Ideas - How the Outdoors Has Inspired Women to Become Trailblazers

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Harvard historian Tiya Miles believes the more girls and women are outdoors, the more fulfilling their lives will be. In her book, Wild Girls, Miles shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America. *This episode originally aired on April 10, 2024.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Good evening, everyone. Bonsoir.

My name is Nala Ayed. I'm the host of CBC Ideas. Thank you for being here. Can you hear me all right? I was on stage at the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales de Québec in Montreal for a very special occasion. Now, for the reason that we are all here this evening, it is my privilege to be here to introduce the Cundall History Prize 2022 winner, Taya Miles. Taya Miles won the Cundall History Prize for her book, All That She Carried, which has won a whole raft of awards and honors for the astounding way in which it tells the story of a 150-year-old cotton sack and the embroidered inscription on it.

My great-grandmother Rose, mother of Ashley, gave her this sack when she was sold at age nine in South Carolina. It held a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, a braid of Rose's hair. Told her it be filled with my love always. She never saw her again. Ashley is my grandmother. Ruth Middleton, 1921. By sifting through countless government and personal records, Taya Miles discovered those three women were Rose, Ashley, and Ruth,

and how their lives span the history of the United States, from slavery to emancipation to Jim Crow to our own day right now. Full disclosure, this whole event nearly didn't happen, as a freak April snowstorm made Taya's arrival questionable. But she made it, somehow was able to press pause on her duties at Harvard University, where she teaches and writes about history. In fact, she's already published a new book, and you'll hear our conversation about it a little later in this episode.

But first, here to talk about her New York Times bestselling and multi-award winning book, All That She Carried, please welcome to the the stage Taya Miles. Hello everybody. I am so heartwarming to see you here. I received a message from my university about the adverse weather conditions that were going to be occurring here, and I thought no one's going to come. I thought you'd all be out shopping for milk and bread. So I am very appreciative of your time tonight. I also want to say that while this evening is titled An Evening with Taya Miles, which feels rather awkward, this is clearly an evening about so many people and so many

voices and so many wonderfully creative and curated partnerships that it shines. I really must thank the Kundal Foundation and the board members, the staff members, the jurors, also McGill University and CBC Radio Ideas, for showering my book with attention that actually pushed it beyond a national audience and moved it into an international context. After I won the Kendall History Prize, my book started going into various languages. There is now a UK edition.

There is a French translation on the way. Thank you very much for that. So I have by now given dozens of talks on all that she carried. And so what I was hoping to do today was to offer something a little bit different. I'm going to give an overview of the book, and then I'm going to offer some comments about the potential of material culture as an archive. And finally, I want to share some ideas and responses that I've received from readers of Object She Carried, which have been really interesting to me and very inspiring. During her talk, Taya used archival photographs to talk about the way material objects,

when closely examined, can tell us stories that we'd otherwise never know about, like the cotton sack that Rose made for her daughter, Ashley. So now you are viewing the back of the object that you heard about, which is known today as Ashley's sack. So I'm going to read now a description of the sack, which was developed by the first curators who worked with the object. They wrote, and this is a quote, the first curators who worked with the object. They wrote, and this is a quote, height 29, 11 by 16 inches and width 15 and three-quarter inches. Sacks made of plain weave cotton, like this example, were manufactured for flour, seeds, and other food staples beginning in the late 1840s with the invention of the industrial sewing machine. It is an accident of history, and something of a miracle, I think, that this artifact has even

survived. This sack was found in 2007 by a flea market shopper. It was in a bin of old rags that was marked for $20. The shopper turned it around to see something that we'll see in a moment, and she realized that it was actually something quite special. She then rushed to the vendor to hurry up and pay before he realized what it was that he was selling in a bin of rags. The first owner of the sack that we know of is a woman named Rose, who was a mother with little control over her own life and certainly with no financial assets. Rose was an enslaved woman in the middle 1800s in Charleston who managed to pass down an object of invaluable worth. managed to pass down an object of invaluable worth. When Rose found out that her daughter Ashley,

who was only nine years old, was about to be stolen from her, that is, sold away in the slave trade, Rose grabbed a sack, the object now known as Ashley's sack, and packed it with a variety of items. The sack wouldn't be for Rose, but rather for her daughter, Ashley. Rose packed into the sack that day a dress, a braid, pecans, and a mother's love.

