How the outdoors has inspired women to become trailblazers

Ideas53:59How the Outdoors Has Inspired Women to Become Trailblazers

*Originally published on April 10, 2024.

Harvard historian Tiya Miles is an impassioned believer that the more girls and women engage with their physical environments, the freer and more fulfilling their lives will be.

In her new book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, the multiple award-winning author explores how the outdoors inspired women's independence, resourcefulness, and vision throughout history.

She highlights the confidence of unappreciated figures like Native American activist writer Zitkla-, and labour and civil rights organizer Grace Lee Boggs and brings a new context to misunderstood icons like Sacagawea and Pocahontas.

Archival material was a key component in sharing the stories of trailblazing women in Wild Girls. In Mile's previous award-winning book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, the historical records became part of the story.

All That She Carried has received countless awards and distinctions, including the 2022 Cundhill History Prize. Earlier this month, Miles delivered a public talk about her award-winning book in Montreal. After a standing ovation, Miles sat down with Nahlah Ayed to talk about her new book, Wild Girls.

Here is an excerpt from their conversation:

You start Wild Girls by describing your own childhood, growing up near the Ohio River. The scene where you're with your father heading towards the river it is frozen over a rare event these days. And you are embarking on this journey you've never made before. I wonder if you could take us to that moment and talk about what you were thinking as you were about to cross that river.

This happened in the 70s. And I recently came across an article that said old-timers still remember when the Ohio River froze over. Like, okay: that's me! And that's when I'm an old-timer!

It's strange to realize that your memories are now part of oral history. I was around eight and [the river] froze for many days. My father, who is quite a risk-taker, quite an adventurous person, decided he was going to take me and my little sister out to walk on the Ohio River.

I don't really know how he got away with this, except that I have to believe he didn't tell a single woman in our family that he was going they would never have allowed this. But he took my little sister and me out to the Ohio River, and we walked pretty far out to the river. It was terrifying and exhilarating and incredible. We could see Kentucky. It was just right there.

You literally walked on water.

We walked on water. It was such a moment in my life, feeling a sense of kinship with the river which actually held us. But also feeling a sense of embodied power, the ability to move and to act in a larger environmental context.

How much later after that did you realize the ice bridge of that river... the possibility of where it could take you

Too much later.

I was in college when I first started to really understand the geographical and political importance of the Ohio River, which was the border between the U.S North and South the border between, so-called slave states and free states. Many people were desperate to cross that river to get to freedom. And in fact, some of my father's enslaved ancestors were from Kentucky. But I didn't know all this until I was in college and reading Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.

The beauty of this book isn't just in the story but in the writing itself. You describe it so beautifully what that river and crossing that river represents. Could you talk about that: where it resides in your mind as a piece of the nature that we live in?

When I went back and reflected on the river through these multiple lenses, after learning about history and reading Toni Morrison's tour de force novel, Beloved about that location, and also in the context of thinking about our present environmental situation, which is quite a crisis, I really started to think about the river as a living entity that wants to partner.

I did some research on that; however, and realized that it actually doesn't go to an ocean. It depends on the Mississippi to get to an ocean. So I think about it as needing a sister river to actually meet its goal and to continue its course.

And I think about the river as a friend and ally to people who are attempting to escape slavery in the 19th century, some of whom waited and watched for the time when the river was going to freeze. And then knew how to get to the bank, knew how they were going to cross over. And some of them did actually make it to freedom, by depending upon this ice bridge, as they called it.

So when you think about that history that's intertwined with the quest for liberty, what story comes to mind?

The Margaret Garner story, which is a story that inspired Toni Morrison to write Beloved. Margaret Garner, who was a young enslaved woman in Kentucky who was having multiple children. All evidence suggests that her children were fathered by both her owner and also by a young Black man whom she loved and wanted to marry.

Margaret Garner attempted to escape when she was pregnant with her fifth child, and she and her partner, Robert Garner did escape with their children, and also his parents then escaped across the frozen Ohio River. But by the time they got to what they thought was a safe house on the other side, the person who owned Margaret had come with the posse, ready to recapture her and to recapture her children, some of whom were his children.

