John Muir is widely and rightly lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to the United States’ vision of itself, largely through the system of national parks and wild areas his writings and public advocacy helped create. That vision, however, came at a cost: the conquest and dispossession of the tribal peoples who had inhabited and managed those same lands, in many cases for millennia. Muir argued for the preservation of wild sanctuaries that would offer spiritual enlightenment to the conquerors, not to the conquered Indigenous peoples who had once lived there. “Somehow,” he wrote, “they seemed to have no right place in the landscape.”
Cast Out of Eden tells this neglected part of Muir’s story—from Lowland Scotland and the Wisconsin frontier to the Sierra Nevada’s granite heights and Alaska’s glacial fjords—and his take on the tribal nations he encountered and embrace of an ethos that forced those tribes from their homelands. Although Muir questioned and worked against Euro-Americans’ distrust of wild spaces and deep-seated desire to tame and exploit them, his view excluded Native Americans as fallen peoples who stained the wilderness’s pristine sanctity. Fortunately, in a transformation that a resurrected and updated Muir might approve, this long-standing injustice is beginning to be undone, as Indigenous nations and the federal government work together to ensure that quintessentially American lands from Bears Ears to Yosemite serve all Americans equally.

lgrsnf/Cast Out of Eden The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness [3877351].pdf

University of Nebraska Press

Wiley & Sons, Limited, John

United States, United States of America

Cover Page
Donor Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The View from Sheepy Ridge, One
Part 1. A Voice Crying for Wilderness
1. From Old World to New
2. A Widening World Darkens
3. The Ungodliness of Dirt
Part 2. East of Eden
4. Yosemite’s Genocidal Backstory
5. Return to the Garden
6. Well Done for Wildness!
7. Missionary to the Tlingits
8. One Savage Living on Another
9. The Grapes of Wealth
Part 3. One Last Time
10. Wilderness Influencer
11. On Top of the World
12. River Out of Eden
13. Leave Only Footprints, Take Only Pictures
14. Bettering America’s Best Idea
Epilogue: The View from Sheepy Ridge, Two
Notes
Bibliography
Index

2024-05-28