Lauret Savoy, a geology and environmental studies professor and author from Mount Holyoke College, gave the annual Otis Lecture on Sept. 30, discussing topics of race and oppression and how they intertwine with the American landscape.
Founded in 1996, the Otis Lecture is funded by a memorial endowment in honor of Philip J. Otis ‘95, who was passionate about the environment and died in an accident shortly after his graduation. The lecture has hosted speakers on environmental topics ever since.
“In learning more about the Otis program, I realized that the works of most speakers had touched me deeply, influencing my own life and work,” Savoy said via email on her choice to speak. “So, it’s a humbling honor for me to have been invited.”
Chair of the Otis Lecture Committee and Professor of History Joe Hall spoke briefly before Savoy, introducing her and some of her complex topics.
“We must consider what relations we wish to have with the descendants of peoples whose many labors, not all willing, made possible our presence here this evening, but what does it mean to remember?” Hall pondered, discussing Lewiston’s history of mills and Indigenous relations. “These are questions that inspire and trouble Lauret Savoy.”
Savoy was chosen as speaker by a committee of four people, chaired by Hall. He said that Savoy is “an extraordinary scholar.”
“She’s trained as a geologist,” he said. “But I think it was because of her personal interests and deep questions about her place in the United States as a black woman, as a woman of native ancestry and as a woman of white ancestry as well….that led her to ask different kinds of questions about not just the geological traces of the ways that this country has changed, but also the traces of human history.”
Savoy’s 2015 book Trace, part memoir and part historical exploration, and winner of the American Book Award, seeks to answer these questions. Savoy spent the first part of her lecture reading from a chapter of Trace titled “Alien Land Ethic: The Distance Between.”
“Trace counters some of our oldest and most damaging public silences,” Savoy said. “None of them is coincidental. Too few of them appear in public history, yet they all touch us all.”
Savoy went on to describe childhood experiences of racism on the playground, which led her to seek safety in the wilderness. Later, she learned the idea of “land ethic” – the idea that “community” should include not only people, but also the living and non-living all around – in a book called A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Then, at 18, she discovered a book written by her father that she’d never known about – Alien Land, a fictional treatise on negotiating one’s multiracial heritage in a nation of racial hatred.
From a combination of these ideas came “Alien Land Ethic.”
“Alien land, land ethic, what is the distance between them?” Savoy asked the audience. “Only slowly did I learn that I would remain complicit in my own diminishment unless I stepped out of the separate, divided trap: you from me, us from them, brown skin from deep, pigmented skin, relations among people from relations with the land, the waters, the atmosphere.”
Above all, Savoy spoke of how ideas of “trace” have fed her curiosity and need to understand and interpret the landscapes around her – and what that means for the future.
“It’s feeding the next work, which considers the global ancestries of my father’s people,” Savoy said, who “by later classifications of race would be divided not by choice, but by what was imposed upon them. Peoples…who were brought here, and often labeled terms like ‘Negro’ or ‘Black’…[who] made a family whose lives were embedded in the land. And that is the next book project.”
