Muir’s views prompt Sierra Club apology
Conservation pioneer held racist stereotypes
LOS ANGELES — The Sierra Club apologized Wednesday for racist remarks its founder, naturalist John Muir, made more then a century ago as the environmental group grapples with a harmful history that perpetuated white supremacy.
Executive Director Michael Brune said that it was “time to take down some of our own monuments” as statues of Confederate officers and colonists are toppled across the
U.S. in a reckoning with the nation’s racist history after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Muir, who founded the club in 1892, helped spawn the environmental movement and is called “father of our national parks,” is the focus of what Brune called a “truth-telling” about the group’s history.
“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. “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.”
Muir, who was born in Scotland, came to the U.S. as a young man and traveled and wrote extensively. He emphasized the need to preserve the land but also disdained American Indians and Black people and used offensive slurs to describe both.
He also kept company with other early club members and leaders who advocated for white supremacy and promoted the race through eugenics, which called for forced sterilization of Blacks and other minority groups, Brune said.
In other developments:
The public has submitted about 600 proposals for a new Mississippi flag without the Confederate battle emblem, the director of the state Department of Archives and History said Wednesday. “People are really engaged,” Katie Blount said.
A park on Chicago’s West Side will be stripped of the name of slave owner Stephen Douglas and may be renamed for abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a city’s parks commission decided Wednesday.
A New Mexico Hispanic leader upset about the removal of Spanish conquistador monuments is pushing for the state to end its support for Chicano and Native American Studies. New Mexico League of United Latin American Citizens executive director Ralph Arellanes wrote that the state’s largest university should dismantle both programs because they teach Latino students “self-hate” about their Spanish heritage.