courtesy outdoor afro
In the five years since those first few strokes of the keyboard, Mapp has become one of the nation’s most influential voices on diversity and the outdoors. When she’s not at a speaker’s podium, she’s on the trail amid the redwoods and rolling hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. We caught her in a rare moment of stillness at Outdoor Afro headquarters in uptown Oakland.
How did you first form a connection to the natural world? I was raised to be outside all the time—and frankly I took it for granted. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized just how special my experiences were. I grew up on a dead- end street in Oakland, and the unused end of the block was claimed exclusively by the neighborhood kids. We’d pilfer wood and nails from our garages and build hidden perches in the oak trees that grew back there. My parents also had a small ranch up near Clear Lake, north of Napa. Out there I could just be a kid: ride my bike on country roads, play around in the creek, watch the seasons change and the wildlife come and go.
In years of hiking, biking, paddling, and exploring the outdoors, Rue Mapp found herself asking the same question over and over:
Why am I the only black person here?
When she put the question to social media, Mapp found her experience resonated with African Americans across the country. What started as a personal blog grew quickly into Outdoor Afro, a national network connecting and creating a new cadre of outdoor leaders.
So the outdoorsy trait runs in the family. I get it from my dad. He was a black cowboy who came from Texas to California and brought his love of the outdoors with him. He hunted and fished—I caught my first fish with him when I was three years old. He taught me this everyday way of being in nature: it wasn’t an event, it was a way of life. We made wine, jams, and preserves. We had pigs and cows. My dad built a smokehouse for sausages and hams and delicacies that we couldn’t buy in a store.
Sounds like Little House on the Prairie. You know what? I used to read those Laura Ingalls Wilder books while we were up on the ranch. I really connected to her characters in some ways, but there weren’t any stories about little girls who looked like me. That’s one reason Outdoor Afro exists—for me to tell my story so that black and brown girls can see themselves in nature and the outdoors.
INSIGHT · 27
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