(This article is reposted fro https://www.waitsburgtimes.com/story/2020/09/03/news-briefs/2020-refuge-outdoor-festival/16704.html .) The Washington State Parks Folk and Traditional Arts Program (WSPFTAP) has teamed up again with the organizers of Refuge Outdoor Festival. In past…
At the Refuge Outdoor Festival, an inaugural campout for inclusion, participants got into the nitty-gritty of hiking, camping, bird watching — and relating to one another. They came away a community eager for next year’s event.
Last month, the first-of-its-kind Refuge Outdoor Festival took place at Tolt-MacDonald Park near Carnation, Wash. Located in Snoqualmie Valley, the lush open space at the confluence of the Snoqualmie and Tolt Rivers overlooks the Cascade foothills.
The festival connected people of color (and their “allies,” according to the website) with activities like hiking, yoga, and camping. But it was a community open to everyone — and outdoor enthusiasts of all “levels.”
For three days, participants slept in tents, vans, and onsite yurts while community leaders from Climbers of Color, GirlTrek, Latino Outdoors, Outdoor Asian, and others shared their messages.
Themed activities like “Transitioning From Day Hiker to Mountaineer” and group topics like the “Untold History of Communities of Color in the Outdoors” also allowed festival-goers to pick and choose their experiences.
The inaugural campout for inclusion tackled tough topics in open conversations. For example, an interracial couple led a discussion on race and privilege. The topic resulted in a packed house.
“With events like this, we get excited, then it all starts to fade away,” said organizer Chevon Powell. “So I challenged all the people who made it to ‘closing circle’ to do one action or have one conversation in the next week.”
Powell tasked participants and sponsors with putting conversations into action after leaving Refuge.
She suggested some prompts: How do we come to the outdoors in an equitable way? How do we address diversity gaps in adventure? And how do we talk about the outdoors in nonoppressive ways?
“Like the mountains are not here for us to conquer,” she said.
Festivarians could choose from a variety of mellow outdoor activities. Many cooked outdoors in a communal space. And the Seattle Audubon Society led a morning bird-watching tour.
“The number of people who wanted to go bird watching at 7 a.m. was really surprising,” Powell said. “We did it three times that day.”
It reminded her to meet festival-goers “wherever they are,” especially in their relationship to nature.
There was a session on bikepacking. And a mobile bike unit was on hand to teach people bike-fixing basics. That came in extra handy for one participant, whose bike broke down after she rode it all the way to the festival.
About 125 people showed up for the first Refuge Outdoor Festival, about 75 of whom camped out. Powell said it was a remarkable turnout given that she began advertising only two months before the event.
A lot of the weekend was spontaneous. The coffee cart bailed, for example, so campers trekked 10 minutes to town for some Starbucks. A few crashers showed up with the DJs. They had so much fun that they asked Powell if they could come back the next day.
That’s to be expected with a first-time event.
Powell said Outdoor Refuge Festival is coming back, and first-time attendees sounded excited for year two. One said she was happy to get in on the ground level because there might be lines next year.
Based on early feedback, Powell is looking into single-day ticket options, a gear rental partner, more scholarships, and other opportunities for next year. The goal is to make it even easier for people of all colors — and outdoors backgrounds — to participate.
For more information, visit the Refuge Outdoor Festival website.
The outdoors weren’t hard for BIPOC communities to access, but discriminatory practices and perpetuated cultural beliefs may have led them to become less accessible throughout U.S. history.
“When we think about the Great American cowboy, those folks were Black and Mexican,” Nuñez of CSU Fullerton said. “They weren’t necessarily the white cowboys that we see on the spaghetti westerns.”
The relationships between people of color and the outdoors evolved as powerful players in U.S. history shaped the country and its landscape in their favor.
The country’s first white settlers colonized Indigenous lands and communities; in the 19th century, some white people romanticized the outdoors in contrast to urban areas, which were largely populated by people of color and immigrants and often viewed as unsanitary. Even President Theodore Roosevelt’s dedication to the national parks system reflected a desire to keep masculinity alive specifically among white men, Krymkowski said.
Such discrimination and exclusion throughout history have left Black communities with fewer opportunities to explore interests in outdoor activities like hiking, he said.
The legacy of these patterns still show today. Over the years, Black Americans age 29 and older faced higher drowning death rates than their white counterparts, a fact Krymkowski said ties directly back to segregationist policies governing swimming pools.
Incidents like the 2020 racial profiling of New York City bird watcher Christian Cooper, on whom a white woman called the police, reveal to some a pattern of continued racism in the outdoors.
For many communities of color, the outdoors can also represent a real danger.
“I’m from the South,” Powell of the Refuge Outdoor Festival said. “We had really some severe ramifications if you went into the woods alone. Or people were taken into the woods alone and came back – if they came back – traumatized.”
CARNATION, Wash. — Refuge Outdoor Festival has an event coming up Aug. 12-14 in Carnation, Washington.
“It’s a three-day camping experience geared toward black indigenous people of color to connect in the outdoors and build community,” explained Chevon Powell, the founder of Refuge Outdoor Festival.
In its fifth year, the festival will include a movie premiere, silent disco, workshops, outdoor activities, and more.
“The community has really taken a hold of it. We have people that travel in from across the country,” Powell shared. “People have said that its really life-changing for them.”
The fifth Refuge Outdoor Festival is happening at Tolt-MacDonald Park and Campground in Carnation, WA from Friday, Aug. 12 at 3 p.m. to Sunday, Aug. 14 at noon. Register for the event here.
The Refuge Outdoor Festival aims to show that outdoor recreation is for everyone, no matter your background or how you identify.
CARNATION, Wash — Geared up and ready for her first ever solo backpacking trip, Chevon Powell was excited.
But instead of focusing on the journey ahead at a park in Vermont, Powell, a Black woman, said she was pulled over by police as soon as she was on site.
“The police said it was unbelievable that I was in the outdoors,” Powell told KING. “It was one of the scariest moments of my life.”
Powell said she knows there is a lack of diversity in outdoor recreation.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent National Survey of Fishing, hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, only 5% of the more than 23 million participants who travel to enjoy the outdoors across the country are African American, Asian or another race.
Powell could have let this incident change her view of the outdoors and her passion to explore.
“I took that and knowing my skills, I said, ‘let me do something to create a safer space for people that look like me to be connected to the outdoors,'” Powell said.
Powell, who splits her time between Seattle and Houston, said this was how Refuge Outdoor Festival started five years ago. It’s a weekend-long outdoors event complete with camping, hiking, biking and a silent disco. It welcomes everyone with a welcoming invitation to members of the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.
The festival takes place at King County’s Tolt-MacDonald Park Aug. 12-14
“A lot of people you know, more people than you would expect, have had situations like this, especially BIPOC community or queer trans folks have experienced this in the outdoors or just in life,” Powell explained. “We’ve all gone through these different situations.”
Powell said Refuge gives everyone the chance to connect with the outdoors and make new friends in a safe and welcoming manner.
“It’s a full weekend of activities,” Powell said. “It’s all centered on outdoor recreation community building. We have over 30 workshops. We have Saturday musical performances and a silent disco.”
The event gathered 125 people in its inaugural year in 2018 and even gathered some virtual attendees and a limited in-person crowd last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year, Powell said Refuge is expecting more than 300 people.
“We’re creating the opportunity for people to pick up skills and learn how to safely recreate and feel comfortable going to state and national parks,” Powell said.
There is still time to register for a day or the full weekend event. For more information, click here.
by Amanda Ong
The fifth annual Refuge Outdoor Festival will be hosted in Tolt MacDonald Park from Friday, Aug. 12, through Sunday, Aug. 14. The festival is hosted by Golden Bricks Events, which also hosts events like Sundaes Outside. Refuge is a camping experience that centers around BIPOC but is open to anyone interested in the outdoors, whether that means people with years of experience mountain biking, or someone who simply enjoys their local park. The event still has tickets available through the Refuge Outdoor Festival website leading up to its opening on Aug. 12.
