Lauret Savoy's Blog, page 2

TRACE Wins ASLE Creative Writing Award

TRACE Wins Creative Writing Book Award from ASLE: Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

If anyone has mastered the art of being in two places at the same time, please let me know! ASLE just honored me by giving TRACE its biennial Creative Writing Award this past week. I couldn’t be there to accept the award (b/c of a board mtg of the National Parks Conservation Association), but my dear friends Joni Adamson and Simmons Buntin accepted on my behalf. Thank you, Joni and Simmons! Thanks, too, to another friend, Bill Stroup, for taking a video so I could see what I missed. Gratitude to all!

It is a great gift to be in the company of writers of such beautiful and powerful words: finalists Michael Branch, Chad Hanson, Kathleen Dean Moore, Midge Raymond, Kate Sutherland, and Joni Tevis! I admire you all immensely.

Punctuated Discontinuity – Canadian Rocky Mountains

The journeys that once-living organisms embark on toward the fossil record, few rarely complete. Decay or disintegration destroys more remains than not. And rocks exposed at Earth’s surface don’t chronicle all of the planet’s past. Tectonic upheavals, such as the forces that made the Rocky Mountains, and unending erosion see to that. We live among relics and ruins of former worlds.

And what remains of our own lives and experiences in the passage of time? I’ve long wondered if history might be more about forgetting and deletion than about remembering and completion.

Like the rock and fossil records I have studied, the past I’ve emerged from is pitted by gaps formed across time. Punctuated discontinuity rather than layered continuity. Erosion. Displacement. Upheaval.

We can take many lessons from Earth’s annals. As much as some might wish it, it’s not possible to retrieve a tidy, intact, and complete history of human experience on this continent from repositories of the past. Documentary records are fragments—and their existence is not a matter of unbiased preservation or re-collection. No single or simple narrative can claim the authority of history or of collective memory.

 

Tracing a Contextual Past – Apostle Islands, Wisconsin

For author Louise Erdrich the painted islands west of Lake Superior in Lake of the Woods are book-islands to be read. Her grandfather was the last person in her family to speak Anishinaabemowin with any fluency. So she tried to acquire what she had not been taught: an intimate engagement with “the spirit of the words” and thus with the land itself. She learned, for instance, that the word for stone—asin—is animate. “After all,” she writes, “the preexistence of the world according to Ojibwe religion consisted of a conversation between stones.”

For geologists who by and large conduct their work steeped in the traditions of Western science, Lake Superior’s book-islands have told other stories.

One I learned is that the ancestral frameworks and most aged rocks of the world’s continents lie within their exposed nuclei, the Precambrian shields. As remnants of an inconceivably distant past, shields chronicle many evolutions: the early growth of continents, origins of life, and an atmosphere gradually becoming habitable. The southernmost outcrops of North America’s core, the Canadian Shield, rim Lake Superior. The Midcontinent Rift also lies exposed here, another piece of North America’s ancient architecture.

Watching days end from my friend’s beach on Madeline Island, I soon realized that “scientific” research of the shield and rift began here because of what the bedrock contained. Paths toward understanding the history and architecture of this landscape didn’t begin in a contextual vacuum as men from Britain, France, and a fledgling United States “discovered” then deliberately sought copper and iron in the nineteenth century’s first decades.

On this southern shore of Lake Superior I saw that one path accompanied (driving and benefiting from) a state-sponsored search for mineral wealth and the treatied confinement of the Anishinaabeg in reservations. By 1890, less than half a century after the removals, the ceded lands led the world in copper mined.

Tumultuous histories, human and geological, formed this landscape. And they continue. The current move to mine iron in the nearby Penokee Range, watershed of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians, threatens not only tribal sovereignty and treaty rights but also the wild rice sloughs along the lakeshore that ancestors harvested for generations.

Yes, to live in this country is to be marked by its still unfolding history.

A Gift from a Wood Thrush

A few weeks ago, White-Throated Sparrows called from the woods near the mouth of Glover Archbold Park in Washington, DC, joining resident cardinals and wrens. Now Wood Thrush songs ring through the forest. I’d never seen this reclusive bird so close before, but its song greeted me on my walk back from the Potomac River. Less than 15 ft away!

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Kenyon College & the Kenyon Review

Catching Up on April – My visit to Kenyon College and the Kenyon Review earlier this month was a true gift. I met amazing students, gave a reading/talk to a generous audience, and shared the bill (science writing symposium) with Andrea Wulf. Wonderful faculty and Kenyon Review staff (like Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Stella Ryan-Lozon, and Kirsten Reach) welcomed me. I also saw an old friend, Sean M. Decatur, who is now Kenyon’s president! And I had the pleasure to riding to and from the Columbus airport with another generous soul, @Wayne Uhrig, who showed me much of the physical and cultural landscape.

If you don’t know about this fine liberal arts college, please check it out. It’s Ohio’s oldest private institution of higher education. And its literary prominence dates to 1939, when poet and critic John Crowe Ransom founded the Kenyon Review.

 

Alabama Point & Counterpoint

Yesterday, President Obama designated Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, honoring those citizens who faced violence and repression (including the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963) in the then ultra-segregated city to win rights every citizen should be accorded. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed. This recognition within the National Park Service marks the end of long years of efforts by the city of Birmingham, Representative Terri Sewell, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and dedicated staff of the National Parks Conservation Association. Yet this week we’ve also witnessed confirmation hearings by the Senate Judicial Committee of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, a one-time U.S. Attorney who long opposed civil rights, and whose record and words (including false prosecution for voter fraud) have been racist, anti immigrant, anti Muslim, and worse. If voted in next week as attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, whose name over three generations honored Confederate president Jefferson Davis and general P.G.T. Beauregard, will be in charge of enforcing the civil rights laws he long opposed.

Point. Counterpoint. I am deeply grateful to all who have ensured that Birmingham’s civil rights history will be protected for future generations. Yet, the legacy of the heroic struggle could be threatened if Sessions is confirmed as the nation’s next attorney general. The fiction of legislated equality, with its supposed removal of “racial” barriers, will become more starkly evident if our judicial system continues to dismantle—by not enforcing, by narrowly interpreting—key laws enacted in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  Yet the federal government’s failure to enforce civil rights laws is at least as old as its abandonment of Reconstruction with the 1876-77 presidential election. America’s past lives in the present.  I will not stand still.

A Gift from Rick Simonson & Ursula K. LeGuin

The last two autumn readings for Trace took me across country to the Pacific Northwest.  My first stop was at the amazing Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, thanks to Rick Simonson, then an event to Powell’s City of Books in Portland.  It was a gift to be welcomed by book lovers at both stores.

But Rick also offered a special treat.   He had made an appointment to visit Ursula K. LeGuin at her home in Portland and invited me, with her permission, to join him.   What a warm, lovely afternoon with the LeGuins and Rick.  I’m so grateful.

 

 

A Gift from Rick Simonson and Ursula K. LeGuin

The last two autumn readings for Trace took me across country to the Pacific Northwest.  My first stop was at the amazing Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, thanks to Rick Simonson, then an event to Powell’s City of Books in Portland.  It was a gift to be welcomed by book lovers at both stores.

But Rick also offered a special treat.   He had made an appointment to visit Ursula K. LeGuin at her home in Portland and invited me, with her permission, to join him.   What a warm, lovely afternoon with the LeGuins and Rick.  I’m so grateful.

 

 

2016 American Book Award – Acceptance Words of Thanks

Thank you, Justin Desmangles.   I didn’t expect this.

To be in the company of writers of such beautiful and powerful words is a gift; to be chosen and celebrated by the founders and board members of the Before Columbus Foundation on its 40th anniversary is a gift. Thank you.

I come from a family that was silent and silenced. It wasn’t until decades after my father’s death that I learned he was a writer whose novel on racial hatred and “passing,” titled Alien Land, was published to some fanfare by E.P. Dutton. But Dutton cancelled his contract on reading a draft of the would-be second novel – about a “Negro” artist fighting against segregation in the nation’s capital, his home, and exploring the possibility of Communism. My father found himself blacklisted. That was the 1950s. Many years later, when I came along, this bitter, angry man did not write and often did not speak.

Silence was easy to learn.

I’ve wondered how much the deep, unspoken hunger or need of a parent can touch a child, even marking a path for her to follow.

Trace began in my struggle reach beyond silence to answer questions that long haunted me. Questions like these:

If each of our lives is an instant, like a camera shutter opening then closing, what can we make of our place in the world, of the latent image, for that instant? What do accumulated instants mean over generations?

The book grew to become a mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry that crossed a continent and time, exploring how this country’s still unfolding history has marked this land, this society, and a person.

From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from an island in Lake Superior to “Indian Territory” & Black towns in OK, from national parks to burial grounds—and to the origin of names on the land—and from the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace counters some of our oldest and most damaging public silences by revealing often-unrecognized ties, such as the siting of Washington, DC, and the economic motives of slavery. None of these links is coincidental. Few appear in public history. Yet all touch us.

