![]() ![]() The killing of Floyd in May has sparked weeks of protests and led to calls to rename places named for Confederate officers and remove statues of historical figures who held slaves or colonized or exploited Native Americans.īrune said the Sierra Club once excluded people of color as it catered to middle- and upper-class whites. Revisiting Muir’s offensive remarks comes as environmental groups and the outdoor industry aim to be more inclusive. The discernible profile of Muir – with long beard, brimmed hat and walking stick gazing at Yosemite’s Half Dome – was stamped on the 2005 California quarter when the US Mint was producing a commemorative coin for every state. Muir is so widely revered that his name appears across California on everything from schools to national monuments, one of the state’s highest peaks, a giant swath of scenic Sierra Nevada wilderness that is bisected by a trail in his name and a national historic site. Then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger displays the final choice for the California commemorative quarter, featuring an image of naturalist John Muir. The way we created the wilderness areas we now rightly prize was racist.” “I would leave Muir’s name on things but explain that, as hard as it may be to accept, it is not just Muir who was racist. “There is a dark underside here that will not be erased by just saying Muir was a racist,” White said. American Indians needed to be removed in order to reinvent those places as untouched. Even though they had been there for thousands of years, Muir wrote that they “seemed to have no right place in the landscape”. Muir’s image of pristine wilderness unshaped by humans only existed if native people weren’t part of it. ![]() Until recent years, Muir’s legacy has been largely untarnished and focused on his conservation efforts, such as saving Yosemite Valley before it became a national park and preserving the world’s largest trees in what became Sequoia National Park.īut Richard White, a Stanford history professor, said Muir’s advocacy for wilderness has an inherent racial bias. ![]() Visitors walk through the Muir Woods National Monument, named after John Muir, in Marin county, California. ![]() He also kept company with other early club members and leaders, such as Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan, who advocated for white supremacy and promoting the race through eugenics, which called for forced sterilization of Black people and other minority groups, Brune said. He emphasized the need to preserve the land but also disdained American Indians as dirty savages and Black people as lazy “Sambos,” a particularly offensive slur. Muir, who was born in Scotland, came to the US as a young man and traveled and wrote extensively, romanticizing nature in breathless passages. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color.” “As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. “He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life,” Brune wrote on the group’s website. Muir – who founded the club in 1892, helped spawn the environmental movement and is called “father of our national parks” – figures prominently in what Brune called a “truth-telling” about the group’s early history. ![]()
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