Trace

Trace is a 2015 nonfiction book by Lauret Savoy that examines race and racism through a highly unique field of study: geology. Subtitled Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, Trace looks at the physical evidence marked by scars on the earth and its rocks to formulate ideas about race, colonialism, and evolution of human societies and acts of subjugation.

Through a series of essays, Savoy—a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College—travels across America to observe the remnants of lost or subjugated people, some of whom share her multiracial heritage. Her work here resists easy classification but is referred to by the Los Angeles Review of Booksas “nature writing” of a sort. For Savoy’s part, she writes that her aim was to teach readers“to see how each of us carries history and a complex cultural legacy, the past(s) becoming present in what we think and do, in who we are. That braided strands of this land’s human history and geologic-natural history touch all of our lives, perhaps without our knowing it.”

But Savoy is almost as concerned with linguistics as she is with natural history, though certainly the two are interconnected. Even at the age of seven, Savoy was interested in how the word “colored” meant one thing as a child and something very different as the multiracial child grew older. In an early essay about her upbringing in California, Savoy writes, “in a neighborhood with few children, my reliable companions were sky’s brilliant depth and the tactile land. . . . I devised a self-theory that golden light and deep blue sky made me. Sun filled my body as it seemed to fill dry California hills, and sky flowed in my veins. Colored could only mean these things.”



Later, in an essay titled “What’s in a Name,” Savoy examines the evolution of how towns, streets, and other geographic locations were named after Native American words or tribes. She examines early naming that reflects outright racism. The racism, Savoy writes, has given way to simple erasure, as labels of Native American-owned lands on maps and in road atlases often simply read “Surplus” or “Unassigned.” They are only “unassigned” to the people who don’t live there and who apparently don’t care about the people who do inhabit these areas.

Other essays about Savoy’s childhood include one in which, as a fourteen-year-old, she reads Aldo Leopold’s book, A Sand County Almanac, a seminal piece of “nature writing” concerned with exploring America for readers. Even at that young age, however, Savoy couldn’t understand why a book so famous for its depiction of America didn’t mention American slavery once. In fact, the only mention of slavery in the entire book, she writes, was about slavery in Ancient Greece. With passages like these, Savoy argues that no examination of America’s natural wonders is complete without some recognition of the slaves who built this country and cultivated its land, not to mention the monumental upheaval and destruction forced upon their lives by slave-owners and their enablers.

On this subject, Savoy writes:



“I couldn’t understand why, in a book so concerned with America’s past, the only reference to slavery, to human beings as property, was about ancient Greece. What I wanted more than anything was to speak with Mr. Leopold. To ask him. I so feared that his ‘we’ and ‘us’ excluded me and other Americans with ancestral roots in Africa, Asia, or Native America. . . . Did Aldo Leopold consider me?”

This mixture of the personal and the historical, the societal and natural, makes Tracea travelogue and nature book unlike many others. During her press tour for the book, Savoy shared what could almost be a mission statement for the text:

“Imagine ‘environment’ broadly—not just as surroundings; not just as the air, water, and land on which we depend, or that we pollute; not just as global warming—but as sets of circumstances, conditions, and contexts in which we live and die—in which each of us is intimately part. This definition falls short without those experiences of place that are exiled or degraded, toxic or alien or migrant or urban or indentured. . . . There is no requirement that a writer deal with any particular subject—yet, it seems to me, for the genre and those who call themselves ‘environmental writers,’ there has been avoidance. The discourse has proceeded in a narrow frame, with too few voices, perspectives, and storied lives of people not of solely Euro-American descent—experiences that transcend history and point to deeply embedded conflicts in this nation.”



Through Trace, Savoy has indeed reinvented what it means to be an environmental writer and, in turn, to read about the environment. And after reading Trace, it is difficult to read nature writing that doesn’t share Savoy’s sense of responsibility toward indigenous people and other subjugated communities without feeling that something is missing.