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"Still Birding While Black" by Drew Lanham from Dear America

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Pray why are you so bare, so bare,

Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;

And why, when I go through the shade you throw,

Runs a shudder over me?

My leaves were green as the best, I trow,

And sap ran free in my veins,

But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird

A guiltless victim's pains.

I bent me down to hear his sigh;

I shook with his gurgling moan,

And I trembled sore when they rode away,

And left him here alone.

They'd charged him with the old, old crime,

And set him fast in jail:

Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,

And why does the night wind wail?

He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,

And he raised his hand to the sky;

But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,

And the steady tread drew nigh.

Who is it rides by night, by night,

Over the moonlit road?

And what is the spur that keeps the pace,

What is the galling goad?

And now they beat at the prison door,

"Ho, keeper, do not stay!

We are friends of him whom you hold within,

And we fain would take him away

"From those who ride fast on our heels

With mind to do him wrong;

They have no care for his innocence,

And the rope they bear is long."

They have fooled the jailer with lying words,

They have fooled the man with lies;

The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,

And the great door open flies.

Now they have taken him from the jail,

And hard and fast they ride,

And the leader laughs low down in his throat,

As they halt my trunk beside.

Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,

And the doctor one of white,

And the minister, with his oldest son,

Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?

And the time will come when these shall dread

The mem'ry of your face.

I feel the rope against my bark,

And the weight of him in my grain,

I feel in the throe of his final woe

The touch of my own last pain.

And never more shall leaves come forth

On the bough that bears the ban;

I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,

From the curse of a guiltless man.

And ever the judge rides by, rides by,

And goes to hunt the deer,

And ever another rides his soul

In the guise of a mortal fear.

And ever the man he rides me hard,

And never a night stays he;

For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,

On the trunk of a haunted tree.

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The Haunted Oak by Paul Laurence Dunbar | Poetry Foundation

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Pray why are you so bare, so bare, Oh, bough of the old oak-tree; And why, when I go through the shade you throw, Runs a shudder over me? My leaves were green as the best, I trow, And sap ran free in my veins, But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird A guiltless victim's pains.

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Extension's list of anti-racism resources

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Extension's list of anti-racism resources

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Racial Equity Tools offers tools, research, tips, curricula, and ideas for people who want to increase their own understanding and to help those working for racial justice at every level –in systems, organizations, communities, and the culture at large.

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Crimes Against Nature by Karl Jacoby - an overview of the history of American Conservation 

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Crimes Against Nature by Karl Jacoby - an overview of the history of American Conservation 

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Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation’s first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation’s impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, fo…

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My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem

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My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem

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In this groundbreaking work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.
The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans--our police.

My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

* Paves the way for a new, body-centered understanding of white supremacy--how it is literally in our blood and our nervous system.

* Offers a step-by-step healing process, in addition to incisive social commentary.

"Sensitive and probing, this book from therapist Menakem delves into the complex effects of racism and white privilege....he speaks from the wisdom of his grandmother and his own expertise in somatic therapy." Publishers Weekly

"An exceptionally thought-provoking and important account that looks at race in a radical new way. For all readers." Library Journal

"Kudos to Resmaa Menakem for such a sorely-needed seminal work which couldn't be more practical or more timely, given this bitterly-divided country's current state of race relations." The Harlem Dispatch

Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, is a therapist with decades of experience currently in private practice in Minneapolis, MN, specializing in trauma, body-centered psychotherapy, and violence prevention. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Dr. Phil as an expert on conflict and violence. Menakem has studied with bestselling authors Dr. David Schnarch ( Passionate Marriage) and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk ( The Body Keeps the Score). He also trained at Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute.

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my grandmother's hands: racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies

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My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

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My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem available in Trade Paperback on Powells.com, also read synopsis and reviews. In this groundbreaking work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in...

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In this "On My Mind" episode, we talk about shame and accountability. We discussed this a bit last summer, but I'm going deeper today in light of the insurrection at the US Capitol building and the resulting calls to unity without accountability. Dehumanization is the most significant driver of insurrection and it always starts with language. We are all responsible for recognizing it, stopping it, and holding people accountable for dehumanizing language and actions.

Listen

For the latest from Unlocking Us

Guest Info

Brené Brown

Transcript coming soon!

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Brené on Words, Actions, Dehumanization, and Accountability | Brené Brown

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In this "On My Mind" episode, we talk about shame and accountability. We discussed this a bit last summer, but I'm going deeper today in light of the insurrection at the US Capitol building and the resulting calls to unity without accountability. Dehumanization is the most significant driver of insurrection and it always starts with language.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on, "Should white people rap the 'n' word?"

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on, "Should white people rap the 'n' word?"

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#OffScriptOn9: Should white people rap the 'N' word?

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Edited By: Jardin Dogan, M.Ed., Ed.S., NCC Overview:
The seven circles of whiteness is a learning tool that puts a name to the myriad of ways that whiteness exist as a construct in American culture by highlighting specific behaviors and thinking patterns associated with each of the categories. The 7 Circles of Whiteness also explores the overlap within the way that whiteness exist. This learning tool uses the concept of a circle to represent the duality of sequence and overlap that exist within whiteness, which helps to unbind rigidity around the way that whiteness has historically been defined. The 7 Circles of Whiteness explores both the covert and overt ways that racism presents, and ends with the caveat that anti-racism is not a destination, but a continuous journey of learning and unlearning. The purpose of the 7 Circles of Whiteness tool is to provide language for the different ways that whiteness exist, promote self-reflection for white people, and defining what anti-racist ally-ship can look like. This tool also brings more conscious awareness to behaviors that Black, Indigenous, People of Color are experiencing by naming and validating those experiences through a visual graphic.
Goals:
To provide language that helps people acknowledge and describe the different ways that whiteness exist in American culture while offering concrete behaviors and thinking patterns associated each category of whiteness.

To promote self-reflection for white people think deeply about conscious and subconscious behaviors and thoughts that contribute to the overt and covert harm towards Black, Indigenous, People of Color. This tool as defines lifelong anti-racist ally-ship, and encourages changed behavior, and brings awareness to the reality that white people can simultaneously exist in multiple circles. The circles deconstruct the rigidity of arriving completely arriving at any one level, and promotes the need for continual learning and unlearning.

To bring more consciousness to Black, Indigenous, People of Color who are interacting with white people within these circles. While empowering and validating BIPOC communities by offering language to name the experiences they are having with white people. This is also a tool to help BIPOC communities move away from explaining experiences and using this as a tool to protect their emotional wellness and safety.
Challenges:
Some people may not agree with the idea of putting characteristics and behaviors in circles, and may feel as if they are being labeled if they identify with behavior and characteristics of any specific circle(s).

Taking time to engage in self-reflection about the content of the circles may bring up difficult and/or uncomfortable emotions, and people may not identify with every characteristic or behavior in each of the circles.

The circles are not a all encompassing example of the many ways that racism exist within multiple systems, and they do not cover every characteristic or behavior associated with whiteness.
Reflection Questions:
1) Did any of the circles resonate with you? If so, which circles did you resonate with?

2) What impact do specific characteristics and behaviors within the circles have on racially marginalized people? ( you may not be able to answer this question, and this can be an area of growth)

3) Can you recall a specific situation that aligns with behaviors in the circle?

4) How has your engagement within the circles impacted racially marginalized people that you know or have interacted with? ( you may not be able to answer this question, and this can be an area of growth)

5) What feelings came up for you as you read through each circle?

6) Why do you think those feelings came up for you?

7) Where do those feelings exist in your body? Can you connect to those feelings in your body, and gently acknowledge that they are there?

8) Identify three to five characteristics or behaviors that you would like to change within yourself?

9) What tangible actions within the circles do you need to do AND/OR stop doing?

10) Based on this tool how might you develop a plan to begin or continue anti-racist work?
Citations:
McCullough, A., 2020. The 7 Circles of Whiteness. [Blog] Blackandembodied, Available at: < https://medium.com/@alishiamccullough/the-7-circles-of-whiteness-cb60e53d14e0> [Accessed 11 June 2020]

Image Description: The content below features slides that are formatted on a white background that are separated into 7 categories (starting from top to bottom) Circle 1: The White Terrorist, Circle 2: The Post Racial Believers, Circle 3: The Oblivious Instigators, Circle 4: The Needy Ally, Circle 5: The Passive Aggressive Oppressor, Circle 6: The Do "Gooder", Circle 7: The Lifelong Student.

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Edited By: Jardin Dogan, M.Ed., Ed.S., NCC Overview: The seven circles of whiteness is a learning tool that puts a name to the myriad of ways that whiteness exist as a construct in American culture by highlighting specific behaviors and thinking patterns associated with each of the categories.

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Do we all have the same twenty-four hours in a day? In Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Rahsaan Mahadeo enters uncharted new territory in critical whiteness studies by arguing that "time is not race neutral." Instead, people of color suffer from disadvantages and inequality as it relates to time. He argues that social structure and the advantages of whiteness, rather than individual behavior, create time inequality. Through fifteen months of ethnographic observation at a multiservice center for youth in crisis in Minnesota, and thirty in-depth interviews with teenagers who frequent the center, Mahadeo studies the ways youth of color in urban spaces view issues of time as racialized. "Racialization" refers to the ways that race influences how people experience social life and phenomena-in this case, time.

Mahadeo found that participants of color viewed White youth as having a more advantageous relationship to time than themselves. They viewed White youth as benefitting from the luxury of time as a result of psychological and emotional resources, resources not bestowed to themselves. Participants not only viewed themselves as having less time, but as having to work twice as hard (physically, mentally, and emotionally) within that time deficit. Despite this extra work, they still saw themselves achieving results that are only half as good as their White counterparts. He found that some youth at the center resisted the racialization of time by interrogating ideas associated with whiteness, including White employees of the center. Lastly, Mahadeo found that participants tried to flip the relationship between time and whiteness by characterizing White youth as behind the times and engaging in cultural appropriation to keep up.

These youth's perspectives and Mahadeo's interpretation stem from recognizing that non-Whites need to understand White culture to survive in a world that values and centers around whiteness. Whites do not have to expend psychological or emotional energy to do this, reducing their racialized temporal burden compared to people of color. Overall, Mahadeo and his participants describe a reality in which time and whiteness are intertwined, perpetuating disparities in time across groups despite efforts by youth of color to resist that inequality.

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Do we all have the same twenty-four hours in a day? In Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Rahsaan Mahadeo enters uncharted new territory in critical whiteness studies by arguing that "time is not race neutral." Instead, people of color suffer from disadvantages and inequality as it relates to time.

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Clean drinking water, clean air, public parks and beaches, biodiversity, and open spaces are shared goods to which every person in the United States has an equal right both in principle and in law. Nature is supposed to be a "great equalizer" whose services are free, universal, and accessible to all humans without discrimination. In reality, however, American society distributes nature's benefits-and the effects of its destruction and decline-unequally by race, income, and age.

The nation's recent reckoning with racism and violence against Black people has brought environmental injustices and disparities into long-overdue focus. The stories of Christian Cooper, threatened with violence and arrest while bird-watching in Central Park, and Ahmaud Arbery, murdered while jogging down a tree-lined street in coastal Georgia, are among the countless stories of Black, brown, and Indigenous people who, while seeking to enjoy the outdoors, have been threatened, killed, or made to feel unsafe or unwelcome.

The unequal distribution of nature in America-and the unjust experiences that many people of color have in the outdoors-is a problem that national, state, and local leaders can no longer ignore. With scientists urging policymakers to protect at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and ocean by 2030 to address the biodiversity and climate crises, now is the time to imagine how, by protecting far more lands and waters over the next decade, the United States can guarantee every child in America the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of nature near their home.

Using a new analysis by Conservation Science Partners (CSP), commissioned by Hispanic Access Foundation (HAF) and the Center for American Progress, this report examines the distribution of America's remaining natural areas to understand the types and extent of disparities in nature access that exist in the United States. This report is intended to supplement, not supplant, the many individual voices and grassroots efforts that have been calling out and working to solve the many inequities and injustices in American natural resource policy. The data in this report help confirm the scale of racial and economic disparities in U.S. nature access. In particular, this report finds that the United States has fewer forests, streams, wetlands, and other natural places near where Black, Latino, and Asian American people live. Notably, families with children-especially families of color with children-have less access to nature nearby than the rest of the country. In other words, these communities are nature deprived.

These disparities are particularly concerning because nature is not an amenity but a necessity for everyone's health and well-being. In the places where human activities in the United States have destroyed the most nature, there are fewer trees to filter the air and provide shade on a hot day; there are fewer wetlands and marshes to clean the water and to protect communities from floods and storm surges; there are fewer parks where children can grow their curiosity and fewer trails where adults can stretch their legs; and there are fewer public spaces where people of all races, cultures, and backgrounds can forge the common experiences and understandings that build respect, trust, and solidarity.

To correct for the inequitable distribution of nature in America, among other barriers that racially and economically marginalized communities as well as LGBTQ and disabled people face to accessing the outdoors, this report puts forth several recommendations for policymakers to consider, including: creating more close-to-home outdoor opportunities in communities of color and low-income communities; changing hiring and workplace practices in government agencies, nonprofits, and foundations to create more representative leadership teams, boards, and staff; improving consultation with tribal nations and pursuing more opportunities for tribal co-management of natural resources; and working to overcome the nature gap among children by bolstering education and outreach programs. Broadly, however, the findings of this report affirm an urgent need for the United States to pursue an ambitious goal of protecting at least 30 percent of lands and ocean by 2030-and to do so in a way that ensures that nature's benefits are more evenly and fairly distributed among all of the nation's communities.

This report examines ethnic, racial, economic, and other demographic disparities in the current distribution of natural areas in the United States. It does not, however, pretend to offer a satisfactory or comprehensive answer to the questions of how and why these disparities emerged. Still, these questions are vitally important, and a deep-rooted body of scholarship and activism sheds light on the systems of power and white supremacy that have caused these disparities to emerge.

One thing is worth stating upfront: The inequitable distribution of nature's benefits in the United States is not the result of a consenting choice of communities of color or low-income communities to live near less nature, to allow more nature destruction nearby, or to give up their right to clean air and clean water. Nature deprivation is, instead, a consequence of a long history of systemic racism.

The data that CSP developed cannot be adequately analyzed without keeping this context of environmental racism in mind, including the following realities:

Discrimination and racism in the United States have had profound effects on human settlement patterns and on the patterns of protections for the nation's remaining natural areas. Redlining, forced migration, and economic segregation are just a few of the unjust policies and forces that have created barriers to, and a gradient of distance from, the United States' remaining natural areas for people of color.

The history of public lands in the United States is rooted in the violent dispossession of lands from Native Americans. For centuries, settler-colonists on the North American continent displaced tribes from their ancestral homelands and engaged in the deliberate destruction of vital natural resources-many with economic and cultural significance-as a tool of genocide against the Indigenous population. This legacy continues in the U.S. government's repeated failure to live up to its obligations to Indian Country that are enshrined in the treaties through which it acquired large swaths of Indian land. The federal government is legally required to ensure that tribes can access natural resources to protect their sovereignty, culture, and economic well-being. Too often, however, the government has sanctioned development that threatens sacred sites, weakens and circumvents tribal consultation, and ignores tribal concerns around environmental degradation.

Historically, the United States has systematically segregated and excluded people of color from public lands and other natural places. Black people have experienced segregation from the Civilian Conservation Corps to the National Park System; the nation's public lands, beaches, and other natural areas have also been venues in which communities of color have been the subject of legalized and institutionalized racism. The legacies of this exclusion persist in many forms, including in the continued underrepresentation of people of color in hiring at natural resource agencies as well as in the histories of different groups represented by national parks and public lands. It also affects visitation to national parks and other public lands and participation in outdoor recreation, as well as causes people of color to feel unwelcome or in danger in nature.

People of color have been and continue to be the subject of violence, intimidation, and threats while in nature. The broader societal criminalization of people of color-and the accompanying threat of police brutality and even murder-can be exposed in parks and public lands. Participants in outdoor activities face the risk of being targeted, stereotyped, and harmed for simply enjoying nature or even trying to protect it, as was clear in the case of Christian Cooper. Experiences such as his led to the coining of the phrase "Birding While Black" to describe the risk, difficulties, and alienation that people of color endure in certain outdoor spaces.

People of color have traditionally been excluded from the U.S. conservation movement. For more than a century, the movement to protect parks, public lands, and other natural places in the United States has been dominated by white people and perspectives. Discrimination and the framing of conservation priorities through this exclusive lens-bolstered by underrepresentation of people of color at the staff and leadership levels of conservation organizations, foundations, and natural resource agencies-has perpetuated the racial divide in nature access.

In evaluating the data discussed in the next section, it is important to recognize that people of color have long experienced unequal access to nature. The United States must not perpetuate existing inequities, which have a real cost in terms of the health and economic well-being of these communities.

The United States is losing a football field's worth of natural area every 30 seconds; this amounts to the loss, each year, of forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other natural places that combined are roughly the size of Everglades National Park. The effects of these losses are not equally distributed across socioeconomic and racial groups; according to a new analysis from CSP, CAP, and HAF, patterns of development-including urban sprawl, the construction of roads, pipelines, and transmission lines, and drilling, mining, and logging-have had a disproportionately large impact on communities of color and low-income communities. As a result, Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, and low-income families are far more likely than white families to live in a place that is deprived of the benefits that nature provides, including nearby places that allow them to get outside safely and access clean water, clean air, and a diversity of wildlife.
Figure 1 Figure 2
To better understand the disproportionate burdens and impacts of nature destruction and deterioration across the country, CSP assembled information from dozens of datasets to create the most comprehensive picture to date of how human activities have modified natural areas in the conterminous United States. The scientific team at CSP then overlaid this picture of the human footprint on nature in the lower 48 states and Washington, D.C., with 2013-2017 U.S Census Bureau demographic data, broken down into small geographic areas known as census tracts, which are about the size of a neighborhood in terms of population. The demographic data include information on race and ethnicity, income, and family structure within each census tract.

Using CSP's data and analysis, this report provides an initial assessment of demographic disparities in the concentration and distribution of nature. The analysis refers to a census tract as "nature deprived" if it has a higher proportion of natural area lost to human activity, including urban sprawl and other actions noted above, than the state-level median. The data reveal substantial differences in the degree of nature deprivation faced by different racial, ethnic, income, and family structure groups. Figures 1 and 2 summarize some of these findings, but there are at least three trends that are particularly concerning:

1. Communities of color are three times more likely than white communities to live nature deprived places. Seventy-four percent of communities of color in the contiguous United States live in nature-deprived areas, compared with just 23 percent of white communities.

2. Seventy percent of low-income communities across the country live in nature-deprived areas. This figure is 20 percent higher than the figure for those with moderate or high incomes.

3. Nature destruction has had the largest impact on low-income communities of color. More than 76 percent of people who live in low-income communities of color live in nature-deprived places.

Nature deprivation has consequences. The communities that are shouldering more of the impacts and costs of nature destruction are also receiving less of nature's benefits, including air and water purification, climate mitigation, biodiversity and disease control, and opportunities for leisure and recreation.

Studies have found that, because they are more likely to live in polluted areas without sufficient tree cover and spaces to get outdoors, people of color and low-income communities are more susceptible to developing immunocompromising illnesses such as asthma-a risk factor for COVID-19. Studies have even established a direct link between exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 mortality. Meanwhile, access to urban nature-and specifically the addition of green spaces to the poorest neighborhoods-can provide mental health benefits. In fact, scientists estimate that every dollar spent on creating and maintaining park trails can save almost three dollars in health care alone-a benefit that is being denied to the most economically distressed communities.

State and local variations and nature deprivation hotspots

Beyond national disparities in the distribution of nature across racial and economic groups, the data reveal concerning state-level disparities. At the outset, it is worth noting that in all states but New Mexico and the District of Columbia, census tracts classified as white had the lowest nature deprivation of any racial and ethnic groups. (see Figure 3 and the Appendix)
Figure 3 Figure 4
In contrast, in 26 states, Black communities experienced the highest levels of nature deprivation. In 16 states, Asian communities experienced the most nature deprivation. Hispanic and Latino people experienced the most nature deprivation out of all racial and ethnic groups in eight states. Natural area loss is particularly acute for Hispanic and Latino communities along the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas, around El Paso, Texas, and in other border communities in New Mexico and Arizona.

Evaluating state-level data by income shows that, in almost two-thirds of states, low-income residents were most likely to live in nature-deprived areas, while in 16 states, the highest income earners were the least likely to live in nature-deprived areas. (see Figure 4)

The analysis also identified so-called hotspot tracts, where there is both the highest proportion of people of color or low-income households and the highest proportion of nature deprivation. (see Figure 5) In order to address the current racial and economic disparities in nature deprivation, policymakers and advocates could use this information to help identify communities that should be prioritized for conservation investments, new parks, or restoration projects. The identification of these hotspots could also inform project-level decision-making such as analyzing how an oil lease sale or new trail would affect a socioeconomic nature deprivation hotspot. These data could also be used in concert with the Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, which estimates exposure to 11 different environmental health risks at the census-block-group level.

Nature deprivation and children

No age group needs nature more than children. Studies consistently find that children who spend time outdoors in natural environments experience improved health and cognitive functions, strong motor coordination, reduced stress, and enhanced social skills. Students who spend more time in the outdoors, including students from low-income backgrounds, tend to perform better on standardized tests, demonstrate more enthusiasm toward school, and have fewer attendance problems. According to one study, simply having more tree cover in a neighborhood could account for as much as 13 percent of variance in student outcomes; the study found the positive effect to be strongest in schools that faced the most external socioeconomic challenges.

The data from CSP, however, indicate that children in the United States have far less nature nearby than the overall population. Specifically, census tracts in the contiguous 48 states and Washington, D.C., with large numbers of families with children under the age of 18 are nearly twice as likely to live in nature-deprived areas than families who do not have children under the age of 18. In every single state, with the exception of Louisiana, families and individuals with young children were more nature deprived than families and individuals without young children. These data echo the Trust for Public Lands' finding that 27 million children lack access to a quality park close to home.

For low-income families with children and families of color with children, the disparities in nature access are even more acute. (see Figure 6) Three-fourths of census tracts with large numbers of families of color with children live in nature-deprived places, while less than 40 percent of white families with children do. Black and Latino or Hispanic families with children were the most nature deprived of any race or ethnicity examined.
Figure 6
Energy extraction as a driver of nature deprivation

An oil and gas boom in the United States over the past two decades has fueled a rapid expansion in a network of pipelines, well pads, roads, and other infrastructure that is fragmenting natural areas and wildlife habitat. This energy boom has pushed fossil fuel infrastructure closer and closer to schools and neighborhoods, contributing to greater air and water pollution, spills and industrial accidents, and the loss of nearby nature.

The data generated by CSP confirm that, along with urban sprawl, energy development is a top driver of natural area loss in the United States, causing the loss of at least 6 million acres of natural area from 2001 to 2017. In certain regions of the country, this explosion of energy infrastructure has had a disproportionate impact on nature access for some nonwhite and low-income communities.

For example, in the parts of Appalachia where coal mining has been most concentrated-including Kentucky, West Virginia, and southwestern Virginia-low-income communities are located in areas with higher-than-average levels of nature loss due to energy development.

In Colorado, meanwhile, Hispanic and Latino communities have more energy development nearby than any other racial or ethnic group. In central California, the state's fracking boom, and subsequent natural area loss, has been concentrated near Hispanic and Latino communities.

Native Americans, in particular, are experiencing disproportionate impacts of oil, gas, and coal development on land, water, and wildlife. In 22 states, Native American communities are in places with the most or second-most energy development out of all racial and ethnic groups. As shown in Figure 7, on the Navajo Nation and parts of the Ute Mountain Reservation in the Southwest, for example, Native American populations experience above-average natural area loss from oil and gas development on nearby public lands.

Nature deprivation and Indigenous rights

Energy development on public lands that threatens sacred sites, depletes natural resources, or pollutes the environment is especially egregious because it often stems from the U.S. government's systemic violation of its trust and treaty obligations to tribal nations. The United States is required to respect tribal sovereignty, including over natural resources, so actions that may affect a tribe's access to economically or culturally significant lands, waters, and wildlife must undergo a formal consultation process. In practice, however, the United States often fails to meaningfully engage tribes in natural resource decisions.

The Trump administration has exacerbated this failing, exhibiting a pattern of ignoring tribal input or conducting insufficient government-to-government consultations. In New Mexico, for example, the administration has ignored tribal input in proposing to expand oil and gas development near Chaco Canyon, the ancestral homeland of Pueblo tribes and of cultural significance to the Navajo Nation. Alaska Natives are facing similar challenges in registering their perspectives regarding the administration's rush to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, as well as its efforts to log the Tongass National Forest. Amid the pandemic, tribal leaders and their allies nationwide have called for a pause on comment periods and significant decisions until tribes-who are experiencing disproportionate devastation from the coronavirus-can meaningfully participate.

The treatment of tribal consultation as a formality or an afterthought that can be circumvented is a core contributing factor to the loss of nature near tribes due to energy development. In order to address the nature deficit, tribes must not be excluded from the design and conceptualization stage of plans to manage natural resources, and extractive activities must not be prioritized over tribal sovereignty.

Providing equitable access to nature, reducing the disproportionate impact of pollution on communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities, and addressing the legacies of racism and injustice in natural resource policy must be core priorities in any effort to better conserve nature in America. While this report focuses primarily on racial and economic inequities that are readily apparent through census tracts, it must be noted that public lands and nature can also be unwelcoming and exclusionary spaces for many deliberately overlooked populations, including LGBTQ communities and disabled people. In the case of LGBTQ people, the lack of U.S. census-collected data on sexual orientation and gender identity makes it impossible to assess the extent of nature deprivation. Equitable access must consider how different communities view, use, and value nature-from community parks and coastlines to front-country recreation areas and wilderness.

That a community of color is three times more likely to live in nature deprivation than their white counterparts does not happen by chance. As is discussed at the beginning of this report, inequitable access to nature is the direct result of systemic racism in the United States; its symptoms cannot be fully treated until the underlying condition is addressed. With acknowledgment that these recommendations alone are far from sufficient to solve the complex and intersecting issues of environmental racism, the following sections detail seven policies that would begin to address the inequities and the disproportionate effects of nature loss on communities of color and low-income communities.

Establish an inclusive goal to protect 30 percent of lands and ocean by 2030

As a starting point for addressing the broader nature crisis, scientists recommend protecting at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and ocean in a natural state by 2030 (a goal known as 30×30). Seventy-three percent of voters in western states support the national initiative, as do 82 percent of Latinos in those states.

In addition to protecting new areas, governments should seek to restore degraded lands and waters that have harmed the health and quality of life of communities across the country. For too long, the costs and impacts of natural resource extraction and pollution have fallen disproportionately on low-income communities and communities of color in the United States. This must be addressed through restoration policies and programs to plug orphan wells, reclaim abandoned mines, clean up superfund and brownfield sites, and reforest the urban tree canopy.

Embracing a 30×30 goal is only the beginning of the significant work necessary to build a strong, ambitious, inclusive, and equitable plan to protect natural systems for the benefit of every U.S. community. How much nature to protect-and how, where, and for whom-must honor and account for the perspectives of all people, including communities that are disproportionately affected by the degradation of natural systems; communities that do not have equal access to the outdoors; tribal nations whose sovereign rights over lands, waters, and wildlife should be upheld; environmental justice communities at the front lines of climate change; communities of color; and other historically marginalized populations.

Increase consultation and engagement with communities and empower them to lead in decision-making

All levels of government should aim to create and support programs and avenues for underserved communities to not just provide comment or consultation on decisions that affect their environment but also take the lead in decision-making. This would allow those who are directly affected by natural area loss and a lack of access to parks and public lands the opportunity to have their voice elevated and centered in a conversation in which their stakes are highest such as when public lands are leased for energy development. At the most basic level, efforts toward this end should include providing resources in languages other than English and ensuring that affected communities are able to provide meaningful public comment and consultation.

In the long term, it should include improving public comment and consultation processes to be proactive rather than reactionary as well as engaging community stakeholders in the process of building and designing resource management plans rather than approaching them for feedback after a project has already been conceptualized. Policymakers should also consider structural fixes such as new conservation models that facilitate the declaration and management of new protected areas by communities, such as Indigenous tribes, whose contributions have historically been ignored or undermined by state and federal governments.

Ensure that staff and leadership reflect the communities they serve

Government agencies, nonprofit organizations, foundations, and private companies should seek to increase the representation of people of color, LGBTQ people, and other nature-deprived communities within their own ranks. Research done by the Green Diversity Initiative, a group tracking demographic data at environmental organizations, found that less than 25 percent of staff at environmental nongovernmental organizations and foundations across the United States identify as people of color. Outdoor advocates of color have long called for organizations and government to diversify their staff and leadership by integrating historically marginalized perspectives on nature into the fabric of resource decision-making and ending the exclusion of marginalized people from access to institutional power.

End the childhood nature access gap through education and outreach programs

Studies have shown that spending time in nature is not only beneficial to a child's development, but it is also a crucial factor in the formation of a lifelong appreciation of nature. Increasing exposure to the outdoors for young children could help break the vicious cycle of nature deprivation that contributes to many excluded communities being locked out of conservation employment and leadership opportunities.

Funding programs for children-especially those in low-income and redlined school districts with a high proportion of low-income students of color-can serve as a leverage point for getting kids outside by providing field trips, nature-based STEM programs, and after-school resources. Federal and state governments should look to programs such as Every Kid in A Park or the New Mexico Outdoor Equity Fund when considering how to correct the stark racial and economic disparities in formative nature experiences. Government action in this area is an especially important investment and equalizer to break down the barriers for families who don't have extra resources for leisure or transportation to nature.

Protect more close-to-home recreation areas and make them welcoming to all

Governments at all levels should create and enhance public lands in accessible places. So-called front-country areas offer close-to-home natural settings and outdoor recreation experiences, which allow people to experience nature without needing to travel to a distant destination. An emphasis should be placed on accessible front-country parks near communities of color, low-income communities, and urban areas.

Land management agencies must also redouble their efforts to attract and engage visitors through outreach programs, cultural programming, interpretation, and services-including safe

and equal access to bathrooms, programs, and any other sex-segregated facilities based on gender identity-that are inclusive and fit the needs and interests of a broad range of communities. Signage, information, and safety resources at parks and public lands should be multilingual and culturally appropriate.

Investing in transit solutions that connect with major public transportation systems would begin to remove the physical-distance and cost barriers that nature-deprived urban communities and low-wage and shift workers face in participating in outdoor recreation and enjoyment. The Transit to Trails Act would direct the U.S. Department of Transportation to establish a grant program to fund accessible transportation systems in critically underserved communities to improve equitable access to nature. Agencies should consider hidden and explicit costs and fees that restrict access to outdoor participation-including access to ocean ecosystems-and prioritize ways to lessen or shift that burden in a more equitable manner. Community partner organizations should be supported in efforts such as HAF's Latino Conservation Week, which encourages parks, refuges, and more to introduce and engage their communities in conservation and stewardship, and the annual LGBTQ Outdoor Summit, which is aimed at building community and making the outdoors more inclusive of the LGBTQ community.

Improve tribal consultation and expand co-management opportunities

Nature access-including expanded ownership, management, and staffing of public lands-is not only a moral and socioeconomic necessity to reduce disparities, but it is also a legal right of American Indian and Alaska Native people. Federal, state, and local policymakers as well as national conservation leaders should engage in formal consultations with tribal leaders to determine how to better support the conservation and natural resource priorities and vision of tribal nations both on tribally owned and nontribally owned lands. This should include exploring opportunities and additional models for genuine co-management of public lands and natural resources as well as sufficient federal funding to uphold trust and treaty obligations.

Provide funding for new parks and access programs

Programs that fund the creation of new parks and open spaces, such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), are critically important to increasing the pace of conservation, creating jobs, and connecting people to nature. Congress should pass the Great American Outdoors Act, which includes permanent and guaranteed funding for the LWCF, to continue to protect open spaces-such as national parks, forests, and cultural resources as well as local parks, trails, and playgrounds-in all 50 states.

Upon passing the act, policymakers should ensure there is swift implementation and distribution of the new funds to help address nature deficits. Specifically, the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership (ORLP) program within the LWCF should be given expanded and dedicated funding. The ORLP supports projects that create parks and expand outdoor recreational opportunities in low-income urban areas across the nation.

In the United States today, the color of one's skin or the size of one's bank account is a solid predictor of whether one has safe access to nature and all of its benefits. As a result, low-income communities, communities of color, and families with children have diminished outdoor recreation opportunities and access to nature; deteriorated drinking water quality; worsened air pollution; greater vulnerability to heat, drought, and floods; greater exposure to disease; and less resilience to the impacts of climate change. As local and national leaders attempt to address the climate and nature crises, they must acknowledge the legacy of environmental racism and pursue policies that are centered in justice and equity. Correcting for the racial and economic factors that contribute to nature-deprived communities will be a critical component of this work.

Jenny Rowland-Shea is a senior policy analyst for Public Lands at the Center for American Progress.

Sahir Doshi is research assistant for Public Lands at the Center.

Shanna Edberg is director of conservation programs for Hispanic Access Foundation.

Robert Fanger is chief communications and development officer for Hispanic Access Foundation.

The authors would like to thank Matt Lee-Ashley, Kate Kelly, Nicole Gentile, Meghan Miller, Chester Hawkins, Keenan Alexander, Tricia Woodcome, and Bill Rapp for their contributions to this report.

The map below shows state-by-state levels of nature deprivation by race and ethnicity and income. Nature deprivation percentages function best for making comparisons within a state, rather than in comparing nature deprivation between states.

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The Nature Gap - Center for American Progress

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Clean drinking water, clean air, public parks and beaches, biodiversity, and open spaces are shared goods to which every person in the United States has an equal right both in principle and in law. Nature is supposed to be a "great equalizer" whose services are free, universal, and accessible to all humans without discrimination.

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The White Supremacist History of the Sierra Club

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The White Supremacist History of the Sierra Club

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John Muir, a Scottish American naturalist, engineer, writer and pioneer of conservation. (Photo 12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

No one is more important to the history of environmental conservation than John Muir - the "wilderness prophet," "patron saint of the American wilderness" and "father of the national parks" who founded the nation's oldest conservation organization, the Sierra Club. But on Wednesday, citing the current racial reckoning, the group announced it will end its blind reverence to a figure who was also racist.

As Confederate statues fall across the country, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in an early morning post on the group's website, "it's time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club's early history." Muir, who fought to preserve Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Forest, once referred to African Americans as lazy "Sambos," a racist pejorative that many black people consider to be as offensive as the n-word.

While recounting a legendary walk from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, Muir described Native Americans he encountered as "dirty."

Muir's friendships in the early 1900s were equally troubling, the Sierra Club said. Henry Fairfield Osborn, a close associate, led the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History and, following Muir's death, helped establish the American Eugenics Society, which labeled nonwhite people, including Jews at the time, as inferior.

The Sierra Club isn't the only organization that is shaking its foundations. Leaders of predominantly white, liberal and progressive groups throughout the field of conservation say they are taking a hard look within their organizations and don't like what they see.

African American and other minority employees are pointing out the lack of diversity in green groups and the racial bias that persists in top and mid-level management.

The most startling example is a manifesto by Ruth Tyson, an employee at the Union of Concerned Scientists who quit recently after she "woke up feeling resentment and agony" because her job there was unbearable. Tyson flipped open a laptop to write a short email explaining why she was quitting with only three days' notice but didn't stop until she had written 17 pages of searing criticism.

She sent it to 200 people.

Her open letter ripped the organization's casual indifference to black workers. Their ideas were routinely dismissed and the community outreach jobs they were hired to perform were a low priority. Tyson said the Union of Concerned Scientists, along with other groups, has fallen woefully short in its efforts to make its workplace more diverse and help communities disproportionately impacted by pollution.

Tyson was one of four black women on a 14-member team when she started work three years ago, watching as they quit or were forced out. Now there are none.

An Open Letter to the Union of Concerned Scientists: On Black Death, Black Silencing, and Black Fugitivity

"They simply baited us in with the language of equity without making significant infrastructural, cultural, and procedural changes to prioritize and accommodate the [people of color or] the actual work of racial equity," she wrote. "As if anti-racist work were something you could just sprinkle on top."

Remarkably, her bosses agreed.

"I've read the letter many times," said Ken Kimmell, the organization's president. "I thought it was fair, yeah. I think this is part of a larger issue in all of society and there is real meaning to the culture of white supremacy.

"There are ways that a white-dominated workplace doesn't make it welcoming to persons of color," Kimmell said. "I have subsequently learned that many of the things she raised in her letter were not unique to her and things other people of color have experienced."

Now, like other green groups, the Union of Concerned Scientists is vowing to look at the way it's structured; diversify its board, workers and managers; and police casual racial bias.

At the 53-year-old Environmental Defense Fund, Fred Krupp, its president, also promised change. "The pandemic has exposed for the American public inequities that have existed, including access to health care, neighborhoods that are much more polluted than others," Krupp said.

"I don't feel EDF is being pressured. I'm feeling pressure from the facts, the inequities that have been laid bare by covid and the events following George Floyd's murder and that EDF hasn't done nearly enough on environmental justice issues and issues involving racism," Krupp said.

Even a coalition of nontraditional groups, GreenLatinos, issued a statement about racism in its community during the racial reckoning. "In the Latino community, we have had a problem of anti-black racism for a long time. We've finally started to recognize it," said Marce Gutiérrez-Graudiņš, a founder and director of the ocean conservation group Azul, the Spanish word for blue.

"I grew up in Mexico and very much present as white," Gutiérrez-Graudiņš said, referring to her skin color. "I grew up in this area of anti-black racism, it was benign. We have this way in Latin America to say, 'That's something that the Spanish did.' We have a way of rationalizing that and say, that was not us. Two years ago, Televista still had people doing blackface on their comedy shows saying it wasn't a big deal."

But no statement was as forceful as that of the 128-year-old Sierra Club, the nation's oldest and most venerable environmental group. Brune recently addressed 800 staff and 4 million members and volunteers with a note that was unusually frank and acquiescent.

For years, Brune wrote, the Sierra Club's staffers of color "have led the call for transformative change and I and other white leaders have not responded with the urgency nor at the scale that the opportunities and challenges demand." He promised to overhaul executive leadership, reallocate $5 million to reduce pay inequities, and devote greater attention to the communities suffering most from "environmental racism" and "structural injustice."

Because Muir was the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, the group's Wednesday statement said, his "words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club."

"Such willful ignorance is what allows some people to shut their eyes to the reality that the wild places we love are also the ancestral homelands of Native peoples, forced off their lands in the decades or centuries before they became national parks," the statement said.

Early Sierra Club members and leaders such as Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan "were vocal advocates for white supremacy and its pseudo-scientific arm, eugenics." Jordan supported forced-sterilization laws and "programs that deprived tens of thousands of women of their right to bear children."

The roots of American environmentalism are grounded in a reverence for nature and racism. Muir's contemporaries at the turn of the last century included Madison Grant, a co-founder of the Bronx Zoo who wrote "The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History," an argument for white supremacy in which he decried the decline of Nordic people.

Former president Theodore Roosevelt, who created the first national forests, praised the 1916 book, which helped shape the views of the future leader of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler, who would go on to write the anti-Semitic autobiography "Mein Kampf," called Grant's book "my bible."

Within mainstream environmental groups, diversity is lacking

Given the troubled history of the groups, black and brown activists who have long complained about unfair funding and lack of attention to their communities weren't impressed.

"The big, white green groups have all issued racial justice statements - a good first baby step," said Robert Bullard, a Texas Southern University professor and activist who helped restart the National Black Environmental Justice Network this month.

"In my opinion, none of them have taken a strong stand in the way their white privilege sucks up damn near all the green dollars from foundations and donors, away from people of color."

Environmental and climate justice groups work in communities with the greatest need, said Bullard, a founder of the environmental justice movement that started when African American, Latino, Native American and other environmentalists gathered for the first time in D.C. in 1991 and vowed to fill the gaps big green groups missed.

For more than 30 years, environmental justice groups have deployed paltry budgets to fight big battles over power plants, refineries, landfills and other projects that foul the air and land around black and Latino communities. Ludovic Blain, who attended the second environmental summit a decade after the first, said activists often worked without pay.

"If you're very used to not getting funded, people are used to doing it free," Blain said. "The environmental movement has a lot of philanthropic money; there's enough money to go around."

According to its tax filing, the Sierra Club had assets of more than $106 million in 2018, and the Union of Concerned Scientists had nearly $40 million. One group, the Nature Conservancy, had assets and grants that totaled more than $1 billion that year. Another, the Natural Resources Defense Council, had more than $350 million.

That compares to about $2 million for the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans and $2.5 million for West Harlem Environmental Action in New York. Los Jardines Institute, another environmental justice group, had about $300,000 in revenue in 2018.

"If you had told me two decades ago that millions of dollars would be going to Latino environmental justice work, I would never have guessed it would have been through Natural Resources Defense Council," Blain said.

The nation's biggest philanthropies have traditionally given to established environmental groups. The Hewlett Foundation, for example, has given about half a million dollars a year to the Natural Resources Defense Council's lands program for a quarter-century, but last year it informed the organization that it would be giving that money to more-local groups such as Outdoor Afro, GreenLatinos and the Hispanic Access Foundation.

Still, many in the environmental justice movement shrug at the recent shift in support. "We're just getting chump change when it comes to big green" environmental groups, said Angela Adrar, director of the Climate Justice Alliance. "It's been quite incremental, to be honest."

"Ninety percent of the funding is enjoyed by two percent of the organizations," said Anthony Rogers-Wright, recently named a member of the board for Friends of the Earth.

Leaking Talent: How people of color are pushed out of environmental organizations

Ruth Tyson entered the world of white environmentalists three years ago. A friend sent her an ad for a Union of Concerned Scientists job that offered $47,000 - "like more money than anyone in my family had made," said Tyson, whose parents emigrated from Jamaica when her mother was seven months pregnant with her.

Tyson was awed by her new workplace, but there were almost no black managers, co-workers or mentors. When things went wrong, she felt she had nowhere to turn.

At a meeting to uplift the voices of marginalized communities, Tyson quickly noticed "the majority of people participating were white," her letter said. She felt she was expected to be the voice of the black community. "I was put on every racial equity task force that popped up," she wrote.

Managers seemed dismissive. "I saw how white men scrolled through their phones or laptops as I talked, and got up and left whenever they wanted to be done meeting with me," the letter said. "I understood that these behaviors ... were not personality traits, but the manifestations of the white dominant culture throughout the organization."

Asked whether he disagreed with anything Tyson wrote, Kimmell said: "We are actually grateful for the letter because it shed so much light on so many things. I was sad because our workplace wasn't welcoming and nurturing for her."

Whitney Tome, the outgoing executive director of Green 2.0, also thought the letter rang true. It "enumerated the problems" people of color face in all the groups and "was heartbreaking," she said.

Andrés Jimenez, the incoming executive director, said it was indicative of the minority talent drain. "Retention is a problem and upward mobility is not strong" at big green groups, he said. "A person of color comes in as a legislative assistant or staff assistant and there is no way up for them."

Tyson's letter also made its way to Brune. "I found her letter to be heartbreaking and familiar." And that has to change, he said.

"What's clear is that there's no going back to the Sierra Club we have been. What's needed is fundamental transformation, not reform."

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Liberal, progressive - and racist? The Sierra Club faces its white-supremacist history.

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No one is more important to the history of environmental conservation than John Muir - the "wilderness prophet," "patron saint of the American wilderness" and "father of the national parks" who founded the nation's oldest conservation organization, the Sierra Club.

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"Return the National Parks to the Tribes"

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"Return the National Parks to the Tribes"

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The jewels of America's landscape should belong to America's original peoples.

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Americans have gradually assimilated to

Editor's note: This article is part of a new series called "Who Owns America's Wilderness?" This article was published online on April 12, 2021.

In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as "the place of a gaping mouth." Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. "None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view," he later wrote. "A peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears." Many of those who have followed in Bunnell's footsteps over the past 170 years, walking alongside the Merced River or gazing upon the god-rock of El Capitan, have been similarly struck by the sense that they were in the presence of the divine.

The Mariposa Battalion had come to Yosemite to kill Indians. Yosemite's Miwok tribes, like many of California's Native peoples, were obstructing a frenzy of extraction brought on by the Gold Rush. And whatever Bunnell's fine sentiments about nature, he made his contempt for these "overgrown, vicious children" plain:

Any attempt to govern or civilize them without the power to compel obedience, will be looked upon by barbarians with derision ... The savage is naturally vain, cruel and arrogant. He boasts of his murders and robberies, and the tortures of his victims very much in the same manner that he recounts his deeds of valor in battle.

When the roughly 200 men of the Mariposa Battalion marched into Yosemite, armed with rifles, they did not find the Miwok eager for battle. While the Miwok hid, the militiamen sought to starve them into submission by burning their food stores, souring the valley's air with the smell of scorched acorns. On one particularly bloody day, some of the men came upon an inhabited village outside the valley, surprising the Miwok there. They used embers from the tribe's own campfires to set the wigwams aflame and shot at the villagers indiscriminately as they fled, murdering 23 of them. By the time the militia's campaign ended, many of the Miwok who survived had been driven from Yosemite, their homeland for millennia, and forced onto reservations.

Thirty-nine years later, Yosemite became the fifth national park. (Yellowstone, which was granted that status in 1872, was the first.) The parks were intended to be natural cathedrals: protected landscapes where people could worship the sublime. They offer Americans the thrill of looking back over their shoulder at a world without humans or technology. Many visit them to find something that exists outside or beyond us, to experience an awesome sense of scale, to contemplate our smallness and our ephemerality. It was for this reason that John Muir, the father of modern conservationism, advocated for the parks' creation.
From the August 1897 issue: John Muir's "The American Forests"
More than a century ago, in the pages of this magazine, Muir described the entire American continent as a wild garden "favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe." But in truth, the North American continent has not been a wilderness for at least 15,000 years: Many of the landscapes that became national parks had been shaped by Native peoples for millennia. Forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked plentiful to white settlers because American Indians had strategically burned them to increase the amount of forage for moose and deer and woodland caribou. Yosemite Valley's sublime landscape was likewise tended by Native peoples; the acorns that fed the Miwok came from black oaks long cultivated by the tribe. The idea of a virgin American wilderness-an Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin-is an illusion.

The national parks are sometimes called "America's best idea," and there is much to recommend them. They are indeed awesome places, worthy of reverence and preservation, as Native Americans like me would be the first to tell you. But all of them were founded on land that was once ours, and many were created only after we were removed, forcibly, sometimes by an invading army and other times following a treaty we'd signed under duress. When describing the simultaneous creation of the parks and Native American reservations, the Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk noted darkly that the United States "made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller."

Many of the negotiations that enabled the creation of these islands took place in English (to the disadvantage of the tribes), when the tribes faced annihilation or had been weakened by disease or starvation (to the disadvantage of the tribes), or with bad faith on the part of the government (to the disadvantage of the tribes). The treaties that resulted, according to the U.S. Constitution, are the "supreme Law of the Land." Yet even despite their cruel terms, few were honored. Native American claims and rights were ignored or chipped away.

The American story of "the Indian" is one of staggering loss. Some estimates put the original Indigenous population of what would become the contiguous United States between 5 million and 15 million at the time of first contact. By 1890, around the time America began creating national parks in earnest, roughly 250,000 Native people were still alive. In 1491, Native people controlled all of the 2.4 billion acres that would become the United States. Now we control about 56 million acres, or roughly 2 percent.
Read: The Blackfeet brain drain
And yet we remain, and some of us have stayed stubbornly near the parks, preserving our attachment to them. Grand Canyon National Park encloses much of the Havasupai Tribe and its reservation. Pipe Spring National Monument sits entirely inside the 120,000-acre Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, in northern Arizona. Many other parks neighbor Native communities. But while the parks may be near us, and of us, they are not ours.

We live in a time of historical reconsideration, as more and more people recognize that the sins of the past still haunt the present. For Native Americans, there can be no better remedy for the theft of land than land. And for us, no lands are as spiritually significant as the national parks. They should be returned to us. Indians should tend-and protect and preserve-these favored gardens again.

Related Podcast: The Experiment
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In July 2020, I conducted something of a barnstorming tour. I wanted to look with fresh eyes at the park system, to imagine a new future for it. I had planned on visiting all sorts of places-the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains National Park-but the coronavirus pandemic intervened.

Some parks closed completely, while others (like Yellowstone) closed campgrounds, cultural centers, and museums. In the end I drove from Minnesota through North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon and down the spine of California. Then I turned around and drove back. I visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Little Bighorn Battlefield, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Mount Hood National Forest, Kings Canyon, Death Valley, and Joshua Tree.

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The roads were quieter than usual, though the skies were sometimes hazy as the West Coast burst into flames. I slept in campgrounds, in my tent in the backyards of friends, and, rarely, in a hotel or motor lodge. I cooked on the trunk of my car and on picnic tables, under the blazing sun and in torrential rain. I fought off raccoons and squirrels.

More than any other place I visited, Yellowstone seemed to contain the multitudes of America. There, I saw elk and bison. I saw enough recreational vehicles to house a good portion of this country's homeless. I saw lake water, river water, black water, swamp water, and frothy waterfall water. I saw Tony Hawk being stopped by two park rangers after longboarding down the switchbacks above Mammoth Hot Springs while an actual hawk circled above him. I saw Instagram models in tiny bikinis posing in front of indifferent bison. I saw biker gangs (who seem to really enjoy parks) and gangs of toddlers (who don't seem to enjoy anything). I saw tourists, masked and unmasked. I saw placards and displays. I discovered that you can learn a lot about nature at Yellowstone, and perhaps even more about American culture. But the park's official captions give you at best a limited sense of its human history.

Yellowstone National Park was created about 100 years after the country was born. An 1806 expedition, part of Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery, passed just north of where the park is today. Later, John Colter, one of the Corps members, joined the fur trade and purportedly became the first non-Native to see its vistas. Of course, Native people had lived there for thousands of years, and at the time Colter was setting traps in the area, they still claimed Yellowstone as their home.

Colter traveled through the Yellowstone area and the Teton Range in the early 19th century, looking for fur. Wherever he went, he ended up in mortal conflict with Native Americans, culminating in his wounding at the hands of the Blackfeet. He hid from the tribe under a pile of driftwood and then walked for a week to safety. Over the next 60 years, trappers like him described the landscape that would become Yellowstone as an area of mud geysers, acid pools, and petrified trees.

Not until 1869 did the first official expedition explore the region and confirm the mountain men's accounts. Things moved quickly after that. In 1871, Ferdinand V. Hayden led a government-sponsored survey of Yellowstone that produced reports complete with professional sketches and photographs. Based on that report, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the Yellowstone Act of 1872, which created America's first landscape to be "reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale ... and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

Grant's declaration made trespassers of the Shoshone, Bannock, and other peoples who had called the parkland home for centuries. The tribes left with the understanding that they would retain hunting rights in the park, as guaranteed by an 1868 treaty. Before the century was out, however, the government had reneged on that promise. This tactic of theft by broken treaty would become a pattern where parks were concerned.

When Yellowstone was established, the Plains Wars were raging all around the park's borders. It was as though the government paused mid-murder to plant a tree in the victims' backyard. The Dakota War had erupted 10 years earlier, just east of the Great Plains. By the time it was over, dozens of Dakota had been hanged, and more than 1,600 women, children, and elders had been sent to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Eventually, all of the treaties between the Eastern Dakota and the U.S. government were "abrogated and annulled."
Read: 'Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone'
In 1864, on the Plains' opposite edge, at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory, Colonel John Chivington massacred and mutilated as many as 500 Native Americans. In 1868, just four years before the creation of Yellowstone, Native Americans, led by Red Cloud, fought the U.S. government to a standstill, then forced concessions from the Americans at the treaty table, though these, too, were eventually unmade.
Viewed from the perspective of history, Yellowstone is a crime scene.
War came to Yellowstone itself in 1877. Chief Joseph's band of Nez Perce had been shut out of their homeland in the Wallowa Valley and embarked on a 1,500-mile journey that would end just south of the Canadian border, where they would surrender to the U.S. Army. The Nez Perce did their best to avoid white people on their way. But they were attacked on the banks of the Big Hole River, in August 1877, by soldiers in Colonel John Gibbon's command. Gibbon's men approached the camp on foot at dawn, killing a man during their advance. Then they began firing into the tepees of the sleeping Nez Perce, killing men, women, and children. The Nez Perce counterattacked. Their warriors kept Gibbon's soldiers pinned down while the others escaped. Although they defended themselves well, they lost at least 60 people.

Reeling from these deaths, the Nez Perce passed into Yellowstone, where they ran into tourists from Radersburg, Montana, enjoying the "pleasuring-ground" created at the expense of Indians. The Nez Perce briefly held the tourists hostage, and then released them, but went on to kill two tourists in the park later in the month.

Moving east through the park, the tribe forded the Yellowstone River at a place still known as the Nez Perce Ford. Around the time they crossed the river, an elderly woman peeled away from the main column and stayed at an area known as Mud Volcano. She sat on a bison robe near a geyser and sang. When a U.S. scout approached her, she closed her eyes. "She seemed rather disappointed," John W. Redington, the scout, wrote, "when instead of shooting her I refilled her water bottle. She made signs that she had been forsaken by her people, and wanted to die." Ten minutes later, a Bannock scout for the Army obliged by striking her down and scalping her. One hundred and forty-three years later, my sons and daughter and I would stand on the same spot, wondering why there are so few places in the park where you can learn about its bloody past. Viewed from the perspective of history, Yellowstone is a crime scene.

America's national parks comprise only a small fraction of the land stolen from Native Americans, but they loom large in the broader story of our dispossession. Most of the major national parks are in the western United States. So, too, are most Native American tribes, owing to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which attempted to eject all tribes east of the Mississippi to what was then Indian Territory. The reservation period likewise began, for the most part, in the West, in the mid-19th century.
From the May 2020 issue: The people who profited off the Trail of Tears
Even after we were relegated to reservations, the betrayals continued. Beginning in 1887, the Dawes Act (also known as the General Allotment Act) split much of the reservations up into small parcels of land to be granted to individual Indians, while the "surplus" communal land was opened for white settlement. In blunt terms, Thomas Morgan, the commissioner of Indian affairs, said in 1890 that the goal of federal policy at the time was "to break up reservations, destroy tribal relations, settle Indians upon their own homesteads, incorporate them into the national life, and deal with them not as nations or tribes or bands, but as individual citizens." This land grab bled at least another 90 million acres away from the tribes-roughly equivalent to the 85 million acres that comprise America's 423 national-park sites.

After Yellowstone was established and Indians were removed and in some cases excluded from its spaces, the same-and worse-happened elsewhere. The Blackfeet, living in three bands in northwestern Montana and southern Alberta, had long thought of the Rockies as their spiritual and physical homeland. They wouldn't have dreamt of ceding it at the treaty table, but in the 1880s and '90s, they were forced to negotiate with the U.S. government. Weakened by a string of epidemics, seasons of starvation, and insatiable Americans bent on opening up their homelands to timber and mineral extraction, the Blackfeet had to make concession after concession. Some years, they had to give up land just to secure enough resources to last through the next winter.

Not long after a harsh winter that killed as many as 600 Blackfeet, the tribe signed away land that would become Glacier National Park. The deal was brokered by George Bird Grinnell, the naturalist founder of the Audubon Society of New York. Grinnell had joined George Armstrong Custer on his expedition into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold. The trip was in direct violation of the treaty guaranteeing that the Black Hills would remain in Native control. Grinnell was often called a "friend of the Indian," but he once wrote that Natives have "the mind of a child in the body of an adult." In 1911, a year after Congress approved the creation of Glacier, Montana ceded jurisdiction of the park to the U.S. government.
Read: How much are America's national parks worth?
So many of the parks owe their existence to heists like these. Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in Wisconsin, was created out of Ojibwe homelands; the Havasupai lost much of their land when Grand Canyon National Park was established; the creation of Olympic National Park, in Washington, prevented Quinault tribal members from exercising their treaty rights within its boundaries; and Everglades National Park was created on Seminole land that the tribe depended on for food. The list goes on.

I set out on my trip through America's national parks from my home, at Leech Lake Reservation, in Minnesota, on the southern fringe of the North American boreal forest. This forest is one of the largest stretches of woodland in the world: It spreads from the Aleutian Islands all the way to Newfoundland and from near the southern edge of Hudson Bay to northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. As I headed west for Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in North Dakota, the taiga gave way to grasslands and oak savanna near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. By the time I crossed the Red River, I'd left the forest behind altogether. I felt the land dip, and looking west, I thought I could make out the horizon where the Great Plains begin.

As a boy, I would accompany my father on business trips through some of these same landscapes. In the car, he would narrate the history of our region, mostly without much emotional inflection: "Chief Little Crow fled this way to escape the military after the Dakota War in 1862." We would pass many small towns-Hawley, Valley City, Medina, Steele-that seemed pleasant enough, until my father ruined them for me. The calm and order of them, their small houses and neatly kept yards, the Protestant ethic reflected in their organization-all of it infuriates me, because every single one of those towns exists at our expense.

Medora, North Dakota, is the southern gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. (The Marquis de Morès named the town after his wife, Medora von Hoffman, though the romance of the gesture suffers when you consider that he established the town as a place to slaughter cattle to be sold at eastern markets.) Medora today is a fantasy of a time that never was. There is a statue of Roosevelt and a Rough Riders Hotel and, during the summer months, the Medora Musical. The show's website really says it best when it promises "the rootin'-tootinest, boot-scootinest show in all the Midwest. There's no other show quite like it. It's an ode to patriotism, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Great American West!" When I was there it was an ode to COVID‑19: According to a clerk at the convenience store, one of the cast members was spreading the virus from the stage.

I wanted to begin my journey at Theodore Roosevelt because no one embodies the tensions of the park system as it is currently constituted like the 26th president. Contained in the person of Roosevelt was a wild love for natural vistas and a propensity for violent imperialism; an overwhelming desire for freedom and a readiness to take it away from other people. Much of the park named after him exists on top of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) land. The MHA lost that land in 1851, with the signing of the first Treaty of Fort Laramie. Executive orders in 1870 and 1880 seized still more of the tribes' homeland.

Roosevelt went to hunt bison in Dakota Territory in 1883. In 1884, when he was back home in New York, his wife gave birth to their daughter, Alice, but unbeknownst to her doctors, his wife had a kidney ailment, and died on Valentine's Day that year. Teddy's mother died the same day in the same house. After drawing a large X in his diary, Roosevelt wrote, " The light has gone out of my life. " He returned to the West and built a ranch outside Medora, intent on letting nature soothe him. He didn't last long out there, and the West never became his permanent home, but it left a mark on him-and he, in turn, left his mark on it.
From the May 1906 issue: Camping with President Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt was familiar with Native Americans, having interacted with them when he was in Dakota Territory. "The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian," he would say in an 1886 speech, during which he also famously declared: "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

Roosevelt's attitude toward Indians is manifest in his treatment of the Apache leader Geronimo. Born in 1829, Geronimo lived the first three decades of his life in the peace and security of his Apache homelands, in what is now New Mexico and Arizona. In the second half of the 19th century, he rose to international fame for fighting the American and Mexican governments in an attempt to preserve his tribe's piece of the Southwest.

In 1858-the year of Roosevelt's birth-Geronimo joined a large trading party that left the Mogollon Mountains and entered Mexico. While he was in town conducting business, his band was attacked and slaughtered at camp. Among the dead were Geronimo's wife, mother, and three small children. He later recalled, "I did not pray, nor did I resolve to do anything in particular, for I had no purpose left." Life, for him, as recounted by Gilbert King in Smithsonian magazine, shaded from peace into a state of perpetual warfare, ending only with his capture by U.S. forces in 1886, around the time Roosevelt was mourning in Dakota Territory.
The American West began with war but concluded with parks.
Geronimo was shipped east and spent the rest of his life in captivity, and his tribe's land was whittled away. Around the same time, Native children were also being shipped away from their homelands, to government-sponsored boarding schools -removed from their families and their culture so as to mainstream them. Attendance was sometimes mandated by law and sometimes coerced, but it was rarely strictly voluntary. For speaking in their own language, the children were sometimes beaten or had soap put in their mouths. Of the 112 Apache children from Geronimo's band sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Pennsylvania, 36 died-most of them likely from tuberculosis-and were buried there.

For his part, Geronimo did get out (under guard) once in a while, including a stint in 1904 as part of the "Apache Village" at the St. Louis World's Fair, where he was made to play the role of the savage. In 1905, he and other Native leaders were asked to be part of Roosevelt's inaugural parade. It was a who's who of tribal leadership, including Quanah Parker (Comanche), Buckskin Charlie (Ute), Hollow Horn Bear (Brulé Lakota), American Horse (Oglala Lakota), and Little Plume (Piegan Blackfeet). They rode horses down Pennsylvania Avenue in regalia not entirely in step with their individual tribal traditions. America liked and still likes its Indians to function much like its nature: frozen in time; outside history; the antithesis, or at best the outer limit, of humanity and civilization.
From the October 2020 issue: "My Industrial Work," a poem written in 1914 by an anonymous student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Geronimo met with Roosevelt afterward. "Take the ropes from our hands," he begged, in a desperate appeal to be allowed to return, along with other Apache prisoners, to his homeland. Roosevelt declined, telling him, "You killed many of my people; you burned villages." Geronimo began to gesture and yell but was cut off. Four years later, he died in captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

In 1903, Roosevelt had let himself be drawn back west. In April of that year he embarked on a 14,000-mile train journey that took him through 24 states and territories in nine weeks. He traveled to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and California, where he enjoyed a three-night camping trip with John Muir.

Along the way, Roosevelt gave speeches-at the Grand Canyon; at Yellowstone, where he laid the cornerstone for the Roosevelt Arch; near some redwoods in Santa Cruz. He said much about the majesty of nature. Regarding the Grand Canyon: "I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it in your own interest and in the interest of the country-to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is ... I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon." And Yellowstone: "The Yellowstone Park is something absolutely unique in the world, so far as I know ... The scheme of its preservation is noteworthy in its essential democracy ... This Park was created, and is now administered, for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

Roosevelt translated his passions into policy. During his time in office, he created 150 national forests, 18 national monuments, five national parks, four national game preserves, and 51 bird "reservations."

Like Geronimo, Roosevelt came of age during a pivotal 50-year stretch when the contiguous United States assumed its final dimensions. The last major armed conflict between a Native tribe and the U.S. government ended at Wounded Knee Creek with the massacre of as many as 300 men, women, and children of Spotted Elk's band of Miniconjou. The frontier was pushed all the way to the Pacific and then was no more, and America's truly wild space-land outside the embrace of "civilization"-was subsumed.

The American West began with war but concluded with parks.

The MHA Nation lives just north and a little east of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, but under drastically different circumstances than the people in and around Medora. Time and again, the MHA reservation was reduced by federal fiat and exploitative deals-from more than 12 million acres to less than 1 million. The dispossessions continued well into the 20th century: During construction of the Garrison Dam and Reservoir on the Missouri River in the 1940s and '50s, up to 80 percent of the reservation population was forced to relocate away from the fertile river bottoms that had given them life and defined them as a people for centuries.

In the 1860s, long before the dam was built, the MHA had lived mostly at a place called Like-a-Fishhook Village, Royce Young Wolf, the collections manager at a new cultural center the MHA are building, told me. "It's all under the lake now, flooded out," she said. We were standing at Oxbow Overlook inside the park, looking down at the Little Missouri River as it wound lazily through acres of cottonwood and grassy clearings. "They were self-sufficient," she said. "Each village had its own garden. Many families had sacred bundle-keepers." The dam was planned without any meaningful consultation of the MHA Nation; after the Army Corps of Engineers threatened to confiscate the land it needed, citing eminent domain, the tribes had little choice but to come to the negotiating table and eventually cede territory. By 1949, they had received settlements totaling only $12.6 million for the more than 150,000 acres that were taken.

"They moved us from where water was plentiful to where there wasn't any," Young Wolf said. "Our river bottoms were the most fertile in the whole state ... But when we were flooded, we were moved to areas where there's poor soil and no water and we couldn't sustain large gardens." The tribes' rights to use the land on the reservoir's shoreline-for hunting or fishing or plant-gathering-were denied.

In recent years, the MHA have been in the grip of rapid, violent, and remunerative fracking enterprises. As I drove north from the park, I saw land bearing scars-pipes, gas vents, and fracking pads dotting the hills. In 2014, the former tribal chair Tex Hall promised the tribes "sovereignty by the barrel," and he wasn't wrong: The tribes are wealthier than they have been since before the first Treaty of Fort Laramie. But by encouraging and facilitating oil extraction, they put themselves at odds with their own cultural legacy and connection to the land.

Native American nations such as the MHA are in a difficult position. They have endured state-sponsored assaults on their families, communities, land, and ways of life. Their traditional political structures and institutions have suffered under the paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which controls Native land by holding it in trust.

On one hand, we are sovereign nations with our own laws and law enforcement, courts, and municipal infrastructures, all derived from those rights that we have managed to retain. Contrary to popular myth, neither casinos nor the right to gamble were "given" to tribes as a kind of pity payment or as the recognition of a debt owed us. The casino industry is the modern expression of a civil right to gamble that we had before white people came along, a right we have retained and that was affirmed by the Supreme Court.

On the other hand, without a strong tax base or much commerce-extractive industries, casino gambling, and tax-free cigarette sales are notable exceptions-we are dependent on federal support for education, health care, infrastructure, and our continued survival. We are, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, "domestic dependent nations," and thus live in constant tension.
Read: One way to help Native Americans: Property rights
The MHA have had their struggles-with unemployment, substance abuse, a destructive marriage to the oil-and-gas industry, and intergenerational trauma inflicted by the U.S. government. But tribes are much more than the sum of their troubles. The MHA are also keenly protective of their heritage and culture. The cultural center they are constructing is a state-of-the-art facility in service to these ideals.
our cultures, our worldview, and our modes of connecting to nature.
The MHA Interpretive Center is on Army Corps of Engineers land because that land is near the river, which is so essential to MHA history, Delphine Baker, the director of the Interpretive Center, told me. She was instantly recognizable to me as a kind of fierce, no-nonsense Native auntie. Government officials didn't want the tribes to own that land, she said matter-of-factly-the tribes now hold a lease instead-out of a concern that the tribes would take control of recreation rights and not allow nontribal members to have access. "The tribe never is interested in blocking access. But, you know, that's a fear."

The facility is gorgeous-swooping embankments and curving walks mirror the rolling hills and grasslands of the MHA tribal area. Inside is a partial replica of an earth lodge, the traditional dwelling of the three tribes, and gallery space that tells the story of the MHA. The Interpretive Center will be the home for hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts taken from the tribes over the years. And it will not be merely a show-and-tell kind of endeavor. The center will cultivate traditional plants on a rooftop garden. A café will serve traditional foods. There is a recording studio for preserving tribal languages, and a research space where tribal members will be able to trace their lineage. For so many Native people who have been separated from their tribes because of federal meddling, reconnecting is an important service the center can provide. To call this an Interpretive Center isn't quite right. It is more like a cultural mothership.

"If you lose your culture, you lose your sovereignty and your tribe," Baker told me. "And that's what we're fighting against."

It is not the first such fight. During the early reservation period, a difficult and fractious time when the people at Like-a-Fishhook Village were trying to figure out a new way of living, a splinter group wanted to hunt and garden in the old communal ways. So they left, relocating outside the reservation, about 120 miles upriver. "That group became known as the Xoshga, and they were led by Crow Flies High and Bobtail Bull," Young Wolf told me. "When they separated, they were taking a stand against assimilation and Christianity. They stayed away for over 20 years." They revived ceremonies and songs and dances. They preserved knowledge of local plants. While they were gone, Young Wolf said, the community at Like-a-Fishhook Village suffered from being split apart into small plots of land. But the Xoshga "kept our traditions safe while they were away. And it's because of them we have many of our traditions today."

In 1894, the government forced the Xoshga back to the reservation. They were treated badly at first by many of the MHA members who had stayed behind, Young Wolf told me. They were looked at as backward and savage. But now, to be Xoshga is to be connected to the land, to tradition, and to a spirit of resistance. The Xoshga were saved by the land, and their return to it saved their tribe.

The first "park person" I met on my trip was Grant Geis, then the chief ranger at Theodore Roosevelt National Park (he has since retired). Geis is tall and broad-shouldered, with a rugged face and large, strong hands. He'd been at the park since 1998, when he started as a seasonal employee. "As soon as I hit Painted Canyon ... I fell in love with it," he told me, "and [I've] kind of been here ever since."

Pretty much every person I talked with in the Park Service used the word love to describe the parks, the vistas, and their own roles as protectors of the land and its visitors. In my experience, that's not a word most government employees use when talking about their job. I asked Geis about Teddy Roosevelt and his legacy. "He was a firm believer in the land of many uses, but at the same time trying to save something for future generations," Geis replied. "It says something about his character when he was forward-thinking to that degree." He also acknowledged Roosevelt's imperfections and expressed support for cooperative relationships between parks and adjacent tribes.

The personal failings of people like Roosevelt are still codified in American policy. A lack of access to land-and the lack of power that such access would confer-undergirds the social ills that affect many Native peoples. But, at least in some places, American attitudes are changing. And in the parks, policies are changing too, albeit slowly, and in piecemeal fashion.

When I was a kid and my parents took my two siblings and me on our first trip out West, in the early '80s, we stopped at Theodore Roosevelt, Custer Battlefield (now Little Bighorn), Yellowstone, and Grand Teton. Indians were barely mentioned on the signage, and I don't remember meeting any Native rangers or even sensing that we existed as anything other than America's past tense. But since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, in 1990, tribes and parks (not to mention museums, galleries, and private collections) have drawn closer together in their efforts to preserve Native spaces and objects. Many tribes now have historic-preservation officers, who work with the parks.

Land use itself is also changing within the parks, to some degree. For instance, the Park Service has made it easier for Native people to harvest plants for traditional purposes, though typically they first have to submit a written request. And some parks allow us to hunt or trap within their borders.

In some respects, ours is an era of Native resurgence. For all we have suffered, there remain 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States. When the first national parks were created at the end of the 19th century, only about 250,000 Native people were left in the U.S. Now there are more than 5 million Native Americans throughout the country, roughly equal to the number of Jewish Americans and millions more than the number of Muslim Americans.

Our survival hasn't mattered only to us: As the efforts to assimilate us largely failed and we remained, mostly, in our homelands, Americans have gradually assimilated to our cultures, our worldview, and our modes of connecting to nature. The parks enshrine places, but they also emphasize and prioritize a particular way of interacting with the land. In the nation's mythic past, the wilderness may have been a dangerous environment, something to be tamed, plowed under, cut down. But that way of relating to the land is no longer in vogue. For many Americans, our wild spaces are a solace, a refuge-cathedrals indeed. America has succeeded in becoming more Indian over the past 245 years rather than the other way around.

It took me a few days to hike the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt. Unlike more congested parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, Roosevelt is quiet, so much so that it feels like a secret. I started in high, red, dusty hills, and descended through a series of washes and dry river bottoms. I keenly felt how far back in time I was traveling with each step. The trail rose past the petrified tree stumps of a swamp millions of years old and out onto a grassy plain, where the wind screamed through the grass, echinacea, aster, and goldenrod. I passed near cliffs where the tribes might once have funneled stampeding bison, causing them to fall to the hard earth below.

The day after I finished my hike, I had breakfast with Wendy Ross, the park superintendent, in Theodore's Dining Room at the Rough Riders Hotel. I asked her whether Native people should be able to use the park differently than non-Natives, considering our longer tenure on the land, which had originally been part of the MHA's tribal homeland. Why, I asked, couldn't the MHA hunt the bison in the park? Ross said it was something of a slippery slope. If the park allowed Native people to hunt bison, the rest of the residents of North Dakota would throw a fit and, more troubling, the efforts of hunting groups to open up parks across the country to sport hunting would be greatly encouraged.

