In recent years, a number of social media posts, blogs, and articles in popular magazines – have asserted that John Muir was a racist, claiming that he disparaged Native Americans.  Much of this was intensified by a controversial blog written by Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, in July of 2020.

Unfortunately, what Michael Brune originally wrote  has been translated by many into an inaccurate blanket belief that  “John Muir was a racist” without regard to the full context of Muir’s writings and his life experiences. This is despite the fact that the Sierra Club itself put together a special task force to study Michael Brune’s original allegation, which concluded that while John Muir used derogatory language about Indigenous people which “created harm,” in fact  “Muir later recognized and appreciated the achievements of Indigenous people and spoke about the equality of all people and the importance of making public lands accessible for all.”

(Despite the Task Force’s conclusion, two members of the task force were subsequently “admonished” by the Sierra Club National Board of Directors for writing an article in Earth Island Journal that elaborated on this very same conclusion. Read more…)

Most importantly, any modern-day criticism of Muir’s attitudes towards Native Americans rests upon the fundamental fallacy that people are not the product of their own time and place, but should instead be judged by the standards of  our own time.  While we may be disgusted by the injustices of the past, we should never forget that the future is likely to be just as unforgiving against us in our own shortcomings – our greed, prejudice, willful ignorance, propensity to violence, outright stupidity, and woeful short-sightedness. Blaming Muir for the Native genocide that occurred before his arrival in Yosemite is unfair, as is blaming him for the subsequent mistreatment of Native Americans for many decades after his death.  Muir may have had a “Euro-centric” world view in many ways as a result of his upbringing and culture, but one attitude he had in common with Native Americans of his time, utterly lacking from his White contemporaries, was an insistent rejection of anthropocentrism.

In any case, the suggestion that Muir made “derogatory” statements about Native Americans is based on a few out-of-context excerpts from Muir’s writings, and for as many occasional expressions of dismay at what he witnessed, there are two or three laudatory comments from him.

For example, in one passage that Muir wrote in an 1868 trail journal and later published in My First Summer in the Sierra, he expressed some dismay when a group of Indians he met on one excursion in the Sierra closely encircled him, begging him for tobacco and whiskey. He found it hard to convince them that he hadn’t any, and observed that “The dirt on some of the faces seemed almost old enough and thick enough to have a geological significance.”  (The critics ignore that Muir decried dirt and squalor anywhere he found it, he even wrote about how  domestic sheep were unkempt and dirty compared to the “clean” wild animals he observed in his wanderings.)  Reading elsewhere in his journals, we find that Muir’s aversion to dirt on the human body applied to people of European descent as well as their domestic animals; in fact, he was even more critical of “dirtiness” he discovered among the white sheepmen, loggers, and settlers that he met. (e.g. see his humorous description of “Billy the Shepherd” and his critique of a “filthy, degraded” white man (in contrast with the clean good quality blankets the Alaska Natives wore) recorded in Alaska Days with John Muir by S. Hall Young).  In fact, he expressed his disgust and abhorrence of the white  inhabitants of towns just as strongly, who, it seemed to him, were particularly degraded:
“All are more or less sick; there is not a perfectly sane man in San Francisco.” And else- where he speaks of “the deathlike apathy of many town-dwellers, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched in toil and care and poor shallow comfort,” contrasting them quite disfavorably compared with a group of Alaskan Indians about a campfire on the shore of Glacier Bay.

Despite growing up in poverty himself, “cleanliness” was a strong part of his stern Scottish upbringing. His attitude toward human beings was strongly colored by a fastidiousness that was outraged by slovenliness and dirt. He repeatedly contrasts the cleanness of wild animals with the dirtiness of men. “Strange that mankind alone is dirty.”  “Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him.” “Pollution, defilement, squalor are words that never would have been created had man lived conformably to Nature.”

Muir also commented at times that while a single individual Native he saw was “very dirty,” this was not universally true. When writing about the Chukchi Indigenous people of St. Lawrence Bay, Siberia, Muir wrote: “Considering the necessities of the lives they lead, most of these people seem remarkably clean and well-dressed and well-behaved.” Chapter 5, The Cruise of the Corwin,  (accessed 26 February 2023)

Muir’s observations of California Native he met earlier may have been less “derogatory” than a simple factual recognition that the Sierra Nevada Indians he met were indeed  “haunted” and “dirty” precisely because they were in the middle of a holocaust and a massive genocide. He was being more “literal” than pejorative. For example, the Indians he met were, in fact, “dirty” because as contemporary Natives point out, they often smeared their bodies with mud as a way to protect against sunburn, insect bites, cold, and wind, and as a form of scent camouflage as a purposeful hunting technique.   But how could Muir  – a non-hunter from a completely different culture – have any way to know that?

Nonetheless – if you simply turn the page from where this “derogatory” comment is made, Muir goes on to say that he is ashamed of his negative reaction to the Indians. He ends by quoting his favorite poet Robert Burns’ ringing endorsement of the brotherhood of all people: “It’s coming yet, for a’ that, that man to man, the warld o’er, shall brothers be for a’ that.”

When one actually reads the bulk of Muir’s writings rather than cherry-picking a few such quotes, Muir’s writings reflect a concern about how the Native tribes in California had been defiled and degraded by white culture, beginning with the Spanish and Mexicans, even before white American settlers came. Later in his life, when Muir met Alaska Natives who still had relatively intact societies, he was full of praise for their way of life.

If you actually examine the actual context for some of the “offending” words that contemporary commentators say Muir used, you find that Muir was often being more descriptive than derogatory:

• “garrulous as jays” refers to Muir’s vivid descriptions of the joyous celebrations the Indians made during their annual harvest of pinyon pine nuts: “at night, assembled in circles, garrulous as jays, the first grand nut feast begins.” Chapter 13, Steep Trails,  (accessed 26 February 2023).
• “superstitious” often refers in Muir’s writing to not only Native people, but whites as well, e.g. “Though all the Thlinkit tribes believe in witchcraft, they are less superstitious in some respects than many of the lower classes of whites.” Chapter 9, Travels in Alaska, (accessed 26 February 2023)
• “lazy” in Muir’s descriptions is typically blamed upon the whites for over-civilizing the natives, which he noted had mostly “been either buried since the settlement of the country or civilized into comparative innocence, industry, or harmless laziness.” Chapter 22, Steep Trails, (accessed 26 February 2023).

In fact,  Muir also praised the “positive” things in Native culture even before he went to Alaska, such as the Indian’s annual nut pine harvest in the mountains of Nevada, enabled by their “keen discernment” of their environment, and how unlike whites, they “alone appreciate this portion of Nature’s bounty and celebrate the harvest home with dancing and feasting.”  That was in 1878, a year before his first trip to Alaska. Even earlier, in 1874, he wrote to his friend Jeanne Carr how he was impressed by a Native gathering honoring the dead, while traveling through the Sugar Pine forests of the Sierra. He favorably compared their songs of sorrow to the beauty of wild nature as he “listened eagerly as the weird curves of woe swelled & cadenced now rising steep like glacial precipices now swooping low in polished slopes. Falling bowlders & rushing streams & wind tones caught from rock & tree I were in it… I wondered that so much of mountain nature should well out from such a source.” Muir, John, “Letter from John Muir to [Jeanne C.] Carr, [1874 Sep].” (1874).

Similarly, Muir’s critics ignore the fact that what many perceive as an early fear or distrust of Indians on his part was largely supplanted by appreciation when he met and came to intimately know Natives of Alaska on his many trips there. After living among the Tlingit natives in Alaska, Muir concluded that “Uncle Sam has no better subjects, white, black, or brown, or any more deserving his considerate care.” Unique among white men, Muir sought to engage with the Natives in a two-way communication, not just preaching to them as his contemporaries did. He commented in his journal in an entry later published in his book Travels in Alaska, “I greatly enjoyed the Indians’ campfire talk this evening on their ancient customs, how they were taught by their parents ere the whites came among them, their religion, ideas connected with the next world, the stars, plants, and behavior and language of animals under different circumstances, manner of getting a living, etc.”

