Welcome to Deaf in the afternoon. I'm Sarah Chavez for the Order of the Good Deaf.

On this episode we'll be sharing another one of our favorite articles from the Order's Archive.

Who's Green burial is it anyway? Like Corinne, Elecona, the Education and Digital Content Manager at Mount Auburn Cemetery,

where she was also their first female humanitarian operator in the Cemetery's 199 year history.

This article is part of our series, The Deaf Gap, that examines the various ways in which systemic racism impacts the way

by pop communities experienced death and access end of life care.

In 1889, over 100 years before the first conservation cemetery was founded in the United States,

a man who was just beginning his journey to become the father of environmentalism,

sat, deflated, in a high mountain pasture in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

John Mueller had emerged from his campsite, furious to see the devastation that a flock of sheep had wrought on the grassland of this cathedral of mountains.

He drew a line on the map through the Sierra Nevada mountain range to outline the pieces of wilderness he hoped to call Yosemite National Park.

Mueller seemed not to notice, Yosemite already had a name, awani, meaning gaping mouth-like place,

named by the awani-chi people, who lived in the Grand Valley of the Mountains.

Years earlier, in the 1850s, the awani-chi people were massacred when a group of white men sat fire to their wigwams.

What Mueller defined as a place of true wilderness where no mark of man is visible had already been a space of community harmonious with the land.

That is, until the land was sportively taken from them.

This is only one example of how environmentalism has the propensity to overlook and exclude the histories and cultures of marginalized populations

who do not fit neatly into their narrative.

In the 21st century, we are only just beginning to unpack these harmful ideas formed in the name of Goodwill and Science.

Part of this unpacking process compels us to discuss the Green burial movement.

The movement emerged in the early 1900s as part of a larger counter-movement addressing the dissatisfaction some felt with the American way of death,

known for being manipulative, corporatized, stuffy, and needlessly expensive.

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