Colleagues Nina Roberts and Alan Spears have recently published an article in the Parks and Stewardship Forum. Their article, “Connecting the dots: Why does what and who came before us matter?” provides a sketch of the long history of people of color in the outdoors, and tries to answer the question posed in the article title. The authors make the case that people working currently on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in environmental matters would benefit from knowing the history of that activism over the past 30+ decades. The article also takes on the dominant, public sphere narrative that People of Color have no histories in the outdoors or in outdoor endeavors, and that they lack the values that would lead them to appreciate experiences in nature and national parks.
Three Circles has a mention in the article, and the first photograph in the body of the article is from a Three Circles trip with Oakland high school students to the tidepools at Pt. Reyes National Seashore in the early 1990’s. Three Circles began challenging the dominant cultural narrative about People of Color and the environment in the mid-1980’s in our Journal and with our first program in a public elementary school in East Oakland, CA. Through that program (the Inside Out Academy) and an earlier related program that Running-Grass directed for American Youth Hostels, we pioneered multicultural approaches to outdoor and environmental education that centered the historical and contemporary experiences of children of color and their communities.During that period, Three Circles introduced over 1500 public school children to their first trips to national parks, from the Marin Headlands, to the Redwoods, to the Sierras. In the Three Circles Journal, we formulated, organized, enacted, and published the counter-narratives to the dominant, deficit model, cultural stories about People of Color in the environment. Three Circles called out the ideological basis of the dominant narratives as rooted in racism, classism and colonialism.
Read more of our history in our archived journals available as PDFs retaining their original format and take a careful read of “Connecting the dots: Why does what and who came before us matter”. Many thanks to Nina Roberts and Alan Spears for paving the way to recovering and documenting the story of our struggle.
Citation: Roberts, N.S., & Spears, A. (2020). Connecting the dots: Why does what and who came before us matter? Parks Stewardship Forum, The Interdisciplinary Journal of Place-Based Conservation, 36(2), 173-187.
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