Muir’s comparisons of Natives to Whites is also telling. In 1869, Muir compared Native Americans and the white settlers thus:  “In good breeding, intelligence, and skill in accomplishing whatever they [Native Americans] try to do with tools, they seem to me to rank above most of our uneducated white laborers.”  Later, he expressed a similar appreciation for the Inupiat “Eskimos” of the Bering Sea, saying “They are better behaved than white men, not half so greedy, shameless or dishonest… These people interest me greatly, and it is worth coming far to know them.. [There was] “a response in their eyes that make you feel that they are your very brothers… ” [Muir Journal, Cruise of the Corwin, June-October 1881.] As Jaquetta Magerry notes,  at the time, Muir was virtually alone in documenting the admirable qualities of native Americans and their culture, contending that they were fellow humans “brothers, even.”

He praised the Alaska Natives for their spiritual maturity, commenting how, as his biographer Linnie Marsh Wolfe summarized his views, that these Natives “came nearer to the truth of an immanent living Principle in all matter, than did the tutored, civilized exponents of Christianity.” [Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, p. 209.]. Muir wrote:

“They should send missionaries to the Christians.”  [Journals, 1879 – First Alaska Trip with S. Hall Young.]

Muir bemoaned civilized men for “the narrow selfishness of the attitude of man in dealing with animals — selfish even in religion, for after stretching to the utmost his mean charity, he admits every vertical mammal, white, black, or brown, to his heaven, but shuts it against all the rest of his fellow-mortals.”  By contrast, Muir praised the more enlightened spiritual view of Native Americans:  “Indian dogs go to the Happy Hunting Grounds with their masters — are not shut out . . . .”  [John of the Mountains, 277]

He expressed further sympathy for  Native Americans in a 1896 letter to his daughters Helen and Wanda, writing from the Black Hills of South Dakota: “It is in the heart of the famous Black Hills where the Indians and Whites quarreled and fought so much. The whites wanted the gold in the rocks, and the Indians wanted the game — the deer and elk that used to abound here. As a grand deer pasture this was said to have been the best in America, and no wonder the Indians wanted to keep it, for wherever the white man goes the game vanishes.”

In the Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Muir commented favorably on the writings of Simon Pokagon, a full-blooded member of the Potawatomi tribe of Michigan, who wrote a magazine article “The wild pigeon of North America” in 1895.  Muir was referencing Pokagon’s first-hand observations of Passenger Pigeons, and he specifically quoted Pokagon’s lament about the destruction of these now-extinct birds:  “When the pigeon hunters attack the breeding-places they sometimes cut the timber from thousands of acres.” Muir assuredly further agreed with the additional comments Pokagon made in his article in which he lamented “how my people had fallen before the intoxicating cup of the white man, like leaves before the blast of autumn” and compared to the objections of Indians hunting game in the western mountains, “what must be the nature of the crime and degree of punishment awaiting our white neighbors who have so wantonly butchered and driven from our forests these wild pigeons, the most beautiful flowers of the animal creation of North America.”  

On his 1879 trip to Alaska, Muir spoke about the “the brotherhood of all peoples of whatever color or name.” He talked to the Tlingit tribe “how we were all children of one father; sketched the characteristics of the different races of mankind, showing that no matter how far apart their countries were, how they differed in color, size, language, etc. and no matter how different and how various the ways in which they got a living, that the white man and all the people of the world were essentially alike, that we all had ten fingers and toes and our bodies were the same, whether white, brown, black or different colors, and speak different languages.”

In turn for such expressions of respect, two different tribes bestowed on Muir honorary titles. The Tlingit called him “great ice chief” while the Stikine tribe of the Tlingit called him “adopted chief” (Ancoutahan). (According to Alaska Native James Crippen, James Crippen, whose Tlingit name is Dzéiwsh,  the words that Samuel Young Hall translated as “Ice Chief” would be spelled “dleit aanḵáawu” in modern orthography. Early English translations turned “aanḵáawu” into “chief,” but this is misleading, Crippen says, “because there are no real chiefs in Tlingit culture, at least as the term is usually used.” A better translation is “aristocrat.” In sum, the name Dleit Aanḵáawu means “Snow Aristocrat.” Crippen adds this important insight: “(The name is) implicitly a recognition that Muir was more than just another random white guy during the Cassiar Gold Rush. Rather, he was friendly enough and respected enough to be called something in Tlingit. He was a real person deserving of a name, rather than just another anonymous interloper in the mad rush for gold up the Stikine (River).” The respect and dignity that Muir showed his hosts was at that time “rare and remarkable behavior from the American settlers.” See An expert opinion on whether John Muir was really an ‘honorary Tlingit chief by Victoria Barber, Alaska Daily News, December 30, 2016.

It should also be noted that Muir wrote about the Chilcat nation’s traditional ecological knowledge and craftsmanship with great respect, observing totem poles with this description:

After admiring the ruins of an abandoned ancient Native Alaskan village, especially admiring its totem poles, Muir had this commentary which plainly indicates his sympathy with the plight of Native Americans in the face of white colonialization:

“These noble ruins seem to foreshadow too surely the fate of the Stiekene tribe. Contact with the whites has already reduced it more than one-half. It now numbers· less than 300 persons, and the deaths at present greatly exceed the births. Will they perish utterly from the face of the earth? A few years will telL Under present conditions their only hope seem to lie in good  missionaries and teachers, who  will stand between them and the degrading vices of civilization and bestow what g0od they can. Thus a remnant may possibly be saved to gather fresh strength to to grow into the high place that they seem so fully capable of attaining to.” Muir, John, “Wanderings in Alaska. A Lovely Sail-Majestic Mountain Views-More Glaciers. Visit to a Deserted Indian Village. Habitations of the Natives-Carved Images and Other Relics-Indian Rites-A Doomed Race. Fort Wrangel, October 12, 1879.” (1879). John Muir: A Reading Bibliography by Kimes, 1986 (Muir articles 1866-1986). 185. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/185

Later, Muir would write admiringly of the ancient and contemporary people who lived in Arizona’s Grand Canyon region, commenting about how “Centuries ago it was inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw America, built thousands of stone houses in its crags, and large ones, some of them several stories high, with hundreds of rooms, on the mesas of the adjacent regions…” and noting “In recesses along the river and on the first plateau flats above its gorge were fields and gardens of considerable size, where irrigating ditches may still be traced. Some of these ancient gardens are still cultivated by Indians, descendants of cliff-dwellers, who raise corn, squashes, melons, potatoes, etc., to reinforce the produce of the many wild food-furnishing plants — nuts, beans, berries, yucca and cactus fruits, grass and sunflower seeds, etc. — and the flesh of animals — deer, rabbits, lizards, etc. The canyon Indians I have met here seem to be living much as did their ancestors, though not now driven into rock-dens. They are able, erect men, with commanding eyes, which nothing that they wish to see can escape.”

And when living near the Petrified Forest of Arizona, Muir,  more often known as a naturalist than an archaeologist, showed a fascination with ancient Native American artifacts, and was among the first to excavate the Puerco Pueblo ruins, and admiringly showed visitors the ancient pottery and petroglyphs found in the region.

Another example of Muir’s ultimately high esteem for Native Americans was his endorsement in 1910 of the proposal to change the name of Mt. Rainer  to the Native name of “Tahoma,” as advocated by the Seattle Rotary Club and Muir’s close friend, mountaineer Philemon van Trump.

