Earlier today, the Sierra Club’s president Michael Brune, posted a letter to the organization’s website saying that it’s time to reckon with John Muir’s racist statements and associations with eugenics proponents.
Titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments,” the letter begins by stating, “It’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history.”
The biggest Sierra Club monument of all, of course, is John Muir.
Beloved by conservationists and outdoorists for decades for his reverence for wild places and his crucial role in kickstarting the conservation movement, the national park system, and the Sierra Club itself, Muir is largely the bearded, crinkled face representing America’s founding wilderness protector.
But, as activists have pointed out for years, Muir made disparaging comments about Black Americans and Native Americans that don’t sit well, in 2020. He had an undying reverence for wilderness and nature, but Muir was also, somewhat ironically, a man for whom refinement, technological advance, and the markings of traditional success were of great importance. He could also be deeply judgmental about people he encountered on his journey across the US.
Muir called Cherokee homes he visited in Oklahoma “the uncouth transitionist …wigwams of savages.” “Birds make nests and nearly all beasts make some kind of bed for their young,” wrote Muir upon visiting a Black family in Georgia, “but these negroes [sic] allow their younglings to lie nestless and naked in the dirt.”
Muir “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 explains in the letter. “As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.”
It wasn’t only Muir, however, the Sierra Club is reckoning with.
Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan, two crucial early members of the club, were eugenics supporters who expressed white supremacist views. From Brune’s letter, it’s easy to imagine they weren’t alone.
“In these early years, the Sierra Club was basically a mountaineering club for middle- and upper-class white people who worked to preserve the wilderness they hiked through — wilderness that had begun to need protection only a few decades earlier, when white settlers violently displaced the Indigenous peoples who had lived on and taken care of the land for thousands of years,” Brune explains. “The Sierra Club maintained that basic orientation until at least the 1960s because membership remained exclusive. Membership could only be granted through sponsorship from existing members, some of whom screened out any applicants of color.”
The Sierra Club has long expanded beyond that exclusivity and today has nearly 4 million dues-paying members nationwide (full disclosure: your author is among them). Brune wants to direct the club’s focus to expanding that number, especially among people who may have felt uncomfortable with the Sierra Club’s past.
“The whiteness and privilege of our early membership fed into a very dangerous idea — one that’s still circulating today. It’s the idea that exploring, enjoying, and protecting the outdoors can be separated from human affairs,” he says. “Black communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color continue to endure the traumatic burden of fighting for their right to a healthy environment while simultaneously fighting for freedom from discrimination and police violence.”
Brune goes on to say the club will shift millions of dollars toward hiring more BIPOC employees and in addressing environmental racism. This will include teaching programs for staff and volunteers. The organization plans to release more statements like Brune’s outlining what the Sierra Club is doing to further their goals and to continue the conversation about which monuments of the club’s past may need to be assessed.
This is an important step in changing the narrative around how we understand wilderness. Wilderness is associated with being untrammeled and pristine, ideas that go back to the very early days of settlement and colonization of the North America. There is a lot of cultural gate keeping around wilderness. It’s a good and healthy thing to rethink how we define wilderness, how to care for it, and who belongs in it.
What does that even mean? Who gatekeeps the wilderness? It seems pretty clear what it is and everyone belongs in it if they so choose. Why do people keep trying to force certain groups of people to participate in activities that, newsflash, might not appeal the same to them as they do to you? God the virtue signaling is just off the charts nowadays
I remember trying to get my black friends in high school to come and try surfing with me the constant reply was “you guys are crazy going out there”. I regret my “gate keeping”.
Plenty of white friends think I’m crazy for surfing too!
If someone grows up without a sense of safety in the world it is hard for them to consciously take on ‘risky’ activities, and that is especially relevant if your sense of being able, or not able, to be safe in the world is embedded in the colour of your skin or your gender i.e. something you cannot escape being and therefore cannot escape persecution for.
In reference to the Sierra Club looking at John Muir’s racist remarks –
I’m not sure John Muir was a “racist”… I’m in agreement with moving forward and bringing about change, but we also must learn to live with our faults and not try to “sanitize” everything.
My two cents…
Good point Sabastien! He lived in a different time, and made a huge positive contribution that lasts through our time.
Outstanding comment. At some point folks are going to run out of things to be outraged about. They’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel.
What the hell is environmental racism? Many of us grow & change for the better. Maybe we should doff our hats to Muir for changes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism
Events like the Flint Water Crisis does not help us grow and so far, there has not been any change.
Environmental racism encompasses a wide variety of things, but a striking example of it in past years would be manifest destiny, the idea that a superior race was ordained by God to use the land as they saw fit and to remove those who lived on it in order to claim resources. In modern times it looks like super fund sites in places like East Palo Alto; where hazardous waste was processed for years without permits or regulations, leading to increased cases of asthma and cancer, among other harms, in the predominantly minority community.
