[100
years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge designated Alaska’s Glacier Bay a
National Monument. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that beautiful spot and
other Alaskan places, people, and stories!]
On three
forces of nature who together helped preserve Glacier Bay (on the 100th anniversary of its designation).
1)
The
Huna Tlingit: As with every history in Alaska—and every history in America—the
story of Glacier Bay is inextricably
interconnected with the worst and best of Native American histories. We can’t
celebrate its natural beauty, nor its evolution from endangered site to National
Monument to (when Jimmy Carter signed the act into
law in 1980) National Park, without recognizing and mourning the removal of
the Huna Tlingit people from the area. But we can’t only mourn, either—even before
the Huna Tlingit were able to return to and reconnect with Glacier Bay in
recent decades, as traced in the first hyperlink above, their legacy was
everywhere in this iconic place, and defining in shaping it across centuries if
not millenia. Every visitor to Glacier Bay must remember and engage with that
worst and best of its, and our, histories.
2)
John Muir:
Speaking of the worst and best. As that hyperlinked article notes, Muir relied
on Tlingit guides for his exploration of Glacier Bay; yet despite his unquestionable
admiration for Native Americans, Muir was also far too often a purveyor
of racist attitudes towards these American communities. That’s all part of
Muir’s story and legacy, and of what he found and advocated for in Glacier Bay.
But at the same time, I don’t know of any more beautiful writing about America’s
natural wonders than Muir’s chapter “In
Camp at Glacier Bay” in his book Travels
in Alaska (1915), among the many other places in that book where he
writes movingly about Glacier Bay. As he did with so much of America’s
wilderness, Muir’s perspective on Alaska helped his audiences see this place
differently, a vital step toward preserving rather than simply exploiting our
natural wonders.
3)
William
S. Cooper: Muir was an advocate for all of our natural spaces, but the plant
ecologist and activist William
S. Cooper made Glacier Bay his specific, lifelong focus. Cooper first
visited Glacier Bay a year after Muir’s book was published, fell in love, and
made the area a
living laboratory for his researches for the rest of his groundbreaking
career. But he also and especially became a determined advocate for the
preservation of Glacier Bay, writing to anyone and everyone about the
importance of not turning this natural wonder over to those who saw only profit
in it (and continuing
those efforts for decades after the 1920s act). Conservation is a
collective effort, but it also requires individuals like Cooper (or others I’ve
written about in this space such as Marjory
Stoneman Douglas), and I’m deeply grateful for every one of them.
Next
AlaskaStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Alaska contexts you’d share?