I’d like to read a small excerpt, an early reflection on a journey that brought me back to CA & a place called the Devil’s Punchbowl, a journey that led me to this work:

From what do we take our origin? From blood?

I am the child of a woman with deep brown skin and dark eyes who married a fair-skinned man with blue-gray eyes. Yet as a little girl in California I never knew race. Skin and eye color, hair color and texture, body height and shape varied greatly among relatives. Like the land, we appeared in many forms. That some differences held significance was beyond me. Instead I devised a self-theory that golden light and deep blue sky made me. Sun filled my body as it seemed to fill dry California hills, and sky flowed in my veins. Colored could only mean these things.

On that drive east from the Punchbowl I realized how little I knew of my family as an organic unit held together by shared blood, experience, or story. I was born to parents already in middle age. They had come into the world before moving pictures talked, before teamsters drove only horseless trucks, before the iceman had to find a new profession. And they’d lived with elders who could recall life before the Civil War, memories lit by lantern light. Though nearly palpable, their pasts never spoke to me. Dad died before I had the questions. In response to them, Momma said she couldn’t remember. She wondered why I wanted to know.

From what do we take our origin? From incised memories?

One memory: Home, many a workweek night. My father sits in his easy chair, alone in the back room, a glass of gin or scotch in one hand, cigar or cigarette in the other. The only light the inhaling burn. What he sees or thinks, I don’t know. What I remember? Smoke. Silence.

Another: A lesson in fifth-grade social studies, Dunblane Catholic School.  Our textbook describes the unsuitability of Indians, who wasted away, and the preference for Africans, who thrived as slaves and by nature want to serve. I ask my teacher, Mrs. Devlin, if I might become a slave.

Imagine searching for self-meaning in such lessons. Will I be a slave? The history taught wasn’t the history that made me, but I didn’t know this. Any language to voice who I was, any knowledge of how land and time touched my family, remained elusive.

Once we moved to Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, I came to learn how “race” cut our lives. Black, Negro, nigger! came loud and hard after the 1968 riots. Words full of spit showed that I could be hated for being “colored.” By the age of eight I wondered if I should hate in return.

My heartfelt thanks go to family and friends, whose generosity, candor, and encouragement kept me from throwing this work away yet again.

I give thanks go to those, like my father, who’ve struggled to negotiate the indeterminate, liminal terrain of “mixed” heritage and write toward understanding and survival.

I give thanks to my editor Jack Shoemaker and other colleagues at Counterpoint Press.

And my deep gratitude goes to the Before Columbus Foundation. You’ve honored me, my struggle, and my voice. You’ve helped me realize that I am learning how to speak.

A Centennial of Possibility – The National Park Service Turns 100

One lesson I learned as a small child was this: the American land did not hate. People did. These were the late 1960s, when riots ignited cities across the nation. These were years when journeys with my parents introduced me to national parklands.

Yellowstone. Grand Teton. Badlands.

Sequoia. Kings Canyon. Zion and Bryce. Grand Canyon.

Postcards collected by my seven-year-old self lie within reach as I write these words. Top right drawer of my desk:

grizzly creek falls roaring river falls kings canyon zumwalt meadows general grant tree middle fork & south fork kings river mojave desert amboy crater cronise mountain soda lake joshua tree oasis of mara towers of the virgin zion canyon bryce canyon kaibab forest point imperial bright angel point colorado river lake powell gunsight butte painted desert petrified forest

The card edges are frayed after more than two-score years. Most images show no people.

Western parks and monuments were my refuges from what seemed to be a hate-filled world that made little sense. By the age of ten I wanted to be a ranger, to wear the uniform and hat, to tell stories about this land. But I began to wonder whose stories mattered and whose “public lands” these were. Rarely did I see brown-skinned people like me. Rarely were people of color lead actors in park narratives told to me. Custer Battlefield National Monument presented a story of the United States losing a battle but winning the war against an “Indian” other. At times I felt betrayed by the parklands I loved.

In this centennial year, it seems just as necessary to face the fraught history of the National Park System as it is to celebrate the parks and their civic value. But how do we recognize a system that contains some of the nation’s most significant historical, scenic, geological, and ecological areas? A few of my friends plan to add to their checklists of units visited, the goal to “bag” every one. I want to acknowledge more. Park service holdings are among America’s most prominent sites of memory. From iconic “wilderness” parks to monuments, memorials, battlefields, historical parks, and more, their making—and the elements preserved within them—are crucial pieces of this nation’s still unfolding history, pieces tied to often unspoken and unexamined narratives about what and who we are.

Wilderness, as an idea and as preserved land, never existed apart from human experience or from policies that bounded land and people. Consider Yellowstone. In 1872, Congress made it the first national park, a “wonderland” removed from the grasps of private interests and set aside as a “pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Yet the park lay within ancestral homelands of Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, “Sheep Eater,” and other tribal groups. Their presence and intimate knowledge of this volcanic landscape contradicted a public myth voiced even today: that “Indians” so feared geysers and hot springs they avoided the area. The U.S. Army would remove these peoples to reservations. And the park’s first superintendent would declare, “Yellowstone is not Indian country.”

Whose country was it? After visiting from Great Britain in 1874, the Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl declared Yellowstone “accessible to all who have leisure, money, and inclination to travel.” Yet touring travelers of means also encountered African Americans—not as privileged visitors but as servants, as hotel waiters, and as Buffalo Soldiers whom a segregated military preferred to restrict to remote posts. Black troops of the 25th Infantry Regiment even bicycled 800 miles round trip between the park and Fort Missoula in 1896 as part of an army experiment to determine if cycles could be used for military purposes.

And Indigenous peoples would be displaced again and again. The Ahwahneechee and related groups were pushed out of Yosemite Valley at different times, starting in 1851 by a California militia. In June of 1864, following three years of Civil War, President Lincoln signed the Yosemite Valley Grant Act, giving the valley and nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.” Bit by bit, after Yosemite became a national park in 1890 to well within in my lifetime, Native residents would be forced out of the valley even as they tried to use the courts to acknowledge their land rights. While a physical Indigenous presence decreased, public narratives in this and other parks began to invoke a “vanished Indian.”

Buffalo Soldiers were there, too, a century and more ago when the U.S. Army administered Sierra Nevada parklands. About five hundred African American troops mainly from the 9th Cavalry and 24th Infantry regiments patrolled Yosemite, Sequoia, and what would become Kings Canyon National Parks. One of them, Charles Young, was the third African American to graduate with a commission from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He would briefly serve as acting superintendent of Sequoia. While posted in the Sierra parks these troops kept illegal stock grazing, timber cutting, and poaching in check. They fought forest fires. They built the first park trail to the top of Mount Whitney, highest point in the lower forty-eight states. They completed a wagon road to Sequoia’s Giant Forest, giving visitors access for the first time. Yet their achievements as park stewards went unheralded until recent years—thanks to efforts of people like Shelton Johnson, an interpretive ranger at Yosemite.

In the last few decades the National Park Service has added broader contexts and a range of voices to existing units. The now renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument presents more sides than Custer Battlefield did when I first visited as a child. Additional sites have been established to recognize the heritage, history, and culture of Native Americans, African Americans, “American Latinos,” Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders. The home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass became part of the park system in 1962. The Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail was added in 1996 to trace the momentous 1965 civil rights march. César E. Chávez National Monument was designated in 2012 to honor this leader of the farm worker movement. There are many more.

Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, dedicated in 2007, is the only park service unit with “massacre” in its name. It recognizes an early November morning in 1864 when Colorado volunteer soldiers attacked a large Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment there. Troops and territory settlers would memorialize what happened as a glorious battle against hostile foes. To survivors it was a massacre of about two-hundred companions, mostly women, children, and elderly. The park service plans to develop, in partnership with Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, inclusive programs to help visitors understand still contested histories and continuing repercussions of violence that “changed the Great Plains forever.”

And Manzanar War Relocation Center, in California’s Owens Valley, served as one of several camps that interned Japanese American citizens and resident “aliens” during the Second World War. Manzanar National Historic Site is the first of the camps to open (in 1992) as an interpretive center under the park service. The site tries not only to preserve stories of internment and earlier relocations but to “serve as a reminder to this and future generations of the fragility of American civil liberties.” Manzanar still stirs deep emotions.

Inhabiting the same time, sharing a past, doesn’t mean sharing common experiences or points of view. No single narrative can ever claim authority as the American story. In this centennial year of the National Park Service, I will acknowledge the origins of the park system. But it’s also crucial to honor the agency’s recent work and promise. More comprehensive approaches to presenting the American experience are leading visitors to think about the contexts and consequences of sometimes painful histories. And I think the park system as a whole offers a collective possibility to help us, the public, recognize legacies of the past that live in our present. With such lessons we might come to know each other and our place in this land a little better.