Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

Native people had gained some rights and a lot more representation in the park. Before whites had arrived, they had set fires as part of their land management techniques, and the Park Service had finally recognized fire as part of the place’s ecology after a century of fire suppression. And the park’s visitors were far more ethnically diverse; the sense of one cosmology having been pushed out by another was giving way, or so it seemed to me, to a sense of the coexistence of many worldviews and a big adjustment in the Eurocentric one to recognize—imperfectly, incompletely, but still—the rights and presence of indigenous Americans. California was on its way to becoming a nonwhite-majority state and some of the promise of that I had found in the park this time around. This was the hopeful vision I’d presented at the university, where the academic man had laid into my motives and my character for half an hour or so, in front of the students I’d brought from the writing class I was teaching at an art school.