The symposium began around 9:00 a.m. on April 23, 2022 in Grace Covell Hall with welcome messages from the following:

1. Bill Swagerty, Director of the John Muir Center welcomed everyone to the conference. He particularly offered welcome to the Muir descendants in attendance, including Bill Hanna, Ross DeLipkau, and their families and cousins.  Among them are Tim Hanna – grandson of Ross Hanna, and now on board of John Muir Trustees of the Muir-Hanna Trust.
2. Christopher Callahan, University of the Pacific President, who read a draft “land acknowledgment” about the Native people who lived on the land that is now the University of the Pacific.
3. Mary Wardell-Ghirarduzzi, Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, who spoke briefly about the University’s efforts on this subject.

Unfortunately, the symposium began with some technical difficulties. They could not get the screen and projector to work properly for some time. The first presentation was supposed to be Carolyn Finney, via Zoom, but since they couldn’t get the screen to work, the began with the presentation by Daniel Henry; but he had to do the presentation without his slides due to the technical difficulties, and the first part of his presentation was interrupted several times as they tried to make the video work. For that reason we offer a link to Dan’s Power Point slides below.

Presentations:

Daniel Lee Henry, author and teacher, spoke about his experiences with the Tlingit Native people where he lives in Haines,  Alaska.  Dan explained that in order to gather information from Native people, one cannot just waltz in with a notebook and tape recorder and expect to have an oral history dictated to you.

Instead, it requires building a relationship with the people over a long period of time to develop trust, and it is essential to develop trust, something that for -Natives takes a very long time.  It took Dan 30 years to gain their trust and develop a deep enough relationship with the Tlingit for them to open up and tell their stories, entrusting him with the stories, as they wanted them told accurately. They told him, “well, it seems we can’t get rid of you, so we’ll tell you some things.” 

Based on these relationships, Dan was able to incorporate a great deal of the Native perspective in his book, Across the Shaman’s River: John Muir, the Tlingit Stronghold, and the Opening of the North, which is about Muir’s relationship with the native peoples of Alaska.  The Natives appreciated and respected Muir because he was the first White Man they had met who did not want something from them.

Dan said that he recently spoke at a conference at the University of Oregon (where he now teaches part-time, commuting back to Alaska in summers) addressing the question “Was John Muir a racist?”  His students were surprised when Dan could tell this story, showing that the answer was no.

While there are differing interpretations, the facts Dan presented clarify that Muir respected the Alaska Natives.

You can listen to a 37 minute audio excerpt of Dan’s presentation here.

You can view Dan’s slideshow here.

[Note:  for all these links to box.com, you might be encouraged to register and/or login, but you do not have to do that to view the slides or listen to the audio.]

You can learn much of the substance of Dan Henry’s presentation by reviewing this 20 minute YouTube interview with Dan by film-maker Michael Conti, recorded on April 1, 2022.

Carolyn Finney, (via Zoom) an independent scholar and author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, talked about that theme.

She grew up in the gardener’s cottage on a 13-acre estate in a wealthy white neighborhood of Mamaroneck, N.Y., where her father was a combination caretaker, groundskeeper, and chauffeur, and her mother kept house. It was, she recalls, “a beautiful piece of property,” with flower and vegetable gardens, a lake, and a variety of fruit trees. The owners, who were there only on weekends and holidays, lived in “what I call the big house.”

She said that Black stories are often “forgotten stories,” using her family’s experience as an example. Her father tended to all the beautiful trees, shrubbery and flowers, and Carolyn and her siblings often had the run of the place. Eventually, the land-owners (their employers) sold their property, but they helped her father set up a house in New Jersey for he and Carolyn’s mother to live in retirement. Of course, her father missed the beautiful grounds that he had tended for 40 years, especially a beautiful tree that he had planted as an anniversary gift to his wife.  During the time Carolyn was growing up there, she and her family were the only Black people for miles around. 

She remembers one event that sort of scarred her  – – one day when she was 9 or 10 years old, she was walking home from school, with her schoolbooks, when the police stopped her and asked what she was doing in this (white) neighborhood. She explained that she lived there, and was walking home from school.  She should not have been asked that because it should have been obvious – but she was Black.  When she got home, she told her father, who called the police department, very angry, and they never bothered her again.

Years later, Carolyn was telling the story about growing up in this beautiful wealthy estate to a documentary film-maker, who plans to include it in a film she was making. The property had changed hands several times since Carolyn’s family lived there, and the original land-owners were long gone as well.  But there was a conservation easement on the property, to retain its natural beauty and to prevent rampant development, so the film-maker contacted the land trust to see if they could get access to the property for the film.

They did so; but when Carolyn went back on the property, she was greatly saddened to see that the special tree her father had planted was gone.  In fact, most of the beautiful flowers and shrubbery  her father had planted and tended was gone – newer owners over the years had removed any vegetation that would require a lot of work to manage – they did not have a live-in gardener like previous generations.  Most notably, Carolyn bemoaned the fact that the tree had been removed, and there was no memory whatsoever of her family on this land. The relationships between land and people – and black people in particular – tend to get lost.  Her family’s story had been erased and the film was the only possible way to tell the story now.  So, they talked with the current land-owners, and they agreed to allow them to re-plant the special tree.

Carolyn echoed what Dan had said previously – that the only way to have respect and appreciation between races is to develop a relationship.   Where the relationship is lost, such as when her family was no longer on the land and the previous land-owner had sold the property to someone else, the memory and the relationship dissolved as is always the case when property is transferred from one owner to another. But the same loss of memory of relationships between land and people can happen with public lands too.

The Symposium’s Program indicated that she would also cover ”her current research on Muir’s 1867-68 trip through the post-Civil War South.” but she did not discuss that at all.

You can listen to a 38 minute audio excerpt of Carolyn’s presentation here:

I also have audio of 5 minutes from the question and answer period here. 

Clifford Trafzer, distinguished professor of history and Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs at UC Riverside, spoke about Muir and Native Californians. Prof. Trafzer, is an authority on his special subject matter in the study of California natives, but admitted at the outset that he was just beginning to learn about John Muir.  The title of his presentation slides pretty much explains the entirety of his talk:  “John Muir’s Missed Opportunities: Ignoring Native American Cultural and Environmental Knowledge.” I hope that Dr. Trafzer will consider some contravening points, since many contemporary Muir scholars, based on a more thorough and careful study of the entirety of mMuir’s life and writings, have come to a different conclusion than he has.

In many ways, I found his presentation to be a simple repetition without improvement of what non-academic blogs have said about Muir, such as “What John Muir Missed: The Uniqueness of California Indians” by Lawrence Hogue,  
(September 16, 2016). That essay, like so many, was based almost entirely on secondary sources, and omit much of what Muir himself actually wrote about Native Americans.

Clifford faulted Muir for having “no empathy” for the Native California Indians, and no appreciation for traditional environmental knowledge. I believe there is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.

For example, Dr. Trafzer was unaware of Muir’s relationship with the Sequoyah League. While acknowledging that you had heard of the League, after the program he told me that he was unaware of Muir’s association with it. Yet Muir’s financial support of this organization, which strongly and vociferously supported Native American rights, is a most clear positive affirmation of Muir’s empathy for Native Americans.  In one of Muir’s letters to the Sequoyah League’s Charles Lummis, Muir’s sympathy was made clear by his concern for “your poor Indians” and “our unfortunate fellow mortals,”

Some say the Sequoyah League had an ethnocentric bias, but given that time in history it could hardly have been otherwise. When donating to the Sequoyah League, Muir wrote, on March 18, 1902, “I feel sure that now something sensible and brotherly will be done for them.” This seems a heartfelt expression of kindness and empathy to me, specifically directed toward California Natives. 

You can learn more about Muir and read his letters regarding the Sequoyah League here. 