Similarly, in a passage in Muir’s 1911 journal, he described the Indians of the Amazon Basin favorably, saying “it was pleasant to see bright flowers in pots in front of their little huts,” commented about how some of their canoes were nicely painted, and how many Indians could be “seen in their canoes with very long bows and arrows standing erect in the prow, fine muscular manly figures watching to get a shot at fishes or turtles…”

Contradicting many contemporary evaluations, Muir actually expressed dismay for the removal of Natives from their ancestral lands. In his book The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, he expressed the sentiment that Indigenous peoples had been unjustly “pushed ruthlessly back into narrower and narrower limits by alien races who were cutting off their means of livelihood.” His sympathy may have been enlivened by the fact that his own Scottish ancestors were often evicted from the land in the infamous Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th century.

Also noteworthy is how in 1897 Muir lamented the misery wrought on the Alaska Indians by miners and missionaries and, as Muir scholar Donald Worster points out in his book A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, Muir urged the government to “intervene to conserve the natives’ food resource and protect them from an alien economy.” Muir became appalled by Native over-reliance on white man’s goods and technology, noting that those who remained independent of the white man’s economy fared better than those who became company employees.

His sympathy for their plight is further shown by his friendly correspondence with his contemporary Helen Hunt Jackson, the writer who became an activist on behalf of improved treatment of Native Americans by the United States government.

Muir’s concern for Indian welfare even led to him financially supporting the Sequoyah League, (founded by his friend Charles Lummis, who was a great advocate of Native Americans throughout the entire Southwest). The League helped displaced Native Americans to find new homes, and advocated for the protection of their religious practices. When donating to the Sequoyah League, Muir wrote, in 1902, “I feel sure that now something sensible and brotherly will be done for them.”

By definition, history is the story of human progress and change throughout time. Muir evolved his ideas throughout his own lifetime, and likewise the environmental movement he launched has evolved even further, and needs to continue to evolve, as we strive to embrace greater diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Muir’s embrace of the equality of all mankind is well expressed in this 1872 statement he wrote in a letter to a friend:

“We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.”

This can hardly be seen as the writing of a bigot.

Of course, Muir’s naivety and some of the outdated language he used at times – perhaps even an ethnocentric world-view difficult for anyone then or now to arise from –  was unquestionably not as enlightened as we hope we are today; but historical figures must be understood in the context of their time. It is simply a naked lie to assert that we must judge history through the lense of today’s mores and norms – – a fallacy that historians call “presentism.”  Protestations to the contrary, it is not mere opinion but actual fact that people are and were products of their times living by different norms. Those who lived in the past really lived not only in a different time, but essentially in a country that would be completely foreign to us. As novelist L.P. Hartley put it, ‘’The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”  For example, it is really unfair to expect the 29 year old Scottish-born farm-boy Muir, raised in a strict orthodox Christian sheltered family farm in the backwoods of Wisconsin, to have the same enlightened attitudes we have today about race and economic justice while going on a botanical walk through the war-torn South right after the Civil War,  and it is even more surprising that he achieved a much greater level of enlightenment in his later years. Remember, Muir was a botanist and a geologist; we can’t expect him to simultaneously have been an anthropologist focused on the Natives of his time (his friend C. Hart Merriam did that); and even if he did, much of what we now know today about how Native Americans managed the landscape with beneficial fire and planting of native edible plants was completely unknown by modern science  until just a decade or so ago. In fact, even the contemporary science showing that the concept of  “race” itself is just a cultural construct, not a scientific one, is based on scientific data like genetics that came long after Muir’s time.  It is simply unreasonable, presumptuous, sanctimonious, and plain wrong to affix blame on individual historical individuals  – who cannot fairly be judged outside the context of their time, culture, and current knowledge  – by assigning judgments based on contemporary standards. Historians call this fallacy “presentism.”

Some even claim personal complicity today for the disgraceful actions of our forebears – an obviously ridiculous claim matched well by the observation “The Emperor has no clothes.”   How can anyone logically assume guilt, shame, and blame for events which occurred before they were even born?  History shows that groups of people have replaced other groups over and over, all over the world.  Long before 1492, Native Americans were warring with each other, and language studies show that great migrations of entire tribes were made from one part of the continent to others, before the arrival of Europeans.  It is estimated that 90% of the Native population was already lost due to European diseases even before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. True, deplorable extermination efforts (genocide) proceeded apace after that, but the issue was hardly racism; it was a fight for land, which has happened the world over time and again, and is likely to keep happening given the way the world is going. Rather than criticizing the past, we ought to be discuss how we can keep that happening today and in the future.

A good example of this kind of self-flagellation and appeals to guilt is a recent book by Robert Aquinus McNally, Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness  (2024). If McNally’s goal was to persuade people to let Native Americans have greater say in how our national parks are managed – which seems to be the point of the final chapter of this book – he failed simply because his argument was built almost entirely on heaping layers of guilt upon all non-Native Americans, rather than developing ways to build trust and mutual respect between all people. Like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Anyone who works as hard as this book does to criticize the past, instead of forging productive pathways to the future, is truly misguided. We must return to the basic universal values  of Liberalism that the fundamental equality between human beings is more important than their ethnic or cultural differences, that what we have in common is greater and more important than our differences. This was something John Muir himself knew well, as he embraced the realizations that Divinity does not flow “from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places” but instead “flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all,” and “that the white man and all the people of the world were essentially alike, that we all had ten fingers and toes and our bodies were the same, whether white, brown, black or different colors, and speak different languages.” (Notably McNally omits these important observations by Muir, quoted in full a couple of paragraphs back.)

We can avoid that kind of sanctimonious, self-righteous self-flagellation (aka “liberal guilt”) for events that preceded us without excusing the evils of the historic and contemporary racist culture in America and elsewhere in the world, and without giving up our current and future efforts to overcome white privilege and systemic racism. Generally speaking, I believe in building bridges between people, not dividing them with barriers. The goal should be moving forward to make progress, learning from the mistakes of the past – but as every psychologist knows, instilling “guilt” is never an effective strategy for persuasion to make changes. And as Rick Halsey says:

“If we ever intend to heal our nation from past and current sins, it can only be accomplished by inclusion and forgiveness, not self-righteous anger.”

Muir is actually an examplar for the kind of evolution and transformation we need as a society. Muir largely – if incompletely by modern standards – overcame cultural prejudices that were widespread during his time and in his culture. Even some of Muir’s critics admit that “Muir at least partially outgrew his old dysfunctional and destructive inherited racism.”  It has been some time in coming, but a few in the news media are finally coming to begrudgingly admit that Muir’s views evolved over his lieftime:  “Muir wrote in ugly terms about Native Americans — until he got to know them better and came to write more admiringly.” (Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2021).

Another “big lie” being argued today is the modern environmental movement, inspired by Muir, regards wild nature “as a transcendent realm apart from the Native people who inhabited those realms.”  A new breed of pundits argue that the idea of Wilderness is antiquated – a flawed idea and an imperialistic enterprise. It is based on the quite mistaken impression that John Muir would  have been surprised to learn that places like his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley he enjoyed in 1871 was not really a wilderness but rather a landscape managed by California Indians long before he or any other Euro-American ever set eyes on it. But the real facts are that Muir was actually acquainted with the Indians in question, was photographed in conversation with them, and in various accounts describes their “huts” on the floor of Hetch Hetchy. Muir knew full well, and firsthand, that Indians used the valley, appreciating their light ecological footprint and their careful stewardship of the land. He also knew and appreciated the vast difference between Native American and Euro-American impacts on the land. Muir wrote, “How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows, probably a great many. It seems strange that heavier marks have not been made. Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than birds and squirrels.”  As author Kenneth Brower says,  “It is time for those of us who know wilderness, and who understand the idea of it, to wrest that idea back from its hijackers, a coterie of academics and historians too clever by half and stuck too long at their desks. We need, first, to reestablish what wilderness isn’t, because it isn’t what they say it is. No wilderness advocate–not Muir or anyone else–ever said wilderness means no people. Seasonal visitation by humans does not disqualify a place as wilderness, nor does subsistence use of it.”

Many of the proponents of this”Big Lie” about Wilderness cite to William Cronon’s 1995 essay,”The Trouble with Wilderness.” They fail to recognize that Cronon himself, in 1996, explained that he was not talking about modern wilderness preservation campaigns, and offered an apology that was as much a recantation as an explanation of his argument: “I have not argued that we should abandon the wild as a way of naming the sacred in nature. I have merely argued that we should not celebrate wilderness in such a way that we prevent ourselves from recognizing and taking responsibility for the sacred in our everyday lives and landscapes.” [William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: A Response,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 56,5.]

Although that “big lie” was thoroughly put to rest decades ago, it has recently  become one of the primary arguments by social justice advocates – who should know better – who assert that in order to attack “white supremacy” means we must  abolish the idea of Wilderness.  Close examination reveals that this “Big Lie About Wilderness” is a literary/philosophical construct little related to the Real Wilderness Idea that conservationists have used to establish the National Wilderness Preservation System.  These supposedly liberal voices are unwittingly falling into the “big lie”  that the Forest Service and the timber industry once used to oppose wilderness designations with their “purity pitch,” which has been long since repudiated – by the Wilderness Act itself and the entire wilderness management profession. Here are some essays which attempt to correct this “big lie”:

• Criticizing Muir and misunderstanding the foundation of American nature conservation by Bruce A. Byers (October 22, 2021)
• Reclaiming Wilderness: It Tells Us Who We Are, and We Lose It at Our Peril by Kenneth Brower (June 4, 2014)
• The Real Wilderness Idea by Dave Foreman (May, 1999)

The revisionist ideas of what wilderness means reveals a huge ignorance of the actual history of the modern movement … even the 1970 Environmental Handbook Prepared for the First National Environmental Teach-In (aka a “Earth Day, April 22, 1970), included an incisive essay about “Wilderness” by Kenneth Brower (son of noted environmental leader David Brower) which talked about how it was the wilderness “that enabled Eskimo shamen, their minds a product of the taiga, tundra, and sea ice to travel on spirit journeys…” He explained that as a child “I became a ten-year -old expert on injustices against the American Indian and an historian of Western Indian wars.” Brower spoke as well how his own first memories of the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada included the people, like “Tommy Jefferson, a packer, a full-blooded Mono Indian.” Similarly, many other promoters of ecological consciousness of the 1970’s promoted recognition of Native American cultures, such as Gary Snyder in his book The Old Ways.  Wilderness activists in the 1970’s grew up reading books like Vine Deloria’s God is Red and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” and protecting “wild” landscapes was understood as being in honor of Native Americans as well as a place for modern recreation.  For example, activists from the 1970’s to the present respect and work in partnership with the Gwich’in natives in their fight against the oil industry, which wants to drill all the wilderness of the Alaska’s North Slope. Concern for Native American welfare has long been part of the environmental movement.

And this concern can be traced back all the way to John Muir and other advocates of national parks. Painters George Catlin, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and photographers like Edward Curtis pictured Native Americans in ways that alluded to their harmony and ecological integration with the land. It was actually 20th century bureaucrats who actively sought to remove Native Americans from their lands, not the originators of the conservation movement.

Noted historian Donald Worster observes,  after making a detailed analysis of Muir’s journals,  “I will say this: John Muir was one of the most racially unbiased Americans of his day.”

As noted author Kim Stanley Robinson has observed, over time, Muir clearly recognized “that Native American cultures had values superior to the dominant white society of his time. In an era when there really were murderous ‘Indian haters,’ Muir defended Native Americans and their cultures.”

Ecologist and Muir historian Bruce Byers contends, “Muir’s worldview, as expressed in his writing, was much more congruent with those of the former Native American inhabitants of California than with the worldviews of the Euro-American society in which he lived. For Native Americans, and for Muir, landscapes are spiritual and sacred, and non-human species are our kin. He often referred to “plant-people” and “animal-people” in ways reminiscent of Native American perspectives. Perhaps the many nights Muir spent alone in the wilderness settings Native American peoples experienced enabled him to channel their vision and ecocentric worldview. Anyone who accuses Muir of not understanding or honoring America’s Indigenous peoples hasn’t understood his philosophy at its depth. “

Similarly, yet another common mythical allegation against Muir was that he was ignorant of the “ecological wisdom” of the Native people, not understanding their role in “gardening” natural landscapes. Yet, as early as 1867, Muir wrote in his journal of his 1,000 mile walk, “Like the Indians, we ought to know how to get the starch out of fern and saxifrage stalks, lily bulbs, pine bark etc. Our education has been sadly neglected for many generations.. The Indian puts us to shame.”  

In 1878, Muir wrote a detailed description later published in Steep Trails of the Indians’ annual nut pine harvest in the mountains of Nevada, which he described as being enabled by their “keen discernment” of their environment, and how unlike whites, they “alone appreciate this portion of Nature’s bounty and celebrate the harvest home with dancing and feasting.” When it comes to other Native food habits, in chapter 2 of Picturesque California Muir’s writing seems more descriptive, curious, and intrigued than dismissive: “The Indians of the west slope venture cautiously across the range in settled weather to attend dances and obtain loads of pine-nuts and the larvae of a small fly that breeds in Mono and Owens lakes, while the desert Indians cross to the west for acorns and to hunt, fight, etc.” Defying cultural norms, Muir even had praise for how the Indians valued as a delicacy the stomachs of deer: “[Deer] are dainty feeders, and no wonder the Indians esteem the contents of the stomachs a great delicacy. John of the Mountains, ed.by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (page 253).

In fact, as Richard Fleck observes, “Thoreau and Muir were key figures in transplanting some of the American Indian ecological knowledge into the mainstream environmental consciousness. They both took inspiration in the varied cultures of American Indians; ‘[f]or Thoreau, the Indian was a key to understanding North America, and for Muir, the Indian was a key to living in harmony with our new continent.’”

Finally, in direct contradiction of the frequent allegation that Muir had no interest in people but only in plants and animals, researchers have found that his vast photograph collection included a great many images of native peoples, their dwellings, and hieroglyphics from places like Yosemite, Alaska, Arizona, Utah – and even outside North America like Africa, South East Asia, and Japan. Muir was interested in everything and everyone.

We need not excuse Muir’s seemingly insensitive early writings to appreciate him as an example of a person who evolved his thinking to a more enlightened view, particularly compared to most of his contemporaries. Our generation is left with the more important task of moving the efforts forward to a more just society than was possible in Muir’s time. Racial harmony comes from building bridges, not by tearing down and promoting divisiveness. Importantly, belaboring ancient wrongs and instilling guilt upon the descendants of those who imposed those wrongs does not help us embrace Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the “Beloved Community” which was so akin to Muir’s view of the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people.

As a group of Native Americans cogently wrote recently, “to place emphasis on [John Muir] as an individual detracts from the real work needed — to challenge established racist ideologies embedded in our largest and most influential institutions.”

The most important task for us today is to complete Muir’s hopes to protect the forests and glaciers and wild places of the earth, by mounting a major effort to combat the globalized threats of climate change and loss of biological diversity. This effort clearly must incorporate the principles of environmental justice and the perspectives of communities of color and indigenous nations as equal partners in environmental protection efforts, not only in North America, but all over the Earth. That does not necessitate rejecting John Muir’s life and writings as inspiration for us today.

“The brotherhood of all peoples of whatever color or name.”

The foregoing observations, and the collection of published analyses of John Muir we provide below, shows that his attitudes toward Native Americans call not for condemnation, but for praise of a man who was able to evolve his thinking to embrace a culture and a people who he had been taught to fear and distrust, even during a period where periodic “Indian Wars” were still taking place during his lifetime.  Please see the articles below for further insights into Muir written by authors who go beyond the “sound-bytes” and the poor research so evident in the historical revisionism engaged by so many today: