In this session, Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, will discuss these stories and how they can help contemporary Bostonians, and others, recognize that what makes a place wild is not the absence of humans but the presence of ancestors.
Two hundred years ago, the residents of metropolitan Boston faced a climate crisis. White settlers had destroyed the region’s pine forests, triggering dangerous disruptions to both water and carbon cycles. Activists responded by creating forest parks on previously disrupted landscapes. But many of these activists were themselves descended from the settlers who had caused the harm they sought to heal. In imperfect yet instructive ways, they blended ecological care with new forms of ancestral devotion. Gradually they learned what indigenous communities had long known: that care for the more-than-human world is inseparable from care for our ancestors.
This is the second event in a six-part series about religion in times of earth crisis moderated by Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life. This event took place February 5, 2024.
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Religion in times of Earth crisis. Ancestors and climate in our Boston backyard. February 5, 2024.
DIANE MOORE: Hello, everyone, and welcome to religion in times of Earth crisis, our six-part faculty webinar series sponsored here at Religion and Public Life with our colleagues at the Salata Institute for Climate Sustainability at Harvard University, the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School, the Constellation Project and Harvard X.
I am Diane Moore and I am the Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life. And on behalf of myself and my colleagues and our Dean Marla Frederick, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the second in this series of six conversations. Before I speak more about our evening's activities, I want to acknowledge the land and the people so please join me in this land acknowledgment.
Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.
This series was originally conceived to build upon the incredibly important and impressive work of our colleague Mayra Rivera who opened our series last week with a first in our dialogue with an expansion if you will, of her American Academy of religion 2022 presidential address.
And tonight, we are honored to have another colleague Dan McKanan who will present his work in this arena. But before I introduce Dan, I want to say a little bit about our vision for the series itself. I'm going to use two quotes that I started and shared last week.
The first quote is from Mayra Rivera, Professor Rivera's American Academy of religion address, presidential address and the second is from Amitav Ghosh. First from Mayra Rivera. We need a more capacious sense of collectivity that can only emerge when we are willing to honor our stories and tell the truth about injustices that have shaped both environmental devastation and responses to it. A world of our many worlds.
And from Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse. This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories. To us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to non-human.
As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political. And because of the magnitude of the crisis that Behcet's the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency. Again, Amitav Ghosh from The Nutmeg's Curse.
I also want to just say that these webinars look pretty simple. We all feel like we are very well versed in Zoom and since COVID times, I think all of us have had many, many experiences with Zoom and it seems like it is a simple operation.
But in fact, these webinars take a village. And I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the many colleagues who have helped make this possible. For our colleagues at Religion and Public Life, Rachelle Swe, Reem Atassi, Tammy Liaw, Natalie Campbell.
From our office of communications, our whole team to help get out the word but especially Kristy Welch for her extraordinary artistic representations in the posters that accompany this series and from the amazing Kama Lord, our friend and colleague in our IT department to make sure that all runs smoothly. So thank you all and please join me in thanking them.
So I also want to say that this event is being recorded and the recording will be available on our website in the coming days. Professor McKanan will speak for 45 to 50 minutes and then we'll engage with questions from the audience Q&A questions from the audience and we will end promptly at 7:30 so now I will turn to introducing my friend and colleague Dan McKanan.
Dan McKanan is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association senior lecturer in Divinity. He has been here with us at the Divinity School since 2008. He studies religious and spiritual movements for social transformation in the United States and beyond with particular emphasis on environmental activism, intentional communities, and socialism.
Much of his research focuses on the Unitarian Universalist tradition and the anthroposophical movement. Tonight, Dan's presentation is entitled ancestors and climate in our Boston backyard. Dan, thank you again for being part of this important conversation and we anxiously await your comments. Thank you.
DAN MCKANAN: Thank you so much, Diane. Thank you to everybody in the Religion and Public Life team and thank you especially to my colleague Mayra Rivera for inspiring this series, for being such a strong leader both at Harvard and among scholars of religion around the world in really thinking deeply about the multiple stories of climate change, of environmental catastrophe, and the important role that religion has to play in shaping the human and more than human response to those challenges.
I have a standard task in lecture series at Harvard Divinity School, which is the task of offering the very local perspective on whatever the theme of the day might be. So what has the Earth crisis meant for Harvard, for Cambridge, and for Metropolitan Boston?
Since I'm a historian, I will answer that question by telling the story of the first Bostonians who realized that their actions had precipitated an Earth crisis and who sought to take remedial action. You might think this story would be set around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, but in fact, it begins more than a century earlier.
It is the story of the garden cemeteries and forest parks that were created in response to Boston's deforestation crisis in the 19th century. Now, I'm going to start my slideshow.
OK. If you've spent time in Cambridge, perhaps as a student at the Divinity School, you have perhaps ventured upstream to Mount Auburn Cemetery, the place where many of our Divinity School founders are buried.
Auburn inaugurated what is known as the Rural Cemetery Movement, which transformed the ways Americans thought about death and dying, but also led to vastly expanded opportunities for outdoor recreation.
And if you're a Bostonian who enjoys hiking, you may have explored the reign of rocky forested parks that circle Boston about 10 miles from downtown. Middlesex Fells to the north, Beaver Brook to the west, Stony Brook and the Blue Hills to the south.
These parks which together have about 12 times the acreage of New York's Central Park are in fact, the oldest state parks in the United States. They were created at the instigation of the first activist to warn that increasing atmospheric carbon was a threat to the human future.
They were also created about seven generations after the founding of Puritan Massachusetts because the descendants of the Puritans wanted to create a new kind of covenant with their own ancestors. And here's the central point I want you to take away from this talk. The Earth crisis that we're so aware of today is also always an ancestor crisis.
We cannot be in right relationship with the Earth and with all of our more than human neighbors, unless we are also in right relationship with our ancestors. For those of us like me whose ancestors were settler colonialists, this is a very complicated task indeed.
And this is probably a good point for me to stress that the stories I will be telling are all within the realm of critical whiteness studies, of looking at settler colonial ancestors and their piece in the many stories that Mayra Rivera talked about with the understanding that other sessions in this series will deal with very different communities.
It's not easy or comfortable to be in right relationship with ancestors who perpetrated atrocities. Settler colonialism is often understood as the juxtaposition of two forms of atrocity or in more religious language, of two cardinal sins.
On the one hand, there were the sins against Indigenous and African people who were violently torn from their ancestral lands and thus for many of the practices that had historically kept them tied to their ancestors. On the other hand, there were sins against the land itself, which was treated as a resource to be exploited rather than as a living being deserving of mutual relationship.