Furthermore, at the outset, Dr. Trafzer explained that his observations were limited to parts of Muir’s published books that mentioned California Indians.  Accordingly, he did not address many of Muir’s many positive remarks about other Native Americans – especially those in Alaska but also elsewhere – which may be found in his newspaper articles, his journals, and and personal letters. Muir found occasion to praise the “fine natural gladness” of Indians in Nevada; the “able, erect” men of Arizona Indians; the “natural dignity, good breeding, intelligence, and skill” of the Alaska Natives of southeast Alaska; and he sung the praises of the Inupiat of the Bering Sea, who he described as “better behaved than white men, not half so greedy, shameless or dishonest…”

In the beginning of his talk, Dr. Trafzer contended that Muir’s “Calvinist and Puritanism” [sic] upbringing contributed to his arrogant views of Native Americans, citing Calvinist ideas as:

• The Elect and God’s Covenant
• God’s Children vs. Satan’s Children
• Clean v. Dirty

I believe that Trafzer’s premise was faulty from the outset. Muir’s father was not a Calvinist, but a Campbellite – whose doctrine held an anti-Calvinist view of human nature.  Campbellites actually embraced not only “free will,” but also the beauty of nature as divine inspiration.  Furthermore Puritanism was an English, not a Scottish form of Fundamentalist Protestantism, and so is irrelevant to Muir’s story. So Dr. Trafzer’s conclusions that Calvinism asserts that “God’s Children” did not include non-Europeans, and that the natural world was “impure” rather than holding sacrality as Native Americans do, simply does not apply to either John Muir’s upbringing, or to his subsequent liberal religious views.

Campbellite Fundamentalism, like all Fundamentalist Protestantism, asserted that Nature was created to serve mankind and is, in fact, subservient to him. But that belief was specifically rejected by John Muir, who instead had a heartfelt belief that Nature most certainly has intrinsic value, and that humankind is an integral part of Nature. This is a  theme that resonates even in Muir’s earliest writings. Muir rejected his father’s Campbellite beliefs rather thoroughly. See: John Muir’s Stance against Anthropocentrism by Bron Taylor 

After his 1,000 mile walk, John Muir’s views about religion became Nature-centered and rejected any idea that human beings were the pinnacle of Creation. Muir’s clear contention at the end of his 1,000 mile walk proves that he embraced not only all people, but all living creatures as part of the “Elect” – specifically arguing that animals should not be excluded from Heaven the way orthodox Christian doctrine provided. Given this vastly ecumenical philosophy, embracing “all God’s people” – human and more-than-human alike –  by necessity Muir considered indigenous people to be among “God’s people” along with all other living things. Muir in fact praised Native Americans for their spiritual maturity which was so similar to his own views of the natural world: 

“To the Indian mind all nature was instinct with deity. A spirit was embodied in every mountain, stream, and waterfall.” [John of the Mountains, 315.] 

Yes, it is true that Muir’s aversion to dirtiness was likely a part of  his strict Scottish  upbringing. Working on a farm, he likely was required to take daily baths after a long day of farm work. After he left home, his writings are full of references to taking “baptism” in nature’s streams, lakes, and waterfalls, a relationship with water that was seems more than merely physical, but actually spiritual.

When talking about Muir’s contemporary era during his childhood and young adulthood, Dr. Trafzer appeared to assume that John Muir,  who was only an 10 year old boy when arriving in the United States in 1849, would have been aware of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), California Statehood (1850), or any the 18 broken California treaties with Indians.  Given Muir’s age, this assumption seems unlikely.

When discussing Muir’s journals, Dr. Trafzer rather starkly alleged that Muir had “little understanding or empathy” about Native Americans. This assumption ignores Muir’s observation that the Indians he met in Yosemite were “haunted” and even “degraded” by Euro-American white culture. As Muir scholar Donald Worster notes, 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 the passage 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.”  

I do not see how Muir’s expecting and hoping for world-wide brotherhood among all people can be characterized as expressing “little understanding or empathy.” 

