Lauret Savoy's Blog, page 3

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.

A Gift from Terry Tempest Williams

Last night Terry Tempest Williams gave me the honor of asking me to share her reading event with her. Terry is on tour with The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks for this centennial of the National Park Service. With gracious generosity she introduced me, Trace, and our friendship to the audience attending the event, sponsored by the Odyssey Bookshop & Mount Holyoke College.  That Terry wanted words from Trace to join The Hour of Land was a gift beyond measure.   Thank you, dear friend!

I’m deeply grateful to her, to Joan Grenier of the Odyssey Bookshop, and to the friends, new and old, met last night–like Andy Friedland of Dartmouth College.  Truly serendipity!

 

 

Placing Washington, D.C., and Slavery

The openness and maturity of First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech last week at the DNC National Convention stand in stark contrast to ignorant dismissive responses by certain pundits. But the truth remains. The White House, United States Capitol, and the nation’s capital as Washington, District of Columbia, grew in a culture of slavery.  See my new National Parks Conservation Association piece for more of this story and how my father’s people were a part of it.

Red Rock Testimony Supports Bears Ears National Monument

It’s a great honor to be asked by editor Stephen Trimble & publisher Kirsten Johanna Allen to join three generations of voices speaking on behalf of Utah’s wild lands and against a dangerous congressional bill (the Public Lands Initiative) in RED ROCK TESTIMONY: THREE GENERATIONS OF WRITERS SPEAK ON BEHALF OF UTAH’S PUBLIC LANDS. TESTIMONY is going to members of Congress, to the White House, to federal agencies, to environmental & conservation organizations, to the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, to Utah Diné Bikéyah, and more.

By viewing Utah’s public lands as isolated, unconnected pieces, whether wilderness areas or BLM oil-and-gas leases, one can easily miss the whole of the landscape, its ecological and geological integrity. Taken together the public lands of the plateau country—from the Grand Canyon to Dinosaur—offer not only unparalleled windows into Earth’s deep history but also fragile, dynamic ecosystems that remain largely intact.

The Utah Public Lands Initiative now threatens this integrity. Although touted as a “grand bargain,” the proposed legislation fails to balance development with conservation and outdoor recreation. The quality and health of these landscapes would be compromised, instead, by its passage. That this bill comes in the centennial year of the National Park Service makes the lack of mutual concession all the more glaring.

Recognizing interconnections, balance, and the significance of historical, cultural and natural elements are goals of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a remarkable partnership of the Navajo, Hopi, Uintah & Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni nations supported by many more tribal groups. The coalition has asked the president to designate the region between Canyonlands and the Navajo Nation as Bears Ears National Monument.

Steve and Kirsten took RED ROCK TESTIMONY to Washington, DC, last week, presenting it at a press conference held at The National Press Club on June 23rd. Kirsten noted some responses: “’We need words,’ Molly Ross told us as she looked through story after story. A national monuments specialist at the Department of the Interior, Molly was immediately drawn into Tim’s beautiful design, and understood instantly what she had in her hands. Steve and I got a similar response to your stories from other folks at Interior and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. . .”

A shortened version of their National Press Club press conference will be available soon. In the meantime, please take a look at www.torreyhouse.org and www.redrockstories.org for links and news.

Bay Area Book Festival

Have you ever been in a conversation with other people where words and ideas flowed easily among you, insight triggering insight?  This was the case with Faith Adiele, Elmaz Abinader, and me at our public event at the Bay Area Book Festival on Saturday. An exceptional panel on race, memory, history, and the American land that I keep replaying in my mind!

Huge thanks to Elmaz, Faith, the organizers of this grand book fest, including Cherilyn Parsons, Melissa Mytinger, Helena Brantley, Stephen Sparks of Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and colleagues at Counterpoint Press.

Johnnie Burrell, executive producer of internationalmediatv.com, videotaped ours and other panels for the Bay Area Book Festival. It’s wonderful to see our conversation again! It was inspiring to share thoughts and words with Elmaz and Faith!

The Land Beyond Hate

Seven years old on a sun-bright June day, she stands by the curio shop’s postcard rack. In their move across the country, her family has visited many national parks — Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon — and at every stop, she runs first to the postcard rack.

Ten cents a card. She takes selected treasures to the cashier: Point Imperial at sunrise; goldening aspen groves; layered, dusk-lit canyon walls; brick-red river against brick-red rock. Each an image of light, texture, home.

The woman behind the counter tilts her head but greets a man approaching the register. She will help him. Marlboros. Then another customer. Postcards and questions about road conditions and nearby motor courts.

The girl stands quietly, her head at counter level. These people act as if she isn’t there. Through the display glass she examines polished stones and beaded place mats under sunlit dust. The room smells stale.

Only after all others have gone does the woman behind the counter extend her hand. Six cards, 60 cents. When the girl reaches up with three quarters the woman avoids the small hand to take the coins. Cash register clinks shut. The woman turns away.

The girl starts to ask but stops as the woman faces her. At 7, she doesn’t yet know contempt and runs far into the pinewoods behind the store. That night, with all her cards covering the motel bed, she wonders if each bright place is enough.

 

What can I say about this child and about a memory that remains sharp-edged after decades?

Then as now, I am the daughter 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, 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 theory that golden sunlight made me and deep blue sky flowed in my veins. Colored could only mean these things.

Yet, as I grew, I learned other things, such as lessons in fifth-grade social studies:

Our textbook describes Africans, who thrived as slaves and by nature want to serve. I ask my teacher, Mrs. Devlin, if I might become a slave.
We read in class that Indians are savages who had to give up the land and their wasteful way of life for the sake of civilization. The book calls this part of Manifest Destiny. Confused again, I ask what made the “five civilized nations” civilized?

Imagine searching for self-meaning in such lessons. Am I civilized? Will I be a slave? The history taught in school 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 from California 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 8, I wondered if I should hate in return.

What I couldn’t grasp then was that twining roots from different continents could never be crammed into a single box. I descend from Africans who came in chains and Africans who may never have known bondage. From European colonists who tried to make a start in a world new to them, as well as from Native peoples who were displaced by those colonists from homelands that had defined their essential being.

As the 19th century ended, known family members had dwelled in rural Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, perhaps Oklahoma, and Montana ranchland along the Yellowstone River. They came to live in cities like Washington, D.C., and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But how they experienced the world or defined themselves in it remained unknown. Forced removal, slavery and Jim Crow were at odds with propertied privilege. My forebears likely navigated a tangled mélange of land relations: inclusion and exclusion, ownership and tenancy, investment and dispossession. Some ancestors knew land intimately as home, others worked it as enslaved laborers for its yield. What senses of belonging were possible when one couldn’t guarantee a life in place? Or when “freed” in a land where racialized thinking bounded such freedom?

But so much of my family’s past was obscured by silence — the silence of voices lost to history and of my own parents’ reluctance to tell me about generations that preceded us. These unvoiced lives cut a sharp-felt absence. Neither school lessons nor images surging around me could offer salve or substitute. My greatest fear as a young girl was that I wasn’t meant to exist.

Yet one idea stood firm: Whether a river named Colorado or a canyon called Grand, the American land did not hate. The Western parks and monuments that I visited with my parents were far more than destinations for recreation or Kodak moments. To the child I was, they became refuges from a world that made little sense.

An immense land lies about us. Nations migrate within us. What I can know of my ancestors’ lives or of this continent can’t be retrieved like old worn postcards stored in my desk drawer. My task is to uncover missing stories of the American landscape, of its past to present — and to give voice to those who, even in their apparent absence, still mark a very real presence. In my journeys to our national parklands and other places, I seek not only fragments of my own origins but traces of a still-unfolding history that touches us all.

Some Thoughts on History Following the Hokule’a First Nation Landing Ceremony

Following the ceremony welcoming the Hōkūleʻa and its crew from Hawai’i to Piscataway tribal homeland, I thought of ironies of history. The event took place on Piscataway tribal homeland in Piscataway Park. There the National Park Service works in partnership with the Accokeek Foundation, which runs the National Colonial Farm- Accokeek, Md. The farm serves as a living history museum depicting the lifeways “of typical tobacco farmers in the 1770s.” Directly across the Potomac River sits Mount Vernon, home to the first president, who held tobacco lands as well.

One part of the event that stood out for me was the beautiful exchanging of gifts, and ceremonial tobacco was given to the crew of the Hōkūleʻa by Piscataway peoples.

Nicotiana rustica and Nicotiana tabacum: names given to two species of tobacco. Indigenous inhabitants of what would be called colonial Virginia and Maryland by English settlers grew N. rustica. But Jamestown colonists and the Virginia Company found, as one put it, that form of tobacco “poore and weake, and of a byting tast. . .”

Profit would be made by growing N. tabacum (by then grown in the Caribbean) on tidewater land taken from its Native inhabitants—thanks to experiments done by a young John Rolfe (yes, that John Rolfe) in the 1610s. By 1640, London alone imported nearly a million and a half pounds of Virginia tobacco a year. N. tabacum became the colonial Chesapeake’s cash crop.

The exchange of gifts, of ceremonial N. rustica, took place in front of a tobacco barn of the National Colonial Farm where examples of that commercial colonial crop, N. tabacum, hang to dry. Nearby stood a woman in period dress, an African American woman who is one of the colonial farm’s interpreters. She spoke of what it was like to work tobacco farms as a free and enslaved African in the 1770s.

Yes, ironies of history stand out here in the tidewater Potomac/Chesapeake lands, a place of convergences of many peoples, past to present. It is in these convergences that I search for my father’s family past.

Exceptional Experiences on Justice, Education, History, Race, & the American Land

May 3rd: The Three Circles Center (an international network for multicultural environmental education), with Running Grass and Barbara Elizabeth Bolles, hosted an incredible day in Portland of meeting and being in dialogue with environmental justice, social justice, and environmental education leaders from the EPA, the city, and ngos. The day ended with a reading from TRACE at the local independent bookstore Broadway Books run by the Book Broads!

May 4th: Corvallis, where The Spring Creek Project at OSU (with Charles Goodrich) and the Corvallis Multicultural Literacy Center hosted a TRACE event at the center. There I met news friends and old friends, including the writers John Daniel and Kathleen Dean Moore. (I owe a special note of thanks to John because he introduced me and my manuscript to Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint Press!)

I also explored Oregon forests, rivers, and volcanic landscapes. First, the Columbia River gorge and waterfalls like Multnomah Falls with Rick Simonson of Seattle’s Elliot Bay Bookstore. Then, with Fred Swanson at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Site, where I learned to read the history of a Cascades ecosystem. Finally on my own, winding through backcountry of lava flows and Douglas-Fir, hemlock, and cedar forests, I found my way to Mount Hood.

Now I’m back in Washington, DC, ready to work on the new writing project, which is a topic for another day!