Rose gave Ashley this packed sack, and Ashley then passed it down to her granddaughter Ruth Middleton Ruth a free woman who moved north to Philadelphia during the African-American Great Migration embroidered the sack with this story saving it for history and sealing with thread a black mother's eternal love this is how we know. Ruth Middleton's sewn inscription reads, My great-grandmother Rose, mother of Ashley, gave her this sack when she was sold at age nine in South Carolina. It held a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, a braid of Rose's hair. Told her it be filled with

my love always. She never saw her again. Ashley is my grandmother. Ruth Middleton, 1921. And so we know that Rose packed a dress, a braid, pecans, and a mother's love. Most of these items no longer exist in the sack. They were separated across time. It's my strong feeling that one item has survived the test of time, and that is, of course, the love that Rose had for Ashley. In the book, I think about all these different items, and I try to consider what they would have meant to Rose, how they might have been used by Ashley,

and the ways in which enslaved people as a community, as a whole, related to them. I'll just share a few of my interpretations here. So the dress would have been very important to Rose and to Ashley in many ways. And one way was to shield Ashley from the weather and from the environment when enslaved people weren't given enough cloth and enough clothing to even last them through an entire year. Another way is that an article of clothing was very important to an enslaved female because it could help to shield her and protect her from the roving eyes of people who intended them harm. Now showing you images of a family collection, actually a beautiful family

archive that's been kept in a Bible, and their Bible included braids of hair, which I think would have been very much like the braid that Rose packed for Ashley. Hair is a very special kind of material. It's material that includes DNA, so it is an actual connector across family lines and also across all humanity because we all share DNA. We know that Rose also packed not just pecans, but three handfuls of pecans. That measurement, I think, is very evocative. It might give us a hint of how special pecans, but three handfuls of pecans. That measurement, I think, is very evocative. It might give us a hint of how special pecans were, and I only learned this through research. Pecans are not native to the U.S. Southeast, even though they're sold all the time there. They're actually native to rivers a little bit further west in Louisiana and Texas and

Illinois and those areas. So they would have been brought into South Carolina as a specialty item. They were very prized. They were also quite nutritious. You know, just as an aside, I was on a trip about a week ago to North Carolina, and I was talking with a food writer who's writing a book on African-American food waste. And she said, even right now, there are all kinds of pecan wars going on where individuals will go and collect pecans and other people will try to maneuver to get those pecans away from them. So they are still quite prized. And Rose would have known this when she packed them for Ashley, that they would have been nutritious and also possibly something that Ashley could have traded for other kinds of items that she needed. The pecans in the sack also led me to piece a couple of things together and to then take what I think is a fairly sound guess that Rose would have been a cook in

the household of the people who owned them because she had access to not only this agricultural sack, but also these very special nuts. So love is the last thing that we know rose packed into the sack. It's very hard to represent love. I like this image because it shows a community of people who would have had to care for one another in order to survive. This is the community of enslaved people in South Carolina. When I was putting together this slideshow for you all, I noticed something that I hadn't thought about before,

which is the dwellings that they're standing in front of. Of course, that is another very important part of the material culture history of slavery, the dwellings that people made and lived in and made their own, even in adverse circumstances. I think it's important to point out with this slide, though, that just because love is present doesn't mean conflict is absent, of course. We can't romanticize these communities, and we have to recognize that there would have been tensions, there would have been fights, there would have been grudges and resentments within this community, even as they all strove to survive together.

The embroidered story of forced separation and loss on this sack, so common in the history of American slavery, and yet breathtakingly particular to this mother and daughter. And let me just slip into my comments here, that the measurements given by the curators in that first catalog description of the sack ended up proving very important to my interpretation, because they really pinned down just how big this object was. When you see it hanging on a wall, the back of the sack just flows onto the ground. It's so long. So I think about how the sack actually could have served as some kind of a shelter for Ashley as she was moved into slavery into central South Carolina. It could have been a blanket for her. It could have been some kind of a tent