"The problem," Ross said, is that "there are no protocols" nationally, and hence there's much confusion. "Here at Roosevelt, I've told all of my staff: We let anybody in who says they're coming in for ceremonial or spiritual purposes." I have no doubt this is true. Ross seems to be a good leader and an ally to the tribes who live near Roosevelt. She spoke of reparations, of "providing what you can to people who used to use that area all the time, and then expanding that to other Native peoples." She has been attending tribal meetings. Superintendents like Ross are changing the parks to better meet the needs of Native nations, but they can do only so much. So far, reparations are partial, ad hoc, and tenuous-always subject to reversal.

Native people need permanent, unencumbered access to our homelands-in order to strengthen us and our communities, and to undo some of the damage of the preceding centuries. Being Native is not so much a disposition or having a certain amount of blood running through one's veins as it is a practice around which families and tribes are built. For a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, buying a bison burger at Whole Foods might satisfy their caloric needs, but being able to hunt and harvest bison, in keeping with their spiritual and cultural practices, feeds their culture and community. Native life was diminished when our land disappeared beneath our feet, and it is further diminished when the manner in which we access "public" lands is scripted by the government.

The preservation of these sublime places for future generations is of course crucially important, something Native Americans understand as deeply as anyone. But putting aside for a moment the interests of Native Americans-and notwithstanding the hard work and goodwill of many park employees-the parks show worrying signs of mismanagement. Myopic decisions have seemed to proliferate, and some protected natural spaces have become political footballs. Bears Ears National Monument, in southeastern Utah, was signed into being by President Barack Obama before he left office. One year later, President Donald Trump reduced Bears Ears by 85 percent, from 1.4 million acres to just over 200,000. This move left archaeological and sacred sites at the mercy of mining operations and motor vehicles. And while it is likely to be reversed by the Biden administration, possibly quite soon, it augurs poorly for the future.

Although the Department of the Interior will soon benefit from the leadership of Deb Haaland, who recently became the first Native American Cabinet secretary, it has typically lacked for innovation in recent years. As Jeff Ruch, a director of the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, has written, " most parks merely 'Xerox forward' old plans, adjusting as they go. " Most of this is done without fresh thinking on conservation, development, and access.

National parks are withering as a result of overcrowding, habitat loss, and what Ruch calls a "science deficit." Even as attendance has increased, park staff has been shrinking, as has the influence of scientists within the Park Service. Ruch's assessment doesn't make the Park Service sound like the protective arm of a powerful government safeguarding its "best idea."

Parks, as they've existed for 149 years, have done a decent job of preserving the past. But it's not clear that today's model of care and custodianship best meets the needs of the land, Native people, or the general public. Nor is it clear that the current system will adequately ensure the parks' future. That's something Indians are good at: pushing ahead while bringing the past along with us. We may be able to chart a better way forward.

All 85 million acres of national-park sites should be turned over to a consortium of federally recognized tribes in the United States. (A few areas run by the National Park Service, such as the National Mall, would be excepted.) The total acreage would not quite make up for the General Allotment Act, which robbed us of 90 million acres, but it would ensure that we have unfettered access to our tribal homelands. And it would restore dignity that was rightfully ours. To be entrusted with the stewardship of America's most precious landscapes would be a deeply meaningful form of restitution. Alongside the feelings of awe that Americans experience while contemplating the god-rock of Yosemite and other places like it, we could take inspiration in having done right by one another.

Placing these lands under collective Native control would be good not just for Natives, but for the parks as well. In addition to our deep and abiding reverence for wild spaces, tribes have a long history of administering to widely dispersed holdings and dealing with layers of bureaucracy. Many reservations are checkerboarded: Large parcels of reservation land are scattered and separated from one another. And much of the land within reservation boundaries is owned by a number of different interests-private, nontribal citizens; corporations; states; the federal government-that tribal leadership balances and accommodates. Through hard practice-and in the face of centuries of legal, political, and physical struggle-Indian communities have become adept at the art of governance. And tribes have a hard-earned understanding of the ways in which land empowers the people it sustains.

Transferring the parks to the tribes would protect them from partisan back-and-forth in Washington. And the transfer should be subject to binding covenants guaranteeing a standard of conservation that is at least as stringent as what the park system enforces today, so that the parks' ecological health would be preserved-and improved-long into the future. The federal government should continue to offer some financial support for park maintenance, in order to keep fees low for visitors, and the tribes would continue to allow universal access to the parks in perpetuity. Bikers and toddlers, Instagram models and Tony Hawk-all would be welcome. We would govern these beautiful places for ourselves, but also for all Americans.

There is precedent for this kind of transfer. The indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand now control some of those countries' most significant natural landmarks. For instance: Uluru, previously called Ayers Rock, was transferred to the Anangu decades ago. Thanks to legislation passed in 1976, nearly half of the Northern Territory of Australia has been returned to Aboriginal peoples. In 2017, New Zealand's Māori were granted a greater role in the conservation of the Whanganui River, on New Zealand's North Island. The public is still free to visit as before, but the Māori now have more oversight of the use of the river.

There is a precedent for this kind of transfer in America, too. In 1880, France began work on the Panama Canal, which the United States took over in 1904. Theodore Roosevelt (he keeps coming up) wanted to see it through, and so he worked out a deal with Panamanian nationalists, whereby the U.S. would receive the canal in exchange for help overthrowing the Colombian government. But in 1977, President Jimmy Carter and General Omar Torrijos of Panama signed an agreement that outlined the transfer of control of the canal to Panama. The canal was jointly managed by the two countries until 1999, when control reverted fully and finally to Panama. It doesn't happen often, but the United States has given things back.

In 1914, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that American democracy was forged on the frontier. It was there that the uniquely American mixture of egalitarianism, self-reliance, and individualism commingled to form the nation and its character. "American democracy," he said, "was born of no theorist's dream ... It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier."

Turner was almost right. It wasn't the frontier that made us as much as the land itself, land that has always been Native land but that has also come to be American. The national parks are the closest thing America has to sacred lands, and like the frontier of old, they can help forge our democracy anew. More than just America's "best idea," the parks are the best of America, the jewels of its landscape. It's time they were returned to America's original peoples.

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Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies.

When she joined Georgia Audubon last year, the group's executive director called her hiring a first step to "begin working to break down barriers" so that people from all communities can fully enjoy birding and the outdoors.

But overcoming those barriers will be daunting. As with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in ornithology's DNA, indelibly linked to its origin story. The challenge of how to move forward is roiling White ornithologists as they debate whether to change as many as 150 eponyms, names of birds that honor people with connections to slavery and supremacy.

The Bachman's sparrow, Wallace's fruit dove and other winged creatures bear the names of men who fought for the Southern cause, stole skulls from Indian graves for pseudoscientific studies that were later debunked, and bought and sold Black people. Some of these men stoked violence and participated in it without consequence.

Even John James Audubon 's name is fraught in a nation embroiled in a racial reckoning. Long the most recognized figure in North American birding for his detailed drawings of the continent's species, he was also an enslaver who mocked abolitionists working to free Black people. Some of his behavior is so shameful that the 116-year-old National Audubon Society - the country's premier bird conservation group, with 500 local chapters - hasn't ruled out changing its name. An oriole, warbler and shearwater all share it.

"I am deeply troubled by the racist actions of John James Audubon and recognize how painful that legacy is for Black, Indigenous and people of color who are part of our staff, volunteers, donors and members," interim chief executive Elizabeth Gray said in a statement in May. "Although we have begun to address this part of our history, we have a lot more to unpack."

For Newsome, community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, the pain is real. When she first wore her organization's work shirt, "I felt like I was wearing the name of an oppressor," she said, "the name of someone who enslaved my ancestors."

She and other ornithologists of color deal with added layers of discomfort while doing research. Alex Troutman, a Black graduate student at Georgia Southern University, says he goes out of his way to smile and wave at every White passerby when he's in a marsh or field "to appear as least threatening as possible" and ease suspicions that he shouldn't be there.

Corina Newsome, an ornithologist and community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, is pushing to make her profession more diverse and inclusive. (Nydia Blas for The Washington Post)

Ornithologist Olivia Wang, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, says her field's troubling, racist past must be addressed. (Michelle Mishina for The Washington Post)

Offensive eponyms compound that sense of not belonging. Despite professional and amateur birding groups' declared commitment to diversity, only two names have been discarded.

The Townsend's warbler and the Townsend's solitaire still invoke John Kirk Townsend, whose journals detail his exploits in traditional Native Americans burial grounds in the West. Townsend, a Philadelphia-born ornithologist in the early 1800s, dug up and collected skulls for studies that sought to prove the inferiority of Indigenous people.

The Wallace's owlet and five other birds honor Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist, explorer and anthropologist credited, along with Charles Darwin, for conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace's writings frequently used the n-word, including in reference to the "little brown hairy baby" he boasted about caring for after fatally shooting her mother during an 1855 trip to the Malay Archipelago. Some historians believe they were orangutans.

Three birds, including the crimson Jameson's firefinch, are named after another British naturalist involved in a heinous act committed against a young girl he purchased as "a joke" in 1888 during an expedition in Africa. James Sligo Jameson wrote in his journal that the girl was then given to a group of natives described to him as cannibals. He drew sketches of the child being stabbed and dismembered.

"Conservation has been driven by white patriarchy," said J. Drew Lanham, a Black ornithologist and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, "this whole idea of calling something a wilderness after you move people off it or exterminate them and that you get to take ownership."

Lanham views the issues as part of a much larger historic pattern, one connected to the White enslavers who renamed Africans kidnapped from that continent's West Coast. "They renamed an entire people" - cancel culture on a global scale, he noted.

In Honolulu, ornithologist Olivia Wang is equally harsh. She regards the honorifics that birds carry with disdain.

"They are a reminder that this field that I work in was primarily developed and shaped by people not like me, who probably would have viewed me as lesser," said Wang, an Asian American graduate student at the University of Hawaii. "They are also a reminder of how Western ornithology, and natural exploration in general, was often tied to a colonialist mind-set of conquering and exploiting and claiming ownership of things rather than learning from the humans who were already part of the ecosystem and had been living alongside these birds for lifetimes."

Indeed, White explorers, conservationists and scientists who crossed the world conveniently ignored the fact that birds had been discovered, named and observed by native people for centuries before their arrival.

To the Cherokee, eagles are the awâ'hili and crows are kâgû. The English common name for the chickadee is a butchered translation of the Cherokee name, tsïkïlïlï. Similar-sounding names for other birds that English speakers renamed or mispronounced are scattered throughout East Coast tribes.

Europeans named birds as though they were human possessions, but American Indians regard them differently. The red-tail hawk in some languages is uwes' la' oski, a word that translates to "lovesick," because one of its calls sounded like a person who lost a partner.

"A whole lot of Native people, in thinking about birds, don't open a book of science. Their book of science is in the knowledge possessed by people in generations before them, the elders," said Shepard Krech III, a professor emeritus at Brown University and author of " Spirits of the Air."

Bird lovers have agitated to change eponyms linked to racists for several years but have encountered resistance.

It would cause confusion in the profession and among casual birders, opponents said. Books and ledgers would have to be revised, and people would have to learn new names. Only twice have such objections been overcome and the American Ornithological Society approved a switch. The first was for the oldsquaw, a species of waterfowl now known as the long-tailed duck. And last summer, the McCown's longspur became the thick-billed longspur - the first time a name with a Confederate past was dropped.

By then, a confrontation in New York City had linked race and birding in an ugly way. In May 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black birder in Central Park, was falsely accused of threatening behavior by a White woman who called police on him after he asked her to leash her dog.

An expedition to Africa in the late 1880s, during which a young girl was cruelly killed, forever stained naturalist James Sligo Jameson's reputation. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

John James Audubon, long the most recognized figure in American birding, is now being reconsidered for his abhorrent views and actions against Black people during the early 1800s. (Bettmann Archive)

For the leaders of Audubon, the American Ornithological Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, among other groups, systemic racism had hit home.

At the same time, activists in the ranks were growing more aggressive in opposing the eponyms. One of the loudest voices was that of Jordan Rutter, a White co-founder of Bird Names for Birds. She wanted to upend the society committee that names a species and reconsiders historic names.

"White people are credited for discovering [the birds]. White people were the ones to name the birds after other White people. And White people are still the folks that are perpetuating these names," Rutter said in a recent interview.

A decade ago, that same committee unanimously refused to rename the Maui parrotbill, criticizing the proposed kiwikiu as "contrived," ridiculous and hard to pronounce. As part of last year's awakening, activists sought an actual transcript of the debate but were denied. "I called out the AOS and NACC for censoring some racist and offensive comments the [committee] made when discussing the ... proposal," Wang said, referring to the American Ornithological Society and its North American Classification Committee.

The society has since publicly apologized for those and other insensitive comments.

It is clear that leaders in the profession are listening more closely to the protests - and preparing to act. Audubon and the American Bird Conservancy, where Rutter works, have looked inward at their near-total lack of diversity and vowed to change. The American Ornithological Society pledged to "redoubl[e] our efforts toward making ornithology, birding, and access to the natural world equitable and inclusive."

This spring, society president Mike Webster announced that the internal group responsible for bird names will now be guided by an advisory committee composed of people of different backgrounds - although 13 of the 17 advisers are White and the ethnicities of the four others have not been identified.

The new panel is "not just because we want to feel good about ourselves," said Webster, who is White. "We see it [as] critically important to understanding and conserving birds. It's critically important that we have a diversity of people out there doing it."

A virtual panel discussion took place in April. Every major birding organization was represented, and 535 people joined from around the country as a majority of the panelists - nearly all of them White - agreed that it was time to move beyond racist eponyms.

Jeff Gordon, president of the American Birding Association, stressed that North America lost 3 billion birds over the past 50 years and that saving what's left will need people of every ethnicity and background to be involved. "The biggest threat birds face ... [is] being ignored to death," he said. "Not enough people know and not enough people care."

There is no timeline for decisions about the worst eponyms, but the discussion seems unlikely to wane, given participants such as Rutter and Newsome. Within days of the incident in Central Park last year, Newsome helped organize a very public declaration dubbed Black Birders Week - an event that quickly became a viral movement. By happenstance, it took place amid nationwide demonstrations and calls for racial justice following George Floyd's death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

The 28-year-old is again taking part in this year's Black Birders Week, which beganSunday. She is encouraged by ornithology's increasing focus on diversity and racism. She hopes it will soon extend to what the National Audubon Society and its chapters call themselves. "I believe they should both absolutely change the name. It feels wrong to enter African American communities ... celebrating [Audubon's] name," she said. "It's a reality I am wrestling with constantly."

Yet far more progress is needed. Heads still turn when Newsome is in the field, observing birds. "I'm always questioned, in a seemingly friendly way, 'Oh, what are you doing out here?' "

On urban and rural trails, she quickly lifts her binoculars when she sees White people do a double-take. In a scorching Georgia marsh where she slogs through muck to study a seaside sparrow, she shifts heavy equipment to the side of her body that faces the roadway so suspicious White motorists "won't think I'm doing something illegal and make trouble for me."

Across the muddy water is the Brunswick neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger, was chased down and fatally shot in February 2020. Three White men have been indicted in the case. Newsome remembers driving past the neighborhood after the killing as she again headed toward the marsh.

"I felt like my soul couldn't take being there anymore," she said. "Like a Black person can't even be what they're called to be without encountering such violence."

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Bird lovers are grappling with honorary names linked to racists. Audubon tops the list.

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Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies. When she joined Georgia Audubon last year, the group's executive director called her hiring a first step to "begin working to break down barriers" so that people from all communities can fully enjoy birding and the outdoors.

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Breaking Down the Lack of Diversity in Outdoor Spaces

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Breaking Down the Lack of Diversity in Outdoor Spaces

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Despite the current circumstances surrounding COVID-19, there is still opportunity to engage in outdoor recreational activity. In Los Angeles, community members can participate in outdoor activities, so long as everyone practices physical distancing, maintaining a minimum distance of six feet apart from others and wears a face mask. We encourage you to take preventative measures if partaking in outdoor recreational activities.
In previous articles we have discussed the lack of green space and parks in low-income communities of color and inner-city neighborhoods, but we have yet to address why Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) do not venture out into affluent communities where park space is abundant. After all, the outdoors does not discriminate....right?

What Makes the Outdoors Inaccessible and for Who?

The Black Lives Matter Movement has shed a light on how deeply rooted racism is in our society against Black communities. Racism goes beyond those establishments we typically associate with it, like law enforcement, and really is engrained in institutions across the board, such as the less expected parks and recreation departments. In better understanding the intersection of racism, policy, segregation, and access, one can argue that outdoor and recreational activities in general, have traditionally served white communities. A combination of economic inequality, legalized segregation, and other forms of historical and present-day overt/covert racial violence has perpetuated a diversity gap in the outdoors. Statistics collected from the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service show that although people of color make up nearly 40 percent of the total U.S. population, close to 70 percent of people who visit national forests, national wildlife refuges, and national parks are white, while Black people remain the most dramatically underrepresented group in these spaces.

Racialized economic policies, employment discrimination, unequal access to quality education, and other fundamental tools that can build a person's economic standing have historically been denied to BIPOC communities; which makes camping, hiking or any similar ventures inaccessible. Costs of camping gear, entrance fees, lack of vacation days, unpaid leave, and other factors make it difficult for families to participate in outdoor recreation, particularly, BIPOC individuals who are more likely to face these economic barriers. However, even though access to capital reduces the likelihood of a person visiting a park or forest, the underlying issue to acknowledge is race.

The Intersection of Race & Culture in Outdoor Recreation

Despite a lack of representation in media or academic studies, it is important to note that BIPOC individuals do engage in outdoor activities. Cultural factors influence the ways in which people of differing racial identities navigate and participate in outdoor recreation. For instance, Black people are drastically underrepresented in national parks or forests, but Black communities and people of color are heavily represented in mass media participating in activities like fishing, hosting communal park gatherings/BBQs, or soccer tournaments. However, it should be alarming to us that the few forms of outdoor activities that BIPOC individuals are depicted as participating in are noticeably distant from public lands like national parks. Often, this is chalked up to cultural factors, which in turn gives people less of a sense of urgency to enact change in our outdoor recreation system. While outdoor recreation in our local city parks is important and is being utilized where it is accessible, the experience of visiting a national park and being surrounded by the natural world holds an immeasurable value and should be accessible for all.

The question then is: how much are the cultural factors that influence us a reflection of the history of race relations in America?

A Deeper Look at Systemic Racism in Outdoor Spaces

For this we must take a deeper look into how ownership, access, and the perceived threat of violence play a role into the history of our outdoor system. The inaccessibility to outdoor and green spaces among BIPOC communities comes from institutionalized legislation that, in many cases, segregated people of color away from public lands, like national parks and forests, or deliberately banned them from accessing these spaces. It has only been a little over 50 years since the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which among other things granted permission for Black communities to enter public spaces like national and state parks - spaces they had been banned from prior.

Although new laws were introduced to dismantle legal segregation there is still a perceived threat of violence from generational trauma that keeps people of color from visiting the natural world. The monstrous amount of lynchings that occurred from 1865 to 1950s usually took place in forests or natural spaces.

For example, the race riots of 1919, otherwise known as the Red Summer, started because of the wrongful murder of Eugene Williams, a 17-year old Black boy who was killed for crossing into the "white section" of the waters in Lake Michigan. In 2020, we continue to see this play out both in covert ways, as we saw with Christian Cooper, a Black bird watcher in Central Park, to more overt and life-threatening ways, as we saw with Ahmaud Arbery who was fatally shot during an outdoor run.

Another systemic component of what makes outdoor spaces inaccessible to BIPOC communities is the white-washing of history and land ownership. In history books and in even in the naming of outdoor spaces, there has been a deliberate and intentional erasure of Indigenous history and ownership of outdoor lands. We have been led to believe that white men like John Muir, were founding fathers of national parks, leading to this belief that park spaces are reserved and owned by white communities. We have yet to acknowledge that John Muir's thinking, which is so embedded in environmental movements, was influenced by his own privilege and position as a white man in the 19th century. Preservation of the natural wilderness was executed at the expense of Indigenous communities.

How Do We Address Racism in Outdoor Spaces?

While many say 'the outdoors does not discriminate,' it is safe to say that our outdoor recreational system is built on the same underlying system of oppression governing our society. This means that we all have a responsibility to actively dismantle the systems that are widening this diversity gap.

To reverse the effects of racism on the outdoors, we must push for policies that have racial and spatial justice at the forefront. By using our social capital through spreading awareness and demanding greater accessibility to the natural world for all, we would be granting communities who have been historically separated from these spaces, an opportunity to enjoy them as well. Programs like Every Kid Outdoors strive to make the outdoors more inclusive by offering free or low-cost outdoor programs to children from low-income families. Community Nature Connection focuses on outdoor equity through access and exploration programs. Their Transit to Trails program offers free buses from low-income urban areas to natural spaces like beaches, national parks and mountains. There is also a growing social media movement with several social media accounts dedicated to championing the #DiversifyOutdoors movement. Well-known brands are now also pledging to advance representation for BIPOC communities across the outdoor industry.

In addition to supporting organizations committed to environmentalism for all, we can also engage in active efforts to listen to BIPOC voices who share their experiences and knowledge so we can continue to mobilize through awareness and demanding greater accessibility to the natural world for all. In turn, we would be opening spaces to communities that have been historically displaced and removed so they can enjoy them without fear.

Author Bio:

Naomi Humphrey is an alumna of National Health Foundation's BUILD Health Initiative at Thomas Jefferson Senior High. She is currently an undergraduate student at UCLA, and continues to advocate for park equity and spatial justice for her home community as a member of Prevention Institute's Powering Healthy Lives through Parks Community Advisory Board, and serving as NHF's Health Equity Fellow. This article is the second of a series authored by Naomi exploring current issues regarding health equity and the built environment.

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Breaking Down the Lack of Diversity in Outdoor Spaces

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Despite the current circumstances surrounding COVID-19, there is still opportunity to engage in outdoor recreational activity. In Los Angeles, community members can participate in outdoor activities, so long as everyone practices physical distancing, maintaining a minimum distance of six feet apart from others and wears a face mask.

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Chicago Wilderness Cafe - In-depth overview of the history and ideals of conservation and eugenics

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Chicago Wilderness Cafe - In-depth overview of the history and ideals of conservation and eugenics

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Chicago Wilderness Cafe: History of Conservation, Racial Equity Series 1 (March 2021)

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Bird-Watching While Black: A Wildlife Ecologist Shares His Tips | Short Film Showcase

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An in depth article of WSC Characteristics

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An in depth article of WSC Characteristics

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White Supremacy Culture - Still Here.pdf

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Tema Okun's Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture 

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Tema Okun's Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture 

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The original piece and therefore this website builds on the work of many people, including (but not limited to) Andrea Ayvazian, Bree Carlson, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Eli Dueker, Nancy Emond, Kenneth Jones, Jonn Lunsford, Joan Olsson, David Rogers, James Williams, Sally Yee, as well as the work of Grassroots Leadership, Equity Institute Inc, the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, the Challenging White Supremacy workshop, the Lillie Allen Institute, the Western States Center, and the contributions of hundreds of participants in the DR process. As noted elsewhere, any wisdom you find here is credit to all those who informed and influenced

Sharon Martinas, who at the time was facilitating the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, suggested I add the antidotes. The characteristics marked with an asterisk* indicate those that Daniel Buford, who at the time was a lead trainer with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, ​asked I credit to him when the original article was written.

​the original article and this website. Any fault or shortcoming is mine.

The original article offered this Partial Bibliography:
Notes from People's Institute for Survival and Beyond Workshop, Oakland, CA, spring 1999. Notes from Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, San Francisco, CA, spring 1999. Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? NY: HarperCollins, 1997. Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words. NY: Context Books, 2000. Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism. PA: New Society Publishers, 1996. Anne Wilson Schaef, Living in Process. NY: Ballantine, 1998. For complete bibliography, see complete workbook for dRwork's Dismantling Racism process (2016).

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Sometime in the late 1990s, I arrived home after a particularly frustrating consultation with an organization I was working with at the time. In a flurry of exasperation, I sat down at my computer...