 Hello. Hello. And again, hello. Who is saying hello again? There you go. That's what I'm talking about. Good evening. Wonderful crowd, with like a lot of energy in the room. Welcome to the 2024 Wilma Diamond Stokely Memorial Lecture, presented by the Friends of the Knox County Public Library. Applause. And by the John C. Hodges Society of the University of Tennessee Libraries. This crowd is going to be wonderful. They're on it. But they have one more test going on. My name is Jim Stokely. I'm one of two sons of James Stokely and Wilma Diamond Stokely. I'm a member of the John C. Hodges Society Board and I'm president of something called the Wilma Diamond Legacy, a small non-profit public charity in Asheville, headquartered in Asheville. So I'm here tonight to do three things. First, I'm going to tell you two or three jokes. And the second, I'm going to say a word about Wilma Diamond 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 maybe the longest sentence. They're already turning on it. We're going to get to that. You turned on me last year too. Yesterday I sent my brother a Get Better Sin card. He's not sick, I just think he could beat better. No, that was good. That was a good joke right there. So lastly, today is an interesting day. You know, 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 I was correct. But I had in mind 365 days of retirement. Today is Leap Day. It's like Perch Day. You can do anything you want to on Leap Day. So about an hour ago, I took up my position on the sidewalk in front of the History Center. I started asking people, I said were you born on February 29th? Couldn't find anybody except this one elderly lady with a walker, she's pushing it 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. I said no you're not. You're 22. You've had four, you've had 22 birthdays your entire life. She looked at me, she pulled herself straight up on her walker and looked me in the eye. She said Sonny when I was 22, the Tennessee River was flowing toward the Atlantic Ocean. That's all I got folks, that's it. Then I'll be back next year. Word about Wilma Dijkman. The Wilma Dijkman Legacy is an organization that sponsors events and activities which sustain the values for which Wilma Dijkman 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 only in celebration of Wilma Dijkman 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, quote, how we treat the land reflects how we treat people. In 1957 she wrote in her and my father's award-winning book, Neither Black nor White, quote, 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 I'm honored to introduce Dr. Carolyn Finney. Dr. Finney 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. Finney'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 environmental 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. Finney is the environmental studies professor of practice at Middlebury College. The difference between a professor and a professor of practice is that a professor of practice has actually done something in their life. That's not in the biographical remarks. She has also been a Fulbright scholar and has served on the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board for the National Parks Service. Her first book published in 2014 is on sale in the back corner called Black Faces, White Spaces, Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans in the Great Outdoors and will be on sale following the talk in the back of the room. So before you leave the building, you need to get your money out ready to spend. No pressure. Dr. Finney, 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 Dagen. Everyone, Dr. Carol and Cindy. What's the more of those jokes? 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. You know what 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. 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 those. But they're meant to try to keep me in line. Thank you for inviting me here today. Whenever I'm invited in particular because it's honoring someone who's doing work, I love the idea that 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. That's how I kind of understand that and heard that. I feel honored that I can kind of share my little story with you to honor that. I always think about where I'm... Somebody can ask me about why I entitled this, but I'm not going to... You can't hear me? Oh my God! Well! That's okay. This is the reality. This is like, you know, Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. You're kind of seeing how it really works. Oh no! There I am! That's all right. Thank you. Oh my God, that's kind of freaking me out. Yeah. I'm going to stand away from them. I just want to do this. I'm not sure why this is here. I'm going to do this too. I didn't need to turn it off. I should have just gone to the next slide. I'm not sure what happened. Where's the fabulous bed? All right. Excellent. Yeah. That's all right. Let's go back. 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 when people ask me to come in and talk to talk about black faces and white spaces. So this is the 10-year 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, and 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 UPenn professor. His name's Jonathan Zimmerman. 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, 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'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 you. Well... Try tomorrow's mic. Well, I'm holding so many things. I can try it. Yes. Oh, wait a minute. Hi, 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. Write the one about this thing. Okay, thank you. I need new batteries, and that's like deep and metaphorical. That's not the one I make 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, well, I get my batteries in place. No, no, it's okay. I lose my way. So, for me, even what I'm talking about is always in context, and I think about the stories of now. I created the slide maybe three or four years ago, right when COVID was in place. I tended to, when George White was murdered, when Kristen Cooper had his skating 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. 