“You shouldn’t have to convince people to go to paradise,” 55-year-old Shelton Johnson says in the short documentary The Way Home: Returning to the National Parks. “But if I could go to paradise without dying, and see all that is there, sign me up,” he continued. “And Yosemite for many people is such a place.”
Shelton, of all people, would know. He has spent 30 years of his life working in the Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks—28 of them as a park ranger. Park rangers are essentially the park’s police officers—they’re the guys in the wide-brim hats and green or khaki security uniforms. But what I didn’t know is that many park rangers serve the park in several different capacities beyond law enforcement.
“Rangers are also safeguarding the park,” Shelton explained to me. “So, many park rangers are also firefighters; some park rangers are skilled at search and rescue; some park rangers are skilled with technical rescues on mountain peaks; or, like here in Yosemite Valley, with some of the highest cliffs in the world, they are skilled mountain climbers or rock climbers.”
When Shelton worked at Yellowstone, he was a firefighter and worked the biggest firefighting effort in U.S. history. Today Shelton is an “interpretive ranger,” a fancy term for the rangers who tell the “park’s various stories.” He’s well-versed in the park’s geological, plant life, wildlife and cultural histories. So one day he’s talking to visitors about a particular kind of rock or what kind of birdlife inhabits the mountains. On another, he’s giving a spirited lecture about the region’s bears.
But one of the stories that Shelton is most interested in sharing is the role that African Americans have played in protecting our national parks, and how that history should encourage African Americans to return to their roots by engaging with Mother Earth once again.
Shelton is talking about the buffalo soldiers. Bob Marley’s dreadlock rastas. They were a group of African-American soldiers in the U.S. Army who fought in several of the American Indian wars in the latter part of the 19th century. According to Shelton, they got their nickname from American Indians who said that their hair was just like the matted cushion between the horns of a buffalo. One of the buffalo soldiers’ duties was to protect the Yosemite and Sequoia national parks.
“They were protecting the national park,” Shelton explained, “and so what that basically means is that African Americans were the official caretakers of some of the most beautiful landscapes in the United States before the National Park Service was even created.”
“They were rangers before the ‘park ranger’ term was even coined,” he said, going on to lament how that significance is lost among black Americans today. “We haven’t internalized that contribution and that heritage.”
There’s that connection between African Americans and the country’s national parks, but a far more compelling approach toward getting black people to reacclimate themselves to the outdoors is perhaps the one that stretches back a few more centuries to slavery. Listening to Shelton articulate how black Americans were systematically distanced from their relationship with the earth, the soil, trees and wildlife is compelling and spans black American history.
During slavery, the wilderness symbolized freedom because that was where slaves took refuge when they wanted to escape the brutalities of the plantation. One reason Johnson believes that black slaves were fond of the outdoors is that it was uncharted territory that put everyone on an equal footing with regard to who was brave enough to enter into its midst.
And then slavery was abolished and black people—for the most part—gradually became enfranchised and were able to own property and build towns. But that progress attracted scorn from whites, in part because black Americans were now economic competitors. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan emerged and were threatened by a burgeoning black middle class. At that point, the home was the black man’s safe haven, and the woods represented terror.
“They’re taking black people out of their homes, dragging them into the woods and lynching them,” Shelton explained, and so “the woods took on this negative connotation post-Reconstruction.”
And the way that African Americans interface with the outdoors persists to this day. Lots of black folks are outdoor sportsmen, hikers or gardeners, but there’s still the (sometimes true) stereotype that we’re averse to camping. For most Americans, any modern-day reluctance to camp out is probably not that complicated. On the surface, it likely has more to do with the inconveniences of not being able to take a shower or enjoy indoor amenities like heat and air conditioning. And then there are survival concerns, like not knowing how to start a fire or not knowing how to swim—a biggie among black Americans.
But I wonder if it goes just a step further when it comes to African Americans and America’s standard of beauty. I think African Americans can be more sensitive, at times, about our appearance because—let’s be honest—it’s hard to perform certain beauty routines in the woods.
Regardless of the reason, the fact that black Americans spend less time these days out in nature breaks Shelton’s heart because, he says, he’s acutely aware of the intimate relationship that our ancestors, sub-Saharan Africans, had with the earth.
“We descend from people who had that connection—that visceral, emotional, physical, spiritual connection to the earth,” he says in The Way Home.
“What is hardly ever brought up is how, over time, over 500 years, that incredible, intimate connection to nature, to wilderness, was incrementally whittled away and broken down to the point where African Americans are now the one group least likely to have a wilderness experience, least likely to have an experience in the natural world,” he continues.
He’s right, and he’s been on a well-documented mission to reverse this. Shelton created and starred in a one-man show titled Yosemite: Through the Eyes of a Buffalo Soldier that chronicles the history of the buffalo soldiers for park visitors. That show eventually attracted the attention of a filmmaker who created a short documentary inspired by Shelton’s performance.
This ancestral affinity for Mother Earth is something that I personally experienced. A couple of months ago in Ghana, I was in awe as I watched my mother walk around her compound—after having not been there for a year—to take stock of all the new plant life that had sprouted. Many of the plants had not even begun to bear fruit, but she was able to see that this plant would bear tomatoes, that one corn pepper and another avocado.
“Ooh, look, Diana, this is okra,” she exclaimed as she walked up to some leaves, turned the plant on its side and plucked an okra from the stem.
“That’s mango, and that will soon produce oranges,” she told me. When I asked her how all of those plants came to be in her yard, she shrugged her shoulders and said that Yaow, her house overseer, may have been eating a mango at some point and then had thrown the core on the soil. That her garden had enough nutritive properties to envelop and then transform a few seeds—seeds that had not been intentionally planted—into a massive fruit-bearing plant fascinated me.
Shelton explained that what I witnessed with my mother was called ethnobotany—a relationship between plants and culture.
A return to that heightened sense of awareness of the earth is the “final act of the civil rights movement,” Shelton argues. “If Martin Luther King were alive today,” he says in The Way Home, “he would be first … to say, we as a people need to go to Yellowstone. We need to go to the Grand Canyon. If this is America’s best idea and we played a role in its creation, how dare we not choose that for ourselves?”
It made me think again of being with my mother in her garden.
“Mommy, what’s that?” I asked her, pointing to some leaves.
“Oh, they use that for medicine,” she responded.
I think Shelton’s on to something. The earth is healing.
For more on African Americans embracing the outdoors, check out these links:
Yes, We Camp, and if You Don’t, Here’s What You’re Missing
By Tent, Trailer or an RV: Some of the Best Places to Camp
Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele is a staff writer at The Root and the founder and executive producer of Lectures to Beats, a Web series that features expert advice for TV and film’s most complex characters. Follow Lectures to Beats on Facebook and Twitter.