir’s racism runs through much of his thought (and our thought today), and the way that led to specific harms, we cannot heal them.
So we oughtn’t just shrug away this part of Muir’s thinking. In our next post, we’ll dig more into why it’s really a big deal, and what it might mean for our notion of “wilderness” if we try to untangle it from these racialized underpinnings. But for now, I’d like to address a few other common responses that often arise when the subject of Muir’s prejudices come up.
A Poor Defense: Contemporary Advocates for Honoring Muir
A recent interview with author Kim Stanley Robinson provides a perfect example of these.
You may know Robinson best for his science fiction works, including The Red Mars Trilogy, but he is also a modern booster of the High Sierra, with a new essay collection The High Sierra: A Love Story, out this year. I’ve read neither of these, though I can vouch for the collection of Kenneth Rexroth’s poetry and prose on the Sierra which Robinson edited.
Robinson was interviewed this spring by Jon Christensen for High Country News, and he more or less represents the “Muir’s racism’s not a big deal and we can keep him as a hero while not worrying about this small piece of his worldview” approach. But he deploys a number of tactics to make his argument on that front. I think these are worth seeing in action (“in the field” with a Muir partisan, as it were), and discussing why they fail. From the interview:
JC: One name you strongly believe should stay on the landscape is John Muir. Why do you think Muir needs defending now?
KSR: I do feel like his defense attorney. And, of course, he was not perfect. No one is perfect. ... I am interested in Muir. I’ve read all of his writings, including his unpublished work in the archives. Muir has gotten a bad rap. Out of, I would guess, 3,000 to 4,000 published pages, there are, indeed, at least three or four pages of nasty comments about Native American individuals. Muir did not put it together that he was looking at a devastated refugee population. He was looking at prisoners. That was stupid on Muir’s part. And he had prejudices, that’s true. But actually, he was a huge admirer of Native American cultures.
Robinson makes a few rhetorical moves here. He opens by making sure we know he’s not arguing for Muir’s sainthood; “he was not perfect.” This keeps us clear of some of the hyperbolic dualism we find in descriptions of cultural heroes, which we discussed last time; so far, so good. Robinson then positions himself as a Muir expert: “I’ve read it all.” This is a bit of a power play against anyone who hasn’t had the chance to sift through Muir’s unpublished archive like Robinson has—can we really authoritatively declare we know his work? So situated, Robinson attempts to minimize the effect of the passages I’ve quoted above by saying, essentially, that they aren’t representative. And by emphasizing the limited quantity of racist remarks in proportion to all that Muir wrote, he tries to suggest, likewise, that they aren’t important.
First off, let’s shake off those poses that are meant to make the reader feel as though they’re not as competent a judge of Muir’s writing. We don’t need to be intimidated, to feel as though our own experience with Muir’s texts are invalid.
That leaves us in a better position to understand the major blindspot that Robinson demonstrates here. In this focus on the number of pages of “nasty comments,” he misses how, sometimes, what a writer doesn’t discuss can be as important as what they do. I 100% believe that Muir cared more about the ongoing existence of bees than of any of the Indigenous communities he met, and that’s both because The Mountains of California ends with pages upon pages about bees and the keeping of bees,6 but also because it lacks a similar discourse on the practices and value of Indigenous cultures to the Sierra landscape. Paired with those repeated statements such as “Somehow they seemed to have no right place in the landscape,” this absence of writing about California’s Indigenous peoples begins to suggest that for Muir, the medium might be the message: erasure.
I hope the last line—”But actually, he was a huge admirer of Native American cultures”—is recognizable for the kind of exculpating misdirection that it is. Our museums are filled with objects from peoples whose cultural artifacts were “admired” at the same time the living people themselves were brutally destroyed. What does it mean to “admire” a culture while advocating that the people practicing it be forcefully removed from the land from which that culture springs?
In the interview, Christensen attempts to press Robinson a bit more on the importance of Muir. Here’s the response:
JC: What do you think Muir still has to offer us — now, and in the future. Why shouldn’t we just bury him for good?
KSR: For Native Americans, Muir is symbolic of European settler colonial appropriation of Native lands. So we have white settler colonialism, and the incredible repressed guilt of the suppression and near extermination of the Native American population in this land. How, then, do you pay attention to this land? Like the Wes Jackson book Becoming Native to This Place, how do you do it? It’s really a religious question, in a way — the transcendentalist idea that nature is a sacred space, that God is imminent, that you can transcend by paying close attention to nature. As a powerful public intellectual of his time, Muir was a crucial figure in that. He was also an early reader of Thoreau. He read Walden when he was young. He read all 20 volumes of Thoreau’s complete works. To California Native Americans, Muir stands for appropriation of their ancestral lands, even though, compared to the military people with guns that actually killed them and drove them off, he was just some hippie figure wandering around up there going, “This place is beautiful!” But also, history is not determinative. In terms of its guidance to us, for what to do now, it’s extremely ambiguous. You can take what you want out of it.