I believe that these two sins were made possible in part because settler colonialists especially settler colonialists in the Puritan tradition had first sinned against their own ancestors. They sinned against their ancestors in part simply by the act of voluntary migration, which made it impossible for them to visit their ancestor's graves and reflect.
Hurt by their theological repudiation of medieval Christian and pre-Christian practices of devotion to Saints and nature spirits. As a result, they bequeathed a dilemma to their descendants. How to honor ancestors who did not believe in honoring ancestors.
My thinking about the connection between sins against other people, sins against the land, and sins against ancestors is shaped by a recent trend in the scholarly subfield of religion and ecology. People studying many different cultures have discovered that some of the most biodiverse places on planet Earth are sacred groves. Places that are protected from economic exploitation because they are understood to be the residences of ancestors and divinities
But Western Christianity with its monotheistic theology has often been hostile to sacred groves. One of the influential early scholars of religion and ecology, Lynn White, famously argued that Christian antipathy to place-based devotion is at the root of the modern environmental crisis.
The pattern white observed is especially evident in the Americas in other places colonized by Europeans. Settler colonialists who had left their own ancestors behind often perceived the new world as utterly devoid of ancestors.
The colonialist doctrine of discovery, notions of unfettered individual property rights, and plantation monocultures tended by enslaved Africans torn from their own ancestors, all of these things flowed from the original breach of covenant with the ancestors brought about by settler colonialism.
Haraway has suggested that our current ecologically devastated age should not be called the Anthropocene but rather the plantationocene. Anthropocene implies that all people are somehow equally culpable. Plantationocene highlights that three different relationships between Europeans and nature, between Europeans and colonized peoples, and between Europeans and their own ancestors were violently disrupted at the same time.
Because these three relationships were broken together, it's not likely that any one of them can be mended without attending to the others. Many people realize that the human relationship with the Earth cannot be healed unless we also address the violence of settler colonialism and white supremacy. I'm simply adding that we add.
The Potawatomi biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer has pointedly asked whether American children of settlers and immigrants can learn to live here as if we were stained? We learned this best I think if we do so in concert with the ancestors.
This ancestral approach to conservation is also a way of addressing what historian William Cronon has called the trouble with wilderness. Noting the many entanglements between wilderness conservation, manifest destiny, white supremacy, and ethnic cleansing in the American West, Cronon has observed that wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. We allow ourselves to believe that nature to be true must also be wild then a very presence in nature represents its fall.
The alternative to this problematic wilderness ethic is to recognize ourselves as at home in nature. And thus, work to restore biodiversity in every landscape, especially in the ordinary landscapes where we live, work, and play.
So what would it look like for settler descendants to honor the land by honoring ancestors? We can find some clues in the stories of 19th century New Englanders. People who were alive at the founding of Harvard Divinity School. These New Englanders were the first generation of settler descended US citizens to have seven generations of ancestors in a single place.
The idea that seven generations have special ecological significance has been popularized by activists from the Haudenosaunee community. The Haudenosaunee also placed strong emphasis on the white pine, the dominant species in the Northeastern forests that spanned both Haudenosaunee territory and New England.
White pine live about seven human generations or 200 years. To think about our seventh generation ancestors is to think about people who might have been present when the tallest trees in our neighborhood first sprouted. To think about our seventh generation descendants is to imagine children who might see the trees we plant reach their full height.
19th century New Englanders were mindful of-- vacation of Sleepy Hallow Cemetery in 1855. He invited his fellow concordance to look forward to win these acorns that are falling at our feet. Our oaks overshadowing our children in a remote century.
Seven generations also marks a period of time that stretches just beyond the reach of human oral memory. If we're lucky, as children, we might hear our great grandparents tell stories about their great grandparents but we won't know anything concrete about seven generations back.
In the absence of specific knowledge, we may have a vague sense of their spirits inhabiting all of the landscapes they inhabited but only if we ourselves inhabit the same landscapes. This was the paradoxical situation of 19th century New Englanders. They were keenly and often proudly aware of their settler colonial origins but that awareness was linked to a growing sense of nativeness in the place
The Bostonians have 200 years ago were also the first generation of Americans to realize that their ancestors had disrupted the landscape in ways that might threaten the well-being of their descendants. The specific problem was deforestation. By 1831, virtually all of the pre-colonial force near Boston had been turned into residences, cropland, or pasture.
Without trees, Bostonians had few opportunities to reflect on the ancestors who might have planted a seed or touched a seedling. What's more, they were beginning to understand the ways trees can stabilize the climate by holding water. Much of the Mediterranean world had become desert after losing its trees and Bostonians feared the same might happen to their homeland.
The first that sound the alarm was the educator and citizen scientist George Barrell Emerson. He conducted a thorough survey of Massachusetts forests for the state government in 1846. Emerson cast the problem as one of intergenerational responsibility. He knew there were plenty of trees further west, but he wrote that it was still worthwhile to reforest Massachusetts because this is our native land.
It's painful to break the chain of affection, which connects us with it. It's painful to separate members of the same family. By preserving a healthy ecosystem, Emerson reasoned, Massachusetts could sustain a larger population and reduce the temptation for young people to migrate West.
Here we wish to live and to die and be surrounded by those who are most dear to us. All of these circumstances shaped the new practices of ancestral devotion that emerged in 19th century New England. 19th century Bostonians honored their ancestors first by creating rural cemeteries that incorporated trees and walking paths into burial grounds.
These in turn inspired the creation of larger biodiverse forest parks. Each of these practices addressed in ambiguous and imperfect ways the threefold breach of covenant with ancestors, nature, and other human communities.
The first act in the story was the creation of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge in 1831. Usually regarded as the first rural cemetery. Now, that's a bit of a misnomer. These are not cemeteries for rural communities but cemeteries planted on the edge of urban communities in settings intended to mimic the picturesque qualities of actual rural cemeteries.
In these settings, graves could be spread out more than in crowded city graveyards and they could be interspersed with trees and shrubs and walkways. Mount Auburn was created by the Massachusett Horticultural Society, an organization devoted to a scientific and sustainable approach to agriculture.
The society planted experimental gardens right next to the cemetery so they had a threefold vision. They wished to make death less frightening by connecting it with pleasant scenery, they wished to provide city dwellers with an accessible place to enjoy the outdoors, and they wished to foster the well-being of trees and other plants through scientific research.