As professor Raymond Barnett shows, any negative criticism found in Muir’s writings about Native Americans was focused on their “degraded” status as a result of white colonialism; not their pre-contact lifestyles:
John Muir: Racist or Admirer of Native Americans?  

In addition, many of the points made in Dr. Trafzer’s  presentation – as with much of the popular press these days – were based on lifting a sentence or two from Muir’s writings and interpreting them in isolation and rather completely out of context, whereas reading nearby passages or other of his writings would show his often humorous and jocular writing style would show a much different interpretation. 

For example, when discussing Muir’s pejorative writings about Native Americans, Clifford quotes Muir’s description of “queer, hairy, muffled creatures” …. “shuffling, shambling, wallowing toward me,” with “dirt on their faces … old enough and thick enough to have geological significance.”  As we shall see, Muir used several of these phrases like “geological significance” to describe some whites as well!  If Muir was pejorative, he was an equal-opportunity critic! 

When Muir uses the term “queer,” he doesn’t hesitate to apply it to his own luggage (his inventions) or to some of his best white friends he visited in Wisconsin, who he described in an 1865 letter to his sisters, as having “queer customs, and queer people with queer names. One man is called Lake, another Jay, Eagle, Raven, Stirling, Bird. Mr. Jay married Miss Raven a few weeks ago.” So Muir didn’t use that word in a derogatory, but rather a humorous sense, as he frequently wrote with such a sense of humor. 

Similarly, Muir’s aversion to “dirtiness” was not confined to the California Native Americans.    In his book, My First Summer in the Sierra, Muir described his white companion – “Billy the Shepherd” – a Basque shepherd – as “a queer character” whose trousers, ‘Instead of wearing thin they wear thick, and in their stratification have no small geological significance.” [emphasis added.] Muir reported that “His trousers, in particular, have become so adhesive with the mixed fat and resin that pine needles, thin flakes and fibres of bark, hair, mica scales and minute grains of quartz, hornblende, etc., feathers, seed wings, moth and butterfly wings, legs and antenna of innumerable insects, or even whole insects such as the small beetles, moths and mosquitoes, with flower petals, pollen dust and indeed bits of all plants, animals, and minerals of the region adhere to them and are safely imbedded, so that though far from being a naturalist he collects fragmentary specimens of everything and becomes richer than he knows.”

It seems Muir’s criticism of “dirtiness” was not based on racial characteristics; just plain observation. 

Furthermore, to Muir, white townspeople living in cities were particularly degraded:

“All are more or less sick; there is not a perfectly sane man in San Francisco.” And elsewhere 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 with a group of Alaskan Indians he joined around a campfire on the shore of Glacier Bay.  

When discussing Muir’s supposed lack of appreciation of Native knowledge, Dr. Trafzer missed Muir’s 1878 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 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.”  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). 

Moreover, the portions of My First Summer that are so typically described as “derogatory” by various pundits today show that what Muir was repulsed by was NOT such things as the food they ate (e.g. the pine-nuts or even the fly larva at Mono Lake), but rather due to the Natives he first met being intensely focused on tobacco and whiskey. While it is easy to have a romanticized view of Native Americans today, what Muir was responding to was their degradation by negative encounters with white people, creating a culture poisoned by tobacco and whiskey.

Muir wasn’t saying their “traditional” ways were wrong, but rather he recognized that whiskey and tobacco brought by whites had “degraded” them – creating poverty and suffering. This is clearly a criticism of whites rather than of natives. Muir’s criticism of Euro-American people degrading Natives with alcohol would be repeated when he was writing about Alaska Natives later on. And yet, in his My First Summer journal, Muir immediately felt pained by his own negative reaction and expressed regret for it. Muir wrote: 

“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 passage quoting Burns, plainly expressing Muir’s desire for universal brotherhood regardless of race or culture, is really quite remarkable, being expressed during a period of history when probably most of his contemporaries were true Indian-haters. Even a dozen years later, Muir’s contemporaries, such as botanist Sara Lemmon, were saying things about Natives such as “I wish they [the Apaches] might be exterminated. They are as worthless material in the great economy of civilization as so many man-eating tigers.” (Of course, other tribes may have felt the same way; for example, the frequent Euro- American allies, the Tohono Oʼodham and the Pueblo Indians, undoubtedly felt the same way about their enemies – –  the war-like, raiding Apaches.) 

