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...
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...
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...
We entered Grand Canyon National Park before sunrise, turning west onto the primitive road toward Point Sublime. This was in those ancient days when a Coupe de Ville could negotiate the unpaved miles with just a few dents and scrapes. My father had driven through the...
Perhaps you’ve seen the image, too? It’s a watercolor of a man—a white man—standing on a tree stump with a long stick, smoking, one leg crossed over the other, as he watches two women of African ancestry wield hoes on land that they are clearing...
Yesterday I attended a truly wonderful and thought-provoking book launch and panel at UMass re: Manisha Sinha's new THE SLAVE'S CAUSE: A HISTORY OF ABOLITION. Her encyclopedic volume presents the African American role in defining and shaping the abolition movement(s) in this land from the...
I am eager to tell you about my new book, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape , which Counterpoint Press will release on November 10, 2015. In a mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Trace explores how the...
This is a website of traces and tracing, of finding voice. Welcome. Edges and hybridity shape my identity as an African American woman of mixed ancestry. Tracing memory threads my work and life: unearthing what is buried, re-membering—piecing together—what is fragmented, shattered, eroded. For me this...