We had the honor of sitting down with author, storyteller, and cultural geographer Dr. Carolyn Finney to ask her a few questions. To say she left us deeply inspired would be an understatement.
What is it about the outdoors that inspires you?
One of my favorite things to do is to go trekking in Nepal. There’s something about walking every day in that outdoor space that pulls me in and makes me feel present. In a way, it grounds me.
I think outdoor places are like people in that they’ll always do something for you if you let them. But I think you have to suspend expectations and be open and curious. Sometimes I think we lose our curiosity. So even if a place doesn’t look attractive to me, I can decide to switch on the curiosity piece, suspend judgment, and see where it takes me.
Would love to hear some of your thoughts on what prohibits more people of color from getting outside.
This is just me, but when anybody says they don’t see a particular group somewhere, I don’t take that to mean the group isn’t there. Yes – perhaps they’re not there. But I’m willing to guess that perhaps, we just don’t know how to see them. For example, I lived in South Florida for a year doing research, and I was speaking a lot to people at the Everglades National Park. The predominately white staff at the park would say, “there’s a significant black and Latinx community in Miami, but
we never see them in the outdoors.” I was a bit perplexed because every day I drove around South Florida and I would see black and brown people fishing on the canals. I shared that with somebody, and they literally said, “that doesn’t count.” They weren’t being mean. To them, it has a lot to do with what “counts” as being in the outdoors. How we measure that relationship. And who measures that relationship. This idea that it has to look a particular way may be the reason we fail to notice them. It’s interesting what we allow to give voice and what we don’t—what we say does and doesn’t count. Maybe we’re not seeing them at the Grand Canyon, but every day they’re going to that park down the block.
What is your hope for people of color in the outdoor space?
I’m always thinking relationally so what I’d hope for folks of color is directly tied to what I’d hope for folks who are not BIPOC—the ability to feel liberated in the outdoors, to feel a sense of belonging, to be in a relationship with non-human nature—the trees, the wildlife, the land itself—and to be fearless in changing your own mind while remaining curious and flexible.
What is the one thing you’d like to tell our Merrell audience?
I often say to people, “where do you stand?” The way that you can partially answer that is by knowing your own story. In order to know who you’re standing with you have to first know where you stand. Not to defend it but just to be honest about it. Because we’re all biased. Finally, who stands with you? Everybody needs somebody to support them. And actually, it’s not for me to tell you who that is or how you should do it. Part of the work is you have to decide that for yourself, which means there’s a kind of honesty; there’s a kind of vulnerability you have to lean into.
Anything exciting you’d like to share?
So, there are two edited volumes that are coming out by two other people that I wrote a piece in. Rue Mapp, who is the head of Outdoor Afro, is putting out a coffee table book called, Nature Swagger. It came out November 1st and it’s about black folks finding joy in nature. My piece is about my trip to Nepal and how that trek brought me out from a very dark place.
The other is from a black filmmaker and writer based in Minneapolis, Erin Sharkey. And the book is called, A Darker Wilderness – Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars. She asked a number of Black authors to write personal essays. She inspired us by sending black-and-white photographs of unknown black people from the past in the outdoors. Like a black man sitting in a campground in upstate New York. She would say, “what does it make you think of?”
Finally, there’s a documentary coming out from the Emmy award-winning director, Irene Taylor, titled Tree Stories. In it, she shares different stories of a person’s or family’s relationship to a particular type of tree—one of which is my family’s story. It’s still in preproduction but is expected to be released by Spring 2023.