Acknowledging that historical figures we admire, such as Muir, had blind spots can inform us on how to examine our own ways of thinking. Realizing that an organization such as Sierra Club has a complicated history can help to inform how it will continue to grow, change, and serve the world.
I wish we would focus on what happens now and the future instead of the past.
Is our focus, time and resources better spent on what we can change now and in the future instead of discussing what people said, did in the past?
Why not have a statue of someone we deem now to racist but put up and equal sized statue of someone else next to it to show how far we have come. This way we accept the past and not hide from it but also celebrate the now.
James, I like the direction you are thinking. I agree, let us look forward and improve vs. look back and recriminate.
Sanitization will cause the lessons learned to be lost …thus repeated
Founders shouldn’t be looked at as Gods, Guru’s, or perfect humans. It’s important to bring attention and acknowledge their their faults and views that are now recognized as racist, but I don’t think they should be scrubbed from the history books. God only knows how our voices and actions will be interpreted in 100 years…I think we all need to adjust our lenses with which we judge people of different time periods.
Yale was named after a slave trader. Margaret Sanger tolerated racism as a means of improving the gene pool. Robert Byrd was a KKK leader. Hillary Clinton was the first public figure to raise doubts about Obama’s place of birth. All these liberal icons are excused and left untouched by the historical presentism currently sweeping the country, and I’m frankly uncertain what erasing John Muir will accomplish, other than making it harder to see how society has progressed since his time.
Can any organization not talk about racism and talk about what there organization or publication actually represents. Seems like everyone needs to jump on the racism train because that’s what’s in . Unfortunately the word is losing meaning and effect for the overuse of it. It also is causing more of a divide than unite.
And this is what he thought of the Florida Crackers-
“Later, after a difficult night sleeping on a soggy hillock and out of bread, Muir spotted a shanty occupied by a logging party. “They were the wildest of all the white savages I met,” he wrote. Nevertheless, they shared with him a meal of yellow pork and hominy. Still, Muir remained skeptical of Florida’s swampy citizens. They were too poor, too dirty, too primitive.“
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-miseducation-of-john-muir
“It is also true that Muir’s views did change over time. He was 29 on his walk to the Gulf, and not much older when he first entered California. Later in his life, he traveled to Alaska. Muir lived among various tribes, including the Chukchis and Thlinkit. “He grew to respect and honor their beliefs, actions, and life styles,” wrote scholar Richard Fleck, in a 1978 article in the journal, American Indian Quarterly. “He, too, would evolve and change from his somewhat ambivalent stance toward various Indian cultures to a positive admiration. “
So the dude was a snob, staring down his nose at people….seems a lot like the cancel culture nuts of today looking down their noses at those they see as beneath contempt.
How about you stay in your lane, Sierra Club?
I wonder why he said those things.
Another reason I think the Sierra Club is a Bullshit organization–As Sebastien nicely said, “move forward”, get over yourselves and your pathetic guilt or elitism.
Well stated Rudi! I’ll add that the less than rational minded are being manipulated by a seasonal political narrative/attempted power grab. The media, including this publication, love it because it creates emotion which creates eyes and ears, which creates advertising dollars.
Muir only described what he observed. Often times, “fact” is just a matter of fact…..
What a joke. At what point do we just delete everything that happened before yesterday and say no one and nothing mattered, so now we can all start pretending that the world is perfect and we can finally go on with our lives.
For those complaining of “sanitization” here – maybe I am misreading the letter, but I see nothing that indicates the Sierra Club is trying to remove Muir’s influence on the club or on conservation in general. It seems to me the club is trying to ensure Muir is seen as a whole person, including the bad parts. In fact, wouldn’t it be “sanitization” to NOT describe our histories as complex and filled with imperfect people?
Am I missing something in these comments?
I couldn’t agree more Paul. SC is only trying to recognize the full Muir, not wipe him from their history. If we ignore his flaws, then we are only sanitizing the past and the history of the Sierra Club.
Its almost like you’re the only person that read the article before posting a comment.
I doubt that “Ensuring Muir is seen as as whole person, including the bad parts” is the real goal. Do you think the reformers will be giving more or less attention to the actual words Muir uttered or wrote in regard to other races? I’m guessing less, accompanied by broad generalizations about his problematic words reflecting views common for his time (which is true) and a giant helping of how good and virtuous and woke today’s keepers of his flame are. They say it’s about confronting racism, but it’s really about signaling their own virtue and hoping it will keep the angry, self-righteous hordes of cancelers off their back.
Well reasoned and thoughtfully articulated. It’s disappointing to see so many people scared to bring the less flattering aspects of Muir to light. Nowhere in his statement does Brune dilute Muir’s contributions to conservation and land protection, nor does the Club advocate for erasing Muir from their history. However, bringing these issues to light helps acknowledge a past that has hurt and excluded black, indigenous, and other communities. Without re-interpreting our history with modern understanding would we still be celebrating Andrew Jackson expelling native peoples from the Southeast? Showing empathy for the suffering, past or present, of others helps bridge the divides left by a discriminatory past.
If the outdoor industry/lobby wants to broaden the reach of their marketing to bring more people into the wild, great. But I’m not sure how “bringing less flattering aspects of Muir to light” is going to have any kind of positive impact on those you describe as “hurt and excluded” in the past. In fact, many of those minorities (just like many white people who enjoy outdoor activities, in general) probably have no idea who Muir was / what he said and drawing attention to his statements will probably create more ill will about the man (and the organization that claims him as their founder) than if they would have just left it alone and said, “All are welcome in the great outdoors.” But as one other post here said, it’s all about the virtue signalling. Irreligious modern people simply can’t get enough of that delicious self-righteousness.
I find most of these comments disturbing and clearly from those with white privilege. These are great examples of white fragility and demonstrate an inability to empathize with other points of view.
Removing statues of oppressive people does not erase history. But it sure does cease to laud them as someone of importance.
I think what Sierra Club is doing is important—examining their past and how they got where they are, and most importantly, where they want to go.
The future of America is not white supremacy. The future is a diversity of races.
If you care about the future of wilderness (which was not truly wilderness and was stewarded by Native Americans before white colonialism), you would see that it’s critically important to encourage non-white people (who will become the population majority) to connect with undeveloped and public land so that it may be stewarded and protected for future generations of humans AND animals.
It is not true that non-whites don’t want to be in the wilderness, it’s that there is serious, systemic racism that inhibits their participation.
Now is the time to open up your eyes and see that the world you live in as a white person is not the same world that non-white people inhabit.
My non-white son and I have hiked a great deal together and he alone, I asked him his thought on this comment and he doesn’t see the “systemic racism that inhabits (his) participation”. Maybe he is just lucky or maybe the racism that certainly exists is less systemic than advertised.
Regardless, I am wholehearted in agreement (and I suspect every poster is also) that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy our outdoors.
I think the idea of reflecting back and seeing historical figures as whole people is important. Muir did a great thing helping to bring about the NPS and conservation of wild places, but we shouldn’t ignore the less flattering aspects of his life. After all Muir was human and we are all flawed. That being said it’s important to recognize the aspects lacking in the past to make a better future. We should all take time to reflect on those mistakes and work to make the future better. I think if Muir was alive now he would be able to acknowledge his error and evolve from it. At the end of the day the environment needs to be protected and it wouldn’t hurt to get all people invested in it regardless of color. I say this as a Latino that gets a lot of second looks in the backcountry.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
The man knew what he was talking about.
John Muir is just the tip of the iceberg of what we need to reconsider when we think about wilderness and its accessibility to BIPOC. The whole master narrative of rugged individualism plays into the view that the outdoors is a place for physically strong white men. The story about Muir romping around the wilderness covering crazy amounts of miles with a handful of oatmeal in his pocket certainly supports this rugged individualism. It’s time to rethink these associations about the great outdoors.
The reality is that Muir like us, are of our times. That is what we need to point to – the way our brains work is that we echo what we have learnt and if anyone has tried to learn about themselves we know how hard that is, first to see and then to change behaviours that may even be destructive to ourselves or others. We need is change the way our brains are programmed in the first place, so the thinking in a way that is destructive and derogatory to others (and the environment) does not happen in the first place… Muir was only echoing what society at that time ‘took for granted’, what he had been exposed to every day of his life, what society at that time (and now) wanted/s people to be exposed to: a society of division — division is an easy mechanism of control, unhappiness, profit.
To change what we are exposed to means changing systems from education, to employment, to parenting, to advertising, to government, to friendship. We learn what we are exposed to… our mirror neurones ensure this. We need to expose ourselves to a greater diversity of thinking and be open to discuss it openly: diversity of thinking builds resilience and inclusion.
It takes time (and hard work) to reprogram our minds, Muir as he aged (and I would suggest, as he challenged his mind) did he deprogram his mind and became to respect indigenous people.
We each need to set about deprograming and reprogramming our minds and to help those around us of any colour or age to deprogram their minds. I think that is what the Sierra Club is setting about doing and well, when one is learning something new we will often, very often, get it wrong, until we become into getting it righter. And the only way to become into being better at something is to practice. Let the work continue.