Environmental Knowledge, American Indians, and John Muir's Trap

This paper is a genealogy of emergences within environmental thought of who belongs in nature. Such a project reveals that there are specific nodes of environmental knowledge. Specifically, I will introduce the trap of conservationist John Muir, in which his hostile attitudes towards American Indians have gone unexamined by geographers and preservationists. Muir's disgust for many of the Indians he encountered produced the need to remove specific humans from natural spaces, thus naturalizing the concept of true wilderness being free of indigenous use. I first show how Muir's work has influenced classic environmental studies and histories without being critically read. The paper ends with a survey of recent work that challenges the removal of indigenous people from natural spaces and in turn forces new conceptions of the spaces of nature. Perhaps by pivoting from given concepts of wilderness, nature, and the environment, new possibilities of preservation may emerge.