Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness

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Synopsis
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.
Copyright:
2024

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
328 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781496239198
Related ISBNs:
9781496227263
Publisher:
Bison Books
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Robert Aquinas McNally
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Outdoors and Nature, Social Studies, Earth Sciences
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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