Return of the Repressed

Native Presence and American Memory in John Muir'sBoyhood and Youth

Bibliographic Data

ID5147249
AuthorsPaul Robbins (0000-0002-2818-4732, University of Wisconsin–Madison), Sarah A Moore (0000-0003-3712-0199, University of Wisconsin–Madison)
Year2019
Volume109
Issue6
Pages1748-1757
Publication date2019-11-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2469-4452 • E-ISSN: 2469-4460
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/24694452.2019.1613956
OpenAlexW2961606607
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited25

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

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Epistemology · Ethnology · Homeland · Naturalism · Political science · Politics · Psyche · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Silence · Sociology · Wilderness · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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