Why CAST OUT OF EDEN
Named for my most recent book, Cast out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness, this newsletter reports on the historical realities that continue to shape this nation’s attitudes and policies toward America’s stunning legacy of wilderness. Our nation can decide where it’s heading only if it knows where it’s been — particularly the unsavory bits.
Who I am
For more than fifty years as a published writer, I’ve sought out stories that connect humans and the wild. My most recent books focus on this connection’s shadow side.
The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America's Gilded Age illuminates one of history’s dark corners. The conflict, which took place in remote northeastern California in 1872–73 and turned on who controlled what had been tribal land for millennia, climaxed a decades-long campaign of extermination and removal that symbolizes all too much of Euro-America's treatment of Native America. The book was a general-nonfiction finalist in the Northern California Book Awards and won a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club as the year's best book on California.
Cast out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness offers a new perspective on the nature mystic rightly lauded as the father of the national parks. Muir's wilderness vision came at a price: the dispossession of the tribal peoples whose homelands the national parks once were. The book explores this long-neglected part of Muir's story, his take on the tribal nations he encountered, and his embrace of an Indigenous-free wilderness ethos that forced tribes from homes and ranges. Fortunately, this longstanding injustice is beginning to be undone, as Indigenous Americans and the federal government work together to ensure that public lands serve all Americans equally.
For more on my work, check my website.
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