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SUMMARY:John Muir\, Indigenous erasure\, and conservation reckoning - Paul
  Robbins\, University of Wisconsin-Madison 
DTSTART:20210511T130000Z
DTEND:20210511T140000Z
UID:TALK159922@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Rogelio Luque-Lora
DESCRIPTION:The great naturalist and environmental advocate John Muir is w
 ell-known for his silence around the question of Native peoples\, even and
  especially those who were violently removed from the lands in and around 
 the places he most revered. Yet his 1913 book\, “The Story of My Boyhood
  and Youth\,” is notable for its saturation with descriptions of Native 
 people and activity in the places around which the Muir family settled in 
 Wisconsin in the 1840s\, a little more than a decade after the violent con
 clusion of the Blackhawk War. Combining a close reading of the text with a
  psychoanalytic interpretation of this remarkable reversal reveals Muir’
 s repression of Native memories\, which parallels the larger American eras
 ure that accompanied that era’s genocide. A Lacanian analysis\, moreover
 \, suggests that such repression is necessarily never complete\, and tends
  to erupt in the form of repetitive compulsion\, announcing itself through
  the activities of conservation and the founding of the national parks sys
 tem. Meaningful steps towards redressing historical inequity and violence\
 , while advancing a more just model of conservation\, require acknowledgme
 nt of this repression in Muir’s psyche and our own as settlers. This hol
 ds further implications for the role of the unconscious in political ecolo
 gy more generally.\n
LOCATION:Delivered online via Zoom
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