February 26, 2025: AlaskaStudying: Glacier Bay

[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?