Carolyn Finney — 2024 Wilma Dykeman Stokely Lecture

hello hello and again hello who is saying hello again there you go that's what I'm talking about good evening uh wonderful crowd which like a lot of in the room uh welcome to the 2024 Wilma Diamond stokeling Memorial lecture presented by the friends of the Knox County Public Library Applause and by the John C Hodes Society the University of Tennessee libraries go this crowd's going to be wonderful Caroline they're on it uh but they have one more test coming up uh my name is Jim stokeley I'm one of I'm one of two sons of James stokeley and Wilma dman stokeley I'm a member of the John C Hodes Society board and I'm president of something called the Wilma Dykeman Legacy a small nonprofit public charity in Asheville headquartered in Asheville so I'm here tonight to do three things uh first I'm going to tell you two or three jokes and the second I'm going to say a word about Wilma dman and thirdly I'm going to introduce our speaker for the evening so I am maybe the shortest sentence in the English language I do may be the longest sentence they're already turning on me we're going to get to that you turned on me last year too uh yesterday I sent my brother a get better soon card he's not sick I just think he could be better now that was good that's a good joke right there uh so lastly uh today is an interesting day uh you know I I said last year that I was going to retire you turned on me in my third joke I said I'm going to retire from being a comedian and uh I was correct but I I had in mind 365 days of retirement today is leap day it's like Purge day you can do anything you want to on leap day so uh so about an hour ago I I took up my position uh on the sidewalk in front of the History Center I started asking people I said were you born on February 29th were you born on February 29th couldn't find anybody except this one uh elderly lady with a walker she's pushing acoss across the sidewalk I said were you born on February 29th she said yes I said well how old are you she said I'm 88 said no you're not you're 22 you've had four uh you've had 22 birthdays your entire life she uh looked at me she she pulled herself straight up on her walker looked me in the eye she said sunny when I was 22 the Tennessee River was flowing toward the Atlantic Ocean that's that's all I got folks that's it then I'll be back next year um word about Wilma dman the Wilma diment Legacy is an organization that sponsors events and activities which sustain uh the values for which wima dment stood environmental Integrity social justice and the power of the written and spoken word each year this Memorial lecture is an opportunity for Book Lovers and Library supporters of our region to come together not not only in celebration of Wilma dman as an extraordinary individual but in support of her core values of environmental and social justice so in 13 words the Legacy promotes environmental and social justice through the written and spoken word Wilma once said quotes how we treat the land reflects how we treat people [Music] yes in 1957 she wrote in her and my father's award-winning book neither black nor white quotes as we have misused our richest land we have misused ourselves as we have wasted our Bountiful water we have wasted ourselves as we have diminished the lives of one whole segment of our people we have diminished ourselves so the third thing I'm going to do tonight is introduce our wonderful speaker and uh I'm honored to introduce Dr Carolyn Finny Dr Finny is a Storyteller author and cultural geographer who is passionate in areas related to Identity creativity and resilience she works to develop cultural awareness regarding the environment and she seeks to ensure that diverse groups are represented in environmental policies and decisions Dr finny's experience backpacking across the world and her time living in Nepal led her to complete a ba and an MBA focused on gender and envir enironmental issues she went on to earn a PhD focused on African-Americans and environmental issues in the United States alongside writing and public speaking Dr Finny is the Environmental Studies professor of practice at middleberry College the difference between a professor and a professor of practice is that a professor of practice has actually done something in their [Music] Liv that's not in the biographical remarks she has also been a full right scholar and has served on the US National Parks Advisory board for the National Park Service her first book published in 2014 is on sale in the back corner uh called Black Faces white spaces reimagining the relationship of African-Americans in The Great Outdoors and will be on sale following uh following the talk uh in the back of the room so before you leave the building uh you need to get your money out ready to spend uh Dr Finny no pressure no pressure uh Dr fenny thank you so much for joining us here this evening we're honored to have you as our guest speaker we look forward to hearing about a topic that was dear to Wilma dyon everyone Dr Carin [Applause] fin funny I want some more of those jokes um thank you it's so funny seeing people haven't seen in a long time I went to grad school with this guy and I haven't seen him in years and his mom I didn't go to grad school with her but it was almost like I went to grad school with you I mean they were there it's so cool when I come places and I run into people I don't expect to see that I know before um I got so many things to say I got notes and the first thing you'll know about me is I don't really pay any attention to them but they're meant to try to keep me online in line um um thank you for inviting me here today and you know whenever I'm invited in particular because it's honoring someone who's doing work I love the idea that you know that's why I had to say something about if we diminish if we treat the land badly we treat the people badly if we treat anybody badly we're all diminished and that's how I kind of understand that and heard that so I feel honored that I can kind of share my little story with you um to honor that um I always think about where I'm you can somebody can ask me about why I'm I entitled this but I'm not going to you can't hear me oh my god well so sorry that's okay this is this is the reality this is like you know Wizard of Oz behind the curtain you're kind of seeing how it really works I'm so sorry and oh no oh there I am that's all thank you oh my gosh that's kind of freaking me out um yeah I'm stand this I'm going to do this I'm not sure why this is here we're going to move this too I didn't mean to turn it off it should have just gone to the next slide I'm not sure what happened where's the fabulous B all right excellent yeah right let's go back okay so what I write here in my notes so I want to sort of start off with this I always try to think where am I going to start with when people ask me to come in and talk to talk about black faces and white spaces so this is the 10e anniversary of me writing that book and I've written other things since no more books yet I'm working on a second one now but I've written other things since but it's interesting for me to think about all the time that's gone by since then so I read an article in the Washington Post a couple of months ago and there was a upen professor um his name is Jonathan Zimmerman uh he was it was a it was a conversation in an article about race and he said quote most of our prior arguments were about who to include in the story not the story itself America has lost a shared National narrative I disagree with him so much and what I disagree with is the idea that there was ever a shared National narrative I think there's a dominant narrative which I don't think is incorrect but I think it's highly incomplete and when we're talking about the environment um that's what I want to talk about today how I think it's incomplete and why it matters and how do we attend to a different story or a different set of stories that are out there I always have to put up you can't hear me anymore and I'm not sure what happened you can where where's the magic lady all right I don't know what happened but the mic went away so I'm going to talk really loudly to the best of my ability um we'll save your voice wait till you get help well well I'm holding so many things I can try it yes I'm oh wait a minute my best friend I don't know what's happening it doesn't like me so I usually put the slide up here I'm just going to keep talking right the one about thank you okay thank you I need new batteries and that's like deep and metaphor oral uh that's not the one I meant to show you yet but we're going to go backwards to this one so whenever I talk I want to talk about this question of story and dominant narratives and while I get my batteries replac no no it's okay uh I lose my way so for me even