A Darker Wilderness

Introduction

Erin Sharkey

So much nature writing is about freedom and access to the vast spaces that provide crisp air and opportunities for fresh perspective. But this collection’s origins lie in a revelation that came to me while teaching nature writing in a prison setting, where participants didn’t have access to such liberative experiences. I had begun teaching in prison in 2016, after years of activism in response to violences of the “injustice” system. I’d always preferred teaching in nontraditional classrooms, and found the best education happens between students across differences, whether in race, age, or socioeconomic experience. This is exactly the kind of teaching that happens in prison classrooms. And beneath this motivation, I felt an unanswered desire to understand my long-absent father, who was incarcerated for a time when I was a child. 

I taught classes from memoir to lyric essay in prisons before answering a call for a new class offering and proposing a fifteen-week nature writing class for Minnesota’s largest facility, a former mental hospital in the southern part of the state. I began teaching in the waning days of summer. 

During the class, we marked the way nature transcended the walls of the institution. On the first day a blaze-orange fox ran across our path to the education building. Over the length of the course, an old-growth aspen grew unbounded, peeling its curling bark, shedding its browning leaves, holding the first snowflakes on heavy branches. The writers moved on timing imposed by a crackling voice over a loudspeaker, but they also watched birds gliding freely past the windows; industrious yellow jackets throwing their bodies against the glass; and a flock of mallards who navigated puddles in the yard, ignoring the guards watching from their towers. The course spanned the entire fall, from the light stretches long into the evenings to its December end, when the students craned their necks to mark the waxing moon as they made their way back to their units. 

Students remembered summer trips out west, cliff jumping in Oregon, dust storms while serving in the military, working the farm as boys, and favorite winding riverside drives. Nature was a meeting place for writers with very different backgrounds: they were Black and white, Hmong and another was Anishinabe. Some grew up in the city, some in the country, some on the reservation; some were from Minnesota, and some from faraway places.  

Over those weeks, the fifteen students remembered nature’s power to teach us about ourselves and help us connect with others, to mark time and its passing, to (re)gain perspective. And I learned from them that nature can shape our lives even in unnatural conditions like those experienced by the incarcerated. Even in those confines, nature was present and worth observing.

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I grew up in Minneapolis, the city of lakes, and I shook sand out of my shoes nearly every evening of the summer. Evidence of days spent on the city’s beaches. A golden tan bloomed on my brown skin, my nose and forehead freckled. I marked years this way. Summers were kids from our southside United Methodist church crammed into a retired Bluebird bus, learning about the Bible and praising Jesus in nature under high pines and on the shores of the state’s ten thousand lakes. The fall: a blaze of red and orange. Tornado drills. The spring: lilacs and lilies of the valley. Floods. The winter: dozens of personalities of snow. Knowledge that the coldest days are the ones with the clearest, widest skies. All of this was natural.

Each summer of my childhood, my family loaded up our maroon minivan and embarked on a road trip. The varied landscapes of North America flew by my window in a blur. For weeks at a time, we made our home in a clearing, slept in our big grey five-person Columbia tent, and set up our kitchen and dining room on a long picnic table and around a fire pit in plain view of our new temporary neighbors. This public expression of our familial cadence, out in the open, welcomed questions about our racial makeup—two white parents, my mom and my stepdad; my towheaded little brother; the baby, adopted from Guatemala; and me, a big-boned Black mixed-race girl. Across the nation I met other kids, exploring the woods and lazy streams, in national parks and wildernesses. They were white and curious. The inescapable questions—Are you Black? Why aren’t you with your real parents? 

I learned that nature was not a place where you could escape the oppressive rules of race. I learned that I had access to natural spaces because of my parents’ privilege and resources, their jobs as a teacher and a bureaucrat, their time off in the summer, their own experiences with travel as children. And because of their race, which granted them comfort in the wilderness, in spaces like those campgrounds, in rural areas of this country.

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In my prison nature writing class, we started with the basics.

Born in the eighteenth century, nature writing grew out of an effort to describe and categorize the attributes of birds, animals, and insects. A list that grew as more of the world was “discovered.” This “discovery” was violent because it was a tool of colonization, with “explorers” conquering new lands and, with it, nature that was unfamiliar to them. Natural history museums also flourished during this time; they often featured human specimens, particularly indigenous peoples, as well as plants and animals. The grave-robbed remains of twenty-two Inuit endured in the archives of Chicago’s Field Museum until 2011, when they were returned to the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami in Labrador. The San Diego Museum of Man displayed human remains until 2012. The hierarchy of colonization is reproduced, within natural history, in the sorting of some humans as subjects rather than scientists. The work of empire, conquering and cataloging, is the field in which nature writing emerges, making its appearance in response to conditions of the state--industrialization, capitalism, urbanization, democracy. 

One of the trademarks of the genre is that it is rooted in first-person observation, so it is vital to investigate the identities of those observers. Let’s consider Henry David Thoreau, one of the central figures of the field. Before Thoreau set out to live deliberately, he had ample leisure time and resources to imagine the Walden Pond project. He embarked on Independence Day 1845 for the two-year, two-month, and two-day experiment; he had just been released from a brief stay in jail, having been arrested for failure to pay poll taxes in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American War. His debt was paid by a family member. The land his cottage was built on was owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.

And the genre remains dominated by white cis-gendered men with access to resources. Thoreau’s Walden was followed by Audubon’s trees and Darwin’s finches, which were followed, over the following century, by Burroughs’s trout, Leopold’s grey owl, Abbey’s desert, and Pollan’s farm. Men who moved toward conservation. Their female counterparts considered nature and the body. Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, and Annie Dillard invited readers to consider the environmental impacts of development and the ways our spirituality can form in relationship to nature. Just as the ways we experience nature in this country are not isolated from our identities, nature writing is not neutral. 

Nature writing is rooted in the American experiment (think: independence, innovation, western expansion), but who is left out from the canon just above? A collection addressing their presence and their contributions is itself a distinctly American project. Despite efforts to the contrary, Black Americans’ relationship to nature has persisted from the middle passage, when our ancestors traveled the westerlies in the bellies of ships, and from our toil in the fields and the intimate domestic spaces of white families. It has persisted beyond the state’s continued barriers against Black people building positive relationships to natural spaces. It has persisted beyond Jim Crow laws that legislated violence impeding free movement along the scenic highways of the South. And it has persisted beyond redlining, which relegated Black communities to areas of disinvestment and blight, near toxic, with smelly uses like waste storage and industrial manufacturing, and a myriad of environmental and health consequences, including asthma and lupus.

These conditions do not mean that Black people don’t have a relationship to nature. On the contrary, Black folks have been instrumental in the stewardship and care of the land, and though their labor has often been under poor conditions or in service to land not under their ownership, skill and innovation has been evident in their relationship with it. In her book Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, Carolyn Finney writes that though her parents cared for “someone else’s land for fifty years,” though they “knew more about the land than the actual owners,” they would never own the land themselves. 

***

In class, I asked students to not simply tell stories that were set in nature but to consider what those stories mean in the greater context of their lives or the larger world. This created a kind of network of meaning, connecting stories with wildly different subject matter and particulars by way of deep themes and significance. 

Each essay featured here is linked to an archival object, whether by geographical connection or some relationship of subject matter. My own journey in archives started in 2016, at the tail end of my MFA journey, when I was invited for a few months to explore the Archie Givens Sr. Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota. I had never had such an opportunity before, to explore without a specific goal in mind, to let one object lead me to the next, to find my own way to meaning. The Givens Collection lives in the Andersen Library, which has an outward face--a whisper-quiet reading room with oak tables occupied by people hunched over their own investigations--and a private face--a cold cavern, at the bottom of a long elevator ride, filled with a small city of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and a special alley devoted to Black literature, music, art, and ephemera. 

My curiosity took me from garden club attendance rolls and cookbooks to maps of rural Mississippi and the narratives of people formerly enslaved there--and to a little emerald-green brochure about share-cropping, titled “Farmers Without Land.” Published by the Public Affairs Committee in 1937, the short volume discussed the failure of land-use model, the environmental effects: soil depletion, boll weevils, and soil erosion, as well as poor living conditions and fewer community contracts. Right away I wanted to know what a boll weevil was. Research told me: they were beetles, hungry for the bud of the cotton plant, who laid their eggs inside and turned the cloud-white bloom into a slimy green mess, decimating crops across the South. The brochure noted that the tenant farming model was also failing because Black growers were migrating to the north.

I learned that looking at archival items requires a particular kind of curiosity because the significance is found not only in individual objects but in their assembly. The viewer has an opportunity to connect objects across time, to find connections, to follow thin strains to something the collectors perhaps did not intend. This is especially true when looking at the collections of items significant to Black history, because they have been shadowed and suppressed by the white supremacy and racism of institutions that collect and store collections. It wasn’t until 2016, with the Smithsonian Institution’s opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that a federal institution was founded to celebrate the contributions of Black Americans. The museum had been in development since the days following the end of the Civil War. At a public presentation in April 2016, at a symposium at the African American Museum in Philadelphia titled “Shifting Narratives: Rethinking The Past to Understand the Present,” the NMAAHC Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs, Dr. Rex M. Ellis, noted that a great deal of the work of assembling that collection was in working with families and church communities to acquire objects of significance that had never been on display because of distrust in institutions and concern for the respect due them.

Before I had even scratched the surface of the Givens’s physical collection, I learned of a new project at the University of Minnesota: Umbra Search African American History. Named for the darkest part of the moon’s shadow, Umbra aims to provide broad, searchable access to digitized materials in those collections of Black memory. The search tool aggregates over 650,000 items, a relatively small amount, from small collections, archives of all kinds, and institutions across the country. Some of the archival items featured in this anthology were located in Umbra.   

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Maybe searching in such an archive is about looking for oneself. An archive can serve as collective memory, though it is important to remember that the archive is not a full or neutral record. Each archive tells a story about the archivist as well as what is archived. The racist structures in place in the institutions of memory can be discerned in the archive, as can the absence of Black archivists within those institutions. One feature of an archive of black memory is that it must, by necessity, include many items connected to unknown or unidentified makers and subjects. This project claims and reacquaints the unknown by connecting those makers and subjects to contemporary Black thinkers across time and, in turn, rewriting the record. 

The essays in this anthology reflect a range of experience with nature, some green and budding, and some rusting and tired. Some pieces are positive, some negative, as varied as our various relationships with nature.