A settler’s paradise: Robert Aquinas McNally, Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness, University of Nebraska Press, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

A settler’s paradise: Robert Aquinas McNally, Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness, University of Nebraska Press, 2024

03Jun24

Description: 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’.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed