‘A mountaineering club for ... white people’
When the Sierra Club was formed under Muir’s leadership, it was “basically a mountaineering club for middle- and upper-class white people who worked to preserve the wilderness they hiked through,” Brune, its executive director, wrote.
“For all the harms the Sierra Club has caused, and continues to cause, to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color,” he wrote, “I am deeply sorry.”
The racist writing of Muir that Brune referred to was outlined in a story by Atlas Obscura titled “The Miseducation of John Muir.” That piece described how Muir once wrote that he found the homes of the Cherokee people to be “wigwams of savages.” The houses of the white people living nearby, however, were “decked with flowers and vines, clean within and without, and stamped with the comforts of culture and refinement,” Muir wrote.
Muir also wrote about Native Americans in California, calling them “dirty,” “garrulous as jays,” “superstitious” and “lazy.”
He described an encounter with a Black family outside of Gainesville, Florida in equally harsh language. Their home was the “most primitive of all the domestic establishments I have yet seen,” and he sees a “black lump of something” that turns out to be a young boy.
“Birds make nests and nearly all beasts make some kind of bed for their young,” Muir wrote, “but these negroes allow their younglings to lie nestless and naked in the dirt.”
Muir didn’t view all Black families that way, the article says: “In other writings about his trip through the South, he sympathizes with African-Americans he meets, and bemoans the bigoted mindset he encounters amongst whites.”
Muir wasn’t alone among conservation leaders with his racist viewpoints.
In his essay, Brune pointed to two other Sierra Club members and leaders, Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan, who he said “were vocal advocates for white supremacy and its pseudo-scientific arm, eugenics.”
Jordan, who also was the first president of Stanford University, advocated for forced-sterilization laws and programs.
LeConte once wrote that “race repulsion and race antagonism is not a wholly irrational sentiment. It is an instinct necessary for the preservation of the purity of the blood of the higher race.”
Not everyone agrees with the Sierra Club’s rebuke of its high-profile founders.
Guy T. Saperstein, 77, a former president of The Sierra Club Foundation, a nonprofit group affiliated with the Sierra Club, called Brune’s post a “hatchetjob attack” on John Muir’s legacy in a letter to Brune and the Sierra Club’s board members. He publicly shared the letter with a Facebook group called “John Muir Fans.”
Reached at his San Francisco-area home, Saperstein said he wanted a “more balanced assessment” of Muir and noted that those racist writings took place when Muir was young. A more mature and thoughtful Muir later financially supported Native American causes and decried the unfair treatment of Black people, he said.
“And missing from your attack on Muir’s legacy is the most obvious and most commendable accomplishments of his life,” Saperstein wrote in the letter. “Muir’s work directly and by inspiration spawned the protection of more than 250 million acres of public lands and over 11,000 miles of wild rivers for the enjoyment of all Americans, regardless of race, sex, religion, national origin, age, disability, status and/or income.”
‘This is something you confront’
“A lot of people are upset and conflicted” after the Sierra Club’s apology, said Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison.
Muir laid the groundwork for the National Park Service, he said, and “obviously that’s a good thing, right?”
Muir’s vision of nature as a place of peace, beauty and spiritual renewal is an alluring concept. How could that be racist? It’s a concept shared by people across the planet.
But Muir and other early American conservationists used the ideas of colonialism and white supremacy to protect their idea of nature. And their concept of the wilderness ideal did not include the people who were already living in it.
“The biggest problem is the very idea of wilderness, which is so important to the magic, the fiction, the myth, that made the Park Service possible, is that you (had) to erase all those Native Americans,” Robbins said. “They (had) to vanish.”
No one can go back in time and change the perspectives of Muir and other powerful conservationists. But people now can look at it with wide open eyes, say those who believe that racial justice and environmental conservation are intertwined.
“This is something you confront. It’s time to talk about it,” Robbins said. “The parks are not going to go away. Nobody in the Native community is saying, ‘Turn the parks over to mining and oil explorations.’ You’ll not find anyone in Native communities who will make that argument. They want to talk about something else. They want to talk about their history on the land, their legacy. They stewarded the land for 10,000 years before anybody else showed up.”
How conservation connects to anti-racism
When August M. Ball heard about the Sierra Club’s apology, “my gut response was, ‘It’s about time’,” she said.
She has been working for years to help connect teens and other young people with conservation and nature as the founder and chief executive officer of Cream City Conservation. It’s a Milwaukee-based consulting firm that offers environmental education, public land stewardship, youth employment programs and strategies to increase diversity in organizations.
Ball, 38, is the daughter of a Black father and a white mother who split up when she was a young girl. After her mother was murdered when she was 4 years old, she said, her father sent her and her older sister to the Philippines, because he had remarried and his wife was from there.
“I grew up on a farm, speaking different languages, in a multi-religious, multi-racial household,” Ball said. The farm, she said, is “where my love of nature came from.”
She moved back to the United States at age 19, studied sociology at UW-Parkside in Kenosha and continued her education with graduate studies in nonprofit management at UW-Milwaukee. She also completed an African American Leadership Program at Cardinal Stritch College.
Her approach to conservation is markedly different from Muir’s. While Muir extolled the virtues of keeping certain parcels of land pristine, untouched by development, Ball sees conservation to be woven into the human experience, crucially linked to diversity, equity and anti-racism. She believes that efforts to preserve the natural world can enhance efforts to build an outdoors community and involvement for all, and vice versa.
“For me, I didn’t get drawn to nature because I love berries and birds. I love people, right? To me it’s about people,” she said.
There is overlap between Ball’s perspective and Muir’s. Muir treasured nature as a place for individual, personal and spiritual renewal. “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in,” he once said. “Where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”
Ball believes that, too. She thinks the disconnection between nature and young people, especially young people who grow up in cities and are Black, Latino or from other minority groups, can be at least part of the reason such teens so often struggle and engage “in risky behaviors.”
But barriers make it difficult for those children to connect with the natural environment. “For many people of color, being out in nature can often times be dangerous,” she said. “The woods, for example, do not represent the sanctuary for Black people that it might represent for white people.”
Cream City Conservation helps young people, ages 15 to 25, find themselves, learn about the environment and perhaps find a career pathway. The firm provides paid training and work experience for youths, helping to develop a new and more diverse “generation of environmental stewards,” she said.
“My goal is essentially to work myself out of a job,” Ball said. “What I like to think about is, OK, what would it look like if every major environmental organization, our DNRs, our U.S. Forest Service, our National Park system, our local county park systems, our nature centers, what would it look like if they were able to attract and retain a work force ... that was representative of the population they serve, of America?”
Muir fans resist conversation about racism
Not everyone is ready to discuss the racism displayed by Muir, even within the Sierra Club itself.
The Wisconsin chapter of the Sierra Club is named after John Muir. USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin reached out through email and phone calls to chapter director Elizabeth Ward. Ward did not respond to requests for an interview about the issue.
Many others are reluctant to talk publicly about the matter.
Tiffany Lodholz, president of the Wisconsin Friends John Muir group based in Montello, provided a written response via email when contacted.
The group acknowledged the racist viewpoints Muir expressed and it planned to hold a “virtual popcorn and ideas event that looks deeper into racial stereotypes that were present in some of his early writings and explore how these stereotypes impact people today. We will also learn how his views evolved over time, including Muir expressing admiration for indigenous stewardship of the land and concern about how they were separated from their land,” Lodholz wrote.
“By having difficult conversations and looking at the good and bad in equal measure we hope to begin the work of ensuring that all people feel welcome and safe in the land Muir loved and other wild spaces,” she wrote.
Lodholz later declined to say anything more on the matter, including whether the discussion event was held, and if it was, what concerns were talked about or whether any plans for future action were outlined.
USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin unsuccessfully reached out through the
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources public affairs office to speak with the secretary of the DNR, Preston Cole, about Muir’s legacy.
Cole was the first African American to graduate from the University of Missouri with a degree in forestry management and prior to taking the helm at the DNR, was the first Black person to become chairman of the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board.
In a June 2014 issue of Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine, Cole spoke about the virtues of improving the diversity in forestry, ecology and other outdoor fields.
Wausau School District officials said no one has approached to change the name of John Muir Middle School on the city’s west side. The Wausau School Board, and its president, Tricia Zunker, were leaders in an unsuccessful effort to introduce legislation to rid Wisconsin state schools of mascots, often depicting Native Americans, that are seen as offensive.
There also is a John Muir Elementary School in Madison. The principal of that school, Andrea Kreft, said no one has suggested changing its name, either.
Environmentalism merges with Native American ideas
Scrutinizing John Muir’s words and the actions of the Sierra Club and other early conservationists is a “great learning opportunity for everyone involved,” said Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings of Odanah. “We as a society have the ability to analyze these figures and tell the true history. And not gloss it over. We need to talk about the full scope of things.”
Jennings is a member of the tribal council of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa and the public information director for the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission.
The commission was formed in 1984 to support the Ojibwe people to exercise their treaty rights for hunting, fishing and gathering, and it offers natural resource management expertise, conservation enforcement and legal and policy analysis related to those rights.
For Jennings and other Ojibwe members, white conservation efforts throughout history have gone hand-inhand with the historical genocide and displacement of Native Americans.
“Tribes have been victims of this systemic racism for many years, for doing nothing more than practicing the way of life that they have been practicing for hundreds and hundreds of years,” Jennings said. “And so when it’s not safe to be who you are in a place where you were first, that’s really a sad notion to think about.”
Addressing that trauma, of which the Sierra Club’s apology is a part, is an important step toward a reconciliation, he said. Jennings also praised efforts to include Native American voices in the management of lands they hold sacred. For example, the National Park Service works with local Indian people in making decisions at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
But he said the most interesting aspect of today’s conservation and environmental thinking is that it is embracing philosophies long held by Native Americans.
“There is no word for ‘natural resources’ in our language,” Jennings said. “In our Ojibwe language we might say which breaks down into ‘from where we get life.’”
The Indigenous approach to conservation and caring for the environment “is very much rooted in reciprocity. And the environment is seen very much as the lifeblood of everything we do,” he said. “It’s a paradigm shift to some people, because it’s not about aesthetics or sheer ecosystem services. It’s more about the life that it gives, and the way that it sustains us and the relationships that we have with everything in creation.”
Jennings, who studied anthropology, archaeology and environmental studies at UW-Madison, sees that the green movement is shifting away from creating parks and wildlife areas and public land, which has a “tendency to categorize and lump areas together and managing things in that fashion ... in a way, it’s a colonized perspective.”
Now environmentalists are working on ways to preserve or upgrade water quality, green up urban areas and prevent air pollution, efforts that will affect people everywhere. In other words, the movement is looking more like a Native American approach to protecting the earth.
“What we’re seeing overwhelmingly is that science and some of the ecological practices are starting to validate traditional (Indigenous) ecological knowledge,” Jennings said. “TEK, they call it, or traditional ecological knowledge. And a lot of people are (using it) in making conservation and ecological decisions.”
Contact Keith Uhlig at 715-845-0651 or kuhlig@gannett.com. Follow him at @UhligK on Twitter.