Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,57

very different book, and it had an auspicious beginning: I sent a proposal on a Monday in 1991 to Sierra Club Books, was called by an editor on Tuesday, and met with him on Wednesday. The book contract came soon afterward. I sold my battered Datsun B210 and spent part of the $12,000 advance on a used white Chevy S10 pickup truck with a camper shell to better pursue my research across the West. My life had changed while I was writing Secret Exhibition, and if that first book laid the foundation for me to understand recent and local history just before my era, this second book would be a broader and deeper inquiry into the American West and its myths, wars, blind spots, wonders, criminals, and heroines.

This book, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West, was about how invisibility permits atrocity. The war at the center of the book’s first half was at the Nevada Test Site, where the nuclear wars generally regarded as a terrible thing that might happen someday were in fact happening at the rate of about one nuclear bomb detonation a month from 1951 to 1991, more than a thousand in all, with dire impact on the local environment and the human beings downwind. The second half of the book was about Yosemite National Park, where the Indian wars widely regarded as something bad that happened long ago were going on in the present by other means against Native people who had not, contrary to what was then conventional belief, disappeared, vanished, reached the end of the trail, set off into the sunset, or been the last of their kind. Native people had been rendered invisible by representations or rather nonrepresentations—in signage, in the more visible of its two museums, in land management practices, and in the depiction of Yosemite by environmental organizations and artists as an uninhabited wilderness recently discovered by white people and a place people only belonged as visitors.

That is, I was arguing that the wars of the future and the past were overlapping in the present, and that they were largely unrecognized because of how we thought about things like war, and the West, and nature, and culture, and Native people. I was the beneficiary of a revolution of ideas under way about all those things. Native people were asserting that they had never gone away, never given up on their rights, never forgotten their history, and that the land had a history, a history of cultures that were not separate from or destructive of nature. It was a revolutionary realization for non-Native people like me, a recuperation after what has sometimes been called symbolic annihilation, a term for the nonrepresentation of a group—a gender, an ethnicity, an orientation—in the popular culture or the arts and official versions of their society or region. Among other things, it undid the tidy nature/culture binary that was so widely used to organize ideas back then.

My editor was encouraging. But when the manuscript was finished, in 1993, he sent it out for peer review to two men who’d written Western histories. One was Evan S. Connell, whose own history of Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn was experimental enough that I thought he’d have a positive reaction, but he seemed to regard my book as incoherent and objectionable, which was disappointing, but fine as an opinion. The other guy, who’d written a book about a national park, was upset about my ideas on Yosemite, insisting on reading what I described as cultural blind spots as intentional conspiracies whose existence he denied. The book’s epigraph was James Baldwin’s spectacular sentence “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” meaning that it’s not cunning but obliviousness, willful or otherwise, behind so much brutality. In a long, indignant letter, he accused me of, among other things, “intellectual dishonesty” and a “hidden agenda,” and he wrote, “I have taken the liberty of copying my remarks to a few respected colleagues, among them park officials in Yosemite.”

I wrote him back that my agenda was not hidden and that “I spoke with my former professor Ben Bagdikian about the matter today, and he condemned the action as wrong. Bagdikian, former ombudsman for the Washington Post, currently a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, and a national authority on journalistic ethics, said that although it is customary to circulate unpublished academic writing within academic