“Refuge Outdoor Festival is the first event that we created,” Chevon Powell, founder of Golden Bricks Events and Refuge, told the South Seattle Emerald. “And it was really to center BIPOC community and allies in the outdoors, building community through outdoor recreation, music, and a weekend together to take refuge from all of the everyday things, because the outdoors can be so powerful.”
This is the fifth year Golden Bricks is hosting the event and its third year in person, after the event was held virtually during the pandemic for two years. But Refuge is back in full force this year, bringing in some new elements, like partnering with Rain Or Shine Community Market for a big partner market on the second day of the festival, and featuring over 25 workshops and activities throughout the festival. This year, it will even host a screening of Expedition Reclamation, a film featuring 14 BIPOC women who redefine the idea of “outdoorsy.” It will also feature music as well as a silent disco where attendees can use headphones to jam out to music together, giving them options to do what they feel most comfortable with in the outdoors.
For Powell, starting Refuge was a way to center and uplift BIPOC in the world of the outdoors, which has a reputation for being predominantly white, with many barriers to access for BIPOC. Ironically, Powell said that all people have been sustained for generations by having some connection to the outdoors, but many younger BIPOC may be alienated from that connection because of racial and socioeconomic barriers. Golden Bricks and Refuge work first to alleviate some of those barriers, and then to center and uplift BIPOC in the outdoors.
“A lot of our work is behind the scenes and making sure that folks have the resources and the knowledge, the transportation, the gear,” Powell said. “So we work with our partners to make sure that no matter what level of outdoor engagement you’re at, you can be fully supported to come and take refuge. Because we all know that nature and being connected to the outdoors, be it outdoor recreation, be it working in the garden, has so many health benefits.”
The festival aims to bring people into the outdoors in any way that is comfortable or best for them — there is no pressure to become a regular mountaineer, but simply to nurture the connection you do have with the outdoors and with the community you find in it.
“What does it look like for us to have our connections with nature? It looks like taking a walk around the block, it looks like adventure travel,” Powell said. “It can look like a variety of things, and I try not to define what that is for other people. For me, refuge in the outdoors has been and will continue to be about healing. We have a lot of healing to do personally and as a community, and as a world, and nature actually helps guide me in those ways.”
Some of Refuge’s past attendees have been as young as 3 months old and as old as 72 years old, and have included entire multigenerational households and families. In light of its attendees’ diverse knowledge levels, every festival starts with a basic course on coexisting with wildlife, so people with less outdoor experience can gain some of the information they need to get comfortable. Most of their activities are done in groups as well, so people with less outdoor experience can pair up with people with more outdoor experience for more challenging activities.
“Many people come to Refuge because they say, ‘I thought I was the only BIPOC person outside,’” Powell said. “And to see the robustness of this community is just really heartwarming. And that’s why people’s levels of engagement may look different. But we’re here for the same purpose — that we want to be outside, that we want to connect. We want to build community. And frankly, we want to have a good time together for a weekend.”
Powell’s passion for bringing people together in the outdoors and helping BIPOC feel connected to the outdoors comes from her own experience, starting quite young. Powell grew up going to a camp for burn survivors, hiking and enjoying nature. But she found there was a stigma that spending time outdoors was simply not something Black folks do, and kept quiet about her passions — until she had a police incident while in the outdoors that made her realize she couldn’t be quiet anymore and continue to feel like she was not seen or welcomed in the outdoors.
“I had a police incident, and that’s where this all stemmed from for me in wanting to build a safer community outdoors, because for various Communities of Color, the outdoors has not been safe,” Powell said. “I just want to see a better world, I want to see a more inclusive and more caring world. And I think that outdoor recreation can assist in that in building a different way of being. We are all longing and searching for community, and I think that this is just the vehicle that I use to help build community and connection.”