When Mount Auburn was consecrated, Judge Joseph Story explained the founders motives in an address that invited Christians to emulate the ancestral rituals of their pagan predecessors. The strongest and most universal human feelings, according to Story, are the desire to die in the arms of our friends and repose in the land of our nativity.
Those feelings he thought were shared by the rude and the polished, the worshipper of the sun, and the worshipper of idols, the heathen dwelling in the darkness of his cold mythology, and the Christian rejoicing in the light of the true God.
Story observed that non-christians who supposedly lacked hope for life after death nevertheless strewed flowers and garlands and crowns around the grave. So why shouldn't Christians also make cheerful the pathways to the grave?
Why deposit the remains of our friends in loathsome vaults or measure out a narrow portion of Earth in the midst of our cities? Far better to honor the dead beneath the lofty oak and the drooping willow in a spot with thick shrubbery to protect and conceal the grave and the wildflower creeping along the narrow path. And planting its seeds in the upturned Earth.
OK. I have a little bit of a glitch here. But another perspective on this was provided in a kind of ironic way by a nature writer named Wilson Flagg who was commissioned to produce this volume that you see on Mount Auburn about a generation after it was created.
Flagg was a little bit ambivalent about his assignment. Because by the time he was writing, Mount Auburn had been kind of taken over by the wealthy people who could afford lots there. And instead of really honoring nature, they put fences around their lots, put up large monuments, did all kinds of things that ran counter to that original ideal of connecting our ancestors to the natural world.
So Flagg filled his volume with little essays that provided a perspective of what he thought the direction Mount Auburn really should have gone. In one of those essays, he explained that the reason people prefer burial under the protection of trees is that we wish to associate our own deaths and the deaths of our friends with memories of comfort.
He told a poignant story of meeting a grieving young woman sitting upon a knoll under a large Tupelo tree that spread its branches over the widening of a small stream in the valley. The woman explained that her sister had died three years before and she chose to remember her by revisiting the place where they had so often gathered wildflowers.
Flagg asked if the sister was buried nearby, the woman replied that she was not but that she had transplanted several of the valley's flowers to the cemetery. I think more of the flowers that spring up from the her grave, she told Flagg, then I should of the proudest monument that was ever carved out of marble.
For Flagg, this story epitomized the symbiotic relationship between love of nature and love of ancestors. When we walk through the grove, the hillside, the path by the river, we're reminded of incidents in our friends lives and thus the trees gain a sacredness.
When Flagg visited New England's older graveyards, he was continually impressed by nature's capacity to sanctify human memories. Flowers, he observed, spring up with a singular charm around the old graves, not because they've been deliberately planted but because many a pious mourner has bedewed them with tears.
Likewise, he went on, the trees in old graveyards have extended their roots into the dilapidated mounds and almost obliterated them. Lichens decorate the leaning headstones causing them to resemble the rocks of the solitary pastures while shrubbery has diffused itself in irregular masses among the graves.
By personifying nature's care for the forgotten dead, Flagg blended his own ancestral devotion with reverence for the spirits of more than human beings. He explicitly invoked the tradition of sacred groves suggesting that towns ought to protect their old graveyards as hallowed ground because the trees that stand there have formed a grove which ought to be as sacred as any that were in ancient days consecrated to philosophy.
I must confess that the image you see right now is not one of the New England graveyards that Flagg loved to visit. It's actually in Kentucky and it's the place where some of my wife's ancestors were buried. You can see that even though the shale gravestones have virtually melted into the landscape, their presence causes people to continue making the space sacred by marking it with flags.
In yet another essay, Wilson Flagg encouraged his readers to dispense with stone monuments entirely and plant memorial trees for their loved ones. A memorial tree he said, would awaken fresh memories of the dead each spring when it put forth its leaves. The thought of having a memorial tree would reassure people that after we are laid in the grave, we're still doing good to our fellow people since a tree is constantly performing a useful office for all living creatures.
Flagg hinted that memorial trees would bring human ancestors, non-human species, and angels into a single spiritual conversation. Trees, when thus consecrated, he said, might be regarded as the medium of constant messages from the dead to the living. Who might view in one of these trees the emblem of heaven.
Perhaps, Flagg mused, there would be a million such trees in a century's time and posterity would revere the custom that had saved so many from destruction.
Five years before publishing his book on Mount Auburn, Flagg offered the citizens of Boston another vision of how they might bequeath millions of trees to their descendants. In 1856, he prepared a proposal to state and city governments for the creation of a forest preserve.
Every city, he said, should purchase 1,000 acres or more of wooded land to be kept as a preserve and be used also as a place for the study of natural history and for summer recreation. Each forest park would be preserved from age to age.
Flagg was not the first Bostonian to have this idea. Nine years earlier, the abolitionist editor Elizur Wright, tucked a similar proposal into the pages of the Chronotype, a newspaper he edited on behalf of the Liberty party. In part, Wright's proposal was a reaction to the Rural Cemetery Movement.
The suburb of Roxbury not yet incorporated into Boston, had just announced the creation of what would become Forest Hills Cemetery. As a cash strapped activist who had already lost five children to disease, Wright was keenly aware that forest park would be-- forest hills would be too expensive for his family.
But why not he asked use the proceeds from elaborate funerals to create rural cemeteries for the poor as well as the rich? And why not, he went on, inquire some better provision cannot be made for the comfortable of the living in regard to rural enjoyment?
He observed that Boston Common was too small for the city's growing population, but that it would be easy to get a mile square park 5 to 10 miles from town and this is the time when the rail lines are just beginning to extend into what are now the suburbs.
Wright's proposal came in a significant moment in American radical history, a time when abolitionists and white labor activists were trying to make common cause. Wright was an ally of the New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith, who had inherited a fortune from his land speculating father.
Working class radicals criticized Smith for the hypocrisy of opposing slavery while he held a monopoly on farmland. Smith decided his critics were right and began distributing his land to small farmers both Black and white. He and Wright then called on the government to distribute federally held Western lands to urban workers in small parcels of about 160 acres.
This idea would eventually lead to the Homestead Act but what Smith and Wright had in mind was much more radical. The homesteads they proposed would have had restricted titles making them exempt from seizure to debt and they would only have been able to be sold to other landless farmers.
Wright envisioned that redistribute of federal lands in the Midwest to create dense neighborhoods of mutually cooperative homesteads with lands further west preserved for Indigenous communities. This was a rebuttal to the then common practice of acquiring as much land as possible working it to depletion and then moving further West.
