![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2022\/10\/221012_Otis_Lecture_Carolyn_Finney_0396.webp\")
Speaking in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, Finney centered her talk, \u201cReparative Gestures: On Race, Redemption and (Re)making a Green World,\u201d around a story about her parents, who were caretakers of the Westchester estate and lived on the grounds in a gardener\u2019s house. It\u2019s where Carolyn and her two siblings grew up and where, some years later, her father planted a cherry tree as a gift to Finney\u2019s mother on their 40th wedding anniversary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then the estate was sold, and Finney\u2019s family moved to Virginia, leaving the tree, the land, and a piece of her father\u2019s heart behind. \u201cI watched my father in particular get incredibly depressed,\u201d Finney said. \u201cHe talked about missing the land. He talked about missing place. He talked about the idea that they had no legacy, no money. And more importantly, they had no land.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years later, they learned that the estate had been put into a conservation easement with the Westchester Land Trust, which thanked the new owners for their conservation efforts. Nothing was said about Finney\u2019s parents, who had cared for the land for over 50 years. \u201cAnd just like that, they were gone,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It got Finney thinking broadly about how people\u2019s histories and experiences get erased \u201cwhen we think about land, when we think about stewardship.\u201d Because land and place are tied up in \u201ccaring and engagement and stories and love\u2026what we’re talking about is love and connection and a sense of belonging. A place where you can stand, that you come to know, and what it’s like when you can be erased, just like that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around the same time, in 2003, Finney had hit a roadblock in her intended doctoral dissertation, and was looking to pursue a whole new topic. \u201cAnd my professor had said, \u2018Look, you’ve been talking about African Americans and the environment. Nobody’s doing it. Why don’t you?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She scoured the library shelves for anything about or by Black people in the environment, but found nothing besides \u201ca few things on environmental justice and the bad things that happened to Black people. But we aren’t only the bad things that happened to us,\u201d said Finney.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So she exited the library, exited the ivory tower, and headed out to do fieldwork. \u201cIt was some of the best research, in terms of the experience, that I’ve ever had,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finney interviewed people, mainly African Americans, and asked them for their stories. The most common answers she got were, \u201cOh, I don\u2019t have a story\u201d and \u201cNo one\u2019s ever asked me that before.\u201d Those responses \u201creally moved me,\u201d said Finney.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fieldwork led to Finney’s first book, in 2014, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors<\/em>, which mapped out the ways in which Black Americans\u2019 experience has been excluded from discussions and concepts of nature and the environment in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what about her own family\u2019s experience of being erased from that Westchester land? Finney felt that pain, but didn’t know what to do with it. Quoting Nadia Bolz-Webber, host of The Confessional<\/em> podcast, Finney asked herself, “What do I do with my pain? Do I transmit it, or do I transform it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plans had been made for Finney to team up with a documentary filmmaker to visit the estate and tell the story about her family and the tree. But then she learned that the tree was gone, removed during landscaping work at the estate. At first, she was hurt and angry. Then came the impulse to tell a story. \u201cThis is a story we have to tell because this is what always happens,” she told the Bates audience. “I’m not blaming anybody, but this is the story we need to talk about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So everyone got involved \u2014 Finney, the film crew, the land trust, the estate\u2019s owners \u2014 and came together on a sweltering summer day in 2021 to plant a new cherry tree. “It felt quite sacred to have everybody involved,” she said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a reparative gesture, a theme of her talk. “My parents\u2019 story is going to become part of their story. It’s not simply my story, it’s our story,\u201d Finney said. “Everybody becomes accountable for the story of the tree. Not simply me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometime later, Finney received a picture of the new tree, and what she saw gave her joy. Not just the tree but also daffodils, planted by the homeowners. \u201cWhat they didn’t know is that daffodils are my father’s favorite flower and I felt so moved by that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finney\u2019s joy prompted, during her Otis talk, a brief reflection on the concept of joy in the context of how we endure and fight the crises of our times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen we talk about climate catastrophe, or environmental and social justice, and democracy breaking down \u2014 all of it’s hard,” she said. “But we don’t have to just do that and not have joy in our lives. You can do this work, you can care deeply, you can show up \u2014 and you can still be joyous doing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “That doesn’t mean you’re not angry. It doesn’t mean you’re not hurt. And it doesn’t mean you’re not scared. None of these things operate in the silo, but you can still have joy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Near the end of her talk, Finney made a point of noting that a reparative gesture is at the heart of her Bates visit. The Otis Lecture is sponsored by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established by his family in memory of the young Bates alum who died in 1996 while attempting to rescue an injured climber on Mount Rainier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The act of establishing the endowment and the annual lecture is, for the family, perhaps the \u201cultimate reparative gesture,\u201d said Finney. \u201cWhen I think of a family who lost their child in 1996, and how, every time there is an Otis Lecture, they elevate and celebrate and remember their son and everything that comes with that memory, I am humbled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe gesture is the choice,” she said, “that possibility is revealed in the repetition of practice: the transformation of tragedy and trauma and pain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reparative gestures are \u201cnot about right or wrong. It’s about an intention to do better, an intention to see better. It’s about remaining curious and compassionate and empathetic and present while looking to the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Environmental history is too often written without acknowledging the presence, passion, and stories of the Black people in it, and storyteller and cultural geographer Carolyn Finney aims to change that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1422,"featured_media":149557,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,232,6],"tags":[6954,6961],"class_list":["post-149501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-environment-sustainability","category-maine-world","tag-philip-j-otis-endowment","tag-philip-j-otis-lecture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1422"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149501"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149588,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149501\/revisions\/149588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2022\/10\/221012_Otis_Lecture_Carolyn_Finney_0637.webp\")
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2022\/10\/221012_Otis_Lecture_Carolyn_Finney_0714.webp\")
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2022\/10\/221012_Otis_Lecture_Carolyn_Finney_0664.webp\")