Black Montana by Anthony W. Wood

Author:Anthony W. Wood [Wood, Anthony W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036140 History / United States / State & Local / West (ak, Ca, Co, Hi, Id, Mt, Nv, Ut, Wy)
Publisher: Nebraska

Such lines hearken back to the language of liberty employed by Du Bois, realizing his hope that African Americans might convene with Nature, “thinking, dreaming, and working in a kingdom of beauty and love.”71

Rose Gordon’s writings, as well as her brother’s bestselling autobiography, contain numerous references to wild spaces of Montana and Gordon’s home in the Smith River Valley.72 One such passage speaks to the complexity with which one should view her Nature experience. At the beginning of her life story, Gordon writes, “I had always thought of it [the Smith River Valley] as God’s garden.”73 Although one of only a few Black residents of White Sulphur Springs, Gordon was by no means isolated from her ethnic community or insulated from the prevailing racism. Juxtaposed to the challenges of the human world, Nature represented a promise of equality; her closeness to Nature became a means to experience that promise. By rendering her natural world as “God’s garden,” Rose Gordon’s words elevated it to the sublime of edenic creation. Her writings qualify Stoll’s assertion that while “the dominant metaphor [for African Americans in Nature] has been Moses in the wilderness, not Adam in the garden,” it is not the exclusive metaphor.74

The purpose of including this fragment of Black Nature writing in Montana is not an attempt to disprove Stoll’s thesis, as such an incomplete archive could hardly do. Indeed, placing contemporary scholarly discourses about race and the environment alongside a (seemingly) far-removed history of Black naturalism, as I have done here, risks distorting the original context of the scholarly argument. But that dislocation is precisely the point. On what grounds have some scholars segregated such histories or ranked the importance of one racialized engagement with Nature over another? Against such occluding inclinations, the writings of Rose Gordon and the lives of Black Montanans unearth a shared cultural and social meaning that formed around Nature and wilderness by the early twentieth century.75 They augment the accounts of the Black wilderness experience in such a way that forces historians to not only reconsider Black participation and contributions, but that also encourages us to ponder their omission from the state and national discourse on conservation—a movement that in part grew from the very same cultural soil.

The rich history of Montana’s Black community throughout the early conservation movement is one of culturally rooted engagement. It suggests that Black Montanans’ exclusion from a state-wide movement headed by men such as Myron Carpenter and Sherlin Stillman Berry is more acutely synthesized as one that intentionally ignored the ongoing Black presence in the landscape. In doing so, white settlers promulgated the prevailing national discourse that African Americans remained disengaged from the outdoors in any real sense. In Montana the occlusion of Black history from a central social unifier in settler states, the collective ownership of land, continued a project of colonial erosion.

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