Powell sought to build a community that she wasn’t seeing in the outdoors. And at Refuge, programming is not just intended to help attendees find community, but also to encourage them to keep that community even after the festival is over. Refuge ends each year with a closing circle so attendees can reconnect and affirm the connections they made and the new resources they found over the weekend before they go back to urban life. Personal health has been shown to improve with outdoor recreation, but along with that, building communities and connections with other people in our areas is also vital to our community health, and keeps us safe.
“I hope that people take away a sense of belonging, a sense of connection,” Powell said. “I hope they take away a sense of, ‘I can go back [to the city] and be amazing, but I know that nature is always there for me, and I’m here for nature.’ Because we also want to make sure that people understand we have to care for nature just as much as we want to enjoy it.”
Refuge Outdoor Festival will be held from Aug. 12 to Aug. 14 at Tolt MacDonald Park, 31020 NE 40th St., Carnation. Purchase tickets to the festival through the Refuge Outdoor Festival website. For accessibility questions about the festival, see the Refuge Outdoor Festival FAQ page. To volunteer at Refuge Outdoor Festival, fill out the Volunteer Invitation form. For other questions or interest in vending or performing, email Info@refugeoutdoorfestival.com.
Amanda Ong (she/her) is a Chinese American writer from California. She is currently a master’s candidate at the University of Washington Museology program and graduated from Columbia University in 2020 with degrees in creative writing and ethnicity and race studies.
📸 Featured Image: Refuge Outdoor Festival is back after two years of virtual programming, creating a space for BIPOC connection and healing outdoors. Pictured: Refuge Outdoor Fest at Tolt MacDonald Park in 2019. (Photo courtesy of Golden Bricks Productions.)
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Trina Baker didn’t grow up hiking, camping or adventuring in the snow. However, as soon as she began walking outdoors with GirlTrek, a program designed to get Black women outdoors, Baker said she fell in love with nature.
“Hiking has been my spiritual place,” Baker said at a Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission work session today in Ilwaco, Washington, near Cape Disappointment State Park.
Now, Baker has made part of her mission to get other Black Washingtonians to head outdoors.
A recent survey by the Black Washingtonians Workgroup on Outdoor Recreation found fewer than 1.5% of State Parks visitors are Black.
Some barriers included safety concerns, a lack of access to transportation, and access to outdoor equipment, which can be expensive.
The 12-member workgroup surveyed Black Washingtonians about these barriers to participating in outdoor recreation. In addition, the group presented potential solutions to lower those barriers.
Reco Bembry, the workgroup’s facilitator, said learning more about these barriers is a critical conversation. However, he said, this discussion should be only the beginning.
“It’s a very critical conversation to have about ways to create greater humanity for our citizens, and I think outdoor recreation serves to do that a lot,” Bembry said.
The workgroup reviewed at least 76 scholarly articles, he said.
Talking to Black community members, the group found at least 57 barriers to getting outdoors. The biggest concern, Bembry said, is safety, especially for parents taking children outside.
“Outdoor Recreating While Black, in Washington, is a modern-day safety hazard,” Bembry said.
To help with potential hazards, a Black couple, Anthony and Marlie Love, created a travel show that rates how safe and comfortable they feel while traveling around the Pacific Northwest, similar to the green book that guided travelers across the country.
The Black community has faced more than 100 years of barriers to recreate in state parks, which were created through systematic racism and white supremacy, he said.
“Parks were set up specifically for people that don’t look like me,” Bembry said. “When parks and recreation as a whole was set up, it was a place for white citizens to go to get away from this diversity in the urban settings.”
In addition, he said, laws and norms have led to the oppression of Black, Indigenous and People of Color, or BIPOC, Washingtonians in the outdoors.
Now, parks have changed, Bembry said, which is something he’s noticed after spending around six decades outside.
“I also can still feel the barriers that exist,” he said.
However, Bembry said the racist system that set up parks is changing slowly.
“It’s like turning a cruise ship. It takes time,” he said.
In addition, adequate transportation can become a major barrier to getting people outside, as well as discretionary money for entrance fees, gas, and outdoor clothing, Bembry said.
To help with some of those struggles, Bembry and Baker recently held two outdoor events for Black Washingtonians, with transportation, food and entrance fees covered by Black Washingtonian groups and businesses.
Meeting up at a specific location to travel together can reduce transportation issues, Bembry said. In addition, communicating plans in-depth beforehand helps people understand what to expect, he said.
Good advertising, for example, attracted 68 people to a snow tubing trip in March – it was designed for 30 people.
“That’s a good problem to have,” Baker said.
Bembry said Black people tend to trust community members who are planning and leading events, such as Black People Who Hike or Outdoor Afro. These groups can help people learn how to get outdoors, a significant barrier when first starting out, Bembry said. People seem to be more comfortable initially going outdoors in large groups with 10 or more people, he said.
“You’d be surprised about how many people in multiple communities around this country don’t know how to set up a tent,” Bembry said. “These are simple learning lessons that a lot of people are uncomfortable with and just need to learn.”
A little bit of help from more experienced people can go a long way, he said.
Experienced community members also can help Black people overcome generations of what Bembry called historical trauma, which leads to a fear of nature, Bembry said. He said he still remembers his grandmother telling him not to go into the woods at night.
“A lot of folks are overcoming that fear,” he said. “It takes one, two or three trips for folks to really get over that completely. The risk and reward function kicks in about the second or third trip.”
In addition, equipment costs can create a hardship for people first looking to head outdoors, Bembry said.
For example, he said, hiking boots can cost $200 to $300.
For her part, Commissioner Sophia Danenberg, the only Black member of the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission, said it’s also hard to know where to buy equipment when first heading outdoors. She purchased her first outdoor equipment from Goodwill, including an external-framed backpack formerly used by the Boy Scouts.
Moreover, Washington State Parks needs more inclusivity in its own hiring, volunteer development, and vendor partnerships, said Chevon Powell, a member of the workgroup who owns the outdoor event company Golden Brick Events.
Earlier in the meeting, Valerie Roberts, State Parks Volunteer Program manager, said the Volunteer Program is building relationships with new volunteers from many communities in Washington.
For her part, Danenberg said State Parks isn’t diverse in its employment or volunteers. At an event in Goldendale last week, she said she saw one other person of color.
“I’ve got to say, I saw one Black woman, and just as I was about to be like, ‘Hey Girl!’ when I realized that she was part of Gov. Inslee’s security detail,” Danenberg said.
To increase diversity, equity and inclusion when dealing with the public, she suggested increasing diversity training and the diversity of camp hosts at state parks.
To make camp hosting easier, Commissioner Mike Latimer said State Parks could look at creating camp host positions in places with yurts or cabins so that hosts don’t have to buy their own RVs.
However, Danenberg said, it’s difficult to bring in more diverse volunteers.
“You’re effectively asking for free labor from people who have been denied the ability to build generational wealth,” Danenberg said.
Next, Bembry said, the state needs to study more deeply how Black Washingtonians recreate outdoors, including focus groups and a more extensive survey of people who don’t already visit state parks.
“Reconnecting with nature is an inalienable right,” Bembry said.
The Seattle chapter of the Audubon Society announced that it is dropping “Audubon” from its name because of its association with white supremacy.
There are hundreds of state and local chapters of the National Audubon Society, the nonprofit dedicated to protecting birds and their habitats, but Seattle Audubon is one of the largest in the country.
Earlier this month, the board voted to change the chapter’s name because the man the organization is named after – illustrator, painter and bird lover John James Audubon, author of the seminal work “The Birds of America” – owned enslaved people and opposed abolition.
J. Drew Lanham, a former board member of the National Audubon Society and a wildlife ecology professor at Clemson University, called the move courageous.
Lanham, who has written about Audubon and left the national chapter over concerns the nonprofit was not doing enough about racial equity, says organizations need to grapple with what to do about monuments that represent the worst of humanity. Names are part of that, Lanham said.
