Lecture Write-up: “Species Insurance”: Black Women, Environmental Storytelling & Survival

Settled between Black History Month and Women’s History Month, Dr. Tiya Miles’s lecture, “Species Insurance”: Black Women, Environmental Storytelling & Survival, served as a timely response to the ways in which women have begun considering the legacies of their female ancestors. From women considering how their own lives mirror those of their female forebears in a TikTok trend to Paris Paloma’s viral song about societal expectations for women, “labour,” it seems as though a women’s renaissance has begun. At the core of these trends is the attempt to retrieve some secret knowledge from their genealogy, as if the specter of a far-removed grandmother could materialize from one’s mitochondrial DNA and impart practical insight. We scour the past for ways in which we can survive each day with the impending threat of irreversible climate change and illnesses new and old, and so in studying their struggles we seek to derive an answer to our modern-day issues.

In many ways Miles’s lecture grappled with the connections people may feel to the past, whether through avenues of gender or race. She added the often-neglected component of nature, underscoring how scholarship on African American and Native American communities cannot exist fully without consideration of ecological spaces and change. Through Octavia E. Butler’s concept of “species insurance,” Miles argued that nature serves as a “responsive” entity that is closely linked to Black survival. Miles expanded this framework and called upon Harriet Tubman to demonstrate how an expansive relationship with nature manifested in her life and the lives of other enslaved Black people. Miles offered a comprehensive portrayal of Tubman’s personhood that films and textbooks frequently fail to construct, a nuanced perspective of how survival and mobility functions in enslaved people’s lives, and finally, how the simultaneous dispossession of bodies and land manifests.

Throughout her lecture, Miles resisted the tendency to portray Tubman as constantly running away from or towards something. To this day, Tubman’s legacy is rooted in her role as a strategist and her efforts to free enslaved Black people. However, Miles broadened our understanding of Tubman to include an image of her “listening and waiting.” To Tubman, nature was something from which she could acquire spiritual strength and identity. Miles recounted Tubman thinking of herself as a weed: something that drew “strength…from hardship.” She not only depended on nature for security, but she also viewed the outdoors as a classroom in which she learned how to read waterways and navigate the land. This led to her recognizing that she could escape her oppressive conditions on the plantation. Nature became the mechanism through which Tubman could undermine enslavement.

Using Tubman’s experiences in nature Miles revealed how there was a largely “eco spiritual” element, such as when leaning against a tree during a snowstorm conjured the feeling within Tubman that God was with her. But Miles underscored that the relationship Tubman and other enslaved people had with nature was not always mutually beneficial. While they derived security from the outdoors, they also participated in damaging nature by virtue of their role as slaves.

Miles demonstrated that conversations about the enslavement of Africans and the dispossession of Native American land are not mutually exclusive. Black women, like Tubman, were “nature writers” and found security in the outdoors, but that relationship should not preclude us from acknowledging whose land we inhabit. In fact, she argued that the discussion of Black enslavement cannot persist without recognizing the role of Native Americans in that historical narrative.

At the foundation of Miles’s lecture are the networks we make, whether in nature or amongst ourselves as human beings. During the Q&A segment, an audience member questioned whether Tubman reconceptualized her understanding of security and survival. Miles responded that Tubman’s perception “evolved” as she strived to create a more “sustainable” and accessible form of freedom through nature. The freedom Tubman envisioned would not be possible to grasp without family and security for all. Here Miles’s answer reinforces what many people have begun to realize today: our survival is not predicated on an individual’s access to security, but rather on the collective’s.

Miles enraptured us with her accessibility during both her lecture and the subsequent Q&A, and she revealed her own personal stakes in her research. She took a narrative the audience knew well and showed us how the crises faced in centuries prior could assist in devising the solutions we construct today. Perhaps the peace Tubman derived from nature can help us consider our own ecosystems, tackle climate change, and weather our own personal storms.

More information on Professor Miles' work can be found at her lecture page.

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