But Muir never wrote anything close to the anti-Indian pejoratives so commonly written in his lifetime. In fact, contrast what Sara Lemmon wrote, with what Muir actually wrote about Native Americans after getting to know them and living among the Tlingit natives in Alaska: “Uncle Sam has no better subjects, white, black, or brown, or any more deserving his considerate care.” He even said of the Tlingit,“They should send missionaries to the Christians.” [Journals, 1879 – First Alaska Trip with S. Hall Young].

Muir wrote more than once about “the brotherhood of all peoples of whatever color or name.”   (E.g. John Muir’s Journal for October-December 1879, First Alaska Trip with S. Hall Young Image 27. This is a view as far removed from bigotry as one can imagine. And yet it seems Dr. Trafzer, like most contemporary pundits and bloggers, somehow miss these fundamentally different views between Muir and most of his white American peers. 

Another difficulty I had with Dr. Trafzer’s presentation was how he ignored the points that previous speakers Daniel Henry and Carolyn Finney had made in their presentations.  Mr. Henry and Ms. Finney made clear that in order to get information from Native people, it requires years of dedicated efforts in building relationships. You can’t just casually ask the Indians you happen to meet when crossing Mono Pass for information about their “traditional indigenous knowledge” when all they wanted was whiskey and tobacco. Moreover, as a budding young botanist and geologist, Muir’s scientific inquiry lay in studying plants, animals, and geological processes directly — he could not be expected to simultaneously become a proto- anthropologist. 

How could we expect Muir to have any idea that these blighted Native people did in fact possess so much traditional indigenous knowledge, which we only know about today because of later decades of research by anthropologists and a very recent willingness by a few Natives to come forward to explain their heritage?  Even today, many Native people quite understandably keep their traditional ways secret from white men – especially in matters of religion and ceremonial life ways. In fact, Clifford pointed out that it was only after many years, that a California Native he knew finally took him to a secret place in the desert where one could find below-surface water, which was an ancient native sacred site. The clear implication was that Dr. Trafzer might have been the first white man for whom this secret knowledge was shared. It seems disingenuous to fault people like Muir for not demanding that the Natives explain their traditional indigenous knowledge, when under the circumstances the Natives were decidedly not willing to offer to anyone an explanation of their traditional life ways, but were instead begging for tobacco and whiskey. 

In his presentation, Dr. Trafzer ignored Muir’s other laudatory writings about Native Americans,  where he said “Indians walk softly and they hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last longer than those of wood rats…” Muir’s writings elsewhere likewise expresses his admiration for their skills in foraging and finding native plants and animals to eat in the wilderness. And  – falsifying many contemporary assertions to the contrary – Muir specifically noted how Native peoples interacted productively with the landscape while living in harmony with wild nature, writing about their positive influence “on the forest by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds.”

While in Alaska, Muir did in fact speak and write about the equality of all people, “regardless of color, or race,” and wrote about the immorality of slavery in his final book, Travels in Alaska. 

Muir described his conversations with the Alaska Natives, describing “how we were all children of one father,” and went on to say he:

“… 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.”

He had additional praise for the Natives of the Southwest as well.  In Arizona, Muir would write admiringly of the ancient and contemporary people who lived in Arizona’s Grand Canyon region, commenting about how “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.” 

I thus found Dr. Trafzer’s presentation wanting for what it omitted, as much as for what he contended.  He simply left out most of Muir’s positive references to Native Americans. Many references to those writings can be found collected here.

Unfortunately, there was not time for a Q & A  or discussion period after Dr. Trafzer’s  presentation due to time constraints.   

I hope that Professor Trafzer will in the future expand his research more widely.  If he does so, he may learn that,  as Bruce Byers writes, “Anyone who accuses Muir of not understanding or honoring America’s Indigenous peoples hasn’t understood his philosophy at its depth.”  (See: “Criticizing Muir and misunderstanding the foundation of American nature conservation,” by Bruce A Byers, The Ecological Citizen, Vol 5 No 1 2021: 65–73. 

I believe that most people, like myself, are greatly supportive of the need to expose and recall the injustices perpetrated by our past and present Euro-American society, and the need to right those wrongs. But that “righting of past and present wrongs” will be most successful if it makes a clear distinction between the actual racists of Muir’s times, and does not mistake as racism mere isolated statements which may be deemed ignorant and problematic under today’s standards, but were lacking actual animus. In this vein, an exploration by John Clayton is instructive, as he points out that terms like “racist” and “white supremacist” no longer have their traditional association with hatred and animus, but are now widely applied to simple ignorance.  See “Was John Muir Racist? The answer depends, not on Muir’s actions, but on how you define racist” by John Clayton  WyoHistory Blog (August 12, 2020.)  Muir may have been ignorant of much of Native culture, even paternalistic, but in an era when there really were murderous “Indian haters,” Muir instead defended the rights of Native Americans.  He may have been lacking in his knowledge, but his views certainly do not warrant applying the traditional definition of “racist.”  

In any case, John Muir, if not “pure” by our present standards, was certainly well in advance of their peers in understanding and attempting to correct those past wrongs. 

I am glad to report that when I shared these points with Dr Trafzer a few months after the conference, he acknowledged “I appreciate your criticism and plan to learn more in the near future. Thank you for taking the time to offer these comments and help me dig deeper into the life and career of John Muir.”

You can view my photos of Dr. Trafzer’s slides here.

You can listen to a 45 minute audio excerpt of Dr. Trafzer’s presentation here.

Kayleigh Guyon, University of the Pacific student (’22), was scheduled to present her research on Muir and food, but she was unable to present, due to illness.

Lunch – the theme for lunch was Chinese food, in honor of the afternoon’s topic and to celebrate the Chinese cooks who prepared meals for Sierra trips such as the 1915 Mather Mountain Party to Sequoia and Kings Canyon (PDF – Ch. 7 of Creating the National Park Service: the Missing Years, by Horace M. Albright and Marian Albright Schenck (1999)). to promote establishing the National Park Service, various Sierra Club trips, and Muir’s own Chinese cook, Ah Fong.

Poster Session –  Students from the University of the Pacific’s “John Muir’s World” class presented their posters discussing their research projects.  I walked around the room looking at all of these, and spoke with many of the students (Because COVID-19 was still a concern, we were all wearing face masks.)  There were a wide range of topics; for example Muir and “Sketching,” “Emerson,” “Botanical Exploration,” “Religion,” “Alaskan Natives,” “Transcendentalism,” “Snow,” “Mountaineering,” “Wildlife Conservation,” “Inventions,” and various other topics.

You can view photos of nearly all the posters, several accompanied by the students who created them, here.

Yenyen Chan, Yosemite National Park

An interpretive Ranger, Yenyen Chan has been researching the Chinese experience in Yosemite’s history, in the context of the early history of California, and sharing her insights with the public through a variety of interpretive programs.

In the context of the horrible background of the intense racial discrimination Chinese immigrants faced in the late 19th and early 20th century, Yenyen told how these resourceful people found alternative work as laborers, cooks, and laundry workers. Discouraged from mining since 1850 by the Foreign Miners Tax and later from immigrating by the Chinese Exclusion Act, they yet survived, and made major contributions to Yosemite and other national parks.

