(Editor’s Note: The following letter was
written by Rebecca Solnit in response to our Oct. 29 article titled
“Making a home for hope: An interview with Rebecca
Solnit”.)
I know the intentions were good, but
the interview with me in High Country News was
damagingly distorted. Readers should know that the conversation was
not recorded, but reconstructed from the interviewer’s notes and
should keep in mind that even the absence of a single word or
change of tense of a single verb can invert the meaning of a
sentence. Many statements attributed to me appear to be garbled or
condensed down beyond coherence. For example, I am quoted as
saying: “The park management made Native Americans disappear from
photos, from the record – and that’s how white people think about
nature. They imagined it as static and stable and without human
intervention and fire. We all know that story now, but in 1991,
when I was writing about it, it was quite radical.” I always say
and believe that I said that what is radical is not the old story
of virgin wilderness untouched by man, but the new one of a
long-inhabited continent that calls into question the old dichotomy
between humans and nature, civilization and wilderness. This
revision of the non-indigenous way of thinking about American
landscapes emerged from the political discourse around the
Columbian Quincentennial of 1992 and the resurgence of Native
American visibility and political power. Park management did not
make Native Americans disappear from the photos with some
metaphysical airbrush. Many forces, including the old environmental
imagination as embodied by John Muir, the language of the
Wilderness Act and the ideals of uninhabited landscape as
represented by Ansel Adams’ work, made Native Americans largely
invisible in key sites such as national parks (this invisibility
and its consequences are the subject of the second half of my 1994
book Savage Dreams, and the profound changes in
visibility and imagination over the past fifteen years are
discussed at great length in my 2006 book with the photographers
Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, Yosemite in Time).
Both High Country News and I have revised our
interview policies as a result of this unfortunate incident. I
appreciate the cooperation of the staff in trying to amend this
situation. I have been both a subscriber and an admirer of the
publication for many years.
Rebecca Solnit
San
Francisco, California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Rebecca Solnit responds.
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