And Wright's idea about city parks in Boston was shaped by his thinking about land redistribution. The common thread was the idea of a democratically managed public domain. By the 1840s, the federal government had a long standing tradition of stealing Indigenous lands and turning them over either to land speculators or using them for canals and public works that would benefit merchants and industrialists. Wright opposed all that and what did the government to act only for the public benefit expressed in parks and homesteads.
Wright initially assumed that the forest park would be among the large hills south of Boston, what is now Blue Hills Reservation. 20 years later and after burying more of his own children in a public cemetery, Wright had enough financial security to purchase his own little homestead on the base of Pine Hill in Medford.
Wright's land is now occupied by I-93 including the spot from which you can observe Wright's tower on top of Pine Hill. From this vantage, Wright discovered another ideal park location, the rocky outcroppings and scenic ponds that are now known as Middlesex Fells.
Around 1869, he launched a concerted campaign for a park there. This was a time when Boston's landscape was changing rapidly. Landfill had turned the Back Bay of the Charles River into a luxury neighborhood. As Bostonians began dreaming of what would become the Emerald necklace of parks, Wright pushed for something bigger and more in touch with nature.
What's wanted is not a local breathing hole, he wrote, but a park large enough to accommodate the much larger population of the future. It would need to build in line with the expansion of the trolleys and that park would become a museum for the study of every branch of Natural History as well as an attractive retreat into the domain of wild nature herself, he wrote.
Now, before a station of hilltops might be accelerated by bringing mud up from the nearby flats of the Mystic River. When it became clear that Bostonians were not inclined to tax themselves for parks beyond the city limits, Wright brainstormed other ways to regional parks.
He took that idea and built a movement of people to create them. And while he was building that movement, he met Wilson Flagg and the two old men decided to devote what years they had left to the cause of public parks.
They were a picturesque pair. One observer described Wright and Flagg and their friend John Owen as a weird council of old Greek wood gods, not yet convinced that Pan was dead. Their campaign's first success was a state law allowing municipalities to create their own forest parks, but that didn't work in Wright's own neighborhood where the ideal land was distributed among five different towns.
Fortunately, a new generation continued writing Flagg's work after their death. In the 1890s, they created both a nonprofit Trustees of Reservations and the governmental Metropolitan Park Commission. These two bodies were the template for all of the land trusts and all of the state parks that now enhance American landscapes from coast to coast.
Wright and Flagg's primary activist strategy was to appeal directly to their neighbors. Dozens of wealthy and not so wealthy people own the land they hope to turn into parks. Wright surmised that they would enjoy living next to a park. At the same time, Wright and Flagg tried to interest people who lived further away by taking them on "a ramble of four or five miles in pretty rough ways with abundant geological and botanical information"
Wright and Flagg also realized that one of the best ways to interest wealthy neighbors was to appeal to ancestral devotion. Late 19th century Bostonians were fascinated by Puritan genealogy. The park movement gave them a chance to preserve locations that figured in their family stories.
For example, in 1882, the philanthropist Thomas Gold Appleton put a marker near Appleton's pulpit North of Boston. A rock from which his ancestors supposedly made a speech in defiance of British authority in 1687. Both the Trustees of Reservations and the Metropolitan Park Commission used this example to promote additional donations of historic sites.
And other Appleton descendants contributed many pieces of land, including Appleton farms in Ipswich and much of the land that is now the Blue Hills. Elizur Wright for his part repeatedly told the story of how Middlesex Fells had been explored by John Winthrop in 1631.
Winthrop had given Spot Pond its name because of the rocky island in the middle and had served a meal of cheese on top of Bear Hill because they'd forgotten to pack bread. Wright noted that the name Bear Hill took on new meaning in an age of deforestation.
He proposed that it be renamed for Winthrop. Luckily, that particular idea didn't take hold or else we'd now be needing to rename it to avoid honoring an enslaver and perpetrator of genocide. Again and again, ancestral appeals were what clinched the deal for forest preservation.
The first large forest park in Metropolitan Boston was Lynn Woods, created on a spot revered by spiritualists because a 17th century pirate had supposedly buried his treasure there. The first parcel of land owned by the Trustees of Reservations is known as Virginia Woods in honor of Virginia Tudor. Virginia's mother mourned her early death by donating the woods where she had played as a girl.
Likewise, when the trustees founder Charles Elliott Jr. died at age 38, he was memorialized with a stone tower in the Blue Hills Park. Similar memorials fill Boston's forest parks today. They call attention to the people who preserve the parks and those who loved them later on.
I especially like this Memorial to Sean Collins. Since Mr. Collins was born in the same year as me, seeing his memorial reminds me of my own mortality. And all the colorful plastic reminds me that everything human can be at home in spaces that are also friendly to biodiversity.
I began by arguing that ancestral healing is an intrinsic part of healing from settler colonialism's violence against both land and people. It should be obvious by now that this is a very fraught process. Because memorial making so often favors the ancestors of those who benefited the most from colonial violence.
The memorials to Virginia Tudor and Charles Elliott reflect in part the extreme privilege of these two nature lovers. As children, Tudor and Elliot probably met one another at the coastal resort town of Nahant. Today, Nahant is notorious for the extent to which its beautiful coastline is owned privately rather than publicly.
Likewise, many park creators honored their Puritan ancestors in ways that minimize those ancestors violence against Indigenous people. In 1889, the first president of the Trustees of Reservations Senator George Hoar, acquired redemption rock in Central Massachusetts because it was the place where his ancestor John Hoar had negotiated the release of Mary Rowlandson, who'd been captured by Native Americans led by Metacomet or King Philip.
A pamphlet published on the occasion of Hoar's purchase urged the refined descendants of the Puritans to remember, "the trials, the sufferings, and the fears of their red skinned neighbors, but also describe Metacomet as a bloodthirsty soul who was not satisfied with the amount of human gore he had spilled".
Other memorials reinforce white supremacist notions of manifest destiny. One can take a long walk along the Charles River that begins and ends with memorials to Leif Ericsson. The Viking Explorer whom some 19th century Bostonians imagined had sailed up the Charles in the year 1,000.
Midway between the two Leif Erikson Memorial stands the Watertown founders memorial. It honors Puritans who planted their town on the banks of the river in 1630. A mural of Puritans in Massachusett people exchanging bread for fish highlights the possibility of interracial harmony, but obscures the more common pattern of settler violence.
Only white people are named on the memorial. As it happens, just about every individual who played a role in creating Boston's forest parks has an ancestor honored on that memorial. Among those people were the Brooks family of Medford.
Once the wealthiest family in Massachusetts, the Brooks had derived wealth from land theft, the use of enslaved labor on one of the largest plantations in Massachusetts, and selling insurance for ships that trafficked in slaves and slave produced goods.
