Cast Out of Eden

The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness

Robert Aquinas McNally

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781496227263
• eBook ISBN: 9781496239198
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

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.”

Cast Out of Eden tells this neglected part of Muir’s story—from Lowland Scotland and the Wisconsin frontier to the Sierra Nevada’s granite heights and Alaska’s glacial fjords—and his take on the tribal nations he encountered and embrace of an ethos that forced those tribes from their homelands. Although Muir questioned and worked against Euro-Americans’ distrust of wild spaces and deep-seated desire to tame and exploit them, his view excluded Native Americans as fallen peoples who stained the wilderness’s pristine sanctity. Fortunately, in a transformation that a resurrected and updated Muir might approve, this long-standing injustice is beginning to be undone, as Indigenous nations and the federal government work together to ensure that quintessentially American lands from Bears Ears to Yosemite serve all Americans equally.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Donor Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part 1
• 1. From Old World to New
• 2. A Widening World Darkens
• 3. The Ungodliness of Dirt
• Part 2
• 4. Yosemite’s Genocidal Backstory
• 5. Return to the Garden
• 6. Well Done for Wildness!
• 7. Missionary to the Tlingits
• 8. One Savage Living on Another
• 9. The Grapes of Wealth
• Part 3
• 10. Wilderness Influencer
• 11. On Top of the World
• 12. River Out of Eden
• 13. Leave Only Footprints, Take Only Pictures
• 14. Bettering America’s Best Idea
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Robert Aquinas McNally
• Illustrations