Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant is a wildlife ecologist who has worked with animals around the world, including lions in Tanzania and bears across North America. She is a force, and perhaps the only Black woman in the world working with bears as a wildlife ecologist. (She literally goes into their dens while they are hibernating!) We talk about the ways in which this work can be isolating, specifically as a Black woman in her field and the challenges of working in such remote areas. We talk about her work, the joy she feels encouraging others to explore this work and how she came to the field, determined that it was where she belonged.
For more information about Faith, Addie and The Trail Ahead go to https://www.thislanddoc.com/thetrailahead.
Discussed in this episode:
Christian Cooper Racist Incident in Central Park and the creation of Black Birders Week
The story of York, an enslaved man who traveled with Lewis & Clark
Addie: Welcome to The Trail Ahead, conversations at the intersection of race, environment, history, and culture. We're your hosts Faith and Addie.
Faith: We bring on folks from all walks of life to have real authentic messy dialogue that can lead to tangible change.
Rae Wynn-Grant: I feel very confident to go on the record to say, "I am the only Black female bear biologist in the world," so come one, come all. [laughs] There's a lot of room for everybody.
Addie: Our guest this week is Rae Wynn-Grant. Rae is a wildlife ecologist specializing in large carnivores. In addition to her role as a mammalogist, she advocates for the involvement of women and people of color in scientific fields.
Rae: To be a wildlife ecologist who also has a social, equity, and justice ambition, that's hard. There are very few blueprints for that, if any.
Faith: I met Rae when I was an undergrad and she was getting her masters in environmental science at the Yale School of the Environment. We both reflected on how cool it was to still be in each other's orbit and to, unexpectedly, both be working at the intersection of the environment and justice. We sat down to talk about how she got into the field, the changing phase of science, and how far we still have to go.
Rae: I am Rae Wynn-Grant. I, professionally, am a wildlife ecologist. I'm the type of scientist that studies the behavior of wildlife and how they interact with their environment. I love it. I do large carnivore ecology. Carnivores are animals that eat meat. I think I'm best known for studying bears. In North America, I study grizzly bears and black bears, but I really got started with carnivores in East Africa, in Kenya and Tanzania, specifically. I used to live in those countries and work in those countries. There I was studying lions and the larger predator community, which is mainly focused on lions but also included hyenas, and leopards, and cheetahs, so a lot of the big cats as well.
Addie: I know you also have focused on female animals as well. It seems like bears are an indicator for ecosystem health. Can you get into this a little bit more and talk more about your work with bears.
Rae: Yes, so two things. Let's go with the indicator idea. That sounds a little jerk indeed but, basically, bears are a great example for what's going on with the environment, meaning, part of my work is to go into a hibernation den of a bear, in particular, female bear, to check on her health and the health of her cubs. Usually, we're just tagging these cubs. We'll give them a check-up, like check their heartbeat, and their respiration, all the things you do. Take a little fur sample to get some DNA, and then we'll tag them. We'll give them a little ear tag, like an earring with a little plastic tag on it so that they're easy to find again in the summer.
The idea is that if we find this female bear six months later, in the summer with two cubs, that shows us that there is a high survival rate. The two cubs survived the challenging winter in the den with no food other than their mothers milk, emerged from the den in the spring, traversed their landscape for the first time, and have grown healthy and strong by midsummer, that means they survived well. That means that the ecosystem is providing everything that mother needs to produce enough breast milk to nurse her cubs all winter and the ecosystem is providing everything that the mother and the cubs need together to survive and thrive.
What I like to say is that a healthy bear represents a healthy forest, and the opposite can be true. We can find a bear in poor body condition, in fairly poor health. That's not only sad and, of course, we'll do everything you can do to save it, but it also indicates that something must be off in the ecosystem, that maybe it's a drought, and there isn't enough water, which means there isn't enough fruit producing, trees and there isn't enough food for bears. Maybe there's too much human influence and the bear doesn't have safe spaces to hibernate or whatever it may be. That's what an indicator species means and not every animal is an indicator of ecosystem health.
One of the things I absolutely adore about studying bears is finding a lot of hope. It's very frequent that I find healthy bears and healthy bear families, and that shows me that like, "Hey, all the conservation work we're doing is working. All the efforts we're making to protect this area, and protect these animals, protect the forest is working." Trust me, in my line of work and in a lot of different environmental fields, finding little bits of hope here and there makes a world of a difference.
The other thing that is super important for me to explain is that a lot of my work with large carnivores is focused on female animals. I really love that because without personifying animals too, too much, it feels like a little feminist angle to my work and I love that. I absolutely love it because female animals, whether it's African lions, tigers in Asia, bears in North America, sharks even in the ocean, whatever it is, female animals give birth, they create the next generation of these wild animals that are going to inhabit the earth, just like female humans for the most part. That's really important.
Making sure that our conservation efforts and our science efforts are focused on protecting females of the species, also, has this trickle-down effect of protecting everything and everyone because it means that we're making sure the next generation, the offspring have the best environment they can get. I really love that philosophy. I try to take it into other spaces even into the human justice world. Making sure that women or people who identify as female are protected in our society also means that there's a better chance that offspring in future generations are protected and healthy and thriving.
Addie: How did you come into this field of study? Did you think as a child you might go into this? Was this your dream? I'm just really curious to hear more about what put you on this path.
Rae: I was a kid and I used to get really into television. It was mostly because my parents restricted television so much. They were television police. I mean, it was a big deal if me and my little brother were allowed to watch TV. When we were allowed, it had to be educational programming and so early on I discovered nature shows. I loved nature shows and I really loved when the nature show host would go to the jungle. I used to just wish and I would say it out loud, I would say, "I want to be a nature show host, and I want to go to the jungle and learn about animals, and tell people about animals."
I did my best in middle school and high school and my grades did not at all suggest that I would one day become a scientist, who uses a lot of math in her work. It was the opposite of that. By the time I got to college, I was trying out different college majors, and I was-- I don't know. Do you guys remember those college fairs where all the departments would have a little booth, then you walk around and they try to sell you, "Join the English Department. Join the dance Department," join this, join that. I remember I went to the booth that said environmental science.
I went to that booth because there was a Black man at that booth. He said, "Oh, are you interested in environmental science?" I said, "Well, I don't know what that is." He explained it to me, then, I say, "Oh, that sounds cool." He said, "You should get environmental science a try. I think it would be a great fit for you." If I am to be completely honest, I trusted him because he was a Black person in this all majority White space. I really felt like he saw me and I trusted his advice. I tried environmental science as a major and I hated it. I hated it so much. I was like, "This is terrible."
It was really confusing to me because I was able to see that since childhood I was really interested in nature because of those nature shows. When I daydreamed, I was still daydreaming about being out, and about exploring the jungle, and learning about animals and protecting them. I was able to deduce that what wasn't working for me was studying wild animals and nature and the environment in the pages of a textbook and in a classroom. I was surrounded by all of these students who are all White, and so they were very different from me, just racially but all the students in my classroom seemed to have this understanding of nature that I didn't have. It was easy for me to see that they had all been hiking and camping and hunting and fishing. They had all been skiing and done all of this recreation in the outdoors that I hadn't done so when they were reading the chapter about forest ecology, they could understand it from their actual experiences in forests.
It dawned on me really quickly like, "Oh, gosh, well, I've never spent time in nature. I've never deliberately been in nature in a way that can help my education. I decided, "Okay, I've got to change that. If I hate environmental science, but I really think it's the right place for me, I have to have some really serious experiences in nature." As I was entering my junior year of college, I decided to sign up for a super intense study abroad program. I was like, "I'm going to find the most naturey, outdoorsy study abroad semester that I can find. Also, it has to be affordable because if my scholarship doesn't cover it, then I can't go."
