“It’s truly remarkable the level of skills and abilities she would have had to develop — her ability to read the land and survive independently, her ability to use the stars to navigate and guide, and her facility with the waterways having worked in a maritime environment,” Mullock said. “I think we can learn a lot from her history about being independent and living side by side with nature.”
When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made their famous expedition to the Pacific Coast in 1803, they discovered numerous plants and animal species such as black cottonwood and the prairie dog.
Many of them would not have happened without the assistance of a nearly forgotten member of their expedition — York.
York was enslaved to William Clark’s family in Virginia and grew up with Clark, becoming his “body servant.” He left behind a wife when he was taken on the expedition and would not gain his freedom for years after it ended.
In the online exhibit, which debuted in December, is a passage from the journal kept by Lewis where he noted York’s discovery of the ruffed grouse bird: “a bird of a scarlet colour as large as a common pheasant with a long tail has returned, one of them was seen today near the fort by Capt. Clark’s black man, I could not obtain a view of it myself.”
Clark also named some islands on the Missouri River — “Yorks 8 Islands” and a tributary of the Yellowstone River, “Yorks Dry Creek.”
“In spite of all of the contributions — and everything like that he made to the discoveries — saving [Lewis and Clark] on several occasions as well as helping them to navigate and being able to negotiate with Native Americans, he’s overlooked and thrown asunder, and his humanity is denied,” said Chavis, who created the exhibit along with fellow George Washington University educator Travis Gallo.
Another group of Black naturalists featured in the exhibit are the formerly enslaved African Americans who raised their families in the Walden Woods, a barren, remote area outside of Concord, Massachusetts from 1780 to the 1850s.
The existence of residents like Brister Freeman, his sister Zilpah White, Thomas Dugan and wife Jennie, and Susan Garrison and husband Jack, who settled and lived off the land, would be unknown if it weren’t for Thoreau, who celebrated them in his writings.
Thoreau achieved fame for his 1854 book, “Walden; or, Life in the Woods,” which recounted the two years the naturalist and resolute abolitionist spent living in a cabin built near Walden Pond.
Thoreau would memorialize one of the residents of Black Walden with this passage: “Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once, there where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste.”
These residents had a profound influence on Thoreau, Chavis said.
“What Thoreau was doing was discussing and examining the ways in which they lived there prior to him arriving. … He’s using that and developing the foundation for his theories and perspectives,” Chavis observed.
Black naturalists now
John Francis, the West Cape May resident, said while he is proud of being a naturalist and of his environmental work — he has helped write oil spill regulations — he does not necessarily see himself as part of a long line of Black naturalists.
“I would like to be just a naturalist or would like to be just an environmentalist, or I would like to be just a human being,” Francis said.
“I feel really fortunate that I had been able to walk across America and experience something that few people get to experience — the humanity of America. That transcends political party and color.”
That Tubman and other African Americans were preeminent naturalists is not surprising to Francis.
“Anybody who was going to walk a long ways back in the day, I just imagine them as a naturalist,” he said. “It’s like farmers back then, a lot of the freed slaves who started farms and grew chops. I consider them some of the first environmentalists.”
Corina Newsome, the wildlife biologist, always had a love of animals growing up. But it was not until she was in her teens interning at the Philadelphia Zoo when she saw another Black person who worked with animals and was a naturalist.
Newsome, who identifies herself as “The Hood Naturalist ,” would go on to get her degree in zoo and wildlife biology at Malone University in Ohio before getting her master’s in biology from Georgia Southern University in 2021.
She now works for Georgia Audubon as community engagement manager. Her career path had been a lonely and challenging one, particularly as an African American woman in the fields of wildlife biology and ornithology, she said.
“My identity as an African American woman is essential to the work that I do. The spaces that I have been in professionally or at school, I have always been the only Black person and often the only person of color,” Newsome said. “At first, it was pretty isolating.”
Newsome said she also felt isolated because her understanding of African Americans and the natural world was “through the lens of trauma and danger.”
“My mom and my family, even I was in graduate school and I was out in rural Georgia doing research, they were terrified for me or doing everything they could to convince me to stop,” Newsome recalled. “There was never any real positive association between Black people and nature for me that I ever learn about.”
She has felt less isolated in recent years after learning about other Black naturalists in various ways, including social media. Newsome herself has attained a following of over 66,000 on Instagram and 84,000 on Twitter while sharing about her work.
They include peers who have become her mentors like Rae Wynn-Grant, a carnivore ecologist and fellow with National Geographic Society, known for her research of the human impact on the behavior of black bears. Wynn-Grant has an Instagram following of 34,000. There’s also Rasheena Fountain , an instructor at the University of Washington and a writer whose work deals with Black environmental memory and environmental justice, and J. Drew Lanham , a professor of wildlife biology and poet at Clemson University.
“Suddenly, it didn’t feel like I was this renegade, like I was wilding out,” Newsome said. “Being able to place myself in the context of a long line of Black people going as far back and further back than Harriet Tubman is so affirming.
“It has placed my work in a more firm foundation. I felt before like I was doing something abnormal, but it was not abnormal. It’s just our history is not celebrated or shared in any mainstream educational context.”
The Enslaved Naturalist exhibit can be found at: https://tinyurl.com/enslavednaturalists
Ricardo Kaulessar is a culture reporter for the USA TODAY Network’s Atlantic Region How We Live team. For unlimited access to the most important news, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: kaulessar@northjersey.com
Twitter: @ricardokaul