what I'm talking about is always related it's always in context and I think about the stories of now and I created the slide maybe three or four years ago right when Co wasn't place I tended to when George Floyd was murdered when Christen Cooper had his skin weaponized when he walked into Central Park I suddenly had more work than ever before and so that's really complicated I was really grateful for that I live in Burlington Vermont I live by myself in a small apartment I tend to travel around a lot I like to talk which you can tell already um but I was engaging virtually all the time I mean I must have spoken and consulted and advised with hundreds of people in the last three or four years alone right and I was really grateful to have that work I was also emotionally exhausted um and I was wondering what would happen in terms of the EV and flow and the way that we move and at the time when I created this Slide the only thing I had up there was the a map of the United States a political map of the United States I had the image of George Floyd and I had Co and uh about a week or two ago I realized I had to update it a little bit and I'm not going to talk about these issues but I had to make sure you know that I know they're also happening at the same time the conversations about what's happening in Gaza um and Israel um the the conversation that's happening around ro ro versus Wade as well as the conversation about climate change but the thing that I want to talk about specifically in relation to what I'm talking about is the other image about the new Underground Railroad and in particular because this is a library so uh a few years ago so I was at the University of Kentucky for about three years I lived in Lexington this was maybe 2015 2016 to about 2019 and I got a chance to to meet some Afrin artists there and one of them was Maria Cochran and she was talking about her visit to the Smithsonian African-American Museum and she said she overheard someone say quote this time they won't be able to pack it up and put put it away this time they won't be able to pack it up and put it the way African-American stories here in the United States now I was reading recently according to Pan America there have been 1,477 instances of book Banning affecting 874 titles 30% include characters of color Andor talk about race and racism Texas has the most bands followed by Florida now this I got this last summer so I think it's gone up since then right so when I go back to thinking about Maria Corker and saying that this time they won't be able to pack it up and put it away I want to say but they're certainly giving it a good try right um and what does that mean in terms of the stories that we tell I think about the fact that this is the 29th but we're still in black history month and I have really mixed feelings about Black History Month for a lot of different reasons but with respect to Carter G Woodson whose original intention was to bring attention to Black presence on the landscape back in 1926 you know what would he say about this current moment a 100 years later and we were actually in some places we can't even have the conversation that you're having with me here today right to understand how serious it is when certain stories get shut out and why that's happening I also wrote here um so for about 3 years I was doing a column for the Earth island journal and I just finished that back in December but one of the contracts one of the pieces I'm sorry I wrote was what would Harriet tubbin do and I wrote that's why I quoted her and I said if you hear the dogs keep going if you see the Torches in the woods keep going if they're shouting after you keep going don't ever stop keep going if you want a taste of Freedom keep going um and so I want to think about what does that mean for us when we think about whose Stories We Tell who gets to tell those stories uh how do we keep going and how are we supported to do it now I know one of the things that the folks who invited me here today asked me to talk about was why I do what I do um and so I want to talk about that a little bit because I always talk about that the personal is political so this is the 10e anniversary of black faces white spaceist it's also the 60th anniversary of both the Civil Rights Act and the Wilderness act um and I'm going to talk about that in a little bit um I want to talk about I don't want to ignore I never like to ignore and I always feel bad when babies are crying and don't cry little baby um the idea that the personal is political so I want to talk about an article that was written in 2021 isn't black representation what we wanted the person who wrote it was a black writer named Mara cheeks and she and I keep looking at my notes CU I'm quoting people and I want to make sure I get this right so in in it she had interviewed one of the people that she quoted was the Jewish writer and thinker Fran libowitz and Fran leitz I think is brilliant and has been around a long time she asked the question fran lioz did why does everyone want to see themselves in books she was having a conversation with the great director Martin scorsi and she kept saying she doesn't understand um people who complain about not seeing themselves in books she said quote a book is a supposed is not supposed to be a mirror it's supposed to be a door Mora cheeks the woman who wrote the article wrote in response quote I understand the sentiment but I disagree with the argument it's the type of sentiment that can only be felt by someone who is unknown represented almost everywhere she turned she didn't know what she had a little bit later friendly wz gets in conversation with the late great Tony Morrison and she says to Antony Morrison says to her I am the reader of the books I write right and Fran Li withth says you're other readers aren't you and Morrison just laughs and says yes they are so I've been thinking about that in terms of representation I've been thinking about whose stories are centered who is centered how we all frame our understanding and where our bias comes into play when I think about the environment when I think about conservation I think about that when we say names like Henry David thorough and Aldo Leopold and John mure and Rachel Carson and it's not because I want to cancel them I do not it's not because I don't believe what they said is valid I've actually believed they said a lot of Truth and it's not believe it's not because I don't believe that they don't have something of value to say but they're not the only ones they are not the only ones and a lot of what they were experiencing was in part because of who they were at a particular time I'm not saying they didn't struggle because I know Rachel Carson did but I want to make the point that what happens to everybody else's experience at that same time when we value a certain group of experien in a particular way so so two years ago I got a chance to go to Camp Al in Alaska and I'm getting a chance to go again this H sorry so Camp Denali for those of you who don't know it is a high-end low impact camp in the middle of Denali National Park the family has been running it for maybe 40 or 50 years it's all of these lodges and they try to make everything sustainable so that's the low impact the idea they have Greenhouse they grow most of the stuff that they feed people there um the cabins are incredible I mean I never seen anything like it like you have a cabin but it ain't like no cabin you've been in before okay I walked in with the fireplace and the mosquito Nets and but everything was well thought out you you can be comfortable but we can also be smart about how we are here on this landscape the food was incredible they take you on Hikes every day and so what they do they invite uh an author out for a week they said we we fly you out here for a week you spend time in the evening you get to talk to the audience a group of people who's paid a lot of money to come here and do this I want to know this is a picture from my own ous everybody has their own ouse with a little heart car in the door and can see the peak yeah it's really something you never been in an out house like that either the reason I'm telling you a story is because I was a long flight from Burlington Burlington Newark Newark Anchorage overnight Anchorage six- hour bus ride and a small prop plane and when I changed flight uh planes in nework I had some time because so I'm walking around the airport there's no ELC store I go in there's a young African-American man he's working behind the counter and he just look kind of bored you know and so I walk over my K and then he kind of jumped up he was Lively how you doing we just started talking the way that you do with somebody you don't know it's good times and finally he looks over and he goes so where are you going and I said Alaska he went he kind of did one of these and he said Alaska why are you going there and I read between the lines he's like why are you going there you're black and no black people are you going to be okay all these things and I just leaned in I did a real stage wh where I said I'm going to tell them about black people good luck go ahead do your thing right when I think back to what part of the reason why I do this I'm also that young man I understood exactly I I tell it in a funny way but I understood what that meant I had those thoughts actually I mean I've been in a lot of places of the world but I got to tell you when I'm traveling in particular here in the United States I will go almost anywhere that I am invited but of course I think about it will I be the only one will people be friendly will people be kind will they invite me in will they ignore me will they just want to take my picture I have you know will they ask me about my hair will they want to touch me like what's going to what's going to happen you know when I go there it doesn't stop me from going but I understood what he meant and actually I want him to feel like he can also go anywhere right um I want him to feel like it's you know whatever he's reading about whatever stories he sees he sees himself in that as well I wanted to put this picture and I'm going to talk more about my parents in a minute but this picture is in Floyd County in Virginia which is is part of Appalachia and the region and this was maybe I took this picture 10 years ago we used to go every summer down there I'm originally from New York and I'll come back to that as well but my we went down to uh with my mother and father my brothers and as we drove we first stopped at a cemetery where all my mother's people are buried and we kind of paid our respects it was a cemetery Cemetery like any Cemetery you might expect to see and then we pulled up to this place and I was like what's happening right now and there was a a white farmer sitting on one of those really big tractors and my father gets out of the car and he goes over to the farmer the farmer is very friendly and nice and they're having a conversation and then my father said come on come on in and what I come to understand is you're seeing this patch here in the middle this is where all my father's people are buried and so it was land that used to be in my father's family and you know things happen it no longer is and it hasn't been kept up I mean the man's left all the bodies there whatever remains there you can see but we couldn't go inside because of snakes but for me where my heart Twisted was my father who was a proud man he's an angry man he's angry at the United States he's been angry for all 92 years of his life has asked permission from anybody but you had to ask permission from a white man I'm not saying that because a white man is bad I'm saying it that for my father it means something to be able to pay his respects to his family on land that is no longer in that family and he doing it with a smile in his face and all of us going in and saying this and I want to think about um I talk about how do we attend to place so part when I go back to what Mr stokeley was saying about his mother and the idea of caring for place and caring for people and how do we tell a story that it tends to place um and part of it for me is that we have to be able to tell the whole story no matter how it makes us feel I think a lot about what it means to flip the script right and I think I have to think that for myself let me tell you when I started writing black bases white bases as a dissertation so 2003 2004 I'm in graduate school I couldn't find a single story about black people environment on the library shelves except for environmental justice where something bad's happened to a community of black people and like any people we are not simply what the bad things that have happened to us where are the nature stories where are the adventure stories were the conservation stories I mean I knew that they were out there and part of it was I wanted to be motivated by that in part because I also did not see myself in any of those stories as a human being I can always relate to another human being what does it mean to actually have a very particular experience Chris Buck is a photographer a number of years ago he created a set of images and I'm only going to put this one up here where he called flipping the script and it kind of speak for itself this is a young white girl she's in a toy store she's looking up at a wall of black dolls there was another picture of a nail salon where people women of Asian descent were having pedicures done and all the women doing their feet were of European descent it's about to really challenge what happens when you flip it is it the same story or does it have a different meaning it's not about being better or worse for me it's just about being different and how do we hold that I love to talk about this was my favorite show back in 2020 2021 if you haven't seen this theories and HBO of Lovecraft country it was based on the books of HP Lovecraft who does a lot of weird fiction and Science Fiction it's set in the 1950s it was focused on an African-American family in in particular a young man who would just come back from fighting the Korean War it was a working class a middle class family but there's witches and monsters and everything involved in this story and the the first episode that really got me in terms of making my point here about what happens when you reenter the story they start off with this young family who found out that they have to do a road trip to Massachusetts because they have relatives who are witches so they're going to have to get on the road they're packing up their car the matriarch of the family can't join them because she needs to stay back with some of the young kids and she's kind of casually has a pad of paper going running down the list making sure they have everything you've got everything you need and what I realize she's doing is she's referencing the green book because it's the 1950s so like any human being who's going to get excited about a road trip who's going to get out there do their thing they're excited all those things are happening but also they're black it's the 1950s it's Jim Crow segregation so it means and it was almost a throwaway moment but it gave some truth to the matter a little bit later in their Adventure they are still driving they're in Massachusetts they get stopped by a white state trooper it's a few minutes before Sundown he comes up to the car window and he says do you know where you are they're like No And he says you are about to enter a Sundown County so if you were here when the Sun goes down I can make no promises about what's going to happen to you and then later you see they make it out and then they're frighting real monsters in the woods but for me it was the idea that they reentered the story you still have an Indiana Jones type Adventure because anybody I believe can have that but if you're black at a very particular time in history it's going to look a little bit different and why can't we tell that story in that way yes that's me um for those of you who don't know who Brian Stevenson is I'm in love with the man Brian Stevenson is a black civil rights lawyer uh he works to get black men and teenagers off death row he's been to the Supreme Court at least five times he helped create the fabus lynching exhibit that's in Alabama um the man is like next level so they made a movie about him in Hollywood True Justice with Michael B Jordan yes also a nice look at um the thing that I like to say about Brian Stevens I was watching his um documentary probably 2021 around the same time I watched extra extra during the co days um and I I know who he was before that so I'm watching like who is this guy and they say I realize we're the exact same age we were born one day apart we're both single yeah and we both work all the time and the interviewer asked him why do you do what you do and the first thing he said is I do what I do because the system is broken and I write it down because I'm like me too the system is broken and then he paused and he said well I do what I do because people are broken and yeah that's people are broken and then his voice got kind of soft and he said I do what I do because I'm broken too and that laid me out so part of this for me was a reminder that and I love that he was able to say that out loud that you know I'm broken too right I'm part of this larger Collective of this larger Collective of humanity that comes in there and I need to be honest about what that is because that's where my bias lies and I want to be really clear bias is not the same as racism it's not the same as Prejudice it's a point of view it's a personal history right and if for me if you want to build trust if you want to build relationship you don't have to defend where you come from you just got to be clear and understand where you come from and what that may might mean in terms of how you move forward um the other thing that I always think about is the question of how you move forward in right relation across your differences and now it's probably been eight or nine years I probably told this story many many times but I was standing in the airport in San Francisco and I was waiting to get on the plane there was a Salvation woman standing in front of me there was two um women of European descent standing behind me we're getting ready to get on the flight attendant comes out says you know there's a delay the four of us start talking as you do right everybody's really friendly um somebody asked me what I do and I started saying well I have these conversations about race land blah blah blah the two um women of European descent say oh that's so good it's isn't it so important to have empathy sympathy and I say yes and I'm agreeing the Sal Asian woman hasn't said anything and suddenly she speaks up and she says I've been to 75 countries I go to businesses and I talk to them about diversity empathy and sympathy are nice but who do you stand with and I just W I wrote that down too I got yes right so for me and many of you have heard this story those of you who' heard me tell the story before it's because I have to do it as part of the practice is to talk a little bit about where I stand um I put a different picture up her this time of my parents so I had to start with my parents Rosen Henry this was taken in Floyd County this was sometime in the 1950s my parents grew up poor big families they grew up black high school education um my father went off to fight they had both really big families so they known each other a really long time my father went off to fight in the Korean War when he came back from the K War he had to get a job he said he saw a park ranger in a park ranger uniform and he thought that looked like a great government job and as a veteran it kind of seems like it would make sense so when he went to apply in the state of Virginia he said they told him I'm sorry but we don't hire negro um my family and I together have never gone to a national park as a kid so I want to just put that out there but you know the universe is funny right anyway so my parents joined the grant migration they moved North to New York like a lot of black folks did and they moved to New York because my probably had a sister who was doing very well there my father had two job offers the first he could be a janitor in Syracuse New York which is about 5 hours north of New York City he didn't take that job the job he took was 30 minutes outside New York City in Westchester County a very wealthy Jewish family had 12 acres of land and they needed people to care for it full-time and that's the job my parents took so there's Gardener's Cottage my parents lived in there's another house you'll see an image in a moment my father was the chauffeur he was the gardener U my mother was a sometime housekeeper and they lived here fulltime my parents wanted to have kids my mother thought she couldn't have kids and the reason she thought she couldn't have kids because like a lot of women who are poor regardless of the color of your skin she had gone into the hospital to have one a sis removed from one of her ovaries but without asking her permission they actually removed one of her ovaries they told her that when she woke up the reason we didn't ask your permission is because we didn't think you could emotionally handle the information so she thought she couldn't have kids and got very depressed that um opening slide I can go back to later was my mother the very opening slide when she first arrived here the owners said have you ever thought about adoption and so actually the owners of the estate arranged for me to be adopted I was born in New York City um and they adopted me through Spence chapen and then what I always like to say then my parents relax I had my first brother and then they did more relaxing and had my second brother so we grew up on this estate it was a very wealthy all-white neighborhood Harry Winston had property down the street shaer of schaer beer lived next door Windfield golf club was around the corner I just want you to get a sense of the the wealth that was there we were the only family of color until the 1990s when a Japanese American woman moved in for a little a while and then she moved out this is the house that the owners came to on weekends and holidays there's a swimming pool there was a pond I had we had such a privilege to play and be outside in nature in this place I just want to say that we all knew how to swim by the time we were seven we had to it was a 12 acre property with water on it this is where I rode my bike for the first time I played out in the woods the first time all these things were fabulous I made a game the driveway was the piranha River and I mean I can go on and on about all the games and good times we had on this property and also my parents didn't own it and also I told the story of being nine and walking from school I went to a public school I was right around the corner there was always policemen patrolling this neighborhood because of the wealth the white policeman stops me he wants to know where I'm going I give him the address on my point because it's right around the corner and he just looks at me and says oh do you work there I'm like dude I'm nine I didn't say that I this was confused and I said no I lived there and he thought about it I guess for a minute or two and then he let me go home I go home I tell my parents my father calls the police station gives them hell they never bother me and my brothers again but for me I have to think about the Logics what were the Logics there I was a little girl 9 years old time of day school back all the reasons that he might have stopped me to see if I needed help if I knew where I was going if I was okay and for me as an adult I think something was out of place for him what was I doing in this neighborhood in this beautiful um this beautiful part of um mamin of this County I want to jump ahead to the 1990s so the patriarch who owned the land had died in the 60s The Matriarch was now sick now my parents have been carrying for this land full-time for 40 years to the credit of the owner um she was sick she wanted to try to keep my parents on this land the property proper was worth at the time over $3 million property taxes alone were $125,000 a year so she would have to pay for that in perpetuity because my parents didn't have that kind of money her grown children said no you can't do that you have to sell the property then she thought about she bought a piece of land right next door maybe she could have a house built because she knew how much the land meant particularly to my father but the perspective buyer that he would only buy that this property if he could also buy that land too so at the end of the day she had a house built for them in lesburg Virginia and the only reason even though my father swore he was never going back to that state that he went to lesburg is because my youngest brother at this point is married with kids and settled there I'm moving around too much as is my other brother so they moved to lesburg Virginia I want to jump ahead and the it's what it's really important for me to say that the owner I'm just careful I used to say their names and I just don't do that anymore but uh the owner wanted my father byy her beds side when she died you know power is complicated but so is love and so it's really important for me to say that and hold that in a particular way she passes away the new owner buys the property asks my parents to stay on they stay on till 2003 now my parents have been carrying that for that land for nearly 50 years fulltime they leave they have a lovely house in Virginia on a half acre of land uh maybe six or seven years later they get a copy of a letter uh one of the neighbors had sent it and they showed me a copy of the letter from the Westchester Land Trust was letting everybody know that a conservation easement had now been placed on this piece of property meaning that it would be protected in perpetuity or people people could live on the land but they'd be taken care of this property it talked about um it talked about the animals that lived on the property the trees that grew there where it sat in the Watershed all the reasons why it need to be protected and I agreed with everything right I agreed with everything I get to to the end of the letter where the folks from the Westchester Land Trust thank the new owner for his conservation mindedness there is nothing in the letter thinking my parents who had cared for that land for nearly 50 years fulltime which meant just like that they were gone from the environmental history and this is when I was in grad school this is when I was thinking about how many people in the history of the country have been rendered invisible who aren't part of the story their labor and not just their labor their love the idea that if you work something and you can't love it I think it's actually quite the opposite right parents had a high school education they knew more about that land than any before so yes I am biased when it comes to thinking about what's invisible and what we see and what we don't see and what we honor and what we don't honor and this doesn't make the people in the land trust bad people that is just too easy it's not about that for me at all it's more about privilege and power I think there's always a moment of convergence you know so I always put this image up there and you can see for yourself you know representations of slavery of Japanese internment of indigenous people being removed from the land of the land being polluted of Chinese people Chinese descent working at railroad but I always have them next to these image the image of G Pino with the mustache who is the reason why we even talk about conservation and thinking about conservation as a management of our resources it's the reason why we have the forest service the reason why we have y forestry which is kind of amazing this was late 1800s and then you have John M father of conservation having a conversation with President Roosevelt 1903 in your 7 on overhanging rock and I imagine it's an incredible conversation because this is where that idea of national parks protecting it Wilderness all of those things they start to think about how do we regulate that how do we change our behavior and protect these wild places the thing for me is I want to know what else was going on at the same time so 186 2 I think one of our most important pieces of legislation if not the most important that changed the way we think about land and environment with the Homestead Act and when that gun went off at midnight for the most part if you were of European descent you could run out you could put your steak down up up to 160 Acres if you stayed on it for five years if you farmed you built a house that land was yours free and clear and no matter how many times I say it I'm like that can't happen anywhere anymore free and clear and land is never just about land it is about economic and political power it is about Legacy you have something to pass down and it is about the right to say you belong how many times have you heard somebody say this is my land and I belong here I've had family here for Generations how powerful that is right so 3 years later emancipation Pro clamation enslaved Africans are free originally giving 400,000 acres of land until white plantation owners started talking said what have we done we've just given people we had as our slaves 400,000 acres of land and land is never just about land it's about economic and political power it is about Legacy it is about the right to say you belong so we're going to take all that land back I don't have to tell you anything else tonight for us to start to understand the question not just of land ownership but the sense of belonging let's go back to that young man in nework wondering can you go to Alaska and feel like you'll be welcom and that it'll be okay for you to be here for me there's a direct line about the right to be able to say you belong that and oh let's not forget all this land was stolen I'm say it one more time all this land was stolen I'm not saying it to make you feel bad but I am saying it to make you feel we can't forget that because there's a whole lot of people who will never forget that and are still fighting for that and for me the question is how do I show up to that right how am I in right relationship with that and what does that actually mean for me I start off by talking about you know in the book I very purposefully use Spike Lee movies as titles to my chapters and part because I was challenged both as a doctoral student and doing research on this again and finding those black stories but that didn't mean the black stories weren't there there were artists writing doing paintings and there were musicians making stories about this people were telling stories about their experience and I love the way that LE did it and for me again we've been bamboo with because I think we think there's a one narrative there's Manifest Destiny there's European immigrants came over there's an Manifest Destiny they go the civilization they did do that and I am very careful I am not here to denigrate European immigrants something like 60% of them died many of them didn't want to leave where they came from I can't imagine what it was like how heart-wrenching it must have been to leave the land that you loved originally and what a risk to come over and do that but again I have to ask the question who had to be removed on that land for you to have that opportunity and who's accountable to that and who's respons responsible for that and how do we tell that narrative really differently another chapter I like to talk about is the idea of jungle fever and Le is talking about interraci relationships but I'm talking about something a little bit different really how black people in this country the stories we told collectively sometimes directly sometimes not so directly about black people in nature so you're wondering why you may be wondering why have LeBron James up here so this is vog it's the first first time 2010 I believe it was that a black man had been put on the cover the Basketball Star LeBron James the supermodel jelle Buon a lot of black people got upset when they saw this because why is he like this why couldn't he be it's Vogue he could have been in a suit you know there's a lot of ways he could have been photographed and then somebody uncovered this poster which is from 1917 I want you to look right down to the color of her dress yes now when people at vog say they didn't know anything about it and I don't believe that but for me it says a lot about what's in our Consciousness so think about the late 1800s there were world's fairs and I think world spares must have been really exciting for some people because it was about sharing ideas what kind of you know culture are we going to become what new ideas do we have and also we put brown and black people on displaying cages at them I think about odanga who was a 19-year-old man from the Congo who was discovered he was brought back to the United States of America he was put on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York my favorite museum first Museum I ever went to and then the museum officials decided not enough of the public will get to see him so they moved him to the prime exit at the Bronx too we can stand here all night all the stories of black and brown people that this has happened to so if we jump ahead to the idea of thinking about our first African-American president and I just I'm not getting political here I'm always political never mind and the idea that you know those images we were seeing the watermelon patches in front of the White House Michelle Obama being called an this is not new again direct line so understand so I come back to this photo and if they didn't know shame on them and if they didn't did know shame on man um the Civil Rights so I said that this was the 60th year of the Civil Rights Act and the Wilderness act which is pretty incredible and one of the things I did was try to read a lot of that legislation when I was writing the book to try to understand did anybody actually talk about the environment the Wilderness act Howard zaner and his people were so committed to think about these Wilderness areas as universal spaces we all should be able to go to and find that renewal and find that connection I one of the things that just broke my heart is that how Howard zizer died within weeks before the legislation was passed and he had worked on it for so long and you had all the folks who were working on the Civil Rights Act also talking about issues of equity and what does that mean it was a focus on black people and women but really it was what does it mean for all of us to be able to labor and appreciate it for who we are the wildness ACT isn't really get at I mean it was written at the time you know before while Jim Crow was still in place they didn't really really get at that so right that didn't really talk about the environment nature but they were all kind of working on that thing a particular way the story that I discovered because a friend of mine in grad school who's Canadian sent it to me in 1960 there was a white Professor named Dr DeWolf who was at Boston College he was friends with an African-American couple who wanted to take a break and go to National Park and because it was 1960 they were African-American they said well let's not go here in the US let's go over the border to Fundy National Park in Canada but he wrote the superintendent because they were going to be staying in these Chalet right in the park you know just so that they would know this and they would be okay he said listen they're they've got multiple degrees they're well educated well cultured the fact that he had to say those things it's problematic but he said I just want to make sure that he be treated with respect he didn't hear anything right away and when he do when he did I'm sorry when he came when a letter came back to him the superintendent said I'm sorry I can't make that promise because we have so many American visitors here the couple was Dr Martin Luther King ketta Scott King who wanted to take a break from their civil rights work in order to find that respit right in the parks that so many other people like Howard Z were saying anybody should be able to get you know wherever you go there you are I always say to myself it doesn't matter how famous you are how much money you have in your pocket whether or not you're a little girl with a school bag that's obviously coming home from school there will always be somebody in this country to challenge your right to be in a beautiful place and just because you're going to a park or a beach or climbing a mountain it doesn't change racism Prejudice and bias do not change because you entered a beautiful outdoor space because you know what wherever we go there we are right and so how do we heal that relationship so that we feel somewhat different I'm red that now I'm not even looking at my notes what's happening I yeah I like to talk a a little bit about memory because one of the things that came up when I was doing this research was how many people there's a kind of collective memory the way we think about ourselves so you know when I think about African-Americans and the tuske experiments and the kind of mistrust of the medical profession for instance but there's also individual memory and so the story that I tell because it's easiest for me to get across to you is 2005 I was living in Atlanta I was supposedly writing up my dissertation um and I got my parents to come visit me so the thing that I know I've only mentioned briefly my father but his name is full name was Henry Lee finny I didn't get along with Henry Leaf he was old school conservative had very specific ideas about gender roles I mean man worked hard and made sure that we had food on the table and all those things and he had a really hard life but he always scared me so even as a grown person 2005 I was scared my mother was a different story so um I do want to say this about my father in around 20 he wanted to change the name Lee because it was sure it was after Robert E Lee he asked us how do you do that we said these are the forms you had to fill out so we changed it so now his name is officially Henry xfy so they're coming to Vis Atlanta we're going to go to um Dr Martin Luther King National Historic Site some of you I'm sure have been there it's on the street where people live there's a ether Baptist Church there's the house Dr King grew up in there's a visitor center we wander into the visitor center my mom off and all the exhibit was about a feeling of what it must have been like in the 50s and 60s all the posters all the sounds coming over the loudspeakers of police riding and dogs a replica of the jail cell Dr King spent time and you were just supposed to have a whole sensory overload I'm staying with my dad in front of one of these we're not a touchy peely family like you know I was little before Oprah so we didn't have this kind of conversation so I'm standing there next to my dad and I'm grown can I can I borrow your arm don't be scared and he just grabbed my arm like this and I got scared and I looked over at him and his face had completely blanched and I thought my father was having a heart attack I mean it would happen so fast because it was unlike him to grab me his face blanching and then right after that he starts to giggle and that's what really freaked me out and he pointed and what he pointed to was a sign that was part of the display and a sign said for whites only he points to that sign he said I saw that sign and for a minute I thought we weren't supposed to be here and he was grabbing my arm to get me out and it was the first time I understood and I told the story hundreds of times and every time I think about it was the first time I understood what that man had been carrying his entire life and he was always presenting this strong you know element but in that moment and the first thing the second thing the first the other the second thing I thought the first thing he did was I've got to get her out um and I come to understand it so that memory that's in ourselves I actually believe we all have it in our DNA collectively but also what we carry individually and how that then shows up in terms of how trauma is passed pass down the baby in the bathtub so I think a lot about you know I started off by saying you know that all this land is stolen which I like to say a couple of times um and you know there's this question about reparations and that's a whole another conversation but I read an article a couple years ago by an indigen indigenous writer named David trer and it was in the Atlantic and it was a wonderful um article where he went on he did his work history he talked about his people he talked about the land that they lived on he's talked about what's happened over time and by the time he got to the end of the article he said excuse me my allergies are acting up he said yes all all the park land should be given back to Native Americans to Steward boom done we're done my question is you know and what I took away from that is not we can have a conversation about whether some of us agree and whether some of us don't but I'm interested are we even able to have the conversation right I work with a lot of predominantly white environmental organizations You' had the privilege to do so um and I always say to them you know cuz many think oh so do you want to cancel us out I said absolutely not we need everybody on board that cancer culture thing is really problematic for don't want to do that at all I said but yeah you know what you got to do you got to look at that mission statement that was made 50 years ago CU it wasn't made for people who look like me you know I always say you don't have to throw up the baby in the bath water but you definitely need a new bathtub and it is so frustrating for me for institutions and organizations who have really good people with good intention to do good work work but don't want to make that change right because it's hard right it's hard to do that and where where does that leave us if we don't do that and and I always talk about taking a risk in order to gain right and what do I mean by that and I you know I think we're always willing to take a risk in order not to lose something but it looks different when you're taking a risk that you might actually lose but because you believe in something else and the story I always like to tell is that it's been a few years now when spana lazy vit the Nobel Prize she's from bellarus and she had written a book on Chernobyl and in order to tell that what she thought was true about that she had to say some things about her people like she was hanging out some dirty laundry in order to make a case because she didn't want that ever to happen again and when she did that a lot of people in her country were not happy with her at all and she was on NPR and Michelle Martin was saying you make a lot of people uncomfortable and her response was so brilliant cuz she said I love my people I'm not interested in them being comfortable I'm interested in them being better right and the risk that she had to take in order to do that we're almost at the end I want to come back to my parents so this is the last day they were on the property it was 2003 they're standing in front of a weeping cherry tree so maybe 10 15 years earlier my father had given my mother that tree as a anniversary gift which they couldn't obviously take with them when they got to neww they bought another one just like it um 2020 when with George Floyd's murder with Christian Cooper walking the Central Park with the opportunities that were afforded me to put certain conversations out there in the world in a particular way I will say this gently and kindly and gratefully a lot of white institutions and organizations and people were reaching out to me and other people of color can you come and do this we'll pay you to do this can you write this can you do this let me tell you when that door open I went right through you know and yes we can have a conversation about the Continuum the people who really meant it and the people who really didn't but I actually don't care because if you actually invite me in I'm going to come in and do something with that right and some of those people were great so the New York Botanical Gardens had reached out to me and said you want to do a residency here for three weeks what are you working on um we love to support that and somehow I started talking about this weeping cherry tree and they said you know we're the New York Botanical Gardens I'm like I know I bet you we get on that property get a grafting of that tree bring it back to the New York pical Gardens and tell the story of your family I was laid out I was like wow it's happening right nowbody wo go do it that's so exciting so they set to building a relationship with the Westchester land trust and they're brand new owners of the property now so they were trying to make all that happen meanwhile in 2019 I'd given a talk at the Mountain film festival in tell you ride and it's environmental films and they had recently said we're going to do more around social justice so they invited a bunch of speakers like myself to come in and that's is own incredible story but I told a quick story for 20 minutes whose story counts big stage big images of my family I told this there a lot of filmmakers and people in the audience some a lot of people I didn't meet in 2020 I got a call from somebody named Irene Taylor She's a wonderful any award-winning white filmmaker who does documentaries who said would you get on a zoom call with me because I HBO has commissioned me to do a documentary about trees and what I want to do if I talk about a tree I'm want to talk about a real person associated with it and I thought about that as I was watching your story and you realized I didn't have a single story in there about anybody African-American could you help me think about what that might be and I said yeah I could do that and because I'm a little jokester I admit that when we got on zoom and Irene's really nice she lives in Portland Oregon I said well if you're going to tell a story about black people in trees yes you might want to talk about lynching and I just you know I kind of smile cuz I said I just want to sort of see what she saying I and she say you're right she goes but I'm not the person to do that and I said and we're not just the bad things that happened to us and so I told her the story about the tree the next thing I know she said can I do it on your family I said yes she says can we film you returning to the estate and New York Botanical Gardens getting a grafting like the thing was turning into a thing I was getting so excited like oh my God this would be amazing for my parents this would be amazing so we're getting everybody on board the president of the land trust is on board the new owners were not responding really they weren't responding at all and I hadn't reached out to them yet on purpose um and I wrote a letter I said let me write to them just give me their address let me just write to they're medical doctors a husband and wife and I wrote her a letter where I never uttered the word race once I said black people and talked about my friends but I said they didn't she wrote me back in 20 minutes and we'd be honored to have you here to do that now before we could arrange to get on the property the LOL wanted to know exactly where the tree was because they realized they didn't know so I sent them this photo and you can see it here next to the peak hydr it's right near the Gage Cottage and I was kind of surprised they didn't know and that's when I understood that just because there's a conservation eent does not mean that everything is protected right I didn't know that right two weeks after I sent them this photo this is what they sent me back it had been cut down actually everything had been cut down the flower beds the vegetable gardens the tree all of it was gone I saw this picture and I for at least three days I had like that horrible pit in my stomach I was angry I was depressed the filmmaker was devastated that New York banal guards was devastated probably about the fourth and fifth day I said you know what this is what always happens so we need to tell this story because it's about eraser we have to talk about it and then I start to feel feel a little better a couple of days later I said what if we could get everybody on board to plant a new mean cherry tree it took a little doing but we got everybody on board to in July 2021 to go on the property and instead which they filmed was us planning a new weekly cherry tree and the new owner was nervous I think she was there and she was really nervous because I don't know what she thought I was going to come and be like listen she wasn't even want to cut the tree down right so I said not at all um and for me me the point is is that everybody is accountable to the story which is very different than appropriating the story that's not yours to appropriate something we've done over time and we continue to do whether we're writers storytellers teachers politicians we do it all the time but if you're in right relationship it's this isn't just my story or my family story it's actually all of our stories I need them to be responsible to it I need them to be the ones remembering it too um about a year later in 2022 they sent me a picture of the tree to let me know how the tree was doing and what really got me was that the owners had taken it upon themselves to plant daffodils around the tree and they didn't know that daffodills were my father's favorite flower and so this is kind of where I want to end there's always a lot more things I can say um and but I'm thinking about playing the long game um some of you may have seen this painting because when Joe Biden was inaugurated Senator Roy Blount gave him this painting as a gift I was watching it on TV it's called landscape with a rainbow and I didn't really think anything about it because I often think a lot of pictures from that time kind of all look like this I just said it I know no disrespect it was that when he said that it was an African-American painter who painted this in 1859 and the reason my ears perked up is because a black man painted a picture in 1859 so so slavery was in place of a landscape with a rainbow and a rainbow is about possibility it's about hope all those things I can imagine what that man was carrying in his body they said he had a lot of mental challenges had to go over the border to Canada I can't imagine what it must have been like to live as a quote unquote free man during the time when many black bodies weren't allowed to be free and for me what I like to say is that I think he's was playing the long game the last thing that I want to say is maybe a year and a half ago Cornell West the black philosopher and thinker came to Vermont and he was amazing just as his ability to talk about so many things with no notes I was like dang but the question for me he asked right at the beginning of his talk is what kind of human being do you choose to be he didn't ask you what kind of human being you are or you want to be but who do you choose to be and I was sitting there like yes yes I choose to be kind and empathetic and you know hopeful and all the positive things I mean all of us were coming out of the audience when it was over he did a signing everybody was like oh my God we love you I love you you know it was like I said I feel great that's the kind of person I want to be but the universe always decides to test me and three days later this is the email I got hi I saw your racist book at the at a National Park Service Center today and I made sure to put a normal non-racist book in front of your stack so that no one else would see your racist book please stop being racist our world depends on Harmony not disharmony and racist like you stop being racist white people are great signed Sarah the great now I have to tell you all that empathy and kindness and everything I was doing three days before was Gone with the Wind right so what I want to and it hurt it actually hurts my feeling I don't know you know I have pretty thin skin friends of mine were laughing they were like but most I said because it hurts there's something in there I know she didn't read the book you know I I know that there's she had all her own stuff going on but it still hurts um and Cornell had talked about that we all have crooked Hearts to Bear right and so what I wrote here just to end it up I say you know I just want to read it as I wrote it um I don't believe it's about waiting till we've figured it all out or even come to some place of Grace and I'm still working on it with Sarah the great but I'm going to bring my crooked heart to bear um yes we may have lost a shared National narrative but there's a difference between losing and letting go to make room for something greater and yes it