Mixed Race Studies

Speaker Series: Memory, History, Race, and America’s National Parks

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Boulevard
New York, New York 10037
Tuesday, 2016-10-18, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

As a young girl Lauret Savoy developed a deeply personal connection to the American land, visiting numerous national parks with her parents. But as she traversed the well-worn paths of Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon and Zion, she began to wonder about the footsteps of her ancestors, and how they marked the very land she walked upon. From the Buffalo Soldiers who safeguarded Yosemite and Sequoia to the painful legacy of Japanese-American internment camps, national parks hold some of the most important yet muted narratives of the American identity.

In her newest work, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, Savoy explores how the country’s still unfolding history, and ideas of “race,” mark a person, a people, and the land. In distinctive and illuminating prose, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons.

Join Alan Spears for a conversation with [National Parks Conservation Association] NPCA Trustee Lauret Savoy about her journeys across the American Landscape and the oft forgotten stories of the places we cherish and call our national parks. She will challenge you to redefine current concepts regarding the meaning of public lands and their place in our shared history…

For more information, click here.

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

Counterpoint Press
2015-11-10
240 pages
5.5 x 8.25
Hardcover ISBN: 9781619025738

Lauret Savoy, Professor of Environmental Studies and Geology
Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts

An environmental historian traces her mixed ancestry by reading both the land and the blistering record of race in America

Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost.

In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Savoy explores how the country’s still unfolding history, and ideas of “race,” have marked her and the land. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past.

In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons.