I'm Major Jackson, and I'm Leah Thomas, and this is the slowdown.

In collaboration today, with Ashley Reises.

I was a park ranger in rural Kansas, the summer following the first in uprisings.

I just needed to heal in nature, so I took an assignment to go to the middle of nowhere.

In a national park, that's one of the least visited.

And that site is called Nicodemus National Historic Site.

The first town west of the Mississippi that freed African Americans after slavery went

to build a community.

And they quite literally used their hands and barks from the tree to dig into the ground

and build dugouts.

And with their freedom, that was enough.

And they stared at the sky and eventually built homes and schools and churches.

And I started thinking about how can I help people recontextualize environmental history

to see these stories that sometimes are buried in the soil or deep within textbooks or

not in textbooks at all.

Even if this textbook I'm reading doesn't talk about people who look like me in this space,

you're out there and our stories are so different.

That intentional seeing and seeing through creative work feels like one of the best ways

to get acquainted with these issues, right?

So tell me about a time in which a dry space has upended your expectations.

So I went to Joshua Tree, my last year in school and I go there often.

It's a beautiful desert national park in California.

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