for her. So this bag was no ordinary object, but instead a prescription for her. It could have been some kind of a tent for her. So this bag was no ordinary object, but instead a prescription for survival and evidence of emergency planning in the face of disaster. In the material culture of Black America, it is one of a kind. Rose's hope for her daughter's perseverance was realized. Her vision for Ashley came to be. Ashley persisted, as did her daughter, named Rosa, and her daughter, Ruth, and hers, Dorothy. All that she carried is the history of a living artifact and the people whose lives it changed. I think of this history as a story that the archive never wanted to tell, because relying only on documents would never have yielded crucial information that we now know about the three people at the center of the book. Rose, the visionary, Ashley, the survivor, and Ruth,

the storyteller. Although she carries a history about many things at once, Black women's historical experiences across time and space, intergenerational memory, women's work and craft, pairedness, resilience, and adaptation, familial bonds, the fragility and ferocity of motherhood, embroidered and embodied memories, seed-carrying and art-making, the triumph of love over loss. It is also a material culture history, an object history, in other words. As a sack itself gave inspiration and shape to the history I tell, and was the most substantial piece of evidence. My book explores what enslaved people, particularly Black women, left behind, the things they made, the things they touched,

and the things they remembered. As a byproduct, it demonstrates ways in which artifacts or kept things can complement archives and even serve as archives and historical work. Projects like the research on Ashley Sack and indeed the reaction to Ashley Sack show how attending to material things yields rewards for us. It helps us to understand the past and to feel closer to one another in the present. I'm going to take a few minutes now to share responses to the book that I was quite moved by and that taught me to think about the objects that are discussed in the book in different ways. One of those emails stood out, and you'll understand why in just a moment. So in my summary to you, I talked about how I write about hair being important because it carries DNA. And this caught the attention of a bioengineer at Stanford University who also did some of his own research in response to reading the book.

I'm going to read you part of his email. I found this just quite fascinating. He also says in his email that he read the book with his family, which is very touching. He said it's been a treasure to his family. And having just finished it, he wanted to share a scientific thought. He wondered, quote, what other important molecules might also be found in the hair? And came across cortisol. He talks about how, quote, cortisol is a primary hormone released under conditions of stress.

He says, in recent years, scientists have found that cortisol does make its way, and now he's quoting from a journal article, so this is a double quote here, to the growing hair follicle and is incorporated into hair where it remains unaltered. Since hair grows approximately one centimeter per month, it is claimed that three centimeters of hair would reflect cortisol levels to which the individual was exposed in the last three months, end of the journal article quote. He goes on to say, putting these thoughts together, I found it deeply moving to think that in giving her own hair, Rose was not only passing a record of their family and Ashley's identity through DNA, but also a molecular record of her own suffering going back over years, centimeter by centimeter,

and reaching an apex at the very root. The agony of having to be separated from her own dearly loved daughter. root, the agony of having to be separated from her own dearly loved daughter. The heartbreak of a mother was literally contained in that sack in addition to Rose's love always. Another email I received that really got me thinking in a new way was from someone who was focused on the description of the tattered dress on the sack, which I write about in the book as being a thin, worn, fragile dress. And this reader wrote me saying that reading the book got her to think about something she'd learned from her grandmother, who was born in 1903, which was that tatting was a reference to lace making, lace making for doilies and for collars. And she says, quote, some people refer to cloth with tatting added as tatted, which is also the

past tense of tatting or tattered, meaning tatting has been added to the cloth. I just thought it may be possible that the quote tattered dress may have been a dress made with tatting added as a collar or a cuff. So I thought this was just wonderful. I can tell you think so too. It was incredible. Just a whole other way of thinking about this dress. And she ended saying, thank you for the wonderful book. It brings to mind my mother and grandmother. And being a mother myself, I know the strong love mothers have for their children. I don't think there's anything stronger in the universe. I also wanted to share with you some of the projects that have been created as a result of people engaging with Ashley Sack. One of those is, for example, in Cleveland, Ohio, a library invited people to come and discuss the book while sewing, knitting, and crocheting.

And I was so touched by the idea that people from different neighborhoods were actually creating them raised together and making their city a little bit more intimate by coming to talk about the book. There was a multiracial cultural group in North Carolina that read the book together over a long period of time, over many months. And during that time, they were all individually working on their own craft projects, and they came together at the end to show what it was they had made. When I gave a talk in their state, they came out in force, you know, from different towns, and it was just incredible. I have heard from various creators who are doing all kinds of things I wish I could keep up. And I wanted to show you this. This is an embroidered line from Ashley's sack that the artist sewed onto a vintage sugar sack. And I don't know if she intended this, but that sugar sack brings with it a whole additional universe of connotations related to slavery,

just as the cotton sack did in a different location. Because, of course, sugar was the product or drug that drove the rapid deforestation and the plantation slaving development of Barbados, which was the feeder island to Charleston, South Carolina, which is the background setting for all that she carried. This artist has an idea which is very ambitious. I love it. I don't know if it's possible that she can pull this off. But her idea is to gather needle artists from various locations

and to ask them to reproduce the language that Ruth Middleton sewed onto the sack on some kind of huge textile and hang it on the side of a building. Her first hope was to do this before the upcoming U.S. presidential election and the hope to send a message to people that we should perhaps focus a little more on love. that we should perhaps focus a little more on love. The journey of researching and writing this book also connected me more closely to my own family members. Some of you may know that I write briefly about my great aunt's quilt in the introduction to the book.

And what you don't know is that during my trip to Montreal for the Kundal Prize ceremony, I packed my grandmother's purse with me. I'm going to show it to you. This bag is one of the fanciest things that my grandmother owned. It's a small black bag with a gold-colored chain. and on the front there's an image of a Victorian or Edwardian era woman swinging in a big flouncy pink dress. And I'd never carried this bag before because I felt like I couldn't really carry it off. I didn't quite feel like me. I don't know how I'm doing tonight with it. But I did have it in

my hotel room that night of the Kundal Prize ceremony. And it turned out that I won. Spoiler alert, right? And someone at my table had actually made this origami swan and given it to me. It's the program from that night. I know. So I came back to the hotel room and pulled out my grandmother's purse. And I was tucking this inside.

And while I was tucking this inside, I found in one of the pockets that's really small and flush against the purse, this. And I'm holding up a little green piece of cardboard. This is a ticket to a 1963 high school graduation. I know. Treasure, treasure. So I called my mom and said, what is this? He graduated in 63. And so she said, I'm going to call the aunts and uncles. And it turned out that this was the graduation ticket for my mother's big sister, who was also my godmother. And my grandmother clearly cherished this event. My grandmother grew up in a sharecropping family in Mississippi. She never made it past grade school, and she always regretted that she couldn't properly write. She would sometimes apologize to me because she was embarrassed about

the appearance of the letters that she would send to me. My grandmother always hoped that her own children and grandchildren would finish school and even be able to go to college. And her dreams and two pieces of the evidence of their realization now co-mingle in this vintage bag. One day, perhaps generations from now, whoever inherits the purse from me may find these tokens of memory inside, consider our family history, and make their own meanings in the light of reflection. Old things are not only sources of historical knowledge, but also devices that gather memories, but also devices that gather memories, painful as well as precious,

holding them across generations for current and future caretakers. They serve as our connectors to people and places of the past and to one another in the present. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. U.S. Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus, and being I'm losing my vision has been hard,

but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. After Taya delivered her talk about all that she carried,

the audience all stood up and gave her a standing ovation for nearly a minute. And as the enraptured audience was still clapping, Taya walked across the stage to where I was sitting, and a couple times did the please sit down gesture. I was riveted by how deftly she took us from the historical to the personal at the end of her lecture. I've rarely been so moved in all my time hosting this program. all my time hosting this program. I have to compose myself. I don't know how you're feeling. Thank you for just a wonderful presentation. Thanks, Nala. It's been extraordinary watching you go through all of this and the journey since we last met. After Taya won, after you won the

prize, we were there. We actually had an interview. You were in a Boston studio. I was in Toronto. And I have to say that the interview was the highlight of our broadcast here. I want to play actually a clip from that interview. And the great thing about this evening is that we're getting Taya about two different topics, or two different books. So the book that we've just heard about, but also her most recent book. But I want to play a clip from our interview that we did. Taya had been talking about Rose's bravery, as she mentioned in her presentation, and her foresight that when she

realized that her daughter was being taken away from her, that she became a kind of an emergency responder. Those are the words that Taya used in our interview. And that led to another point of how Taya wove all these kind of historical threads together into a portrait of all of the three lives of Rose, Ashley, and Ruth Middleton. I have it on pretty good authority that Taya doesn't normally listen to interviews that she does with people like me. So I hope you enjoy this. But we're going to play a little bit of this particular one because the clip really captures a few things, but most importantly, this magical moment where Taya pulls back the curtain on her intellectual and her ethical evolution and how she approaches history.

Taya, we've talked about Rose, Ashley, and Ruth and how their gestures were acts of resistance and resilience. And as you say, as an emergency responder, you yourself reject the notion of telling history through the experience of slave owners themselves or them alone. So let me ask you this, is all that she carried, your book, itself, an act of resistance? You might say that. And what you just noticed about the way the book is written is the slave holders, the people who held Rose and Ashley as their property, are not central to what I write about or to what I speak about. You probably noticed that I worked to not say their names in our conversation. It's hard to miss that. I didn't used to write histories of enslavement in this way. It took me several books, and really probably this book,

to really confront not just the fact that the records are completely slanted toward the record keepers who were the enslavers, but also that we were in many ways reproducing those power relationships by allowing those records to be the center of our stories. You have this term liberation theology. Is your book a kind of liberation history? Oh my goodness, Mama, I love you. Well, you know what? I love you too. You don't have to say that. That sounds great. I mean, you wouldn't, okay. In a few years, maybe, perhaps, if things go well,

if my next book comes out, you will see how prescient your statement was, your question was. Oh my goodness. I would hesitate to attach that label to my work because it's quite a grand idea. And I'm not sure how much any one method can do or any one book or any one discipline can even do to move us toward real liberation and all the meanings that that word might hold. But I do think we have to try. I've never said I love you on the air to anyone,

just so you know. Neither have I. It may be the last time. The biggest point of the clip, aside from demonstrating Taya's deep thinking over this topic, is to, you heard her say, my next book, and that's exactly what we're going to talk about right now. And the name of the book, in case you are not aware, is Wild Girls, How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation. It's a remarkable work, another remarkable work, and it connects the historical to the personal and the past to the present. It's a living thread that ties the women, again, featured in it together. So I'd like to

start, if I may, with you, Taya, because the very first wild girl in the book is actually you. So you start wild girls describing your own childhood, growing up near the Ohio River. And you start with the scene where you're with your father heading towards the river. And it is frozen over, a rare event these days. And you are embarking on this journey you've never made before. And I wonder if you could take us to that moment and just talk about what it was you were thinking as you were about to cross that river. You know, I feel like I want to enter this question in a different place than you're taking us here, Nala. Because this happened in the 70s. And I recently came across some articles that said, old timers still remember when the Ohio River froze over.

Like, okay, that's me. I'm an old timer now. That means both of us are. I suppose so. now. That means both of us are. I suppose so. It's strange to realize that your memories are now part of oral history. But I was around eight years old, and the high river did freeze in this winter, which was incredibly cold. It froze for many days. And my father, who is quite a risk taker, quite an adventurous person, decided he was going to take me and my little sister out to walk in the Ohio River. And yes, exactly. I mean, I don't really know how he got away with this, except that I have to believe he didn't tell a single woman in our family that they would never have allowed this.

But he took my little sister and me out to the Ohio River and we walked pretty far out to the river. It was terrifying and exhilarating and incredible. We could see Kentucky. Kentucky was just right there. It's just like right there. You literally walked on water. We walked on water. And it was such a moment in my life around not only feeling a sense of kinship with the river, which actually held us, but also feeling a sense of embodied power, the ability to move and to act in a larger environmental context. How much later after that, what sounds like an extraordinary moment, did you realize the ice bridge nature of that river, the possibility of where it could take you to? Much, much later. I was in college when I first started to really understand the geographical and political import of the Ohio River, which was the border between the U.S. North and South, the border

between so-called slave states and free states. Many people were desperate to cross that river to get to freedom. And in fact, some of my father's enslaved ancestors were from Kentucky. I didn't know all this until I was in college and reading Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, that she centers around a family that had escaped. So how do you think of the Ohio River now? I mean, the language, I mean, this book, if you've read all that she carried, you'll understand that the beauty of this book isn't just in the story, but in the writing itself. And you describe it so beautifully, just what that river and crossing that river represents. Could you talk about that?

