[This week, I’ll
be camping with family up in Maine’s
beautiful Acadia National Park. So I wanted to AmericanStudy come contexts
for this longstanding
form of national recreation and escape. Share your camping contexts in
comments, please!]
On two
historical and cultural contexts for a complex American divide.
Earlier this
week, I mentioned the growing
conversation over race—and especially African
Americans—and camping in America. As those hyperlinks illustrate, in the
last couple decades more and more National Park Service officials and other
camping and nature advocates have noticed and commented on a stark divide in
how much different
ethnic American communities take part in those activities and make use of
those spaces. While there’s no necessary reason why this would be a problem,
America’s national parks and natural spaces represent a significant, shared
national resource, and of course it would be ideal for all Americans to have
the chance to experience and benefit from that resource. And in order to
address this communal division, it’d be important to analyze some of the historical
factors that have contributed to its 21st century existence.
At the first
hyperlink above, Yosemite National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson (himself African
American) diagnoses the problem as a communal “disassociation from the natural
world,” one based, “in part, [on] a memory of the horrible things that were
done to us in rural America.” Exemplifying that perspective on nature are a
couple of seminal early 20th century cultural texts: Paul
Laurence Dunbar’s historical Gothic poem “The Haunted Oak” (1900) and Billie Holliday’s haunting song
“Strange Fruit” (1939; based on a
poem written by New York city schoolteacher Abel Meeropol). While trees have
tended to represent pastoral and even spiritual beauty and power in many American
literary and cultural texts—see Joyce
Kilmer’s “Trees” (1913), one of the most popular works of poetry from
Dunbar’s era, for an early 20th century case in point—Dunbar and
Holliday’s texts illustrate the far different cultural and historical roles
that trees have played for African Americans. Given that the National Park system was created
in precisely the same era as those texts (and the
lynching epidemic that they reflect), it’s certainly understandable that
many African Americans wouldn’t hasten to embrace the natural world preserved
by those parks.
I’d also
highlight another cultural factor in that disassociation from the natural
world, however—although to be clear, this is amateur sociology that I have in
no way researched, and as always I welcome any pushback or other perspectives. Camping,
it seems to me, is often a profoundly individual activity, one undertaken by
small groups (families, groups of friends, even organizations like Cub Scout
troops or the like) who are overtly separating from the society and broader
communities around them in order to escape into this natural space. And while
this is of course a reductive overstatement, I would argue that for most of
American history members of minority communities have understandably sought safety
and solace in community, the kinds of ethnic
enclaves that allow for individuals to receive the kinds of support and
comfort too often denied them by the broader American society. Indeed, Camping in Color, the camping
blog on which my first hyperlinked article above appeared, is overtly framed as
an effort by its authors to create and pass on such a shared camping community
for African Americans, “presented with the goal of infusing family with the
appreciation of nature.” If camping is to become a truly national American
experience, perhaps such a redefinition from the individual to the more communal
will have to accompany that growth.
Monthly recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other camping contexts you’d highlight?
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