Chinese workers built the wagon road from Yosemite Valley to Tuolumne Meadows. In Yosemite they worked as cooks and staff for Yosemite’s early hotels.  Among them were Tie Sing, who was a cook on many mountain expeditions. He worked as a backcountry cook working for the United States Geological Survey.  In 1915, Stephen Mather, a special assistant to the secretary of the interior, hired Sing to cook for a two-week wilderness expedition intended to convince business and cultural leaders of the importance of a national park system.  Amazingly, the USGS named a peak in 1899 for Sing in honor of his outstanding service, 16 years before he joined the Mather Party. 

Yenyen continues to work to better integrate the Chinese history into the general understanding of the park along with conventional history.  When it was discovered that a small building being used as a storage site in Wawona was once the Chinese laundry there, the NPS is now converting it to a museum to celebrate the Chinese workers who were so instrumental in making visitors’ tour of Yosemite a comfortable one.

You can listen to my audio recording of Yenyen’s presentation here.

I only took photos of a few of her slides, but here they are.

A recent NBC News report on this topic tells more of her story, including an interview of Yenyen.

Other website stories on this topic:

• The Role of Chinese in Yosemite History (NPS)
• Welcome to Yosemite’s Chinese Laundry Building (Sierra Magazine)
• Chinese  History Come to Life in Yosemite  (Yosemite Mariposa County Tourism Bureau) 

Panel on how Muir is Being Reconsidered at Muir-related Sites

The Panel was moderated by University of the Pacific curator Lisa Cooperman.

• John Muir National Historic Site (Kelli English)
• Sierra Club (Dan Chu)
• University of the Pacific Muir Collections (Mike Wurtz)
• Yosemite National Park (Yenyen Chan)

Each person presented briefly on the topic, followed by a bit more discussion.

Lisa Cooperman, University Curator for University of the Pacific, discussed how museums are changing their focus from just displaying historical “objects” in the abstract, to instead provide stories of the people who used those objects. Then, throughout the panel discussion, she engaged the panel in thoughtful questions.

Kelli English  expressed the view that it is a good thing to not have “heroes” like John Muir always set up on pedestals, that it is better to know them as human beings, who contributed to society but also had their flaws.  She did not address Muir specifically all that deeply. The bigger picture for her is the more over-arching story that the National Parks were created “by and for” wealthy White people, and that too often Native people were removed from the parks, both literally, and in terms of telling their stories. The NPS is now trying to get back to some of the stories of people of color, such as Sheldon Jackson’s revelations about the role the “Buffalo Soldiers” in Yosemite, and Yenyen’s revelations about the important role that Chinese people contributed to the national parks.  She revealed that the next “rotating exhibit” room at the John Muir House would be focused on racial issues. It is currently focused on women in Muir’s life.

Dan Chu began by reading verbatim the a small excerpt from the Sierra Club’s History and Future Task Force final report about John Muir:

“John Muir is a complex historical figure and a symbol of the early conservation movement. The Sierra Club acknowledges that John Muir used derogatory language about Black Americans and Indigenous people that created harm. 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.”

However, I was disappointed that after that short paragraph, he completely omitted the first part of the report which had put all this in context.  That first part of the report read:

“John Muir, one of the Sierra Club’s founders, sparked the movement to preserve millions of acres of land from logging and mining, and inspired generations of people to protect nature. The Sierra Club recognizes the importance of Muir’s conservation efforts with regard to designation of national parks, national forests, and rangelands, which prevented hundreds of millions of acres from being privatized and transferred into the hands of white logging, mining, and livestock grazing corporations enabled by 19th century colonization laws like the Timber and Stone Act, Homestead Acts, and Desert Lands Act.”

To me this was a very important part of the statement, putting Muir into perspective for his contributions, and not purely faulting him, as the original Brune blog did. To omit it skewed a primary thesis of the task force report.

But worse than that omission, Dan Chu badly mis-represented the report’s statement about the issue of eugenics.  Dan talked about the views of Henry Fairfield Osborne Sr., Joseph LeConte Sr., and David Starr Jordan, who publicly espoused pseudoscientific theories that eventually led to eugenics.  Then he said rhetorically, “Did John Muir hold the same views?  We will never know.”

That statement violated the Task Force report’s initial admonishment:

“Don’t lump Sierra Club’s early founders together. Name individual ownership of harmful views and actions.”

In fact, the Task Force report explicitly rejected any allegation of “guilt by association” by explicitly stating:

“There is no evidence John Muir supported their beliefs.”

Thus Dan Chu badly misrepresented the Sierra Club’s formal investigation and report on this issue, a position which had ratified by the Club’s Board of Directors.

Chu also ignored the fact that we actually do know that Muir did not hold the same views about racial superiority held by the eugenicists. Eugenics as a so-called “scientific” discipline did not gain traction in the United States until the 1920’s, years after Muir had died. On the contrary, Muir repeatedly expressed his belief in the brotherhood of all people – – even, all mortals. As we’ve seen, when speaking with the Tlingits, he spoke of the “brotherhood of man—how we were all children of one father; sketched the characteristics of the different races of mankind, showing that no matter how they differed in color and no matter how various the ways in which they got a living, that the white man and all the people of the world were essentially alike; we all had ten fingers and ten toes and in general our bodies were the same whether white or brown or black…” 

In my view, the Sierra Club Task Force report gives the opportunity to retain Muir as a positive part of the Sierra Club “brand,” even while acknowledging that like everyone, he may not have been perfect.  But Dan Chu failed to take the opportunity to do that, and instead simply perpetuated the same inapt views that Brune had initiated.  While even Brune’s statement had its problems, it triggered a needless exaggeration and misrepresentation of Muir’s views by gleeful bloggers and innumerable newspaper reports, which pitifully ignored all the nuances required.

Yenyen Chan also spoke briefly, but she had already made her main points (if I remember correctly) during her own presentation. Again, the main point was how the NPS is moving to do a better job than it has in the past at providing information about the role and contributions of people of color with reference to the parks, including not only Native Americans, but other non-whites as well, a quite laudable effort.

Mike Wurtz expressed the constructive point that many institutions, including those in higher education, are now doing more to identify and celebrate the role and contributions of people of color. For example, the  University of the Pacific is recognizing and educating people on the fact that the site of the university was once a Native American village.

You can listen to an audio recording of the panel discussion here.

Final Statement by Bill Hanna

After the panel was completed, Mike Wurtz and Bill Swagerty invited Muir descendant Bill Hanna to come to the front, who wanted to read a final statement. Bill read the following passage from John Muir’s writings, which he said he believed most succinctly encapsulated John Muir’s world view of love for all creatures of the Earth, including mankind:

“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.”
– June 9, 1872 letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley, in Badè’s Life and Letters of John Muir.

You can listen to Bill’s introductory statement and the foregoing quote (about 2 minutes) here.

Reception at the Library’s Muir Experience

The Symposium attendees then moved from Grace Covell Hall over to the Holt-Atherton Library, where just off the main entrance was the new “Muir Experience,” a small museum dedicated to John Muir, located on the ground floor of the main Library near the entrance. The conference attendees toured the “Muir Experience” and participated in a reception.

At the reception, several tributes were made in honor of Bill Swagerty, who will soon be retiring  after 21  years as a UOP professor, including work directing the university’s John Muir Center. The symposium organizers also expressed appreciation to the Muir family who have made preservation of the John Muir Papers possible. 

I took about 33 photos of the “Muir Experience,” which you can view here.

Learn more about the Muir Experience here.

Speakers and Family Dinner

When the conference was over, Janet and I were delighted that Mike and Bill invited us to attend the final post-symposium dinner, arranged for the speakers and the Muir family descendants.  We enjoyed sitting at the same table as NPS Ranger Andrew Marker from John Muir National Historic Site, Sierra Club librarian Therese Dunn, and one of today’s speakers, Daniel Lee Henry.  There were many toasts and appreciations expressed to Bill Swagerty and all the family members especially.

–  6 March 2024