Where it resides in your mind as a piece of the nature that we live in? When I went back and reflected on the river through these multiple lenses after learning about history and reading Toni Morrison's tour de force novel, Beloved, about that location, and also in the context of thinking about our present as a living entity that is a partner or that wants to partner. And I thought of it as wanting to partner in many ways. I did some research on the Ohio River and realized that it actually doesn't go to an ocean. It depends on the Mississippi to get to an ocean. So I think about it as needing a sister river to actually meet its goal and to continue its course. And I think about the High River as a friend, an ally to people who were tending to escape slavery in the 19th century, some of whom waited and watched for the time when the river was going to freeze, and then knew how to get to the bank, knew how they were going to cross over.

And some of them did actually make it to freedom by depending upon this ice bridge, as they called it. So when you think about that history that's intertwined with the quest for liberty, what story comes to mind immediately? The Margaret Garner story, which is a story that inspired Toni Morrison to write Beloved. You may remember that Toni Morrison was an editor, and she was putting together a book about African American history, pulling together all the different kinds of historical events, facts, and details. And she came across the story of Margaret Garner, who was a young enslaved woman in Kentucky who was having multiple children. All evidence suggests that her children were fathered by both her owner and also by a young black man whom she loved and wanted to marry. Margaret Garner attempted to escape when she was pregnant with her fifth child,

and she and her partner, Robert Garner, did escape with their children and also his parents. They escaped across the frozen Ohio River, but by the time they got to what they thought was a safe house on the other side, the person who owned Margaret had come with a posse ready to recapture her and to recapture her children, some of whom were his children. when the historical figure, the real person, Margaret Garner, started to attack her children. She started to kill her children, saying she'd rather see them dead than sent back to slavery. There's a whole trial that then ensued, and the question at the heart of the trial was, was Margaret Garner a person, and therefore she would be guilty of murder, or was she property, in which case she would be remanded back to the hands of her owner, and the court decided that she was property, so she went back into the hands of her owner, who then sold her into the deep South.

who then sold her into the deep south. The range of personalities in the book is astounding and the experiences are bound together because of nature but are really quite varied. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Harriet Tubman and talk about what she kind of saw as what you describe as ecological consciousness. How is it that she had, as you describe, ecological consciousness? Well, some of that idea comes out in the story of the Garner family as well, and other people, people who were paying attention to the river and how it flowed and how it responded to temperature changes. That is an example of ecological consciousness, and the way that I write about it is an example of ecological consciousness in the way that I write about it. It's an awareness of what's going on in the physical world around these individuals and their families.

And Harriet Tubman had a very fine-tuned awareness of her environmental surround. She had to, in large part because when she was a very small girl, around the age of six, in large part because when she was a very small girl, around the age of six, her owner leased her out to another family who put her to work outside. And Harriet Tubman's job was to collect the dead bodies of the muskrats from the traps that the person who was renting her was setting. And she would do this without shoes, without any kind of proper clothing to keep her covered, to keep her dry, to keep her warm. And she got terribly ill from this kind of work. She was then sent back to her mother, who nursed her back to health. And then the person who owned

her just sent her out again, leased her out again, and she was constantly being leased out into situations where people were having her work outside. She learned about all the different features of the outdoors through these experiences, and she eventually was able to put that education, that knowledge, to use when she finally escaped and helped her brothers to escape and then returned to Maryland around 12 times to help approximately 70 people escape from slavery. And her knowledge wasn't just rooted on the ground and what was immediately available, but also Levi looking up. Yes.

The chapter in Wild Girls where I talk about Harriet Tubman is one in which I'm also thinking about the sky and what the sky held and what the sky meant for many girls across different racial backgrounds, enslaved girls and free girls. And there are examples where they are imagining the sky as a place of relief, a place of dreaming, a place of freedom. Harriet Tubman dreamt about herself being a bird flying across. It's a really wonderful section of her biography. It was an as-told-to biography. So she was talking to the person who wrote it down. And she imagines herself flying over Maryland

as the landscape changes, over waterways, and then coming to this border, this barrier, where she would then kind of plummet into what she calls the pit. And of course, that was slavery. She talks about slavery being a pit like hell. The one that really, the story that you told that really struck me, in terms of how the sky and the stars play a role in liberation or the attempt at liberation, is the story of the meteor shower in 1833.

And specifically the story of Amanda Young. You wrote that it revealed to her and other enslaved people at the time watching this meteor shower. And even to the enslavers themselves that, quote, there were limits to mastery. The meteor shower is a wonderful example of this. And there are many others in nature of the ways in which heathen beings walking this earth do not control everything that happens on it. It's the weather and it's the climate. It's these natural forces, it's the realities of physics that make this apparent to enslaved people like Amanda Young.

And Amanda Young's story is that she and her family were enslaved during what's now known as the 1833 Leonid meteor storm. And this was an incredibly dramatic moment where people across the U.S. saw what looked like hundreds of thousands of stars just plummeting to the ground. People were just amazed. There are all kinds of reports and drawings of this event. And enslaved people, of course, noticed this too

and told stories about it too, mostly in an oral form. Amanda Young talks about how when the stars were falling, enslaved people were running out of their cabins, alarmed and amazed and in awe. And so were the enslavers. So were the people who lived in the big house who owned them. They were running out of their house in awe and afraid. And she talks about how the people who owned her family were so terrified. They thought it was judgment day. And they started just admitting and confessing who they had sold and where they had sold those people to.

Again, so many different stories. I'm curious about Sacagawea. She, of course, was the Shoshone woman who was instrumental in the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 that, and I'm using big air quotes here, opened up the West, which, of course, meant endless suffering and catastrophes for Indigenous people. Can you talk about how you considered her a wild girl? Well, the premise of this book is that girls who spent meaningful time in the outdoors

during their growing up years many times ended up becoming people who were willing to interpret society and politics in a different kind of way, that they had in their young years pushed against the boundaries of societal expectations by being outdoors, and that they later applied that to other situations. Saika Dhuwe is one of the most famous Native American figures in U.S. history, and oftentimes, unfortunately, she is romanticized as a so-called, quote, quote, quote, quote, okay, huge quotation marks, y'all, Indian princess figure. She is viewed as someone who welcomed white explorers into the U.S. West and through her act of supposedly welcoming them, opened up the West and gifted the land to the American nation. The story is more complex than that.

And I write in the book about how Sacagawea, who was a Shoshone girl, was herself kidnapped as a young girl. And she was held as what was described as a wife by a French-Canadian man. And he was then paid by Lewis and Clark to help guide them along the Missouri River and across the U.S. West during this expedition that Thomas Jefferson had asked them to do. Jefferson had asked them to do. But of course, Charbonneau, Sacchauea's quote, quote, quote, so-called husband, who had actually acquired her through some kind of trade or purchase, didn't actually know the terrain of the West. It was Sacchauea who knew the West, And she had a brother who was a leader in her nation named Kmeowet, who also knew the West, who had a lot of influence and had a lot of horses. She runs into him. She does. And he helped to make it possible for the expedition to continue moving all the way to the West Coast.

So the discussion of Sacajawea is one that is, I hope, complex and nuanced. I want to talk about the way in which she was a girl whose life was very much shaped by her deep knowledge of the outdoors. And she was a girl and a young woman who embraced the outdoors and loved aspects of the outdoors. She loved collecting plants. She knew how to use plants for medicines, for food, and so on. And yet that knowledge was used against her ultimately and against her people ultimately because it helped to pave the way for U.S. expansion and colonization of the West. I want to just push the idea forward that you've written in this book to the future. So you say in your introduction that this is a book that isn't simply historical

and that these ideas are with us now, like with Afrofuturist writer Octavia Butler. So I'm wondering what the most compelling example is for you of her relationship with nature and emancipation. Every question you ask has a conversation on its own. Yes, there's so much that we could say about Octavia Butler and her work and about the way this book is future-oriented. I think I would want you all to know that this is a book that I wrote during the height of the COVID pandemic, and it's one that was very influenced by my experience of, well,

being isolated with my dearly loved three children, my dearly loved spouse, and I dearly love two cats and dog. And feeling like the outdoors were our only real outlet or only real way to, I don't know, release some of that pressure that was building up in the household. I came to really cherish the outdoors right outside our own front door in a way that I hadn't before. And I really realized something that should have been obvious to me from the very beginning, which was that we had a home that we sort of own. I mean, the bank owns most of it, but on paper we own it, right? We have a yard. And many families didn't have the ability to get outside. They were cooped up inside. Because where we lived, the parks were actually closed and the