I found a study abroad program. It was a wildlife management study abroad program in Southern Kenya, and it was like basically camping for an entire semester, which is what made it affordable. It was being outside, being in the East African bush studying wildlife, and I signed up. I remember going shopping with my mom before the program, and we were all stressed out because all the gear was so expensive, so, so expensive. We got it. My parents put me on a plane and they said goodbye. This was 2005 so this is before Southern Kenya was wired with technology for communications.
I saw them five months later and I was a completely transformed person. I was 100% positive that I belonged in the environmental sciences, that I should be a wildlife ecologist.
Faith: The fact that that man being one of the only people that look like you in that space drew you to him, so representation matters, and then the idea of one person can change someone's life.
Rae: Absolutely, and I think what, what matters even more is that when I was talking to this man at the department fair, I figured he was a professor, I figured he was a faculty member, as he was the only person at the environmental science booth. I later learned that he was not faculty. He was a staff, and he was better at his job than any of the professors I interacted with, probably, in my entire university career because he identified the spark in me and in other students, and related to me on just a basic level and really saw potential in me that I did not see in myself, and I would say, used blackness, used our racial commonality in order to strike up that conversation and to bring me into a space that folks like me, traditionally, more in.
I think one of the things that really gets me the most, whether we're talking about academia, whether we're talking about nature and media, whatever we're talking about, I think I get the most frustrated that people of color, and Black people, in particular, have had so many barriers to entry and barriers to success in these fields because, ultimately, we're doing this for the betterment of the planet. No one's becoming a millionaire [chuckles] studying wildlife ecology, no one is out here getting rich by working to protect the environment.
It really is extra super frustrating that anyone would face any barriers to entering any of these fields because the more people that are participating in these fields, the better and the quicker we're going to be able to get to some of our environmental goals that make the world better for every single person. It makes me like if anything fires me up, it's of course racism, and then add on top of that racism and systemic barriers in the environmental space because it's like, "We need to break down these barriers period," but especially because everything will get better for everyone if we're able to focus on solutions to environmental problems to protecting nature, to protecting wildlife, ASAP.
I could go on and on, but it's this double-edged sword, essentially, where it's like, we have two super important movements, and all of the information, all the data shows that if we tackle racism and we tackle environmental crises, we're going to have a healthier, thriving, more balanced planet, period. Let's just knock both of these out with one blow, but at the same time it's not on me, it's not on us, it's on the people who have the power to construct these systems and benefit from these systems to take them down.
Faith: I'm thankful for the term environmental justice because it begins to say that, "No, the environmental movement and social justice movements are not separate movements." I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how does that show up in your work?
Rae: [chuckles] I have to say I am going to do my best to be super careful with my words, and it's because I am a student of environmental justice. I am definitely constantly, constantly learning about terminology, language, philosophies all of it, and I just was so fortunate that I have so many amazing people to learn about this from, but it results in me feeling sometimes uncomfortable articulating my own philosophies around it because it's almost like, the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know, the more there is to learn.
I have gleaned [chuckles] a lot of my environmental justice understanding from my own lived experiences, and it's super helpful but where I am right now with my work is really trying to wrap my head around and learn from the indigenous communities in the United States because these days, a lot of my conservation work, my conservation work is primarily research, is domestic. It's mostly in North America. That means that it's taking place on historically indigenous landscapes.
I have been super, super, super rooted in advocating for the intersection of support for Black lives and environmental work. I've been talking about blackness, blackness, blackness, and it's super important to me. It's tippy top important, and yet, I am doing my research and my work in landscapes that are not historical Black but native groups were and could continue to be if land was returned to them. This is something that I have been really, really quiet about, especially because I have just started a new project and a really, really awesome research site that is on historic Chumash territory, and Chumash people are around. [laughs] They are not relics of the past. They are living breathing people active in society in this landscape, and yet, they do not have ownership of the lands where I am leading a lot of really great carnivore research and understanding the landscape and whatnot.
It's been a little bit tough because I have been yet to find myself in a project where we are fully working alongside of indigenous groups that have full rights and access to their historic lands. I think it's possible, and I imagine there, probably, are conservation landscapes like this in the United States, but right now, and for the past several years, I've been working in places where elders and leaders from different indigenous groups are very active in advising about the science and the conservation, approving it, giving support, but not necessarily fully empowered to lead it or to, again, own it or take the land back.
That's really been on my heart a lot, and because these issues are not rooted in my racial group or my own racial community, I've been having to have a lot of conversations, do a lot of listening, do this whole other education, so that I can be a student of environmental and social justice for a different target group other than my own. I have to say it's pretty heavy. It's pretty heavy to be from one target group and to take a lot of time and energy to educate myself about issues surrounding another target group. I'm willing to do it, and I'm happy to do it, and I'm honored to do it. I just hope and pray that my White colleagues in my direct circle and then in the wider conservation community are taking that time as well and internalizing all of these issues themselves.
Faith: Thank you for sharing that. I think it's something that it's relevant to both of us in different ways. For me, I've been aware of different conversations in indigenous communities since I finished my master's thesis in 2013, which was around Native American cultural appropriation in fashion. I've been very aware of appropriation, these conversations about appropriation, but I've definitely struggled to find my voice and know when I can speak up and be in solidarity. I think in the last couple of years, specifically, I've been like, "There is no time to be too afraid of messing up to not speak," but it's something that is very difficult and I think particularly as Black folks, our destinies and histories have been so intertwined and yet we've been disconnected from each other's societies, even though there are Black indigenous people too. It's just so complicated, but it's really wonderful to hear you speak about that, particularly, when so much of our work is tied to the land and the truth, and the history about that land has been so unacknowledged for so long.
Addie: I also hope that our listeners, particularly White listeners, can hear this conversation and realize, "Yes, time for me to step up in all aspects of my allyship, and all aspects of my co-conspiratorship because it's always going to be imperfect and yet we can't afford to be silent. We can't stop trying.
Rae: You know, I have definitely accepted myself that I am an imperfect ally, but I also think it's important not to rest on that. It's important to give yourself grace and forgiveness when you make mistakes, but also not too much. Of course, forgive yourself. Of course, give yourself grace. Life is too short to be beating yourself up all the time, but change right now. Start getting right, right now.
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Addie: Faith, I have to admit the Patagonia strider shorts are my new favorite, and this time I got these because you always wear them and I was jealous, so now I think we're even.
Faith: It's true. I love these shorts. The elastic band makes them a comfy fit and the little pocket in the back is perfect for a phone or some snacks, and so far no chafing, which is a very real thing for me.
Addie: Oh, so real they're also so light they're fair trade certified sewn and made with a mix of recycled materials. Where have you been running these days?
Faith: I've been staying close to home, checking out back alleys and near ride trails that I hadn't explored before the pandemic. I'm really glad it's warm enough for shorts again.
Addie: Totally. Patagonia in the business of saving our home planet and making the best trail running shorts ever.
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Faith: Let's talk about the Merrell Moabs.
Addie: Moabs, the Moab speed and the Moab flight.
Faith: What do you like best about the shoes?
Addie: This is going to be me sounding like a total trail running nerd, but the lugs on both of these shoes are incredible.
Faith: Nerd out, yes, please. What are lugs for our listeners who do not know?
Addie: They're like the spikes on the tread of the shoe.
Faith: Lugs matter so you don't slip and slide and still have grip on varied terrain.
Addie: You agree?
Faith: Yes, the lugs on these make my heart sing. These shoes can tackle anything from soft PNW trail, even after a lovely PNW rain to scaling rocks and JTree.
Addie: If you're in the market for trail running or hiking shoes, go grab yourself a pair of Merrell Moabs. You can thank us later.