And this is the moment that we know from Beloved, which is so horrifying when the historical figure, the real person, Margaret Garner, started to attack her children. She started to to kill her children, saying she'd rather see them dead than sent back to slavery. There's a whole trial that then ensued. And the question at the heart of the trial was: was Margaret Garner a person? And therefore, she could be guilty of murder or was she property, in which case she would be remanded back to the hands of her owner? And the court decided that she was property. So she went back into the hands of her owner, who then sold her into the Deep South.

The range of personalities in the book is astounding. And the experiences are bound together because of nature, but are really quite varied. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Harriet Tubman and that she had, as you describe, ecological consciousness?

Harriet Tubman had a very fine-tuned awareness of her environmental surroundings. She had to, in large part, because when she was a very small girl, around the age of six, her owner leased her out to another family who put her to work outside.

She was constantly in situations where people were having her work outside. She learned about all the different features of the outdoors through these experiences, and she eventually was able to put that education, that knowledge, to use when she finally escaped and helps her brothers to escape and then returned to Maryland around 12 times to help approximately 70 people escape from slavery.

And her knowledge wasn't just rooted on the ground and in what was immediately available, but also looking up.

Yes. The chapter in Wild Girls where I talk about Harriet Tubman is one in which I'm also thinking about the sky and what the sky held and what the sky meant for many girls across different racial backgrounds slave girls and free girls. There are examples where they are imagining the sky as a place of relief, a place of dreaming, a place of freedom. Harriet Tubman dreamt about herself being a bird flying.

The story that you told that really struck me in terms of how the sky and the stars play a role in the attempt at liberation is the story of the meteor shower in 1833, and specifically the story of Amanda Young. You wrote that it revealed to her and other enslaved people at the time watching this meteor shower, and even to the enslavers themselves, that, "there were limits to mastery." And how so?

The meteor shower is a wonderful example of this, and there are many others in nature of the ways in which human beings walking this Earth do not control everything that happens on it. It's the weather and it's the climate. It's these natural forces. It's the realities of physics that make this apparent to enslaved people like Amanda Young.

Amanda Young's story is that she and her family were enslaved during what's now known as the 1833 Leonid meteor storm. This was an incredibly dramatic moment where people across the U.S. saw what looked like hundreds of thousands of stars just plummeting to the ground. People were just amazed. There are all kinds of reports and drawings of this event.

Enslaved people, of course, noticed this too, and told stories about it too, mostly in an oral form. Amanda Young talks about how when the stars were falling, enslaved people were running out of their cabins alarmed and amazed and in awe. And so were the enslavers the people who lived in the big house who owned them. They were running out of their house and afraid. And she talks about how the people who owned her family were so terrified, they thought it was Judgment Day, and they started admitting and confessing who they had sold and where they had sold.

This isn't something you only write about. This is something you obviously care about very deeply. You founded an organization called Eco Girls in Michigan in 2011.

One thing that I really wanted to do was to help young girls who were also living in urban environments, to recognize that the out-of-doors outside was their home, it was their home. It was their place. It was a place that they had a right to know, that they had a right to be in and move in and to feel confident in.

You are a mother of twin girls. How do you advise them to live in that way?

Well, our daughters were in Eco Girls, and I would sometimes have to drag them to the events we had after school. We had weekend events, we had summer camp, but now it's really wonderful to see the ways in which they're choosing to live their lives in college. So, I mean, I promise, I promise you that I did not orchestrate this and I did not push this, but one of our daughters has decided to major in environmental studies in them. Yeah, she says that she wants to actually have a ranch and rescue animals. And another one of our daughters, whenever she feels overwhelmed or stressed, she just goes outside.

We spend a lot of time in Montana. And I remember this one moment when she was feeling like things were just too much. And she just went outside. She disappeared into a field until I couldn't see her anymore. My instinct as a mother was "Where is she? Where is she?" But my instinct as somebody who had been a girl who loved the outdoors was: let her be. And it turns out she went out to that high, high grass. And she just lay on her back, and looked up at the sky.

Listen to the full conversation by downloading the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.

*Q&A was edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly.