Return of the Repressed: Native Presence and American Memory in John Muir’s Boyhood and Youth

Abstract

Naturalist John Muir has often been criticized for his relative silence on the role of native peoples in occupying, forging, and tending the environments that he so often described as wilderness. His work is further marked by the absence of reflection on the elimination of native peoples from the land in and around the exact locales he revered most in his writing. Muir’s The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, published in 1912–1913, is an anomalous part of the naturalist’s historically important oeuvre in this regard. Unlike his earlier works, which commonly neglected accounts of native people in the United States, this book contains numerous descriptions of Native American people and lifeways. Exploring the text in its historical context, this research deploys psychoanalytic geography to understand the surprising return of natives to Muir’s landscapes and memories. That Native Americans, so absent or ignored in Muir’s previous work, would return in such full force in a late reflection, the research suggests, is no coincidence. The text, we conclude, represents the return of repressed memory, affecting the U.S. psyche at the time. Unable to consciously address complicity in, and benefits derived from, the violent removal of Native Americans from the landscapes of Muir’s youth, he (and, in turn, America) becomes the revolutionary progenitor for a national park system predicated in part on the expulsion, both discursive and physical, of native peoples. These expulsions are necessarily revisited again, as ghosts inscribed in a textual return of repressed memory, with significant implications for the conservation movement. Key Words: conservation, political ecology, preservation, psychoanalytic geography, wilderness.