University Place

The Possibility of Us and the Land on Which We Stand

-[Paul Robbins] Welcome to the 6th Annual Jordahl Public Lands lecture. I’m Paul Robbins, I’m the director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and thanks for coming. It is a huge pleasure to have Carolyn Finney back in Madison tonight. As you might remember, Carolyn’s talk in our 2012 Earth Day conference was captivating. I have to admit that people said, “Why should she come back?” and I said, “Because she’s brilliant and she does all kinds of great work, and I missed the last talk.”
– [Audience Member] I forgive you.
– [Paul Robbins] I was in the hospital, right? It’s all good. Her talk actually ignited so much activity and discussion at the institute that we began to unroll a broad initiative that we call Everyone’s Earth. Core to Everyone’s Earth is the notion that we widen the audiences and contributors to environmental studies beyond its historically unnecessarily narrow demographic by addressing issues of community importance, diversifying our student population, connecting students and faculty to communities of all kinds, and we’re also committed to bring this effort to a broader audience, an external audience. We’ve organized a set of ongoing Everyone’s Earth lectures or events in order to foster conversations specifically on the question of race and environment.

Before Carolyn inspires us again, I’d like to say a few words about the person after whom this lecture series is named. Harold, better known as Bud Jordahl worked closely with the late U.S. Senator in Wisconsin, Governor Gaylord Nelson, throughout much of his career. Now, Bud was a visionary and dedicated his life to preserving Wisconsin’s natural resources. He helped to establish the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, and if that was enough, if I did that, I’d just quit there. I’d just be done. But he was a doer. He helped establish the Northern Great Lakes visitor center, the Wisconsin Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund which was a genius piece of vision, and much, much more. Bud was also a professor of urban and regional planning here at the UW, Extension and Environmental Studies who inspired hundreds, I’d probably say thousands, of students. The Jordahl Lecture was established six years ago to honor his legacy and to foster a conversation about the critical role of public lands, the lands that belong to the people in our society, so thank you for taking part in that conversation this evening and remember Bud.

This event is made possible by the financial support of a number of generous individuals and partner organizations. We’re incredibly grateful for your commitment to this lecture. I’d also like to acknowledge the other supporters of this event, each of which helped to promote tonight’s event. That includes the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences Arts and Letters, the Gathering Waters Conservancy, 1,000 Friends of Wisconsin, the Nelson Institute Center for Cultural History and Environment and the UW Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture, the Wisconsin Association for Environmental Education, and Wisconsin Public Radio. I’d add that this lecture will be recorded tonight and it will air on Wisconsin Public Television later, so if you’ve got friends who might dig this, send it to them; make sure they see it. Without further ado, it’s my great pleasure to introduce Carolyn Finney. Carolyn Finney is a leading voice in a very important conversation about diversity in environment. Her book, “Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors” asks the question, “Why are African Americans so underrepresented when it comes to interest in nature, outdoor recreation, and environmentalism?” Her book looks beyond the environmental justice movement to examine how the natural environment has been understood, commodified, represented by both white and black Americans. Carolyn is a writer, a performer, and a cultural geographer who is a professor of geography at the University of Kentucky. She is deeply interested in issues related to identity, creativity, and resilience.

Carolyn pursued an acting career for 11 years, but a backpacking trip– How many people were transformed by a backpacking trip in this audience? Like everybody, right? Changed the course of her life. She returned to school after a 15-year absence to complete a bachelors, masters, and a Ph.D. Were you that inspired? Carolyn’s research explores how issues of difference impact participation in decision-making processes to address environmental issues. Her work aims to develop greater cultural competency within environmental organizations and institutions, to challenge media outlets on their representation of difference, to increase awareness on how privilege shapes who gets to speak to environmental issues and determine policy and action. Carolyn has made numerous media appearances. That’s a gross understatement. She’s everywhere. She serves on the U.S. National Parks advisory board to assist the National Park Service in engaging in relations of reciprocity with diverse communities.

If you’re interested in learning more, please know that Carolyn’s book can be found at the Room of One’s Own bookstore table in the lobby and she’s going to do a signing after the talk. I was just told. She’s going to speak for about 50 minutes. We’re going to have time for maybe one or two questions and then we can get out there to the book signing. Please welcome Dr. Carolyn Finney. (audience applauding)

[Carolyn Finney] Thank you very much, it was really nice to meet you all. I’ll see you outside. No, all right. (laughs) This is that moment, okay. This is always, I love doing this, and I love coming and meeting people but there’s always this moment right here where I’m just like, “(gasps) Okay,” but we’re going to be good, we’re going to be good. I got to say some hard stuff, but understand that I’m really saying it from my heart, I have to say that. I’m going to start off in that place because I’m feeling nervous. But, it’s going to be good. Thank you for having me here. First of all, I don’t even need my notes to say this. I have my notes, I don’t really need my notes, but I feel better about my notes. I want to thank Paul Robbins. I want to thank Emily Reynolds. I want to thank everybody at the Nelson Institute for bringing me back here.

I love coming to Madison. I love coming to Madison. I mean that. (audience clapping) I want to thank the Jordahl family, and this is something that I had to just admit. Sometimes I forget that there is a legacy that’s come before that’s made it possible for me to be here now, and I don’t often get to meet the family members who are part of that legacy, so I’m always really honored and moved by that even though I don’t know that person, I don’t know Bud Jordahl, but I feel like I’m part of his legacy so I have some responsibility to that. I’m really honored to be here so I want to thank his family for having me here as well. I hope it’s going to be good. Yeah, we’ll see. Woo, okay.

Public lands. That’s right, I’m dropping some James Baldwin on you right from the beginning so you know exactly where I’m going. All right. I was really nervous to talk about public lands. Because when I was here before there’s a lot of stories and stuff I tell from the book and I’m only going to pull a little bit from there because actually I really wanted to try to come honestly to this question but I was really nervous about it, and I was nervous about it because– Last year I was invited out to Moab, Utah to have a conversation somewhat like this with folks out there. It was a predominantly white audience. I had lived in Utah before so I was excited to go back but I’m always a little nervous when I go to Utah. That’s an aside story, but not really. It’s actually kind of related.

(laughter) I met some really fabulous people there, and a couple of months ago one of these women, this white woman, these folks who were doing some really great work as it relates to public lands, gave me a call and said, “We’re putting together a public service announcement. The public lands are under fire. Anybody who’s paying any attention at all to the news knows that’s true.” They had some money. They wanted to do a public service announcement and they wanted a couple of oral histories. They were going to spend a day with a bunch of different people and ask you a lot about yourself and your own life experience, kind of whittle it down to a few minutes, put it as a public service announcement on one of their cable stations. They had already got a Native woman who was going to be involved and they knew a little something about my personal story and they said, “Would you like to do it?” I said, “Well, what’s the question?” This is the question, I want to make sure I get it right, that they asked me. They said can I tell a credible story about belonging where the public lands were seen in a good light? Is there promise there? Can I tell a credible story about belonging where the public lands were seen in a good light? Is there promise there? I was really conflicted. I chewed on the question for days because I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it because I liked the person who asked me.

I wanted to do it because I believe so much in story and the power of story and showing up when somebody asks you, but I talked to her for a while and I said, “I don’t know if I can be honest about that in terms of the way you framed the question.” I felt like I couldn’t be honest about it because I said, “Look, I’m an optimist and anybody who knows me well knows that no matter what I say to you today, the thing is I’m really an optimist about things. I believe in the possibility of our better selves. I want to honor the land that has fed me and told me a bit about who I am. These things are true, but I am also angry. I’m hurt. I’m somewhat mistrustful. I’m guilty. I’m complicit. Sometimes I think I’m lazy and weak and really I’m just really afraid a lot of the time. I’m not sure that I have the right to talk about belonging because I’m not sure that I’ve ever belonged.”

I’m not sure that I have the right to talk about belonging because I’m not sure that I’ve ever belonged. I’m going to drop that and let it sit for a second. It’s even hard to me to say it. I say it with a sense of humor, but actually it makes me really nervous because it brings up all the insecurity about who am I? Where am I allowed to stand? Will I be accepted? Will you see me as whole? You can talk about the land, but you know wherever you go, there you are. If the land is public, if the land is private, if you own it, if it’s a park, if it’s a beach. Is it a hotel? Are we in a city? Are we in the woods? It doesn’t matter for me because I’m always thinking about this wherever I go. I can’t help it because I’m reminded about it in good ways and in not so good ways, all the time. I’m thinking about my security. I’m thinking about how people are looking at me.

I’m thinking about are people going to like me? Are people going to think I’m strange? Are they wondering where I’m from? I lived in Utah for two years. I lived in Logan, Utah. Yes, I was diversity in Logan. I did my masters there. I did it because of a boyfriend, but that’s another story. I was there for two years in Logan, Utah, and actually people were really friendly. The most challenging thing for me is that if you were not Mormon, you weren’t part of the majority community, but people were actually pretty friendly. The thing that made me feel that separation was that– This was 1996, 1997, and I was preparing to go to Nepal to do some masters work there in community forestry so I would always go to the travel agent because in them days, you younger folks, we used to go to the travel agent to buy our tickets. (audience laughing) I had visited this woman three times.

She was a really nice, I would say middle-aged, white woman, and the third time I walked in, and I looked just like a younger version of myself. I was skinnier, I was younger, but I was pretty much the same. By the third time I walked in to pick up my ticket, she finally looked at me and said, “So, is Nepal your home country?” I’m a little confused. I remember just saying, “No, no, I’m from New York,” because I didn’t know what to say. A few months later I’m up on campus and I’m putting together a slideshow, and for young people in the room, we used to have slides. (audience laughing) I’m about to show my visit to Nepal and this young white kid, a student, came over to me and asked me what I was doing. I said, “I’m going to show you about Nepal,” and he said, “Oh, is that where you’re from?” All I could say to him, I was like, “Dude, have you ever watched MTV?” We used to do that, too. (audience laughing) “I’m from New York.” It was the sense, sometimes it’s not about somebody being racist or biased. Sometimes it’s simply somebody doesn’t even think you belong here, you’re not from here.

I think everything about me screams American, from how I talk, how I show up, how I behave, but it didn’t matter. There’s something that threw people off about who I am. I did not have that in my notes to talk about Utah. What happened? (laughter) Really can I have a conversation about public lands without revealing these truths about who I am and where I stand? I always have to start from me, because I think we all always start from who we are. I always say that I believe all knowledge is subjective. We bring all of who we are to bear up on anything that we are trying to understand. We can have a conversation with a scientist about objectivity. I don’t want to go there. I’m just saying I can only talk to you about this as myself.

I’m going to extrapolate and talk about some other things as well but it’s important that you understand who I am to give you a sense of why I think of things this way and I think about public lands in terms of belonging. (deeply inhales and exhales) Next. Okay, public lands. I have here public lands and race, okay. Yes, I’ve come to you, I’ve come to this conversation in two ways. I’m going to talk about some stories and the way that I think about public lands, but again I have to acknowledge that I’m doing this as a black woman and that means something to me in terms of how I see, understand, and experience being on this land in which we all stand. I cannot separate it. Right? I don’t care if we’re talking historically, collectively, or individually, as a black person I have to think about the land on which I stand all the time. It’s weird because I served on the National Parks advisory board for eight years. For the first time I saw an amazing array of national parks.

What a privilege it was. I actually never thought about the national parks, to be honest with you. John Jarvis would forgive me because I’ve said it to him as well. For me this is kind of amazing. I’d been to a couple of parks here and there, but mostly my travels were outside of the country because I was way more comfortable backpacking on my own in Asia and Africa than I ever was here in the United States. I have never gone backpacking by myself in the United States, ever! That’s embarrassing actually. I like to brag and be like, “Yeah, I trekked up to 16,000 feet,” back in the day when I was really fit. When I think about the Appalachian Trail, places that I can go here, it makes me really nervous to think about it here. I don’t know if that’s right or correct, but it’s true for me.

I got a message from– This was about a week or two ago. I lived in the Bay Area for eight years, so I’ve been in Kentucky for the last two years. Eight years before I was living in Berkeley, considered very progressive. In terms of public lands, environmental issues, people are right on it out there. Californians are loud and proud about how they feel about non-human nature and the land there. I got a message from a friend, an African American man who’s lived out there for years who does a lot of work himself around environmental policy, and he was really distraught. He had been with a female friend of his, who happens to be Chinese American, with their two teenage children. Her child was Chinese and black. His child was trans and black.

They were teenagers. They were on Point Reyes National Seashore, so public lands. On the beach, Bay Area. Progressive, liberal. You should feel cool. Been out here for years. He was distraught because he and his friend walked away, they walked down the beach for 45 minutes and left their kids on the beach and when they got back their kids had been accosted by a white man with a Nazi sign telling them they better go back to their country. When people say to me, “You’re in Kentucky. Oh my god, are you scared? Confederate flags.” I have something to say about that.

I said, “But it doesn’t matter where you are in this country.” That’s been my experience. I have stories from so many places in this country. Some of them are like that. Some of them are funny. 1997, 1998 I lived in the state of Washington. I was hiking with two friends, not by myself, on Mount Baker. Two white friends. It was a day hike, no big deal. Great cloudy day, Pacific Northwest.

We hiked up the mountain. There was a kind of lodge where there was a fire, a gift shop and stuff, so we went inside because it was kind of cold. My friends wandered off. I was standing– There was a fire and I had a shawl, so I was standing with my backside to the fire like this. There was an elderly white woman, I would say she looked like maybe she was in her 70s, and she was staring at me really hard. Not unfriendly, just hard. Finally I must have moved because she jumped and then she walked over to me and she said, “Dear, I thought you were a beautiful Indian statue.” That’s kind of weird because it was kind of a compliment. I like the whole beautiful thing. The Indian thing’s kind of messed up because I’m not Indian.

Babe, she didn’t think I was real. Right? I was like, “Okay, how am I supposed to deal with that?” Yeah, sometimes it’s funny and light, but there’s still this sense of difference that becomes really apparent. I dress when I go hiking like most people in this country dress when they go hiking. I don’t think I look that tremendously different, but not everybody feels that way about my presence in outdoor spaces, so I carry this with me. For myself and many others who live in this country, the color of our skin matters, not simply because we say so but because it is embedded so deeply in the history of who we are and what we did to get here. It’s embedded so deeply in the history of public lands and how public lands became public lands and how they became wilderness. This is the truth. I know you know and I think we don’t always want to own that thing about public lands. I always ask which public are we talking about? Whose public lands? For many of us, public and private doesn’t make a difference because there’s still this sense of this body in this space on a piece of land, and what are people going to think about us? I read this story a couple of months ago. We’re so interesting.

Americans are so damn interesting. Right? The story of Silicon Valley executive Vinod Khosla. He’s the co-founder of Sun Microsystems. I read two different numbers that he either bought a 53-acre property in 2008 for $37.5 million, or it was 89 acres of coastal property. Either way what he did was he shut off public access to the beach. He shut it off. For about 100 years people had been bringing their families to the beach. That’s a picture of it. He shut it off and it went to court. Khosla said, “He has the fundamental right to exclude the public from his private property without state interference.” The LA Times was talking about how it could set a worrisome precedent in favor of the wealthy private citizens who would prefer to disregard the Coastal Act.

What I was thinking of, it’s that old justification that it is our right to claim land for ourselves for me and mine regardless of the cost, and I’m not talking about money. This is as old as this country, the right to claim the land for ourselves. I always want to know whose land was it before. And how do we hold that? The thing that I’ve been really grappling with, and I’m so privileged to have these conversations with people like yourselves around the country, and now I’ve started to say the land was stolen. I have no answer for that. I’m going around talking to all black people are doing this, and just because I’m black doesn’t change the fact that the land was stolen. I’m not saying what we should do about that, but how do we not hold that? How do we have a real conversation about public lands and remember that? How many people have died because of that? How many people are still fighting because of that? Not because they own the land but because they are of the land, and it’s such a different way of standing and holding yourself in the world. When someone tells you, “You can’t be on that land and you can’t use it anymore like you used to,” they are telling you that you cannot be whole. You cannot be yourself.

You cannot be here because it’s for the public, but that actually has nothing to do with you. Yeah, it’s going to get better. Just ride with me, ride with me. I’m with you, I’m with you. Public lands are not really of the public because a huge swath of the public was denied access. Land was stolen, declared wilderness, and the military was used to create boundaries. (groans) Oh man, I need a drink right now. It’s uncomfortable, it’s not very nice, but it’s also true. When I talk about freedom and sovereignty when talking about public lands, I have to ask myself, “Whose freedom am I talking about? If I attain that freedom for me and mine in regards to public lands, whose freedom is denied and at what cost and who carries that cost?” I’m not asking this of you. I’m putting this out there, but I have to ask it of myself.

This is the work I get to do and I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do with that. If I have freedom to have access, whose freedom is denied because I get my freedom? I was casually thinking about Thomas Jefferson, because I just like to think about Thomas Jefferson now and again. The first part of the title of my talk, “Ten Thousand Recollections,” is actually from a Thomas Jefferson quote. I got it from a really great book written by Carl Zimring. It’s called “Clean and White” and he looks at the history of sanitation and waste and environmental racism here in the United States. It’s a great book. The quote from Thomas Jefferson is, “Deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained will produce convulsions which will probably never end, but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” Thomas Jefferson was a complicated dude. He was president.

He owned slaves. He helped write the Constitution. He owned slaves. He was president. He raped a black woman and had children with her. He had the privilege of owning people as property to do with what he wanted and he had the foresight to know that we would all be reliving this tension for a long time, that it was going to come back and bite us all in the butt. “We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice,” that is the first line of the preamble that he helped to write, and for me, I’m not about denigrating Mr. President Jefferson. I want to point to how complicated some people are. He’s complicated and I’m being nice.

We know I’m being nice. When I read that quote from him, I was moved by it. He understood. I can’t curse because we’re on video. He understood that the stuff was really raggedy, that it was really raggedy and that we are going to be paying for it for a long time, and I believe that we are paying for it right now. Yeah, so let me tell you a little bit about my story, where I come from. We’ll come back to Thomas Jefferson a little bit later. Belonging. Some of you have heard me tell this story before and that story doesn’t change, but I want to go back a little farther because I want to talk, I want it to be focused more on my parents and less on myself.

My parents are from Virginia, the state of Virginia. They grew up very poor and always black, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s in Floyd, Virginia, which near Roanoke near the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Things I started looking up about Virginia that I never knew about Virginia before I started preparing for this talk. When Brown versus Board of Education was passed and the whole move to desegregate schools, Virginia was one of the most resistant states. They created something called massive resistance to actually fight back, Congressmen, schools, and others to keep them segregated. I called my mom today because I remembered some little fact that she had told me, and actually my mother has seven sisters. The youngest, Daisy, was the first black woman in the state of Virginia to graduate from an all-white high school. My family, we’re not a famous family. There’s no legacy there of anything, to understand that, oh my god, my aunt Daisy was the first to graduate an all-white high school.

My dad went to fight in the Korean War and when he came back from the Korean War, he was looking for a job. He told me that he saw a park ranger in a park ranger uniform, and for him it looked like a great government job and so when he went to inquire about that they told him, “Well, we don’t hire Negroes.” My father has held something against the national parks for all those years because of that. We never went to a national park as a family, and in part we couldn’t really afford it, but also in part because where we grew up I don’t know that we actually needed to go to a national park. My family, like a lot of black folks, moved north. They came up to New York in the late ’50s. My father’s sister was up there and she was a nurse and my father got two job offers. One, he could be a janitor in Syracuse, New York, which is about five hours north of New York City, and the other was a job that was about 30 minutes outside of New York City in Westchester County. There used to be a wealthy family called the Tishmans, a Jewish family. They own a lot of real estate, Rockefeller Center.

They used to own a building on Madison, on 5th Avenue, which is now owned by Jared Kushner. Yeah, I dropped that. They had a 12-acre estate. Swimming pool, lake, two houses, vegetable gardens, fruit trees. They needed full-time caretakers for the estate. My parents took that job. My father was the chauffeur, he was the landscape gardener, the caretaker. My mom was a sometime housekeeper. This picture here, that house up in the corner was the gardener’s cottage. That’s the house we lived in. I’m going to show you on the next slide the house the Tishmans came to on weekends and holidays. It was beautiful. My parents thought they couldn’t have kids so they adopted me. I was born in New York City. Then what I always say to everyone is then my family, my parents relaxed. They had my first brother, they relaxed some more, and they had my second brother. (audience laughing) It was a very wealthy white neighborhood. Schaefer, of Schaefer beer, lived next door to us.

Some of you older folks remember Schaefer beer? Not so good. Winfield Golf Club right around the corner. Harry Winston had property down the street. You start to understand the kind of money. We were the only family of color in that neighborhood until the ’90s when a Japanese American woman moved in, but then a few years later she moved out. The story that I tell very briefly about my sense of color in that place was being nine years old. I was walking home from school. I went to a public school, Mamaroneck public school. I was walking home one day and I was around the corner from the house.

There were always policemen patrolling the neighborhood because there’s all that wealth there and beautiful land. The cop stopped me. He wanted to know where I was going. I said, “1000 Old White Plains Road,” because that’s the address. He said, “Oh, do you work there?” I’m thinking, “I’m nine.” (audience laughing) I said, “No, I live there,” a little confused. Then he let me go and I went home, I told my parents and my father called the police station and he gave them hell. He said, “Don’t ever bother my children again,” and they did not. Upon reflection when I think about the fact that I must have given all the signals, you know like the travel agent in Utah, like the signals of everything. I’m a little girl, I got a schoolbag, I look unimpressive. It’s 3:00 in the afternoon, I’m coming home from school.

But for him he could only imagine me in that neighborhood because I must have been working there. I couldn’t simply have been living there at that time. I’m going to jump ahead a little bit and then I’m going to leave this story and come back to it in a minute. My father had– Let me show you the Tishmans. This is what I call the big house, which is really terrible but not really. The Tishmans would come up on weekends and holidays, and actually the distance from the houses was from about this wall to that wall back there, so they were really close. In the ’60s Mr. Tishman had a silver Rolls Royce. He died around ’69, but I don’t really remember this, but my dad said that he occasionally dropped me and my brother off at the public school in the silver Rolls Royce. Years later I put that stuff together because Mary Mitchell and Darlene Robinson who were black kids who grew up in the poor section of town used to beat my butt from fourth grade right up through high school and I said, “You drop me off in that silver Rolls Royce, that messed my stuff up from the beginning.” How do I explain that, because when you’re nine or 10 years old.

How do you explain that to your friends? The thing was they were saying, “You think you’re white. You think you’re better than us because you live up in the hill.” I understand the arguments now. I understand what they were saying but I had no way to actually explain it to them at the time. Mr. Tishman passed away. Mr. Tishman and my father had a very close relationship. It was complicated. I always say, I make a joke and say it was like Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy. I just never say it in front of my dad. Even though my dad kind of looks like Morgan Freeman, so this is just an aside.

My dad now, he’s 85 and he works at Costco in Leesburg. He stands at the door so he’s the dude that has to look at your receipt when you walk out. He says that every once in a while somebody comes in and they’ll be like, “You look just like Morgan Freeman,” and he says, “Morgan Freeman looks like me.” (audience laughing) That’s my dad. Mrs. Tishman got sick in the ’90s and the big question was what’s going to happen to my family? At this point they had been on this land and caring for this land for almost 40 years. To her credit, she wanted to try to keep my parents on this land back in the gardener’s cottage. The property was worth over $3 million. This was in 1997, 1998. The property taxes were over $125,000 a year. My dad had been making like $20,000 a year, so there was no way we were going to be able to stay on that property, so she had a beautiful house built for them in the state of Virginia.

My youngest brother was married, living with kids, me and my other brother were moving around too much. My father swore he was never moving back to the state of Virginia. He’s back. They live in Leesburg, which he likes to call Sleaze-burg. That’s a whole other conversation. The house is beautiful. It’s on half an acre of land. Mrs. Tishman passed away. A new owner came on.

My parents stayed on for a few years to help this new owner get it set up and also because I realize it must have been really hard for them to leave because this was home. A family from the Dominican Republic moved in and my parents left in 2003. My dad in particular, my mother too but my dad even more, has been depressed ever since. Has talked about that land, of missing that land, because at this point they’d been in it for almost 50 years. 50 years. This is what got me starting to think about the question of ownership and land and who becomes invisible in this country. Some might say, you know– What I’ve heard said that the concern that African Americans, do they care about the environment, are they engaged, are they doing things, and I said, “Really? My parents worked somebody else’s land for 50 years.” Love shows up in all kinds of ways. Love for the environment. It’s not just a supermarket of resources for some people.

It’s not just a place to go recreation for some people. Some people work it because it’s their lifeline. It’s what becomes possible for their children. It’s how they’re able to put food on the table. It’s for real. Not a lot of people write about them. Not a lot of people ask them their opinion. They had that experience of loving it every day, day in and day out, and they get discounted this fast. In 2005 I was living in Florida because I was working on my dissertation around this topic and I once lived near three big public lands.

Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, and Biscayne National Park. I was based in Miami near the university there. Folks, there’s some great folks doing work. The rangers and stuff doing work at Everglades. They wanted to get more families of color in particular out to the Everglades. Now, it’s about an hour away if you live in Miami. A lot of people don’t have a car; there’s not any public transportation. They were kind of focused on this idea that it’s public transportation, which was a piece of it.

Often I would hear someone say, “Well, you know, they’re not really interested in the parks. They’re not in the outdoors. They’re not interested.” Now, if you ever drive around Miami and Fort Lauderdale, the Everglades there’s the park but the Everglades itself, the actual land expands. There’s canals. There’s water everywhere. Every single day you will see brown people fishing. Every single day on the canal. They’re doing it every day, but they’re invisible. It’s like they don’t exist. That is a relationship with the environment. They could probably tell you a lot about that canal, the water, the fish.

More than most people could because they interact with it every day. They do it because they have to. They do it maybe because they love to. Maybe it’s the place they socialize. It’s a place where they get their food. Maybe it’s a favorite spot where they feel like they belong and be. But how fast they get discounted. I’m always asking the question about what it is we see and what it is we don’t see. How do we teach ourselves to see more expansively? I’m warming up now.

I’m warming up, okay. Yeah, all right. Belonging. I want to talk a little bit more about my parents and land and the issue of belonging and land. When I was a kid what we used to do, every summer we would drive and spend a few weeks with all our cousins and aunts down in Floyd, Virginia, but I hadn’t been for about 30 years until maybe about six years ago. My parents said, “Let’s take a family trip.” They had been down there but I just hadn’t been back. I said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” We drove down. Both my parents’ parents, my grandparents, aren’t alive, haven’t been alive for some years, so my parents wanted to go visit the cemeteries where they were buried. My mother was buried at a public cemetery there in the middle of Floyd.

We went there first, we took a lot of pictures. She could look at all her relatives. Great-grandparents and everybody. My dad family– That’s my mom there. That’s enclosed. His family is actually– His parents and other family members are buried on this white man’s farm. It’s a complicated issue about land and who owned it when and how it got taken away and moved around. But when we drove up, what we had to do was ask permission so that he could go visit where his family was buried. This white farmer was very nice. He was on his tractor.

We kind of drove up, my father went and talked to him a little bit and he let us go. The whole time I think I was more emotional than my father was, because we got up close, you couldn’t go inside because the farmer had put the fence around it but it was really overgrown. You couldn’t go inside because of snakes, so my father couldn’t get close and have that moment of communing. I think about that in terms of land again and belonging and public and private. He has to ask permission. Do you know how long black people had to ask permission? I’m not putting down the farmer. It’s not entirely his fault. For me it’s a historical issue that’s complicated, but what that does for a man like my father who is incredibly proud, who is incredibly proud, to have to bow his head just a little bit so he can ask permission to go on somebody else’s land to see where his family is buried. I worked on a project also about six or seven years ago, and now everything becomes six or seven years ago because I can’t quite remember, but it’s an archeologist, Dan Sayers, a fabulous archeologist out of American University in Washington D.C.

He was doing work on the Great Dismal Swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp is watched over by Fish and Wildlife. A really fabulous piece of public land that stretches from Virginia into North Carolina. He discovered as a grad student– When it’s Fish and Wildlife, what I understand about Fish and Wildlife, the focus is fish and wildlife which makes sense. It’s less about the stories of people on this land. When Dan was out there doing work as a grad student, he found the remains of enslaved Africans who had run away and built their life over years, right in the swamp, and so he had been working– He’s no longer a grad student. He’s since written a book about it. Getting Fish and Wildlife to really understand and incorporate that story in there, that we need to tell that story about who’s on that land. He put a team of us together to do work.

My job, along with an African American grad student, was to talk to black people who live in Suffolk County in the area because the swamp is right there. It’s like how you have your water, the lake right there. It’s right there, you can’t miss it, and really to ask them what they think about that. What do they think about the swamp? Are they involved in caring for it? Do they ever go to it? Do they ever think about it? What are the legends and stories behind it? At the end of every interview that I spoke to, I would ask this question. I want to get it right. I would ask everyone what their favorite place was, what was home to them. This one African American woman, she was in her 60s. We were in a really modest home. And when I asked her that question she was happily talking about the swamp for like an hour, and then when I asked her that question, she got really quiet and then she started telling me.

She said, “My father’s name was Lot and all my family is buried in a line, Lot’s line.” She named the place where they were buried and then she burst into tears and said, “That’s where I belong. That’s where home is.” She was so moved by herself that she left the room for 10 minutes and came back. She goes, “I don’t know why I got so emotional, but nobody’s ever asked me that before.” Then I go back to my father and thinking about belonging and land and it looks different for everybody, and how he can’t do that even if he feels that way about that land. Yeah, so what I think about public land is deeply tied to a sense of belonging, belonging to a public and a place that cares for you, that sees you as whole, that values you and your input and your possibility, that knows who you are and is not afraid. Right? That knows who you are and is not afraid. I go into this one-sided conversation, because it’s really one-sided, I got you for a little bit, with a lot of questions. When we say public lands, what public are we talking about? For those who feel their presence has never been welcome and is always contested, the difference between public and private land is negligible, because again wherever you go there you are. Whose freedom are we fighting for? Freedom from what? What are we willing to face in order to earn that freedom? Protect our public lands from who and for whom? Protect our public lands from who and for whom? I imagine that some of you want to say, “Well, it’s for all of us.” (takes deep breath) I love that because I’m all about the people, man. I want to belong.

Yes, first and foremost we are all human beings. I would safely say that everyone in this room wants to feel loved, wants to be seen as whole, wants to feel safe, wants to feel good. I think we have that in common. After that it starts to get complicated about what it means for all of us to be in this room or in any space. I think about how far back are we responsible? How far back are we responsible? How far back should we be responsible? Is it the Homestead Act? The Homestead Act, 1862. I never thought about the Homestead Act up until about 15 years ago when I started doing this research. One of the most important pieces of legislation in terms of how we think about land in this country. 1862, gun goes off at midnight. Largely, mostly if you were a European immigrant who were running away from really difficult situations, made a difficult trip overseas, probably came through Ellis Island, maybe some of your family members didn’t quite make it.

Often you had to leave the land where you were because you couldn’t afford to pay rent or you were dealing with famine. It was hard and you got a chance to come over because somebody said, “Come over here. There’s free land.” That gun goes off at midnight. You run out, you put your stake down. 160 acres. All you have to do is stay on it for five years. You have to build a structure. You have to farm or have a garden. If you survive, that land is yours free and clear.

That’s some crazy mess. That can’t happen anywhere, anymore. Land is yours for free. Land is never only about land. It is about economic and political power. It is about legacy. It is about your ability to dream so far and it is about being able to claim and name where you stand and belong. That is incredible. What a gift.

Three years later enslaved Africans were free, given 400,000 acres of land, and then when white plantation owners realized what they had done, they had just given people who, yeah, were going to be a little pissed off, all that power, they took all that land back and most of them could not participate in the Homestead Act. It’s complicated. 60% of those European immigrants didn’t make it. You could live 100 miles from the closest neighbor. You could die from the common cold. I am not denigrating any of them. Some of them are probably your ancestors. I can imagine it because I’m a human being and I can imagine wanting to dream big and take a risk, and what a risk for you and your family. I get it.

Then I want to say who lived on that land before you got there? What happened to them? We know what happened to them, right? Many of them were killed, died, moved off that land. We know what happened to them. This is why I ask the question whose freedom? Whose freedom? Public lands for whom? Can we stand here and have a conversation about it? If I say Standing Rock that’s really going to mess with you. There’s a hundred things I could throw out there because I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know. I don’t have the answer for it. But, I want to know how we are going to hold that. How are we going to hold that? Yes. Okay, maybe we don’t want to be that responsible.

We don’t want to go that far back to be responsible. If we don’t want to go that far back, because that’s a few hundred years, 1862. That was a long time ago. What about the last 50 or 60 years? I go back to my parents because I want to talk about that gate which is now in front of the house I lived in. My parents leave. About two years later they get a letter in the mail from one of their neighbors. When anything ever happens on their property, their neighbors like to let my parents know. I have a copy of the letter. The letter was talking about– It was the Westchester Land Trust and they had just put a conservation easement on this property.

They wanted to let everybody in the neighborhood know about the conservation values of this place. Where it sits on the watershed. The kind of wildlife it has on this property. Just wonderful things. The blue herons, all the kinds of animals. Everything that’s there. We need to protect this 12-acre parcel of land. Near the end of that fairly short letter, it thanked the new owner for his conservation-mindedness. He’d been on the land for I think three years.

There was nothing in the letter thanking the people who had cared for the land for 50 years. My parents were just showing– They weren’t showing me that because that’s not how they are, but that’s the first thing, it was glaring to me. I said, “Oh, that’s how it happens.” Erasure happens like that. You’re just forgotten. You were the people who cared for it and knew it better than anybody else, worked it day in and day out, but actually there’s no thanks to you for that or the Dominican family who’s in there now. I gave a talk, and I have to be really careful here. I was thinking about how I’m going to say this because I’m, again, never interested in denigrating anyone. Last spring, the Nature Conservancy, it’s the biggest land conservation organization in the country, and they brought me to Washington D.C. to have a conversation with them around these issues of diversity.

They’re great. I know some good people who work there. I told the story about my parents. I tell it all the time with no expectation of anything except to give you a sense of who I am and how I think about land. A man, an older white man, stood up in the audience. He was very soft spoken. He said, “You know, I think we can do something about that. We should talk about doing an oral history of your parents.” I burst, the tears– I was just like, “Oh my God, nobody’s ever said that. What an amazing idea.” This is what I’m talking about. This organization put its full resources behind it and get my parents on the books.

It actually means more than just my parents. It’s about something else. We worked over the summer about how we would do this and then we had a phone call. There were a few of us on the phone call. When they realized– I’m trying to say this in the nicest way possible. When they realized that actually the Nature Conservancy had nothing directly to do with that land becoming a conservation easement, they said they couldn’t put any other resources to creating the oral history. What I could also tell, they didn’t realize how much that hurt me. I heard that and I thought … I’m on the other side of the phone going, “Are you kidding me?” But I’m trying to be polite going, “Oh my god.”

Because I was thinking, “But it’s not just about you. Wow, it’s not just about you. You have over $900 million. It’s not about you.” For me, I can ask somebody else to film my parents. I can look for money elsewhere. What I was excited about was actually this is a story that now you can tell, that you understand historically your role in changing the story and recognizing all the other people who care about land and have put their time in and continue to put their time in, and somehow you missed it. I don’t know how to say it to you because I just feel like I’m going to be ungrateful or make you angry at me and I’m just confused, and so I let it drop. But I’m telling you all now, and now it’s on video. On my God. (audience laughing) Because I would say this to them.

I struggle with how to have that conversation and say, “Sometimes it’s actually not about you. It’s about what are we responsible to beyond our own immediate experience and the way we think about land and environment in this country?” Making my parents visible, our ancestors visible, our history visible. One of the things I love the most about serving on the National Parks Advisory Board is that we got to vote on sites that told stories that were hidden or erased from history. Cesar Chavez in California, Stonewall in New York, Waco Mammoth in Texas. It went on and on. I don’t know how I got the opportunity to sit in that room and I’m not saying that because I’m just being humble. I really don’t know how that happened because there were some amazing people sitting in that room and we got a chance to vote on.

This is for me the highest meaning of service, because this is what the civic duty thing looks like. Whoa, and we get to say, “Yeah, that should be a site. We should be memorializing that. We should be having a conversation about that.” When I hear now that a lot of that stuff, they’re trying to roll that stuff back, I nearly lose my mind. Not because of the time I put in, because we all lose if that happens. We all lose. This is an opportunity for us to have those difficult conversations, because those difficult conversations are part of who we are. I stand here today because I’m part of that difficult conversation. Just living in my body is part of that difficult conversation. Sometimes I look good, but other times not so good, and how I feel about that. How do we hold these questions? Not necessarily how do we answer them, but how do we hold them? The conflict that we’re having and seeing today is in large part a reflection of those questions that just won’t go away.

Some people are surprised at the rise of white nationalism and Nazism or the dismantling of our many environmental protections meant to protect public lands, but for me, it has always been there. It is an expression of what lies beneath, beneath our sense of collective self. James Baldwin talks about the American dream as a myth and a dangerous one at that, something we live and die for, but also something that glosses over the wider truth of our collective experience, allowing us to build on less than solid ground. Yeah, I’m going to get to some good stuff really soon. It’s coming, it’s coming. Good stories. But I got to talk about the Dann sisters first. Yeah. When I heard about the Dann sisters, I just think about how complicated we are.

There’s a documentary film called American Outrage and the Dann sisters are so amazing. They’re Western Shoshone grandmothers. They’re part of the Western Shoshone Nation. I want to make sure I get this right. Nevada territory, so there was something– The United States government has had a lot of agreements with Native people over the years about land. As a part of the Treaty of Ruby Valley signed in 1863, 60 million acres guaranteed to the Western Shoshone Nation. The government says 60 million acres guaranteed to you and it gave certain rights to them. 1863. In 1962 the Shoshone lost their land by gradual encroachment and in 1974 the U.S.

sued the Dann sisters for trespassing on the U.S. public land without a permit. (laughs) It’s kind of– They were here first and the government makes a deal with them to be on this land. And, they’re ranchers so they have animals, horses and other cattle. When you watch the video, these grandmothers were something else. They’re out there putting the posts in and doing all the work themselves. That’s what they look like but they’re out there doing all the work on that land and talking about how they’re of the land. The timing is interesting. The Bureau of Land Management, another one of our federal agencies that are responsible for public lands, accuses the sisters of degrading the land.

In 1961, a year before they lost that land, there was a discovery of a cyanide leaching method to get gold out of rocks and there was gold discovered under this land. 1962, they suddenly lost the land. It’s hard not to feel like there isn’t some kind of relationship there. Right? For gold, because gold is part of our American dream and represents so many things that so many of us are able to do. Shoshone land is the second largest gold producing area in the world, so just so you understand how much gold we’re talking about, which translates into money. Right? When you’re watching the movie, what’s really powerful is you see the way they’re coming in at night. They killed a lot of horses trying to remove the horses from the land. The grandmothers having to fight with them and protest for them, tried to stop them from taking the land. They took it all the way to the Supreme Court.

While they even took it all the way to the UN who said, “You’re right here. You’re right about this. Here’s what should be happening,” the government has largely ignored this. I bring this up because it’s one story of many, and one of the sisters in the middle of all this died, had an accident and died during all of this, because it’s just one piece. They’re talking about 60 million acres of land, and some good folks at the Bureau of Land Management are talking about public land. When you say that to the Dann sisters, what are we talking about? They are of the land. They worked hard. They are two people working the land with their animals and they weren’t even allowed to stay there, even being grandmothers. Even trying to work all that magic. All right, so now I got to talk about one other sacred cow, and I’m not going to do it in a denigrating way, but I’m just warning you upfront.

Okay, so about a year and a half ago Paul Robbins and I were asked to be on a panel. The question was asked, because it was the national parks centennial, is John Muir still relevant? They had about seven of us coming from different geographical perspectives to come in and say this. This is part of the answer that I gave that I want to share with you about John Muir, because John Muir was also a complicated man. He’s someone who was instrumental in the national parks idea. He’s probably a premier example of what is public lands, the national parks. I think there’s something really amazing about the national parks. I think it’s a way that can actually bring us together, but there’s also some kind of universalized mechanism that if we just say National Parks and public lands, it kind of obscures the messy history behind the parks on that land, and for me it becomes a missed opportunity when it isn’t dealt with directly. I was asked that question, is John Muir still relevant today? I was like, “Oh okay, here’s what I want to say about this.” I really wanted to think about imagine who John Muir was. Late 1800s.

Maybe he looked a bit younger than that at the time. This was a man who was incredibly committed, incredibly committed to the idea of preserving land, and I have a lot of respect for that. He wrote a piece called A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. In 1867 he decided he was going to walk through states in the South because he wanted to see the impact of war upon the landscape. These were some of his entries from his journal. His words. September 31, 1867. Muir, “He escaped from the dust and squalor of his garret bedroom to the glorious forest.” He enjoyed the “hospitable Kentuckians.” He met many “Negroes who were fat, happy, and contented.” September 27, Muir “witnessed the most gorgeous sunset and was directed by a very civil Negro to the lodgings.” October 16. While in Florida Muir sees an alligator. He learns that “alligators are said to be extremely fond of Negroes and dogs.” 1868 in Havana, Cuba, Muir “saw the strongest and ugliest Negroes he had met thus far in his journey. He remarks on the good-natured ugliness that he believes the Negro woman to possess.”

There’s more but I’ll stop there. After that he got sick and he went back home to California. I was thinking about that. Now, do you remember Gone with the Wind? Many of you saw the movie Gone with the Wind, the book “Gone with the Wind,” by Margaret Mitchell. It has some issues because many feel it glorifies slavery in that movie, but in terms of a dramatic story on-screen it’s pretty spectacular. A black academic from Harvard, Alice Randall, decided in the early 2000s, she said, “What if a black person told that story?” She called it the “Wind Done Gone.” (audience laughing) She decided, instead of Scarlet O’Hara, it was going to be Scarlet O’Hara’s half-Mulatto sister who was her slave, sort of talking about it. When it came out the Margaret Mitchell estate got very upset, of course. If you go buy the book, it says “A Parody” on it. She had to put “A Parody” on it, even though it’s not meant to be a parody.

I thought about that. I said, “What if a black woman wrote “A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf?” Okay, instead of “A Thousand Mile Walk Through the Gulf,” it’s going to be “My Thousand Mile Walk was Rough,” written by Sojourner Washington Douglas. I actually took some of the ideas from a very real story about Ellen Craft and William Craft, who in the early and late 1840s or around 1850s they were runaway slaves. How they ran away from Georgia, Ellen Craft was light enough to pass so she dressed as a sick white man and her husband played her slave and they made it up to Boston. That’s like, “What?” They got all the way to Boston to hold that. I was thinking about that and I just wanted to come up with some quotes of things that happened for Sojourner around the same time that Muir was doing his thing.
“1852, Sojourner was born with no last name on Magnolia Plantation in Louisiana. She later adopted the nom deplume Washington Douglas. 1862, the Homestead Act had passed and white folks were getting free land. Black folks were dreaming of being free. Rumor had it that a new day was coming. 1865, Emancipation Proclamation. Black folks began the long walk to freedom across a metaphorical and literal landscape of discarded chains and bodies and dreams deferred and were reborn ducking and weaving as fast as they can. 1866, 400,000 acres of land were given and taken, given and taken, given and taken to free men and women, ducking and weaving across a hostile landscape. 1867, Sojourner sets out for the promise land of the North. Since she is not light-skinned enough to pass for white, she sticks to back roads in the woods, surviving off nature’s bounty. 1868, race related massacres take place across the country, including 200 in her home state of Louisiana. 1873, more massacres. Another 70 in Colfax, Louisiana. 1880, Jim Crow was the man. 1890, Jim Crow was the man. 1900, Jim Crow was the man. 1910, Jim Crow was the man. 1920, Jim Crow was the man. 1930, Jim Crow was the man. 1940, Jim Crow was the man.”

Well, at this point the story ends because Sojourner passed away and the editor talks about how she had passed away at the ripe old age of 90 in 1946. Like the Crafts had done earlier, she too was living in Boston at the time of her death and Jim Crow was still the man.

I do that to think about, imagine. It doesn’t take away from what John Muir might have been experiencing and seeing and choosing to share with ourselves, but in part he could do that because of who he was at that time. Sojourner Washington Douglas, someone who looked like me trying to do that, enjoy nature’s bounty, have a spiritual moment with it, feel safe and free, know that I could belong, be like Henry David Thoreau with my seat, your seat in nature. I love that he could do that. That is so awesome. Everybody can’t do that. (laughs) They can’t do that. It doesn’t mean they don’t want to do it. Doesn’t mean they don’t dream about doing it. I met some black painters in the state of Florida called the Highwaymen, who in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s would paint the Florida landscape.

Tourists didn’t know because there would never be any people in the pictures. They would buy those pictures on the side of the road and so they start to think about Florida in a very particular way because of the Highwaymen, all black men and one black woman. I said, “How did you do that? Did you go sit and paint the landscape?” They said often they’d take a picture, go back home, develop the picture, and paint from the picture. Jim Crow was the man. I need to remind you Jim Crow was the man at that time. It does matter who you are. Okay, we’re getting to two really positive fabulous stories. We’re coming to the end, but I have a little preamble about that first. This country was not founded on love.

Just ask the descendants of tribes who lost the right to live on the land that they were born from. This country was not founded on love. Just ask the descendants of African women and men whose backs are broken and bleeding so that we might live the American dream. This country was not founded on love. Just ask the Irish immigrants who had to leave the land they were born from so that they might thrive once again. This country was not founded on love. Just ask the Chinese who built our railways but were disappeared from the photos that memorialize the moment of completion. This country was not founded on love. Just ask the Japanese farmer whose right to grow free was interned by our fears.

This country was not founded on love. Just ask the new Mexican who can no longer practice old ways on the land that they thought was their home. This country was not founded on love. Just ask the descendants of tribes whose ancestors’ blood is still on our hands. I repeat this because if history tells us anything, if justice is what love looks like in public as Cornell West says, then there should be no surprise that we have not loved ourselves as we should. Just because we put the word environment in front of justice or land in front of justice does not change the history, the practices, or the outcomes. We’re not going to see more righteous policies for the environment and this land if we’re not doing that for each other. We are not going to see more righteous policies for the environment and this land if we are not doing that for each other. This country was not founded on love, but I believe this country was founded on possibility.

I want to end with two stories of African Americans in terms of public lands who I think have been doing amazing work. One is Israel Lafayette “Parson” Jones. In 2005, that year I was living in Florida, I met this wonderful park ranger, Brenda Lansingdorf, who worked at Biscayne National Park, who is no longer with us but I always carry around her picture with me because that’s what we do now. I know there’s phones but I actually carry around her photograph. Brenda was a white park ranger who was deeply invested in expanding the story of the way we think about national parks and public lands. She found this story of Israel Lafayette “Parson” Jones. I’m going to get it right here. You got to think of the late 1800s what Florida was like. Right? Florida again, black people weren’t allowed to go to the same beach as white people.

Jim Crow was in place. Few possess successful businesses. Israel, which is … That’s a young Israel Lafayette “Parson” Jones there and there he is with his wife later on in his life. He was born in 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina. They’re not sure whether or not he was born a slave, but his parents were definitely slaves. His father was a slave. He became a major fixture on the social landscape as a farmer, as a philosopher, and a preacher. He married Mozelle. Mozelle is from the Bahamas there, Albury.

Somehow he managed during this time in Florida to buy land. If you go to Key Biscayne, there’s Porgy Key. There’s a series of keys there. He saved up enough money and he created this amazing farm on these three little islands. He was using unusual agricultural methods to do what he was doing. He was one of the largest producers of pineapples and limes on the east coast of Florida at that time in Miami-Dade County. Both his sons, they had two sons, King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, no joke. King Arthur Lafayette Jones was born in March of 1897. Sir Lancelot Garfield Jones, and that’s Sir Lancelot right there, was born in 1898, and both sons were believed to be the first African Americans born on Key Biscayne.

What’s so interesting, when you read and I started doing research on this story, was the ways within which a lot of presidents and famous people would come down and they would take them out on the water because they knew so much about the landscape, about the water, about the wildlife, and they loved it. Imagine now we’re getting into the 1900s. Biscayne National Park isn’t there yet. Biscayne National Park becomes a park … Let me get the date right. 1968 the area was declared a national monument. 1980 it was declared a national park. Around this time, the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, man, this is beach front property so developers were salivating and actually wanted to buy it up. Israel and Mozelle had died, but Lancelot was still there and one of his half cousins.

They decided they didn’t want to sell it to developers, because they could have gotten a lot of money, but instead they wanted to sell it to the Park Service. The only deal was– They realized they were taking a cut in the money but they believed in what the Park Service was about. The only thing that Lancelot wanted was to be allowed to live there until he died, and he was able to live there until 1990 and I believe it was Hurricane Andrew that came that knocked down everything but the foundation of the house which now the park is rebuilding and turning it into a national historic site. I think about– Have any of you heard that story? It’s an amazing story. It’s an amazing story coming from a man who was probably born in slavery, that the idea of believing in public land, that even though they had to I’m sure fight for the right to be who they were, where they were at that time, they still believed in the idea enough to say it isn’t just about the money. It’s about something else so much greater than that and we want to contribute to that. A favorite story that I’ve told over and over again because she is just one of my favorite human beings ever is MaVynee Betsch, The Beach Lady. Silence. MaVynee, also from Florida, from Jacksonville, Florida, of from I should say Amelia Island off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, was also born in the ’30s and ’40s.

Came from a very wealthy black family. Her sister is actually quite well-known in academic circles, Johnnetta Cole. Her great-grandfather, A. L. Lewis, was the first man, black or white, to have a life insurance company in Jacksonville so he made a lot of money at that time, but they were black. They weren’t allowed to go to the same beach as white people, so A. L. Lewis said, “Well, if we can’t go to the same beach we’re just going to buy a beach.” They bought a beach on Amelia Island and they called it American Beach. If you were a janitor, if you were a judge, you could have a small modest house on the beach. There was a maritime forest, whales went by. Your kids could play in the sand dunes which is what you’re seeing behind the background there. This is where MaVynee grew up. MaVynee went to Oberlin College and then she decided she wanted to be an opera singer so then she went off to Germany for a while and she must have been there for quite a while and had some success there.

In the ’70s she got really interested in environmental causes. She supported a man who studied the monarch butterfly. She would give money to organizations that would look at Pygmy communities in Africa. Then she came back to the United States. She gave away all her wealth to environmental causes. Over $750,000. The house that had belonged to her great-grandfather that had been bequeathed to her, she gave it away to environmental causes. She was living on a chaise lounge on the beach. When I met MaVynee in 2005, I always asked her, I said, “Were you scared? You were living on a chaise lounge on the beach.” She said, “Well, I had a big stick.” (audience laughing)
I was like, “That’s not really enough, but okay. I’m impressed.” Her sister ended up buying her a trailer that she could move into. She promptly turned it into a mini museum. Then she turned her attention to American Beach. We were talking about prime beach front property once again. You had Fernandina Beach Resort on one side, Amelia Island Plantation on another, and developers wanted to cut down that maritime forest, maybe put in another golf course or another hotel because we need one so badly. Whatever. MaVynee wasn’t having it. MaVynee would tell me, and I’ve done this a lot, MaVynee said, “I’d go to civic meetings.” What MaVynee is holding there under her arms is all her hair. Her dreadlocks were so long that she’d roll them up and then put them in the net– You see that’s what she looked like all the time. She’d go to a civic meeting and stand in the back because they were discussing that land so the developers had the right to come in and they’d always do the Pledge of Allegiance, so MaVynee would be standing there.

“I pledge of allegiance to the flag, to the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice,” and then she said, “I’d shout out at the top of my lungs, ‘For all white people who got money,’ and all.” She’s like, “Yeah, they’d all see me, they’d turn around.” I’d be like, “They saw you when you came in.” (laughter) Working with the Park Service she got them to protect 8.2 acres of the sand dunes. If you look up, there’s been books written about her, stories written about her. If you just Google “The Beach Lady” you would remember her. MaVynee said to me, “I am the freest person you will ever meet.” I feel like it’s a code that I’ve been carrying around to understanding. She said, “Because when I walked away from the money, I was able to do exactly what I needed to do.” It blows my mind every time to think about that. It’s funny to think about her living on a chaise lounge. She died of stomach cancer in 2005. She was in her 70s. She was calm.

She was funny. She used to say things that only a black person could get away with saying. She’d say to me, “If we want to get more black people more involved, black people love chicken, so let’s start with food. We can talk about the way black people love chicken.” I’d be like, “Oh my God, okay. Yeah, you could say that.” But she was by any means necessary, because she would talk about the forest and the beach and the whales and the water and she understood it, and it wasn’t just about non-human nature. It was about the African American story in place there and these things went hand in hand. Who she was, was of that land and the story and the history there, and she wanted people to know that and she did what she had to do in order to get there. For me, these are stories of possibility. If I could stand here all night– don’t worry, I won’t– I would continue to tell you more stories of people who just amaze me, who feel afraid, who feel that their presence is contested, who feel that they make a stop in that park or on that beach or maybe they thought they’re not real or tell them that we don’t want you here or look at you kind of askance or be kind of scared of you or surprised.

There’s a funny video with black actor Blair Underwood. It’s a five-minute video on funnyordie.com and it shows him going hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains and it’s funny as hell because it really gets that. He’s hiking and every time a white person, they’re like, “Oh my God, can we take a picture? Oh my God, you’re hiking.” It’s meant to make a– He’s just like, “What is going on here?” It’s happening to him all over the place, but this is real. It’s funny because I’ve had stuff like that happen to me, too. And despite that, they take those risks. They care anyway and they’re involved. I’m going to read one last thing and then I’m done. Then I will stop talking. I was like, “Should I read this one or should I read that one?” They’re both short, no worries.

Okay, I’ll read this one. 1,000 Oceans. “I have cried the tears of 1,000 oceans. I have watched the dreams of my parents give way to their devotion to that something better found in the soil that raised me. I have cried the tears of 1,000 oceans. I have watched my mother cry secretly while feeding squirrels and birds and us, her hands extension of her mother’s servitude to whiteness that knows no bounds. I have cried the tears of 1,000 oceans. As my father’s memory of himself slips away, he becomes the shadow of himself that he’s always been, moving through a world that feared his presence while eating him whole. I have cried the tears of 1,000 oceans, but do not mourn me.

The tears you see are for the us that struggles to be. Do not be fooled into thinking that they are a sign of weakness because these tears can fill 1,000 oceans, and I am all things considered, and then some. I am Cesar Chavez, Wangari Maathai, and Thomas Jefferson. I am Issei, Nisei, and John Muir. I am Standing Rock, Flint, Michigan, and Yellowstone. I am glaciers melting, seas rising, and that clear day when you can see forever. I am in the streets, in the woods, and in your head. My humanity is fluid and it flows like the Mississippi, and I will not be less for you because I have cried the tears of 1,000 oceans and I will not be less for you. So to those who cannot see beyond their own fear and try to blind me with their indifference and disdain, be warned.

I am more than myself, than this brown skin connected by bones and memories of others who dreamed me. I am 1,000 souls, seen and unseen. I am the coral reef and the elephant, the patch of grass I played on as a child. I am blood spilled in your name and mine. I am the song sung by the crickets in spring. I am the laughter of a child at Christmas. I am snow falling. I am steam rising. I am ancient languages. I am glory hallelujah. I am he, I am she, and everything in between and beyond. I am singular and I am many. I am few and I am plenty. I am the memory of us before we became, and I am you always. For we are part of something greater, reminding us that we can be greater, and you might resist me but I remain in all my glory all that we are so that you too might rejoice in the possible.”
Thank you (audience applauding) Thank you.