Cultural geographer and author Carolyn Finney explored the connections between race, land, history and belonging during a talk on Saturday, Sept. 12, at the Albuquerque Museum, drawing on both decades of academic research and experiences from her own life.
The talk accompanied “The Woods Before Sunrise: Environment and Place in New Mexico’s Black Contemporary,” an exhibition featuring nine contemporary artists whose work explores sustainability, cultural history, land, belonging and the Black experience in New Mexico.
Finney is the author of the 2014 book “Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors,” which examines how slavery, segregation and racial violence have influenced cultural understandings of nature and ideas about who can access and belong in outdoor spaces.
Throughout Saturday’s presentation, Finney repeatedly returned to questions of who is allowed to occupy land, who is remembered as having cared for it and who gets to decide which histories become part of the American environmental story.
“Land is not neutral,” Finney told the audience.
Finney’s path into environmental scholarship was unconventional. Before entering academia, she pursued acting for 11 years and later spent roughly five years traveling through Africa and Asia and living in Nepal. She eventually returned to school after a 15-year absence, focusing her undergraduate and master’s work on gender and environmental issues in Kenya and Nepal before turning toward African Americans and environmental issues in the United States for her doctoral research. Finney earned her Ph.D. in geography from Clark University in 2006 and has taught at institutions including Wellesley College, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Kentucky.
Much of Finney’s scholarship is rooted in experiences that began decades before she entered a doctoral program. Finney was adopted after her parents had been told they could not have children; they later had two sons, giving her two younger brothers. Her parents worked as caretakers for a wealthy Jewish family’s estate in Westchester County, New York, where Finney and her brothers spent much of their childhood outdoors.
At the same time, Finney’s family was the only Black family living in the affluent, predominantly white neighborhood, creating what she has described as a complicated relationship between privilege, race and belonging. During Saturday’s talk, Finney recalled some of the contradictions of that childhood with humor. Her father worked on the grounds and as a chauffeur, and Finney said she was occasionally driven to school in the property owner’s silver Rolls-Royce.
Other experiences were less humorous: Finney has described being stopped by a white police officer while walking home from school at age 9 and telling the officer that she lived on the estate after he asked whether she worked there. She has since used the encounter as an example of how a person can be physically present in a landscape while still being perceived by others as being “out of place” there.
Finney’s parents eventually left the estate in 2003 after caring for the property for decades, forcing her to confront the distinction between caring for land and actually possessing it. That experience helped push Finney toward questions about land ownership, environmental history and whose stewardship is acknowledged in mainstream accounts of the American landscape. Although Finney spent much of her childhood outside, she told Saturday’s audience that her family did not take trips to national parks when she was growing up.
Her work has challenged the tendency to define a relationship with nature primarily through activities such as national park visitation, hiking or other forms of organized outdoor recreation. Finney has argued that nature is also encountered in neighborhoods, cities, yards and ordinary daily life and that narrow definitions of who counts as “outdoorsy” can obscure the ways different communities interact with the environment.
During the talk at the Albuquerque Museum, Finney placed these questions within a broader history of American land ownership. She discussed the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed eligible settlers to claim up to 160 acres of surveyed federal land in exchange for residing on and improving the property for five years.
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Finney also drew attention to two landmark federal laws enacted in 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations and employment and providing for the integration of schools and other public facilities. Two months later, Johnson signed the Wilderness Act on Sept. 3, establishing the National Wilderness Preservation System. Putting the two laws side-by-side allowed Finney to pose one of the recurring questions of her work: Who gets to move freely through the United States, including through outdoor spaces that are nominally preserved for everyone?
The history of the National Park Service reflects some of those disparities. In 1961, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall asked federal bureaus to account for their Black employees, and discovered that the National Park Service employed only one Black ranger. Udall subsequently sent Interior Department recruiters to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), part of an effort that brought future National Park Service Director Robert Stanton into the agency.
Decades later, Finney herself became involved in shaping conversations surrounding the parks system. She was appointed to the National Park System Advisory Board in 2010, and ultimately served for eight years under the Obama administration.
More recently, Finney participated in “Big Medicine: The York Project,” a National Park Service initiative focused on York, the enslaved Black man who traveled with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as a member of the Corps of Discovery on their approximately 8,000-mile journey from 1803-1806. York, who was enslaved by William Clark, hunted, cared for sick members of the expedition, scouted and performed other essential work alongside the Corps of Discovery.
As part of Big Medicine: York Outdoors, Finney joined other Black educators and environmental stewards on a four-day trip through the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, retracing part of the landscape traveled by the Corps more than two centuries earlier. The journey became a National Park Service documentary, connecting York’s history with contemporary questions about access to recreation and the restorative possibilities of outdoor spaces.
Finney has also brought her own family history to documentary film. Part of her family’s story appears in the 2023 HBO documentary “Trees and Other Entanglements.” Her work extends outside the United States as well: After spending years traveling through Africa and Asia earlier in her life, she now participates in the Diaspora Salon at Jnane Tamsna in Marrakech, Morocco, a gathering of artists and other creatives from across the African diaspora.
During Saturday’s talk, Finney reflected on how speaking with audiences outside the United States changes the assumptions she can make. Stories about race, national parks or American history that may carry an immediate set of associations for a U.S. audience can require an entirely different context elsewhere.
Finney also moved between academic history, art and popular culture throughout the presentation. One example was Robert S. Duncanson’s 1859 painting “Landscape with Rainbow.” Duncanson was one of the best-known African American painters in the years surrounding the Civil War, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum describes the painting’s rural scene and rainbow as “expressing a hope for peace on the eve of the war.” Finney used such images to ask audiences to consider how Black people have been represented — or omitted — in cultural depictions of nature and the American landscape.
Finney also questioned the language institutions use when attempting to broaden participation. She said she does not always find “inclusion” an adequate goal because the term can imply that an existing institution retains the power to decide who is allowed inside and on what terms. Instead, much of her work asks what might happen if people historically left out of environmental narratives are treated not merely as populations to be invited in, but as communities that already possess their own histories, knowledge and relationships with land.
Finney described confronting the more painful parts of that history as part of a larger process of healing from generational trauma and injustice. That concern closely parallels “The Woods Before Sunrise,” which the Albuquerque Museum describes as both “a joyful and at times challenging exploration of land, place and belonging through the work of Black artists in New Mexico.”
The exhibit will remain on display at the Albuquerque Museum through Oct. 18.
George Slad is a freelance photographer for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at photo@dailylobo.com or on X @SladGeorge