The heirs to this wealth eventually transferred most of the family land to public ownership, spread across multiple parks as well as a garden cemetery. Here, I found a few memorials that hint at the complexity of ancestral healing.
The Brooks themselves are buried in Oak Grove Cemetery. In keeping with Wilson Flagg's ideal, they're very modest granite slabs are overshadowed by a majestic beech tree. Just a few thousand feet away, are two other memorials.
In 1888, Francis Brooks discovered Indigenous remains in the land he claimed as his backyard. The first time this happened, he gave the remains to Harvard University. The second time, he chose a more respectful approach, reburying the remains beneath a monument to Sagamore John, the leader of the local Indigenous community just before the arrival of white settlers.
Several decades later, other members of the Brooks family gave the town of Medford a parcel of land, including a brick wall that had been built by Pomp, an enslaved man claimed by the family in the 18th century. The Brooks family never explained their reasons for memorializing Sagamore John and Pomp. As far as I know, these memorials do not come with any public apology.
Still, they are powerful examples of what ancestral devotion should look like in the plantationocene. Located at the heart of what was once one of the largest slave plantations in New England, they remind their neighbors that the histories of colonial violence are not far away but still living among us.
They also connect neighbors to what eco theologian Mark Wallace has called the wounded sacred. Both are insights of ecological as well as social woundedness. The Sagamore Memorial is literally in the middle of the street, Pomp's slave wall is on a sliver of land between a road and a train track.
The area is filled with plants that might be deemed invasive species, but it's also a wildlife corridor that helps plants and animals move between the larger parks on either side. Together, these memorials invite New Englanders to continue the work of ecological restoration begun nearly two centuries ago. And they promised that ancestors of all races and species will be with us in this work.
Still, it's noteworthy that neither the Brooks' nor other park promoters reached out to members of the Massachusett or other Indigenous communities to think together about what ancestral devotion should look like on lands inhabited by the Puritans for centuries, and by Indigenous people for tens of millennia.
This is slightly puzzling because some park promoters did have significant ties to Indigenous communities elsewhere. Elizur Wright for example served on a federal commission, that urged the government not to build dams on the upper Mississippi that would have flooded wild rice fields of the Anishinaabe.
Likewise, the journalist Sylvester Baxter who served as the founding Secretary of the Metropolitan Park Commission, had a strong connection to anthropological and archeological expeditions to the Zuni tribe. The expeditions that brought many significant artifacts to Harvard's Peabody Museum around the same time the parks were being created.
Similar to Baxter, the journalist JP Harrison who helped the trustees of reservations identify potential lands for preservation, had previously worked as an agent for the Indian Rights Association. That group sought to protect Indigenous communities from the violence of white neighbors, but also pressured them to adopt so-called civilized habits of agriculture and private land ownership.
Ironically, Harrison was an advocate of public land ownership in Massachusetts at the same time as he was pushing for the privatization of Indigenous lands in the West. Harrison exemplified what I call the problem solving mentality that would come to dominate park policy in the 20th century.
Though he had genuinely benevolent intentions for both the land and the Indigenous people who cared for the land, he and other problem solvers tended to regard land and people as problems to be solved rather than as genuine partners. At its best, ancestral devotion offers a path toward partnership, even kinship, rather than problem solving.
And this path need not be limited to human ancestors the 19th century Bostonians who honored ancestors by planting trees did so because they also regarded the trees as ancestors or kinfolk. In the time I have left, I'd like to explore this dimension of Wilson Flagg and Elizur Wright's park proposals.
When Wilson Flagg made the case for forest preserves, he included arguments that verged on what we might call deep ecology. The life of every creature with the exception of certain offensive animals, should be held sacred within the limits of these grounds. It should be considered a misdemeanor to kill a bird or a squirrel that makes its dwelling here.
Flagg's anti-hunting agenda is intriguing because the simultaneous and better known campaign to preserve wilderness areas in the West was largely led by big game hunters who wanted to protect their own opportunities for sport. Flagg's counterpart was ecologically naive. His opposition to offensive animals by which he meant large predators failed to recognize that predation is necessary for ecological balance.
Flagg also imagine that in the absence of hunters, wild birds would become very tame and companionable, and thus, easier to study. This runs counter to an environmental ethic that values wildness for its own sake but it also suggests that for Flagg, deep kinship between humans and other creatures was the point.
With somewhat differently, Flagg championed a vision of biodiversity as fully compatible with recreation, education, and agriculture. He hoped that cheap trains would bring even the humblest clerk or apprentice to the forest preserves. There he hoped they would find marble tablets with poetic inscriptions and information about natural history. He also thought it would be possible for farmers to graze some sheep and cows without harming wild animals nearby.
Elizur Wright's understanding of the kinship between humans and other creatures turned him into arguably the first climate activist in the United States. Now, it's always risky for a historian to claim that anything is first. As already made clear, Wright was not the first American to warn that deforestation would change the climate by disrupting the water cycle. George Barrell Emerson deserves credit for that though he certainly had many European precursors.
Wright may have been the first to hold public events what he called forest festivals to raise public awareness, and thus, spur action to prevent deforestation. It was at the forest festivals that he began making a second argument about climate change.
While George Barrell Emerson had focused entirely on the water cycle, Wright also suggested that deforestation and the burning of coal would change the climate by disrupting the carbon cycle. I think he was the first to make that argument, though, I may very well be wrong.
Specifically, Wright hypothesized that too much carbon dioxide in the air would make it unbreathable, especially for working class people in treeless urban areas. The complementarity of vegetable and animal life he explained was a well-established scientific fact. Our health depends on pure air and trees are the greatest purifiers because they absorb the carbon and restore to the air the oxygen essential to the life of animals.
So Wright concluded that the destruction of a single healthy tree would shorten some human life. And if all the forests were destroyed, all of humanity would smother in the poison of their own breath. In other words, Wright agitated around rising carbon levels without recognizing the specific greenhouse mechanism that is at the heart of climate concern today.
It's a bit ironic that Wright did not know about the greenhouse effect because it had been discovered decades earlier by New Yorker Eunice Foote, who moved in the same abolitionist circles as Wright. She was a chemist, not an ecologist. She didn't realize that human activity might change the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus change the climate.
She just worked out the mechanism. Credit for putting the pieces together goes to Svante Arrhenius. Whose research on ice ages helped him make the connection a few years after Wright had died. Now, the fact that Wright got the mechanism wrong, I think makes his argument more ecologically significant.