will cost you something it's going to cost me something too but we're worth it thank [Applause] you we got time for a couple of questions anybody got questions don't be shy tell me your name Thea Thea put micone got power yeah let's see if we can is it on I'm a school teacher can you all I'll repeat the question your words and yours remind me so much of I'm good I'm done get rep your words your thoughts remind me of bell hook yeah the book of belonging yes yes and I every part of that book just resonated me too so much with me and I don't really consider myself an outdoor person but um this was wonderful thank you so much for sharing yeah thank you um she's just thinking me making me feel good well and I want to say something I don't really think of myself as an outdoor person I mean I'm very Urban you know I asked you know we were joke about this earlier but I moved around a lot and people will say to me well ask me like where you know you meet somebody go where are you from and I said do you want to know where I live or do you want to know where I'm from like I with my little attitude until I was in Detroit at a street fair and an older black man said so where are you from and I said do you want to know where I live or do you want to know where I'm from and he just looked me up and down like this and said you must be from New York I'm very Urban I mean I you know yes I've done all the backpacking and stuff but I don't think of myself as an outdoors person but here's the thing nature isn't something out there we are part of nature right like that's the that dichotomy is false and so just a sense of being in place we're in place right now we're on ground that somebody else lived on and died on right now right and for me is just having that willingness to be open to what those stories might be who we don't know um I have a I teach one class Middlebury because it's part of my residency there and I have the students all write their environmental autobiographies and I start off by saying you know just two or three pages they just turned them in this week and I said just you know what place informed the way you think about nature in the outdoors there's no wrong answer this is going to be your easiest a all semester but you have to tell the story is it where your grandmother's Garden is it where you went camping you know it doesn't matter just I want you to talk about it you know um and then what they do for the rest of the semester so now I want you to go back to it and all the things you don't know about it who lived on that land before how has it changed over time how is the land used you know your family how were they impacted now I want you to tell a richer Fuller story with you still at the center you do not have to defend your story but you need to be able to tell your story so you can understand how your story is relationship with all those other stories of who we are the stolen land and everything else that comes after that those thank you than you people ownership who've lost ownership yes lot of stories like in California the brown Beach yes yes so it's all the questions about ownership and sometimes for me I I you know because ownership for me in and of itself is problematic you know the idea that we think we can own something living like land well we've done it with people you know land um and can determine who can have access or not and that ownership I always say um you know who's going to tell you more about a piece of land the people who own it or the people who work on it who are on it day in and day out which doesn't mean the owners don't know something but having a deed actually uh this is just my bias doesn't mean you actually the one who knows the most of what's best for that land last question somewhere over here yeah yes what's your name New York hi Scott Scott what New York you didn't say that okay there's relationship there somewhere yeah so why do you think so many people don't want us to have these conversations why are they working so hard to keep us from B to talk about these things did y all hear that one it's a good one hi um I have a couple of thoughts about that you know so I like to be generous and expansive about people so I think one of you know sometimes I think there's a lot of fear you know how you know sometimes if I'm looking at it a predominantly white audience and I say and I mean it in the best way especially if it's an organization or something that's brought me in and I say it's got to be really hard to be you right now like in these conversations and these kinds of conversations because anybody who's listen we all don't know something you know we all don't know something privilege has the privilege of not seeing itself and we all have privilege we just don't have the same privilege in the same way at the same time suddenly faced with maybe for the first time that you have to consider your lineage that you have to consider the impact you and or your family have had before that you have to consider actions that you took that were you didn't mean to be thoughtless but it but somebody else perceived it as that that's huge and I always want to say and how are people supported to do that work so part of the reason I think is people don't want to do that work because that's scary do you want to dig down in your own basement and do some serious internal upheaval there how are you supported to do that I think it's hard I think it's painful I think people misinterpret that they think it's about shame or they think it's about I press too um that you know I'm always careful that if I come into a room like this one that I understand that I was invited but also I'm not here to make anybody feel bad I think people are afraid of feeling bad I think when I look at some of the rules that have been passing forward that we can have these conversations in schools and somebody you know I read somewhere somebody said we don't want white children to feel bad now when I might after s of the great response first like have that response first is you know what black and brown children have been feeling bad their whole lives and then I take a breath and I say I don't want them to feel bad either I don't want anybody to feel bad this isn't about being comfortable but it's also not about feeling nice it's about feeling a sense of who you are as a whole person what I love to tell is if you've read a color purple or you've seen the play or you've seen the movie right about this young black girl cely and one of the main characters was Mister a black man who was domestically abusive to the women around him he just was brutal right and both in the book and in the movie and the play and I've seen them all right you you watch it when he finally gets his come up and he's kicked out of the community Al Walker got so much hate mail about that when Stephen Spielberg's movie came out from black people and Cent her into a depression for three years because the people she loved the most were like why did you put her JY laundry out there and start talking about about black men like that as so black men haven't been abusive this well women right but she said they missed the point if you read to the end of the story they bring him back into the community it was about until you do right so you make the choice to do right and then we bring you right back in that's the Redemption piece and I think that you know my human in me understands like who wants to do anything that's really hard and it's risky and you might lose people what is do it mean for that to happen that's that's the whole point you're probably going to lose something but it's for something greater and bigger it's not about the thing that's comfortable and that's easy and how do you solve 400 years of treating a lot of people poorly we've legislated it we've commodified it we still think it's okay and we got to do things like at Black History Month because that's the only way we know how to show up and make up for it and that doesn't do it in indigenous people's month women's month I mean I know what we're doing but it is topical it is not the heart work it is not the deep down oh my God my gut hurts work it does it's it that's the thing and I think people often don't want to do the work and people are busy most humans have full lives and are dealing with their own kind of pain I believe everybody is broken everybody is broken because we're human and life is hard sometimes we lose people in our lives it happens to everybody every day and I can understand why somebody might not want to do any more of that work and if we are going to move forward with everything that's happening to the environment everything that's happening in this country we have to be willing to do the work and to show up for each other the [Applause] best same time next week I'll be here only thank you carollyn fny everybody I hope m