Reckoning with John Muir’s Racism today!

The recent acknowledgment of John Muir’s racist attitudes toward Native Americans and Black Americans has diminished his stature within the Sierra Club. I have had my own reckoning with the dichotomy between John Muir’s status as a pioneer of the environmental movement and his racist views of the people who lived on the land long before him. While many of his observations present his racial bias and erasure of Native Americans, I am of the opinion that he had a change of heart [to some degree] during his 1879 trip to Alaska. https://johnmuirmovie.com/2022/04/18/... While coming to terms with John Muir’s racism, I wanted to know more about Muir’s encounter with Native American tribes in Alaska. I discovered that author Daniel Lee Henry had also explored Muir’s Alaskan awakening in his book, Across the Shaman’s River: John Muir, the Tlingit Stronghold, and the Opening of the North. Henry has a direct connection to the Chilkat/Chilkoot Tlingit descendants, having lived and taught school in Haines, Alaska for many years. His book takes the reader into this community in Alaska during Muir’s Northern travels. I asked Henry to write a new foreword for the 2022 annotated printing of Travels in Alaska (Illustrated and Annotated) (which also includes an eBook and an audiobook version). It is important to address why this book continues to be significant and relevant in the context of our modern times. #johnmuir #unrulymystic #sierraclub