Author Talk: Robert McNally on John Muir In-Person
The Mill Valley Library presents an evening with Robert McNally, author of Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness.
John Muir is lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to America’s vision of itself. That vision came at a cost, however: the dispossession of the tribal peoples whose homelands the national parks once were. Muir argued for wilderness that would offer spiritual enlightenment to the conquerors, not the Indigenous peoples they conquered. Cast out of Eden tells this neglected part of John Muir’s story, his take on the tribal nations he encountered, and his embrace of an Indigenous-free wilderness ethos.
Robert Aquinas McNally has long sought out stories linking the human and the wild. His recent work continues that concern by focusing on aspects of America’s troubling history with Indigenous peoples and their homelands. The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age lays out a decades-long campaign of extermination and dispossession of Native America.
Our bookseller for this program is The Friends of the Mill Valley Library Bookstore. For information about accessibility at the library, please visit https://millvalleylibrary.org/2049/Accessibility