Audubon was a “genius artist in many ways but a despicable human being,” Lanham said.
“To excuse inhumane acts as just being in the context of their time is, I think, a lazy excuse,” Lanham continued. “Those are the excuses the privileged tend to lean on when they don’t want to make changes.”
Lanham added that it is particularly important for conservation efforts to strive toward diversity and inclusion because environmental conditions often impact Black, Indigenous and other people of color the most.
Sundaes Outside
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Golden Brick Events
Chevon Powell, who five years ago started King County’s Refuge Outdoor Festival, which is specifically geared toward diverse communities, called the decision to change the chapter’s name long overdue.
Powell says those who take up birding will slowly learn about the history and then might think to themselves “oh, actually, this space isn’t for me.”
Powell says without significant changes – such as the stripping of names of white supremacists – “eventually, some folks will be like ‘I’m going to step away from this.”
Last year, the Audubon Naturalist Society, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental organization, announced it, too, would be removing “Audubon” from its name, but it is not affiliated with the National Audubon Society. Seattle Audubon is the first large chapter of the National Audubon Society to signal its intention to change its name.
Louis Agassiz Fuertes
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Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Claire Catania, executive director of Seattle Audubon, said discussions about a possible name change at the organization coincided with larger questions about the role of racism in the United States that arose in 2020 as protests over police brutality erupted across the country.
Soon after, dozens of American birding experts launched “Bird Names for Birds,” a campaignto change the names of birds named after white men who perpetuated colonialism and racism. For example, the group has pointed to the need to change the name Bachman’s Sparrow, a bird named after the Reverend John Bachman, a former slave owner.
Catania says the biographies of Audubon and others whom birds are named after have taken their majority white membership by surprise.
Still, she says she hopes other chapters will study the issue and make similar changes.
“It’s our hope that by making this public declaration now we can blaze a trail that hopefully will be easier for others to follow,” Catania said.
In the end, Seattle Audubon says its main goal is for more people to feel welcome in spaces dedicated to conservation.
Seattle Audubon plans to hold a listening session on Tuesday, and choose a new name by the end of the year.
For many people, getting outside can be a chance to relax and unwind. For people of color, it can also mean having to deal with racism.
People of color and their allies gathered outside Seattle last weekend at a festival aimed at changing that.
At the Tolt-Macdonald Park in Carnation, a deejee played music while attendees of the second annual Refuge Outdoors Festival line up for pancakes.
Chevon Powell founded the festival after an incident when a policeman pulled her over in Vermont and wouldn’t believe she was there to go hiking.
She said she wanted to create a safe space and also build community.
“It’s not just a fun weekend. It’s about learning the skills, sharing the skills. People can get connected in the local area so that they can continue to do outdoor activities and so they can feel comfortable doing those beyond this weekend,” Powell said.
Powell has plans to grow the festival.
So pumped to be presenting a short set at tonights Refuge Outdoor Festival‘s second night of programming! Tune in tonight at 6:30pm!
Join the Refuge Outdoor Festival for their 3-day virtual event from September 18-20 that will be centered on community, and BIPOC in the outdoors. There will be musical performances, a DJ battle, and community spaces to meet new people. You can learn about Wildlife Safety, the basics of bikepacking, go on a Live Bird Walk, learn about herbs for self-care and so much more! Follow @refugeoutdoorfestival to get details on how to sign up for the Refuge Outdoor Virtual Festival 2020.
 is a Chinese American writer from California. She is currently a master’s candidate at the University of Washington Museology program and graduated from Columbia University in 2020 with degrees in creative writing and ethnicity and race studies. There, she was involved with Asian American student activism and completed a thesis on immigrant family stories and orientalism. Amanda has recently been awarded second place for the Bristol Short Story Prize, and completed a zine about radical self-love. In both her creative writing and journalism, Amanda sees writing as a means to community building and empowering marginalized folks.</p>
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<p>Amanda Ong</p>
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