Every couple of years I take students on an extended academic road trip around the American West, the "Westminster Expedition." Much of our lives together center on evening conversations around the campfire. The fire keeps us warm on cold nights, focuses our thoughts and energy, and creates a space of light for us to maintain and build our community. I like to think that my research and creative work as a way of finding the material for the fire that holds our community together. Our collective research provides the material for our classes, sheds light on the world around us, and produces more conversations about how we engage with the injustice and pain associated with the Anthropocene. I’ve centered this work on finding and sharing stories, making connections and, like my teaching work, helping us imagine and create a better world.
In the fall of 2019, I gave a talk at a climate change teach in on campus. The first 3 speakers of the night painted a picture of rapid and traumatic change to our natural and social worlds. The Great Salt Lake, our snowpack and many of our social institutions are under a grave threat. We live in a scary world of change and fear. I began my talk by recounting the story of Chief Plenty Coup who faced his own devastation as it is told in Timothy Lear’s book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Plenty Coup’s people had been forced to give up their nomadic life following the bison herds. The herds were gone and his people had been forced onto a reservation. In the face of this genocide, the end of his world, Plenty Coup challenged his people to find a new poetry. I told the gathered students and community members of this challenge. “Plenty Coup refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. "I have not told you half of what happened when I was young," he said, when urged to go on. "I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere." Lear goes on to write that Plenty Coup took this moment as an indication that it was time to create a new world. He writes that the creation of a new world, a world in which something happened, would require a new poet. He writes "here I mean a poet in the broadest sense of a creative maker of meaningful space.”
Our policy-makers and many of our existing institutions have failed us. While policy change is necessary, it is now inadequate for the task at hand. Rather, like Plenty Coup, we needed new kinds of poetry, new ways of living and existing in the world, new “creative makers of meaningful space. I drew upon research with parkour practitioners in San Francisco that might offer a model for how to use play to build new relationships with each other and the world around us. Parkour may not change the world, but we can look to inclusive and revolutionary subcultures to practice new ways of living and building relationships. The firewood for change is there if we are prepared to learn from those who have already answered the call for a new poetry, a new way of living in the world.
Increasingly, my research and creative work has become about sharing stories. This can mean telling the stories of parkour practitioners in San Francisco, but perhaps this has manifested most immediately in the collaboration I’ve been honored to be a part of with Dr. Xiumei Pu and the project: “Mountains and Stories: Building Community Among Asian and Pacific Islander Refugee and Immigrant Families in Salt Lake Valley,” funded by a Whiting Foundation Community Engagement Seed Grant. For the last two years we’ve been gathering and sharing stories of Asians and Asian Americans in the Salt Lake Valley. We have recorded 12 conversations with storytellers and shared those stories on the Institute for Mountain Research’s podcast “Mountain Stories,” which I host and produce. I’ve been honored to use this platform to share the stories and experiences of people who have made the Salt Lake Valley their home. Episodes have ranged from a 12 year old retelling stories about China that his dad has told him, to people discussing their lives as refugees and how they have found a new home here in the mountains.
This research might mean photography and video projects grounded in exploring our place in the world that surrounds us, whether that is on adventures in "Nature" or more quiet moments in the places that mean things to us.
The heart of this story telling is rooted a set of questions around meaning. What does the natural world mean to us, what can we mean to each other. Why does it matter in the face of grief, loss, pain, and ultimately, hope?