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. And I was wondering what would happen in terms of the ebb and flow and the way that we move. And at the time when I created the slide, the only thing I had up there was a map of the United States, a political map of the United States. I had the image of George Floyd and I had COVID. And 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 have to make sure you know that I know they're also happening at the same time. The conversation is about what's happening in Regaza, in Israel, the conversation that's happening around road, road versus way, 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 then in particular because this is a library. So a few years ago, 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 meet some Afro-Lachen 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 it away. This time they won't be able to pack it up and put it away. 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 and or talk about race and racism. Texas has the most bans followed by Florida. Now, I got this last summer, so I think it's gone up since then. So when I go back to thinking about Maria Cochran saying that at 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. 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, what would he say about this current moment a hundred years later, and we're actually in some places we can't even have a 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, so for about three 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 Tubman 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 to taste the freedom, keep going. 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, 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. 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 10-year anniversary of Black Faces White Spaces. It's also the 60th anniversary of both the Civil Rights Act and the Wilderness Act. And I'm going to talk about that in a little bit. I want to talk about, I don't want to ignore, I never liked to ignore and I always feel bad when babies are crying. Don't cry little baby. The idea that the personal is political. So I want to talk about an article that was written in 2021. Is it Black representation what we wanted? The person who wrote it was a Black writer named Mara Cheeks. And I keep looking at my nose because I'm quoting people and I want to make sure I get this right. So in it, she had interviewed one of the people that she quoted was the Jewish writer and thinker Fran Liebowitz. Fran Liebowitz I think is brilliant and has been around a long time. She asked the question Fran Liebowitz did. Why does everyone want to see themselves in books? She was having a conversation with the great director Martin Scorsese and she kept saying she doesn't understand people who complain about not seeing themselves in books. She said, quote, a book is not supposed to be a mirror. It's supposed to be a door. Mara 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 was unknowingly represented almost everywhere she turned. She didn't know what she had. A little bit later, Fran Liebowitz gets in conversation with the late great Toni Morrison and she says to, Toni Morrison says to her, I am the reader of the books I write and Fran Liebowitz says, your 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 Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and John Muir 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 actually believe they said a lot of truth and 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 really want to make the point that what happens to everybody else's experience at that same time when we value a certain group of experience in a particular way. So two years ago I got a chance to go to Camp Denali in Alaska and I'm getting a chance to go get in the park. Sorry. So Camp Denali, 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. All of these lodges, they try to make everything sustainable so that's the low-impact. Yeah, they have a greenhouse. They grow most of the stuff that they feed people there. The cabins are incredible. I mean, I've never seen anything like it. You have a cabin but it ain't like no cabin you've been in before. I walked in with the fireplace and the mosquito nets but everything was well thought out. You would 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 an author out for a week. They say, we fly you out here for a week. You spend time in the evening. They talk to the audience, a group of people who spend a lot of money to come here and do this. I want to know this is a picture from my own outhouse. Everybody has their own outhouse with a little harsh card in the door and you can see the peak. Yeah, it's really something. You've never been in an outhouse like that either. The reason I'm telling you this 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 in. When I changed flight planes in Newark, I had some time to get some walking around the airport. There's an electronic store. I go in. There's a young African-American man. He's working behind the counter and he just looked kind of bored, you know. And so I walk over and I'm like, hey, 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 at me. 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 don't you go there? You're black. You're no black people. Are you going to be okay? It's Alaska. All these things. And I just leaned in and I did a real stage. I said, come on, 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 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 in the world, and I've 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? Will they ask me about my hair? Will they want to touch me? What's going to happen 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 doesn't want to also go anywhere, right? I want him to feel like 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 part of Appalachia in the region. And this was maybe, I took this picture 10 years ago. We used to go every summer down there. I was originally from New York, and I'll come back to that as well. But we went down to, with my mother and father and my brothers, and as we drove in, 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 like any cemetery you might decide to see. And then we pulled up to this place, and I was like, what's happening right now? There was 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 farm, and the farm is very friendly and nice, and I have a conversation, and then my father says, 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 things happened, 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 what we couldn't go inside because of snakes. To 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, had to ask permission from anybody, but he had to ask permission from a white man. I'm not saying that because a white man is bad, I'm saying 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'd do it with a smile on his face and all of us going in and saying this. And I want to think about, I talk about how do we attend to place. So part when I go back to what Mr. Stokely was saying about his mother and the idea of caring for place and caring for people, and how do we tell a story that attends to place. 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, and I have to think that for myself. Let me tell you, when I started writing Black Bases as a dissertation, so 2003, 2004, I'm in graduate school, I couldn't find a single story about black people in the environment on the library shelves except for our environmental justice where something bad has happened to a community of black people. And like any people who are not simply what the bad things have happened to us, where are the nature stories? Who are the adventure stories? Where are 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. Well, 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 be this one up here where he called flipping the script. And he 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 not 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. This was my favorite show back in 2020-2021. If you haven't seen the series of HBO of Lovecraft Country. It was based on the books of HP Lovecraft. It has a lot of weird fiction and science fiction. It's set in the 1950s. It was focused on an African-American family, in particular a young man who had just come back from fighting the Korean War. It was a working class, a middle class family. But there was witches and monsters and everything involved in this story. And the first episode really got me in terms of making my point here about what happens when you re-center the story. They start up with this young family who found out that they have to do a road trip to Massachusetts because they have relative super 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 has to stay back with some of the young kids. And she kind of casually has a pad paper 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 what it means. And it was almost a throwaway moment, but it gave some truth to the matter. A little bit later on their adventure, they are still driving there in Massachusetts. They get stopped by a Wright 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? We are 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 they're fighting real monsters in the woods. But for me, it was the idea that they re-centered the story. You could 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. For those of you who don't know who Bryan Stevenson is, I love with a name. Bryan Stevenson is a black civil rights lawyer. He works to get black women and teenagers off that row. He's been to the Supreme Court at least five times. He helped create the fabulous lynching exhibit that's in Alabama. The man is like next level. So if they made a movie about him in Hollywood, true justice might be Jordan. Yes, also nice to look at. The thing that I'd like to say about Bryan Stevenson, I was watching his documentary probably 2021 around the same time. I watched Extra, Extra during the COVID days. And I didn't 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 I went, yeah, 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 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 about this. It's 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 for me, if you want to build trust, if you want to build a relationship, if 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 might mean in terms of how you move forward. 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've 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 women of European descent standing behind me. We're getting ready to get on. The flight attendant comes out, says there's a delay. The four of us are talking as you do, right? Everybody's really friendly. Somebody asked me what I do and I started saying, well, I have these conversations about race, land, privileges, blah, blah, blah. The two women of European descent say, oh, that's so good. Isn't it so important to have empathy and sympathy? And I say, yes, and I'm agreeing that some 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 wrote that down, too. I got a little like, yes, right? So for me, and many of you have heard this story, those of you who've heard me tell this 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. I've got a different picture I've heard this time with my parents. So I have to start with my parents, Rose and 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. My father went off to fight. They had both really big families, so I've known each other for a really long time. My father went off to fight in the Korean War. When he came back from the Korean War, he had to get a job. He said he saw a park ranger in a park ranger uniform, and he thought that would be a great government job 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 have me, Rose. My father and I, together, have never gone to a national park. That's a kid, so I'm going to just put that out there. But you know, theater is funny. Anyway. So my parents joined the Great Migration. They moved north to New York. A lot of black folks did. And they moved to New York because my father 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 five 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 a gardener's cottage. My parents lived in. There's another house you'll see in the image in a moment. My father was the chauffeur. He was the gardener. My mother was a sometimes housekeeper and they lived here full-time. My parents wanted to have kids. My mother thought she couldn't have kids. And the reason she thought she couldn't have kids is because like a lot of women who are regardless of the color of your skin, she had gone into the hospital to have one of the cysts removed from one of her ovaries. But without asking for permission, they actually removed one of her ovaries. They told her that when she woke up, the reason we didn't ask for 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. Opening slide. I can go back to it. It was my mother's very opening slide which you first drive here. The owners said, have you thought about adoption? And so actually the owners of the estate arranged for me to be adopted. I was born in New York City and they adopted me through Spence Chapin and then what I always like to say, then my parents relaxed. We had my first brother. And then they did more relaxing. My second brother. So we grew up on this estate. It was a very wealthy, all-white neighborhood. Harry Winston had property at the street. Shaper, Shaper Beater lived next door. We lived golf clubs around the corner. I just want you to give a sense of 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 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. We had such a privilege to play and be outside in nature in this place. I just want to say that. We all have a swim by the time we were seven. We have to. I'll make a 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 up games. The driveway was the Piranha River. I had to go on and on about all the games and good times we had on this property. And also my parents didn't know it. And also I told the story of being nine when I was in high school. I was right around the corner. There was always a policeman controlling this neighborhood because of the well. The white policeman stopped me once and where I'm going. He gave me an 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 not. I didn't say that. I was confused. And I said, no, I lived there. And he thought about it. The police station gives him hell. They never bothered me and my brothers again. But for me, I had to think about the logics. What were the logics there? I was a little girl, nine years old, time of day, school bag, 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, neighborhood, 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 caring for this land full-time for 40 years. To the credit of the owner, she was sick. She wanted to try to keep my parents on this land. Property was worth at the time, over $3 million. How many taxes a loan 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 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 prospective buyers said he would only buy that, this property, if he could also buy that land too. So at the end of the day, I was in Leesburg, Virginia. And the only reason, even my father's story, was never going back to that state that he went to Leesburg, is because my youngest brother at this point was married with kids and settled there. I'm moving around too much, as is my other brother. So they moved to Leesburg, Virginia. I wanted to jump ahead, and it was 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 the owner wanted my father to decide. You know, power is complicated, but so is love, and so it's really important for me to say that whole bit in a particular way. She passes away, the new owner buys the property, asks my parents to stay on, they stay on until 2003. Now my parents have been carrying that for that land for nearly 50 years, full time. They leave, they have a lovely house in Virginia on a half acre land. There's a copy of a letter one of the neighbors had sent it and they showed me a copy of the letter from the Westchester Land Trust. It 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 could live on the land but they'd be taken care of as property. It talked about the animals that lived on the property, the trees that grew there where it sat in the watershed, all the reasons might be protected every day. I agreed with everything. I get 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 thanking my parents who had cared for that land for nearly 50 years full time 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 and 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 parents had a high school education they knew more about that land than any before so yes, I'm 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 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 so I always put this image up there and you can see for yourself 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 in the railroad but I always have an image of Gifford Pinchel with a mustache who was the reason why we even talk about conservation as management of our resources it's the reason why we have a forest service it's the reason why we have Yale Forestry which is kind of amazing and then you have John your father of conservation having a conversation with President Roosevelt in 1903, he was 70 on overhanging rock and I think 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'm going to know what else was going on at the same time so 1862 I think one of our most important pieces of legislation is not the most important that changed the way we think about land and environment with phones that act and when that gun went off at midnight for the most part if you were a European descent you could run out you could just take down 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 a 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 three years later our Emancipation Proclamation enslaved Africans of free originally giving 400,000 acres of land until white plantation owners started talking and said what have we done we've just given people we had as our slaves 400,000 acres of land it is never just about land it is 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 love to tell you anything else tonight for us to start to understand the question not just a land ownership but the sense of belonging let's go back to that young man in Newark wondering can you go to Alaska and feel like you'll be welcome and it'll be okay for you to be here on that line about the right to be able to say you belong there and oh let's not forget it all this land was stolen 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 we are still fighting for that and for me the question is how do I show up to that how am I in a right relationship with that and what does that actually mean for me I started off by talking about in the book I very purposefully used Spike Lee movies as titles to my chapters in part because I was challenged as a doctoral student in doing research on this again and finding those black stories but that didn't mean that black stories weren't there and there were paintings and there were musicians making stories about this people were telling stories about their experience and I love the way that Spike Lee did it and for me again that we've been bamboozling because I think we think there's a one narrative there's Manifest Destiny there's European immigrants came over there's Manifest Destiny they go into civilization they did do that and I am very careful I am not here to denigrate European immigrants something like 60% of them died they 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 have 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 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 Spike Lee is talking about immigration relationships we're not 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 he maybe wanted to have Lebron James up here so this is both it's the first time 2010 I believe it was that a black man had been put on the cover by the star Lebron James the supermodel J. L. Bunshan a lot of black people got upset when they saw this because why is he like this why couldn't he be Alex Vogue he could have been in a suit you know there's a lot of ways he could have been photograph and then somebody uncovered this poster which is from 1917 I want you to look right down to the color of her dress now when people at Vogue say they don't know anything about it but for me it says a lot about what's in our consciousness so think about the late 1800s there were world fairs and I think world fairs must have been really exciting for some people because it was about sharing ideas what kind of culture are we going to become what new ideas do we have and also we put around to black people on display in cages at them I think about Otamanga he was a 19 year old man from New 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 to be public we'll get to see him so they moved into the primaries at the Bronx Zoo we get to see all the stories of black and brown people that this has happened to so if we jump ahead and the idea of thinking about our first African-American president I'm not thinking politically or I'm always political and the idea that those images we were seeing the watermelon patches in front of the White House Michelle Obama being called to me this is not new again direct line to understand so I come back to this little photo and if they didn't know shame on them and if they didn't know shame on them 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 if anybody actually talked about the environment the Wilderness Act Howard Zenizer and his people were so committed to think about these wilderness areas as universal spaces we all should be able to go through and find that renewal and find that connection and one of the things that just broke my heart is that Howard Zenizer 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 with 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 Wilderness Act doesn't really get at I mean it was written at a time you know before while Jim Crow was still in place they didn't really get at that so the rights act didn't really talk about the environment and nature but they were all kind of working on that in 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 the National Park and because it was 1960 they were African-American they said well let's not go here in the U.S. let's go over the border to Fundy Bay National Park in Canada but he wrote the superintendent because they were going to be staying in these chalets right in the park just so that they would know this and they would be okay he said listen they've got multiple degrees they're well educated well cultured he had to say those things was problematic but he said I just want to make sure that he retreated with respect he didn't hear anything right away and what he did when he came the 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 Karen Scott King who wanted to take a break from their civil rights work in order to find that respite right in the parks that so many other people like Howard Zanz were saying anybody should be able to get wherever you go there you are I always say to myself it doesn't matter how famous you are or 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 go into a park or a beach or climbing a mountain it doesn't change racism, prejudice and bias do not change because you enter 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 revved up now I'm not even looking at my notes what's happening I, yeah I like to talk 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 when I think about African Americans in the Tassini experiments and the kind of mistrust of medical profession for instance but there's also individual memory 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 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 Fink I didn't get along with Henry Lee Fink 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 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 I do want to say this about my father around 2000 he wanted to change the name Lee because he was sure it was after Robert E. Lee he asked us how did he do that we said these are the forms you have to fill out so we changed it so now he's officially Henry X Fink Fink so we're coming to visit me in Atlanta we're going to go to 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 an Easter Baptist church there's the house Dr. King grew up in there's a visitor center we wandered to the visitor center my mom wandered off and all the exhibit was about a feeling of what it must have been like in the 50s and 60s all the posters were supposed to have a whole sensory overload I'm staying with my dad in front of one of these we're not a particularly family I was little before over so we didn't have this conversation so I'm staying there next to my dad and grown can I borrow your arm? don't be scared and he just grabs my arm like this and I got scared and I looked over at him and his face completely blanched and I thought my father happened 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 the sign said for whites only he pointed to that sign and he said I saw that sign and for a minute I thought we weren't supposed to meet 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 it's the first time I understood what that man had been carrying his entire life and he was always presenting this strong element but in that moment and the second thing I thought the first thing he did was I've got to get her out and I come to understand it so that memory that's in ourselves will 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 down the baby in the bathtub so I think a lot about I started off by saying that all this land is stolen which I like to say a couple of times and there's a question about reparations and that's a whole other conversation but I read an article a couple of years ago by an indigenous writer named David Truer and it was in the Atlantic and it was a wonderful 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 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 take 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 a conversation right I work with a lot of predominantly white environmental organizations you've got a privilege to do so and I always say to them you know because many think, oh so do you want to cancel us out and I said absolutely not we need everybody on board we don't want to do that at all I said, but yeah, you know what we got to look at that mission statement that was made 50 years ago because it wasn't made for people who look like me you know I always say, you don't have to throw up a baby in the bathwater but you definitely need to do bathtub and it was so frustrating for me for institutions and organizations I'm really good people with good intention to do good work but don't want to make that change because it's hard right, it's hard to do that and where does that leave us if we don't do that and I always talk about taking a risk in order to gain and what do I mean by that 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 maybe you believe in something else and the story I always like to tell is that it's been a few years now when Spetlana won the Nobel Prize she's from Belarus and she had written a book on Chernobyl and in order to tell what she thought was true she has to say some things about how 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 because 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 were standing in front of a weeping cherry tree so maybe 10, 15 years earlier I gave my mother that tree as an anniversary gift which I couldn't take with them when they got to me's work they bought another one just like it 2020, with George Boyd's murder with Christian Cooper walking in Central Park with the opportunities that were for me to put certain conversations out there in the world in a particular way I would say this gently and kindly and gratefully a lot of white institutions and organizations of people were reaching out to me telling me can you come and do this or pay me to do this can you write this, can you do this let me tell you where that door went I went right through and yes we can have a conversation about the continuum of the people who really rented and the people who really didn't but I actually don't care because if you actually invite in I'm going to come in and do somebody with that and some of those people were great so the New York Botanical Gardens every time to me said you want to do residency and somehow I started talking about this we can show you a tree and they said you know where the New York Botanical Gardens I'm like I know I bet you we can get on that property get a graphing of that tree bring it back to the New York Botanical Gardens tell the story of your family I was late at that I was like wow what's happening right now everybody's woo go do it that's so exciting so they said to building a relationship with the western they ran to us and they're branding owners they make all that happen meanwhile in 2019 I gave it a talk at the Mountain Film Festival in Telluride 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 its own incredible story and I told a quick story for 20 minutes whose story counts big stage big images of my family I told this to a lot of filmmakers and people in the audience somebody from a lot of people I didn't meet in 2020 I got a call from somebody from Telluride she's a wonderful Emmy award-winning white filmmaker who does documentaries who said would you get on a Zoom call with me because HBO has commissioned me to do a documentary about trees and what I want to do if I talk about a tree I want to talk about a real person associated with it and I thought about that as I was watching your story I 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 I admit that when we got on Zoom and I raised really nice she was important in the origin I said well if you're going to tell a story about black people in trees yeah you might want to talk about lynching and I just you know and I kind of smile because I just want to sort of see what she's saying and she's like you're right but I'm not the person to do that and I said we're not just the bad things that happened to us and so I told her this story about the tree the next thing I initially said can I do it on your family I said yes she said can we film you returning to the estate and near Britannical Gardens getting a grafting like the things 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 I hadn't reached out to them yet on purpose and I wrote a letter I said let me write to them just give me your address let me just write to their medical doctor so husband and wife and I wrote her a letter where I never under the word raised once I said black people she wrote me back in 20 minutes and said we'd be honored to have you here to do that now before we could arrange to get on the property the land trust wanted to know exactly where the tree was because they realized they didn't know so I sent them this photo to the peak hydroagents right through the gardens cottage and I was kind of surprised they didn't know and that's when I understood that just because there was a conservation easement does not mean that everything is protected right they know that right? two weeks after I sent them this photo this is what they sent me back gave me a cut down actually everything was cut down the flower beds, the vegetable gardens the tree, all of it was gone I saw this picture and for at least three days I had that horrible pit in my stomach I was angry, I was depressed the filmmaker was devastated the New York Potomac 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 the racer we have to talk about it and then I said to feel a little better a couple of days later I said what if we could get everybody on board to plan as a new tree but we got everybody on board to in July 2021 to go on the property and instead what they filmed was us planning a new week in 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 going to cut the tree down right so I said not at all and for 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 it's writers, storytellers, teachers politicians, we do it all the time but if you're in a right relationship this isn't just my 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 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 all themselves to plant daffodils around the tree and they didn't know that daffodils 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 but I'm not thinking about playing the long game 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 can all look like this I just said it I know no disrespect it was that one he said that it was an African-American painter who painted this in 1859 and the reason my ears perked up was because a black man painted a picture where his favorite was in place of a landscape with a rainbow and a rainbow is about possibility it's about hope all those things I can't 