ABSTRACT
This chapter articulates both the “new” and the “old” anarchic sense of place that is announced with the “new-old” name Turtle Island in its West Coast evocation. If settler colonialism was the initial and rapaciously dominating mode of inhabitation, what Gary Snyder and others have called re-inhabitation is to be “born again on Turtle Island” and it is therefore to hear it as the “new-old name for the continent.” In engaging some of the luminaries of these bioregions of Turtle Island like John Muir, William Everson, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, and Mary Norbert Körte, this chapter discusses some of the basic political conditions under which settler colonialism gives way to a more originary and compelling sense of place. These conditions are generally anarchic and demonstrate that the roots of this movement were already practiced by the original inhabitants of Turtle Island. It develops this vision in its ecological-political grounding as Western Turtle Island Anarchy.