playgrounds were closed. There weren't really places for people to go. And so that was the genesis of this book, realizing just how precious outside was. And from there, I started to think about these historical figures and what outside might have meant for them. The way the future comes into this is the COVID-19 pandemic was a terrible moment. We know that COVID is still circulating. We are told that this is not the last pandemic we are going to see. And I think that we, many of us recognize that we are living in a moment of polycrisis. There are so many things that are going wrong in shocking ways. And Octavia Butler, who was an African-American science fiction writer who passed away in the early 2000s, is someone who wrote about the future, which is actually our present, in a way that names these many challenges that we are

now facing. So I talk about her toward the end of the book as a way to think about how outdoor understanding and time spent outdoors can help us to think about the challenges of the future and maybe help us to cope with them. But this isn't something you only write about. This is something you obviously care about very deeply. And you yourself founded an organization called Eco Girls in Michigan in 2011. I wonder if you could talk about the moment at which you decided, I must do this.

Well, if you would ask me many years ago if I was an outdoorsy kind of person, I would say, no. And my family didn't camp. I didn't know how to pitch a tent or anything like that. What I did do was I spent time outside with my grandmother in her garden, which I loved. I walked the streets of our neighborhood going into abandoned buildings,

which I also loved, another not-so-safe thing that mothers and grandmothers didn't know about. And over time, I came to recognize that that was actually outdoor exploration. That was outdoor experience. And one thing that I really wanted to do was to help young girls who are also living in urban environments to recognize that the out of doors, outside, was their home. It was their home. It was their place.

It was a place that they had a right to know, that they had a right to be in and move in and to feel confident in. And this coincided with an environmental justice tour that I was able to participate in in Detroit, where we got a chance to see a number of very frightening environmental realities in that city. And I was living near there at the time, and I just wanted to try to make a contribution. And so I started this organization, which was intended to bring girls into the outdoors right there in our local cities, and also in the northern part of Michigan, which is much less developed and quite beautiful with the lakes and dunes.

So what does that practically look like? What does success look like if EcoGirls does what it's supposed to do? Well, I will say, and this is rather sad, that I changed institutions, and EcoGirls closed when I left the University of Michigan. We did try to create what we called a seed bank of ideas. So we have our website still up and everything that we did is up on the website, including the steps that we took to accomplish those things. If anybody would like to try to do some of these things as well. But my hope for EcoGirls was that the girls in the program would feel a sense of the realness, the authenticity of their own selves,

their whole selves, their minds, their bodies, their feelings in nature, and that they would claim those outdoor spaces and those environments as their own so that they could live fuller lives, but also become stewards or caretakers of those places in the future. You are a mother of twin girls. How do you advise them to live in that way? Well, our daughters were in eco girls, and I would sometimes have to drag them to the events. We had after-school events, we had weekend events, we had summer camp. But now it's really wonderful to see the ways in which they're choosing to live their lives in college. So I mean, I promise,

I promise you that I did not orchestrate this. I did not push this. But one of her daughters has decided to major in environmental studies. Yeah, she says that she wants to actually have a ranch and rescue animals. And another one of our daughters, whenever she feels overwhelmed or stressed, she just goes outside. We spend a lot of time in Montana, and I remember just one moment when she was feeling like things were just too much, and she just went outside.

She disappeared into a field until, I mean, I couldn't see her anymore. My instinct as a mother was, where is she? But my instinct as somebody who had been a girl who loved the outdoors was, let her be. And it turns out she just went out into that high, high grass, and she just lay on her back and looked up at the sky. Beautiful. Taya, you are a gift to all of us.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Thank you. Good night. You were listening to Taya Miles, the 2022 Kundal History Prize winner for her book, All That She Carried.

Her latest book is entitled Wild Girls, How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly. It was recorded in front of a live audience in Montreal. Special thanks to Lisa Shapiro, Cynthia Cooper, Olivia Woodruff, and Keeley Rigdon. On-site technical production, Benoit Fredette, and for ideas, Danielle Duval. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed.