OCR Text |
Show 300. That an Indian would go to Mono Lake for a vacation from a resort hotel in Yosemite, was a fine irony indeed. And the man's view of the desert as paradise was also suggestive. But Muir never pursued this insight, and in fact eliminated this passage from the revised version of the essay as it appeared in The Mountains of California. It is hard for me to understand. Did he get unfavorable comments about his description of the Indian's diet? Did he decide that Americans were incapable of acquiring a sense of place from Native Americans? Did he think that there was no point in trying to fight the American fear and hatred of "savages?" For whatever reason, Muir never managed to integrate completely the figure of Native Man into his ecological vision of the American wilderness, though he mourned the passing of Alaskan cultures in the newspaper articles collected as Cruise of the Corwin. We have always been part of the flow, yet we still have trouble defining our place in it. Even the Wilderness Act indicates that in wilderness, "man is a visitor and does not remain." Since the Indian has always been more than a visitor to the American continent, legislators had to draw a line between "European man" and "indigenous cultures." In this symbolic act they separated white Americans from a true and complete relationship with those lands. It was a practical and perhaps Politically necessary distinction, but was also the result of a history filled with prejudice and ignorance. The Wilderness Act is certainly not a document meant to further a deeper understanding of Man's relationship with the earth. As long |