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 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 his ability to talk about so many things with no notes I was like, hey 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 you want to be but who do you choose to be and I was sitting there like yes yes I choose to be culminated empathetic and hopeful and all the positive things all of us were coming out of the audience when it was over and he did us a book everybody was like oh my god we love you I love you 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 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 else coming today before was gone with the wind right so what I want to and it hurt you know I have pretty thin skin friends of mine were laughing they were like for most people because it hurts there's something in there I know she didn't read the book I know that she had all her own stuff going on but it still hurts 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 I don't believe it's about waiting we 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 yes we may have lost the 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 you come to your name Theresa we're going to look at this microphone you know you've got power use your words yeah let's see if we can is it on? yeah you don't hear me correct I'll repeat the question your words and your thoughts remind me so much of that book I'm good I'm done repeat it your words and your thoughts remind me of jail books the books I found belonging yes yes every part of that book just resonated me too I don't really consider myself an outdoor person this is wonderful thank you so much for caring yeah thank you she's just thanking 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 we were talking about this earlier but I've moved around a lot and people will say to me you meet somebody look up 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 until I was in Detroit at a street fair and an older black man said 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 he just looked me up and down like this and said you must be from New York I'm very urban I mean I 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're a part of nature 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 and for me it is just having that willingness to be open to what those stories might be who we don't know I teach one class at Middlebury because it's part of my residency there students all write their environmental autobiographies and I start off by saying just two or three pages they just turned them in this week and I said just what place informed the way you think about nature in the outdoors there's no wrong answer this will 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 doesn't matter just I want you to talk about it and then what they did for the rest of the semester now when you 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 has the land used 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 but who we are the stolen land and everything else that comes after that thank you who lost ownership yes yes yes so it's all the questions about ownership and sometimes for me I because ownership for me in and of itself is problematic the idea that we can own something living like land what we've done with people the land and can determine who can have access or not and that ownership I always say you know who's going to tell you more about a piece of land the people who own it are the people who work on it who are on it day in and day out which doesn't mean the others don't know something but having the deed actually this is just my bias doesn't mean you are actually one who knows the most about what's past on that land last question someone over here what's your name? Scott Newark Scott what? you just said that okay 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 being able to talk about these things did y'all hear that one? that's a good one a couple of thoughts about that you know so I like to be generous and expansive about people so I think one of the sometimes I think there's a lot of fear you know how sometimes if I'm looking at 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 gotta be really hard to be you right now like in these conversations of conversations because anybody who's listen we all don't know something 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 the actions that you took that were you didn't mean to be thoughtless but somebody else perceived it as that that's huge and I always want to say that 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 we 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 it's about I press 2 that 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 but I look at some of the rules that have been passed that we can't have these conversations in schools and somebody not heard somewhere said we don't want white children to feel bad now when I might after sorry a great response first that response first is you know what black and brown children are feeling bad their whole lives and then I think about 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 written a color purple or you've seen the play or you've seen the movie right about this young black girl Celie and one of the main characters was Mr. 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 in the play and I've seen them all you watch it when he finally gets his come up and he's kicked out of the community I always talk about so much hate mail about that when Steven Spielberg's movie came out from black people and sent her into a depression for three years because the people she loved the most why did you put her up very long talking about black men like that so black men haven't been abusive as well to women 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 and that's the redemption piece and I think that my human in me understands who wants to do anything that's really hard and it's risky and you might lose people what does it mean for that to happen and 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 the fears 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 apply history months because that's the only way we know how to show up and make up for it and that doesn't do it indigenous peoples 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 that's the thing people often don't want to do the work and people are busy most humans have full lives that 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 at the same time next week I'll be here thank you Carolyn Fettie everybody thank you see you next time