Much of this response is a non-answer, enough that I almost wonder if HCN printed the entirety of this to help highlight the paltriness of some of the arguments in support of Muir.7 I take this second paragraph as boiling down to: “Muir wasn’t the one with the gun,” and “Muir was a Thoreau acolyte, that makes him a good guy.” As though racist ideology never helped those with guns justify and perpetuate racist violence, and as though being a student of transcendentalism somehow absolves one of wrongdoing.
Okay, we can probably be more generous than that. Robinson is trying to find a way that non-Indigenous residents of the Americas can have a deeper connection with land, a concern that obviously resonates with our themes here at Unsettling. In his avoidant response to Christensen’s question, however, he is valuing both that connection and his specific spiritual tradition8 over any other goals, including redress of the real harm experienced by Native communities the world over. He does not go looking for a third way, in which White settlers might build a relationship with the land without calling up and perpetuating the harms of the earlier eras of colonialism. “History is not determinative,” sure. But if that’s true, does Muir really tell us where we want to go? Or might his directions—and I think we can debate here about whether or not they’re “extremely ambiguous”—be overly shaped by the “nasty comments” Robinson wishes to write off as trivial?
And honestly? I laughed out loud at Robinson’s use of Thoreau as some sort of defense for Muir. While I was influenced by On Civil Disobedience as a teen, I have yet to make it through Walden. Just like Muir’s journals, Thoreau’s account of his daily life at the pond puts me to sleep every time. So I find it funny that White9 environmentalists pull him up as a cultural authority to whom the rest of us should capitulate. Do I have respect for Thoreau and his politics? Yes. Do I think waving his name about is a justification for failing to critically examine the history of wilderness land management and its founding figures such as Muir? No, not at all.
Where Next With Muir?
So what do we do with all this? We’ll be looking more closely in upcoming posts at the way those racist ideas creep into modern notions of “wilderness” and see if we can begin steering ourselves towards other ideals that repair, rather than perpetuate, historical harms. And we’ll return, also, to the question of what to do with Muir himself. Can we deflate the hold he has on the cultural imagination while still understanding what draws many to his story, and without dismissing his achievements as a naturalist?
I don’t fully know my own answers to these questions yet. The notion of “wilderness” has felt complicated to me for some time, and I think I can speak to those complications adequately enough. But as to where we go afterward? That’s new territory for me, too. I hope you’ll keep me company.
Thanks for reading! Until next time,
Meg
From the foreword to Essential Muir: A Selection of John Muir’s Best (and Worst) Writings. Varela is the founder of Indigenous Women Hike; coverage of the group hike she organized in 2018 is how I first learned more about the history of the Nüümü Poyo.
As an example of prior writing on this, see historian Carolyn Merchant’s article “Shades of Darkness: Environmental History and Race.”
There is in fact continued ongoing conversation about how to consider Muir’s legacy as the organization he co-founded, the Sierra Club, moves from being predominately White, with a narrow definition of preservation, to a more diverse membership and more genuinely centering environmental justice.
I went looking for some of this evidence, but without great success. The Wikipedia article on Muir, for instance, which boasted this claim, saying “Later, after living with Indians, he praised and grew more respectful of their low impact on the wilderness, compared to the heavy impact by European Americans.” Potentially there is something in his Alaska writings that gets to this point, but whoever made this claim on Wikipedia didn’t cite that—they in fact pointed to My First Summer as the exemplar of his respect. You’ll notice there’s now a “citation needed” flagging this issue in that article, courtesy of yours truly.
We might also suggest, that perhaps had he known squirrels can carry bubonic plague, Muir might have had some different thoughts about claiming all wild animals are ‘clean.’ For one recent instance of squirrels catching the plague (and why you don’t need to worry too terribly about it) see this piece from Slate. Also, no disrespect to squirrels here. You all are cute, and who else is going to distribute all those seeds?
But his prejudice was not limited here. I haven’t read A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, documenting his travel from Wisconsin down into the South, but the quotes I have seen suggest Muir wasn’t exactly out there advocating for the rights of Black folks.
No disrespect to bees, either. Keep planting those pollinator gardens, everyone.
If you’re not aware, High Country News has an award-winning Indigenous Affairs desk and they’re a publication I highly recommend reading and supporting.
Many a secular wilderness advocate would find it strange for us to name natural landscapes after Jesus or other Biblical figures (and visitors to Utah often feel just this), despite the strong presence of the “wilderness” in various religious texts, and its influence on Christians attempting to practice what they understand as Biblical principles of ecological stewardship. So why privilege the transcendentalists?
If you’re wondering about this convention of capitalizing White, I’m following Kwame Anthony Appiah’s reasoning on this as he discusses in “The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black.”