What he recognized most clearly was that in an interconnected world, changes that initially involve only one part of the whole, such as trees or coal will eventually extend out to touch everything. For Wright, this was also an argument about ancestors. Both the scientific ancestors who helped him understand this and the biological ancestors who had transformed the atmosphere over millions of years.
Wright was familiar with the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and he was also familiar with the speech that Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley had made in honor of the earlier scientist Joseph Priestley. Priestley had been the first to isolate oxygen from the atmosphere.
Huxley said and Wright agreed, that Priestley had made the most important scientific discovery of all time when he showed that plants and animals depend on one another for carbon and oxygen. What this shows us is that Wright understood Darwin in ecological terms.
The essential discovery was not the red in tooth and claw competition of the social Darwinists, the essential discovery was the interdependence of all species. Building on that, at the 1882 forest festival, Wright argued that the Saurian monsters, they hadn't coined the word dinosaur yet, might have been able to breathe before the first gigantic forest growths had absorbed the carbon out of the atmosphere, making the vast coal formations.
But humans wouldn't have survived in such an environment and likewise, they won't be able to survive if they burn up the coal at the rate of 280 million tons a year and destroy the forest. Humanity has a sacred obligation, he concluded, to ensure that at least a quarter of the Earth's surface remain forested.
Because Wright understood that humans and trees were kindred beings who had evolved in mutual dependence, he repeatedly referred to trees as persons who could be genuine partners in environmental activism. Wright first hinted at his belief that trees are persons when he published a petition of the big Elms and buttonwoods on the mall to the corporation of the city of Boston in September 1847.
He did it again in 1883 essay entitled The voice of a Tree from Middlesex Fells. In this piece, a white pine speaks directly to a human audience. Speaking not for myself alone but for all my kind to your kind for the vegetable to the animal world. Appealing to the natural friendship between humans and trees, the pine urges those who have teeth, axes, and saws not to use them to your own hurt.
The tree makes a joke about its Linnaean name suggesting that pinus strobus inspired the invention of the wheel because of the spoke like patterns of its branches. It then whispers into its reader's ear that our food is your poison allowing Wright then to explain the carbon cycle.
At one level, this is just a funny way that Wright made his point but Wright really wanted his readers to think about whether trees are persons. Answering the objection that trees cannot feel and have no consciousness of the harm done to them, pinus strobus replies, but how do you know that?
How do you know that? Have you ever been a tree yourself. But highlighting the fact that we cannot know for sure, Wright suggested that it might be wise to give tree personhood the benefit of the doubt.
One of Wright's last words in the question of tree personhood was a poem simply titled The Tree that he composed in his final years. It's a fitting conclusion for this talk but to help you understand his vision, you need to a bit more about Wright's religion.
In his early abolitionist years, Wright had been solidly within the evangelical wing of the abolitionist movement. But during the 1830s and 1840s, he drifted rapidly to the liberal end of the spectrum. Eventually, renouncing Christianity and gaining a slightly exaggerated reputation as America's first atheist.
In keeping with that identity, he generally avoided God language in his environmental writing. But somehow, he couldn't say everything he wanted to say about trees without bringing in God. In a riff on the Christian understanding of humanity as midway between animals and angels, Wright wrote that trees are halfway from man to God. Casting them sequentially as worshippers, high priests, and almoners.
An almoner is somebody who distributes charity on behalf of the church, and this fits well with Wright's understanding of trees as symbiotic benefactors of animal life. At the same time, Wright was clearly working out his own impending mortality, his own imminent ancestor hood in this poem.
The Tree, he wrote, neither hastes nor fears to die, and as such is able to remind cowardly human souls of the evolutionary truth that old organisms must die in order for new life to be born. For shame and you so free, Wright's Priestley she whispers to him, to fear this death, which is the goal of fresher life to be.
The greatest gift of the ancestors is the possibility of new life for future generations. That's why 19th century New Englanders turned to their ancestors for guidance when they first realized that their own actions were threatening their children's future. The work they began remains for us to continue. And these trees. Thank you. Along with me.
DIANE MOORE: Dan, thank you. What a beautiful tapestry that you've just woven. Thinking about-- especially the different dimensions of how one can consider ancestors and ancestry.
While folks are gathering their thoughts, Dan, I'm wondering-- I've got a couple different questions now but one that we thought might be a useful one to begin with was that you started thinking about and giving us a vision of conservation aimed at increasing biodiversity and local contexts.
And the local context I think was key and really clearly woven throughout. Can you speak a little bit about where you see that same vision of conservation playing out today in the greater Boston area?
DAN MCKANAN: Yeah. Maybe I'll begin by saying that my work on this project began as a pandemic research project. I had a sabbatical where I couldn't go anywhere. And so I tried to see where I could go on my own two feet, and I set myself the task of walking through all of the land that had been preserved by the efforts of Wright and Flagg and their allies in the 1880s and 1890s.
And as I walked through those spaces, I saw lots of interesting things. One thing that I saw was that their activist vision had been forgotten for much of the 20th century. Once the land was preserved, there was no longer an activist movement. There was no continuous set of folks striving on to preserve biodiversity in Metropolitan Boston.
And many of those protected lands became deeply polluted over the course of the 20th century. And then were rediscovered by a new wave of activist organizations beginning around the time of the first Earth Day and really continuing ever since.
So in some places, I found land that was publicly owned but no one seemed to know it and people were using it as a dumping ground. And in other places, I saw really creative work being done by organizations like the Mystic River Watershed Association or Earth Wise Aware, that really invite all the many different human communities in Metropolitan Boston to get to know their more than human neighbors through art in the park initiatives, through participating in planting wildflowers. All these sorts of different ways.
And I was constantly reminded of how deeply local this is. That people really respond if they're invited to care for the wildflower meadow that they walk past every day on the way to school, or the part of the river that is closest to their own neighborhood.
DIANE MOORE: That makes perfect sense. There's so many-- in fact, Mayra spoke-- Professor Rivera spoke about this last week too about the powerful intimacy of what it means to engage with entities outside of ourselves, but also the connections that we can draw and make from those intimacies, and the ways that they can motivate us. Can you speak a little bit more too about then your perception of a contemporary understanding of ancestry and whether that has been preserved in any meaningful way?
DAN MCKANAN: Yeah. It is really interesting that these parks were created at a time of burgeoning interest in genealogy. And I'm writing about them at another time of burgeoning interest in genealogy.
I was going to say that our time is more complex and more thoughtful, but I'm not even sure that's true. Because probably in both times, there were some people caught up in the fascination of genealogy who were primarily interested in glorifying their ancestors for the sake of glorifying their particular group.
You think about daughters of the American Revolution, daughters of the Confederacy, these types of organizations. And I don't want to say there's not any of that today, so I'm not sure I'm going to make one period is better and one is worse, but certainly today, there are many people and many people around our Harvard Divinity School community who are engaged in genealogical work that is much more complex.
Trying to understand the particular harms in which our ancestors were complicit and connecting with the descendants of people who suffered those particular harms. And really trying to tell the complex stories. And my intuition is that that nuanced approach is really a more honoring way of relating to our ancestors who to the extent that they were perpetrators of harm, died with some of that unreconciled. And working towards ways of repairing and reconciling that harm is the best I can guess. have no clairvoyant insight into what the ancestors need but my best guess is that reconciliation and repair is what those ancestors most need.
DIANE MOORE: I also was struck-- you cited Donna Haraway and her recent work, Staying with the Trouble. She has the phrase, make kin not babies. And her kin is to recognize the deepest and most profound-- to ask us to be more conscious, become more conscious I'll say of the deepest interdependence that we have with non-human life forms.
And that that consciousness of that interdependence will shape us and change us and help become a vehicle to connect with and have more concern for, again, non-human life which is critical for human well-being, of course, as we face the sixth mass extinction.
So I just wonder if you have any thoughts about that, relevant to ancestors because she's going to push and encourage us to be as did Flagg, especially Flagg and Wright thinking of trees as ancestors
DAN MCKANAN: Yeah, absolutely. I do think-- I mean another dimension to this would be epigenetics and thinking about the ways in which who we are is shaped not only by DNA code, but by patterns in which our DNA has interacted with the DNA of all the other creatures with whom we're symbiotic over long periods of time.
And this is-- in Haraway and Singh's idea of the plantationocene, one of the things that they really highlight on is that in a plantation-- a plantation is deliberately lacking in biodiversity.
So you take a plant, I think it's sugar that they talk about in particular, on that is the way sugar is cultivated on plantations, it's essentially a clone. There's no genetic recombination happening. It's native to some other place.
You put it in this land in a new place, you try to kill everything that has been living in that place before so that one very artificially simplified organism fills the whole space with a labor of people who have been kidnapped from other places as well.
So if we're going to heal that, we have to heal all of it together. And I see the question from Tracy about the impact that the arrival of domesticated animals, cattle, dairy cows, pigs, had on the land in the Boston area.
And Tracy, I don't know the specific book you allude to there and I don't know deeply the history of how domesticated those animals impacted the lives of deer or grass species or whatever in New England.
But certainly, when we think about agriculture moving forward, agriculture that involves all kinds of-- a relatively small number of species that have been violently relocated, we have to ask, how do agricultural spaces themselves be more hospitable to biodiversity?
And this really is one of the things that worries me about a lot of the way we talk about wilderness preservation. Even the-- on E.O Wilson's idea of half Earth idea, that half of the Earth ought to be protected for biodiversity.
Now some pieces of that I probably would endorse but the image of half an Earth is really problematic. We have to say that all of the Earth is a place where we are actively seeking to increase biodiversity. And that means if we're going to have cows, if we're going to have broccoli, if we're going to have whatever species we happen to eat, we have to find ways to grow those species side by side with wild things that are just doing their own thing.
It's really exciting, another thing that I saw as I walked through many of these parks is that oftentimes there are now community gardens incorporated into park spaces. And people when they're doing their recreation, instead of thinking, oh, my food should be produced thousands of miles away so that I can have-- just have a forest to recreate in, people can think, no, actually, I should recreate in the same space that's producing my food and find ways to ensure that that space is hospitable for the deer and the poisonous mushrooms, poisonous dust and all these other creatures along with the ones that I'm planning to eat.
DIANE MOORE: Wonderful. Thank you. There's an intriguing question, Dan, that maybe you can also give some background to and I'm going to pose the question from the anonymous attendee about the Divinity School tree.
Toward the end of the talk, you speak of Wright and his poem The Tree. Can a tree be an ancestor? When you remember the Divinity tree, might that tree's death be as he says, have given birth to new life? I'm wondering as a historian of the local, how do you see the Divinity tree in the context of your talk as ancestry-- and ancestory, the context of the Divinity School's evolution?
DAN MCKANAN: So I assume you're alluding to the beautiful oak tree that was located in what is now the Swartz Hall commons. And lost its life as part of the Divinity School's expansion of our main building.
And for those who don't know, generations of Divinity School students had really valued spending time with that particular tree and were deeply troubled when they realized it would lose its life, and engaged in a whole series both activism and ritual on both trying to persuade the leadership of the Divinity School not to sacrifice this tree, and also ritualizing the process of saying goodbye.
And certainly, many things came out of that process. I hadn't-- I'd have to think more about the exact timing but ever since that incident happened, conversations about the personhood of trees and the personhood of beings of all species have been essentially non-stop at the Divinity School.
Thinking hard about what it means to honor all the persons that surrounds us has become part of our sense of shared identity as a school. And I think it's probably the case that that one person, that one oak tree contributed more to that transformation of our shared conversation than any of the many human persons who also had a place in that story.
To me, it's also a reminder of how deeply local all of this is. That there are thousands, maybe millions, I'm not good at counting trees of other oak trees in the Boston area that are honored and dishonored in various ways.
But a group of human beings found it somewhat difficult to recognize the personhood of all those abstract thousands or millions of oak trees and much easier to start in with the one oak tree that they knew and move out from there.
I had a similar experience hiking in a very small bit of conservation land in Melrose, and I met a gentleman who was shaking his hiking stick up at the hillside where several McMansions were being built because that had been his own backyard woods, and the developers had chosen to destroy it.
And it wasn't so significant to him that there were other parcels of land, three miles in either direction, where the forest had been connected. That particular force was part of his story and this really is the way in which we're going to turn our Earth story around is by people being willing to fight for the particular beings, the particular ecosystems that are deeply part of their own stories.
DIANE MOORE: Beautifully stated. I love that story of the stick, of the hiking stick being shaken. Another piece of that, the story of the tree, which I agree with you. I think it was a pivotal moment. It was a hard moment at the school, I will say too.
But it raised again, a particular kind of consciousness that you allude to in a way that I do think was if not the beginning of that, certainly it helped elevate that relevance and that consciousness.
The other complicating factor is the tree was diseased and that was also a piece of the-- it was a diseased and therefore, unstable relevant to whatever might even have been able to be addressed or architecturally incorporated into the beautiful Swartz Hall that's now standing.
So anyway, it was just a-- Thank you for the question. I think it's a really interesting one relevant to the locality, to local ideas. So Peggy is asking, what it was-- you may not know this, Dan, but it's an interesting comment. What was Flagg's ethnic heritage, his philosophy on trees recalls the Lore of the druids or pre-Christian images of Britain Albion?
I'm sorry, she wants you to also say what the settler colonial impulse whether you agree that it was simultaneously to destroy and preserve nature could be called a love hate relationship. That's an interesting-- Amitav Ghosh addresses this also in his work. If so, what does that suggest about the settler psyche?
DAN MCKANAN: So everything that you ask about, Peggy, is stuff that I'm still kind of wrestling with. So in terms of Flagg's ethnic heritage, I have looked deeply into his genealogy. That's how I knew that he had an ancestor on that Watertown Memorial who was an ancestor named Flagg.
I think he might have had a couple others. It is the case that many of the players in this story are descended almost exclusively from the first wave of Puritan migration to New England between 1620 and 1660, which is to say they are of English origin.
I think Wilson Flagg himself would definitely appreciate your sense that he might have been embodying a druidic heritage. He used the language of sacred groves explicitly. Elizur Wright whose ethnic heritage was identical explicitly used the language of the druids. Actually, when the American Forestry Association first had their conference in Boston, he wrote an article titled The Druids are Coming.
Because at that time, the assumption was that scientific foresters were about the preservation of forests. Is there a love-hate relationship in the way settler colonials seek simultaneously to destroy and preserve nature?
I guess what I'm not sure about is whether the destroy and the preserve impulses coexist within the same psyche or whether this is a destructive impulse of the first wave of settlers, and a preservationist impulse of their descendants.
And I don't want to say it quite like that because I don't want to assume that some people are wholly good and some people are wholly bad, but I do think that these 19th century folks that I've been talking about were in some ways behaving quite differently than the way their ancestors had been behaving even as they were also trying to honor their ancestors. And so this is something I'm continually wrestling with.
DIANE MOORE: Great. John Kidd asks, thank you, John. He says he confesses that he cuts down invasive plants and trees that have squashed out the more "native plants". And he says, I find joy in seeing natives return, what would you advocate our treatment of invasive should be?
DAN MCKANAN: So, John, you probably heard me say so-called invasives. My feeling is that it's always appropriate to respond to imbalances by taking rebalancing actions. And so there's way too many cows in the world, and we as a human species need to find ways to reduce the number of cows by reducing our own consumption of meat and dairy.
And find some ways in which some prairie landscapes become home to buffalo or elk or other species, that have seen their numbers decline so dramatically. And we need to-- while we're doing that, also honor the personhood of the cows, honor their long standing relationship to us, honor the ways in which their story is tied up with our story.
And explore all the great techniques that biodynamic farmers, regenerative farmers, permaculturists are coming up with that allow people simultaneously to treat cows better and make the places where cows live more hospitable to a wider range of species.
And I've just kind of inserted cows in place of invasive species. Cows certainly are an invasive species. Naming them as such reminds us that they're kind of innocent, they got entangled in this invasion mostly against their will, as is true for all of the other invasive species.
So though I certainly support the kind of rebalancing activity that you've engaged in of eliminating certain plants in order to give other plants, more symbiotically connected plants a chance to thrive, I really try not to use the language of invasion or any language that would imply that entirely eliminating any species would be a good thing.
It's always really a matter of rebalancing and to the best of our ability, honoring the personhood of-- honoring the personhood of all the different species that are in this balancing mix.
DIANE MOORE: Great. Thank you. I think we have just a couple more minutes, Dan, before we close but Stockton raised a really, I think, interesting and important question. How do we approach honoring our ancestors with memorials in nature in the midst of the legacies of colonial violence that don't re-weaponize widespread violent triggering motifs?
I'm thinking of Billie Holiday's strange fruit and how meaning is produced within nature by different communities, which aren't always the ones that get to design or dedicate memorials. And that may have attitudes toward "nature" that don't align with mainline conservationists.
DAN MCKANAN: That's such a great question. And one that I'm not going to be able to give full justice to. I guess I would just say that in lifting up the memorials of the slave wall and the Sagamore John Memorial, I was certainly not intending to suggest that those memorials created by the descendants of the people who perpetrated the violence, are the perfect model for the memorials of the future.
The memorials of the future need to be created with the leadership of impacted communities and their descendants. I simply was lifting them up to say that there was already in the time I was talking about, the beginnings of an impulse towards ways of memorializing that did not glorify the violence.
Oh, I'm not remembering the exact details of the very well intentioned and very problematic artistic installation in Minneapolis that was created to honor victims of a particular genocidal killing in the state of Minneapolis that was not done in a collaborative way. I wouldn't say re-weaponize but certainly retraumatized.
DIANE MOORE: Re-traumatized.
DAN MCKANAN: Yeah so these are-- my historian's voice is one small voice in a conversation about future memorials in which other voices will need to be much louder.
DIANE MOORE: Great. Thank you. I want to just say again, thank you so much, Dan, for this very expansive and deeply engaging commentary. Weaving together all of these wonderful threads from this very local focus, which again, is going to be a theme throughout our conversations. So thank you. If we can all give Dan a bow, a Zoom bow of appreciation.
I want to invite everyone in the room and all of your friends to join us next week, February 12, we're here again at 6:00. We will continue our conversation in this series with the Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal assistant Professor of Islamic Studies Teren Sevea. And he will be presenting animal stories in crisis.
So I hope you'll be able to join us for that. And I'm going to end actually with Leah Borden who made-- offered a quote. I think this is a full quote, Leah. Thank you so much for offering it. She suggests this quote for us to share at the end of Tomlins's Freedom Bound.
"Once we had a wilderness and now we have fields--" it just-- here we go. "Once we had a wilderness and now we have fields, orchards, meadows and pastures, the classical impulse is to bring nature into order rather than to preserve or destroy it."
Thank you all and thank you again, Dan, for this wonderful presentation. Hope to see you all next week.
DAN MCKANAN: I told Diane and the team that I would probably lose my internet at some point during the presentation and I lost it one minute before the end.
DIANE MOORE: One minute before. Well, I'm glad you came back. Wonderful. All right. Thank you all. Thanks, Dan.
DAN MCKANAN: Thank you so much.
DIANE MOORE: See you next week.
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SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the president and fellows of Harvard College.