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Faith: We're hopping back into episode five of The Trail Ahead with wildlife ecologist Rae Wynn-Grant. As a Black woman in the majority White and male-dominated world of environmental science. Rae has had some harrowing experiences in the field. When I ask her about navigating often in remote places, she tells a story in this episode that mentions intimidation and racial violence. We wanted to warn our listeners because it may be upsetting to hear.
Addie: First, we'll back up a bit and ask Rae about how advocating for people and justice fits into her work as a wildlife ecologist.
Rae: The majority of wildlife conservation work around the world occurs in protected areas like national parks, for example, these spaces that have been built by governments and institutions, but have political boundaries or it's like, "Okay, people you can't live or build stuff or operate on these landscapes because we're using it for wildlife conservation." In a very simple way, I grew up thinking like, "Good, yes. People make problems. They pollute, so let's have people out of these spaces so that big wild animals that I care about can thrive and survive and have a future."
Of course, once I got out of my formal education and training, I realized, "Oh, this isn't right." There's very few places where protected areas were constructed in a fair, in a safe, in an equitable way. In so many places, it was a colonial or a neo-colonial concept where indigenous people were unwillingly removed from their own landscapes in order to emphasize the importance of animals and it has been something that I've had to really, really work through because I care about animals so much. I have dedicated my entire life and career and always will to protecting wild animals and keeping them from going extinct. At the same time, I have arrived in this place where I'm willing to say out loud, and it's not a popular opinion in conservation that people are more important than wild animals.
Definitely in a traditional conservation wildlife ecology education that is not what is taught. What is taught is that people are problematic, they destroy the environment, and wild animals are important on this earth inherently. Because conservation is primarily done in protected areas, I have really had to reconcile like, "Well, what work can I do? How can I protect wild animals while also advocating for the rights and the needs of people?"
It's brought me to a lot of uncomfortable conversations. It's gotten me fired from jobs sometimes, it has blacklisted me sometimes, but what I am really dedicated to at a minimum is arguing that a conservation project, a wildlife conservation project and plan is incomplete if it doesn't address poverty because if we are saving wild animals and they are just abundant and thriving, but the people in and around the landscape where we're saving them are facing poverty or living in poverty, then we are not successful. That's what I'm committed to right now and I hope that I get more and more courageous to speak up more, have more ideas, push the needle a little bit further so that wildlife conservation is not in direct opposition to human well-being and justice.
Faith: Recently, you were involved in Black Mammalogy Week. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that.
Rae: I was a small part of bringing Black Mammalogist Week to life in 2020. Mammalogy, I hope it makes sense, is the scientific study of mammals. I was one of the originators of the idea that it started with a very small team, but then I very quickly dropped off so I have to really give credit where credit is due to everyone else who took on the role. We have a website, blackmammologists.com, so you can just look up all the leaders, but it actually got started because of Black Birders Week.
Black Birders Week occurred because there was a really difficult racial incident in 2020, in the spring of 2020, in Central Park, where there's a Black man who is a bird expert and professional who was in Central Park with his binoculars, just out birding, and got harassed by a White woman. It was a racially motivated harassment where she threatened to call the police on him. In response, a big part of the Black community everywhere said, "You can't be a Black person anywhere. You can't just even walk around looking at birds without someone calling the cops on you saying that you're a threat to society."
It was just another reason to talk about the injustices against Black people and in this case, particularly. Black men who are often characterized as suspicious, or threatening, or dangerous in every and all places, especially the outdoors. It was this exact same time of year that Ahmaud Arbery was killed in the outdoors for existing as a Black person. There was just these cries out there that it is dangerous to be Black. At the same time, while we're fighting that fight to allow us to exist and to be without problem, a lot of folks banded together to say, "We're also not being celebrated."
Black people are making today, and have made throughout history, humongous contributions to all kinds of outdoor sciences. We have been naturalists. We have been experts. We have been the drivers of so many discoveries in nature throughout time, primarily unacknowledged. Let's do some celebrating, as well as some marching and crying out and advocacy work. Black Birders Week came together really, really quickly.
I was a part of it, funnily enough, because at the beginning of Black Birders Week when we were just getting organized, it was kind of a group of many people who work in the outdoors, especially in the science capacity. We just got together on social media, moved it off social media, and got to work. Then, again, since I know next to nothing about birds, I took a really big backseat and just watch the magic happen.
The Black Birders Week really gave birth to a whole bunch of other weeks. We saw Black in SciComm Week. We saw Black Mammologists Week. We saw Black in Marine, which I have to say, is still going strong. It's just so much pride. It was pretty easy for me and a couple of other amazing leaders to get Black Mammologists Week off the ground. We did it in September. It was super, super fun. It was a social media dominant week, but I would say, the biggest impact is that we were able to raise tons of money, I mean, tens of thousands of dollars for a scholarship for Black and indigenous students to get money, to pursue their studies in mammalogy.
We were able to celebrate ourselves, celebrate those people who are on their way up, celebrate the contributions that Black folks had made to mammalogy over the years, which are often like untold stories, even stories that were new to me, and really keep up this narrative that Black folks belong in these places and that we can make important discoveries and contributions to this field. If you're a Black person out there thinking that you're some crazy alternative nerd because you're interested in the study of field mice or squirrels or polar bears or whatever it is, you're absolutely not. You're not alone and there's a space for you.
Faith: You have navigated so many different environments, and you talked about the fact that very often, in your work, you're navigating historical White spaces. That's been the case with the various institutions as well. I'm just wondering-- I guess my question is can you ever run away from feeling that that is the context within which you're working?
Rae: There's a lot of really tough stuff that I, as a Black individual have to go through, that Black folks in environmental sciences and outdoors at large have to go through in order to be in the wilderness, and it makes it feel like, "Yes, I'm still in this predominantly White space," but not just White space, but like an aggressively racist space. One of the reasons is because of where I go to do my work, where I have studied, let's use the United States as an example, where I have studied bears has mainly been in the west, the Western United States. For the last several years I've done work in places like Montana. I hope it goes without saying that some of the most beautiful landscapes that we have in this country, but also places that have felt super, super White, and sometimes not in discreet ways.
I have found that I have to do a lot of driving. I have to do a lot of driving from airports to rural areas. I often drive through these mountain towns and villages and whatnot that have a lot of White and hostile racist symbology. I see Confederate flags a lot. Montana was not the Confederacy [laughs] by any measure. It has clearly nothing to do with heritage or some of those arguments that people in the south sometimes have about why Confederate flags should remain. There are very deliberately placed to symbolize hatred and racism and a certain belief system.
The most horrifying racist symbology that I ever encountered was in Western, Maryland when I was heading out to join the Maryland Department of natural resources going into a bear den. I was driving through the town and on someone's property, there was an effigy, a life-size effigy of a lynched Black man hanging from a tree. I had a choice. I could either like crawl into a ball and cry and go home or do my job, and I did, but the way that it pained me to put that down and go forward, and the way that it continues to pain me that I honestly feel like my colleagues were complicit because they aren't marching with signs like protesting this effigy. They shake their heads and saying like, "Oh, what a shame," and then keep it moving. They sleep well at night. That hurts too. That hurts too, and not just for me but for the entire community.
Also, I'm realizing like I have so much privilege, I don't live there. I visited once. I do not intend to go back and there are people, Black folks, Brown folks, all kinds of folks who cannot escape that place, who cannot escape that hate. That is where they are and they might be locked into place there without opportunity. They have to have that pain all the time.
Faith: How can we expect anyone to want to spend time out in the woods? It's not just one place. You're talking about Maryland. We're talking about Montana. I'm talking about Oregon. We just moved east to west and had the same experience. How can you want to study birds or study bears when you're not sure that you can safely take a walk in the woods? That's so limiting.
Rae: Yes, I've worked with a number of organizations who feel like the best thing they can do is expose people of color, Black folks, kids to nature. That's an important part of it. I can say I wasn't exposed to nature when I was a kid, but it has to be safe. It has to be inviting. It has to be fun. It has to be inclusive, equitable. It has to be all the things. I have to say in some of the institutional work that I do I often encourage things like providing internships and different opportunities for Black and Brown youth, but I also try to let folks know you can't just make an internship for Black kids and call it a day.
It really doesn't matter if Black people are going to wilderness spaces that are hostile, or dangerous, or both. You could have all the internships in the world and it's not going to make a difference. At the same time, you could make nature a really safe and inclusive place but if your dad might be killed by the police driving home from work, does it matter? Is the problem solved? No. In order to nurture scientists of color, in order to create a space where everyone has opportunity to participate in the science that will make our planet a better place, you have to eliminate racism altogether. It has to be completely dismantled across every field, not just in the outdoors or in the environmental field. It has to be in total.
Faith: A lot of times we're given this narrative that says that Black people haven't been in the outdoors, and the reality is our kinds of knowledge systems haven't been respected.
Rae: Faith, what you're saying is reminding me of all the time I spent in Montana and the narrative is often about Lewis and Clark. Let's restore the land to what it looked like when Lewis and Clark passed through. They're famous folks. They are two famous men who left a big impact on American history, on White American history. I've learned a lot about Lewis and Clark from being a conservation scientist [unintelligible 00:39:31] colleges.
The person that I had not learned about formerly, until recently, when I took it upon myself is a man named York, a Black man named York. I don't know if that's his first name or his last name. It is undocumented, whether he has a full name, but he was an enslaved man his whole entire life and he guided Lewis and Clark through their expedition as an enslaved person. He was not given a choice and he quite literally saved their lives on multiple occasions. He did the physical labor. He helped them get from the east coast to the west coast, and upon arriving out west, he asked for freedom, and they did not give it to him.
He was sent back to the Southern United States and lived the rest of his life as a slave, as an enslaved person. It's enraging. Lately, I've been trying to take that rage and turn it into pride, and feel a lot of pride that people like me, people like my ancestors have been involved, have been facilitating exploration of the outdoors. I'm not even touching on indigenous peoples and how much they facilitate it and have been stewards of the environment for eons.
It's slightly comforting, even in these places where I'm encountering racism, it is slightly comforting to take steps in the wilderness, in the west even, and know that ancestors of mine and other Black folks in history have taken steps in these same places and paved a way for me. It feels like empowerment, and it feels like love, and it feels like belonging. I hope that I can do work to help other people after me feel those same feelings.
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Addie: Rae Wynn-grant, you are an absolute inspiration to myself and Faith and so many others. Thank you for joining us and sharing your wisdom, tough questions, and hope for the future.
Faith: To learn more about Rae and her work, you can follow her on Instagram or Twitter, @RaeWynnGrant. You can also visit her website, raewynngrant.com. We'll provide additional links on our website, thislanddoc.com/thetrailahead
Addie: The Trail Ahead is created and hosted by us Faith E. Briggs and Addie Thompson. It's produced by Lantigua Williams & Co. Jen Chien is our editor. Elizabeth Nakano is our producer. Sound design and theme music by Cedric Wilson.
Faith: Our podcast art is by Shar Tuiasoa. Check her out on Instagram @punkyaloha. Special thanks to our amazing teams from Merrell, Adam Kepfer, Lauren King, Will Pray, and from Patagonia, Bianca Botta, Sasha Tenedy, Clare Gallagher, and Whitney.
Addie: Big thanks also to Trail Butter and Outdoorsy, and thanks to our team on the visual side. Tyler Wilkinson Ray, Fred Gorus, and Monica Medellin. Thank you for listening and for spreading the word. Follow the Trail Ahead on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. See you next episode.
CITATION:
Briggs, Faith E. and Thompson, Addie. “Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: Racism, Role Models and Bears (Oh, My!),” The Trail Ahead Podcast, May 25, 2021. thislanddoc.com/thetrailahead