My name is Kriste Peoples; I use she/her pronouns; I am a huge lover of being outside. Earth and grounding are really important to me. I really find a sense of connection and healing and restoration and, I'd also say, right-sizing by being in the outdoors. I am currently the Executive Director of Women's Wilderness, which is a nonprofit based in Boulder, Colorado, which serves to empower women, girls, gender-expansive youth and adults in the outdoors, providing a greater sense of belonging, agency, connection, and self-leadership. In my own personal take around the name ‘Women’s Wilderness’ has been more aligned to that uncharted territory within us, that calls us to explore, that calls us to venture in and beyond our edges. And to break past the shores of all the stuff that we think we know about ourselves. That is the work. That is the work of a lifetime, as far as I'm concerned. That is the wilderness and that–specifically that journey, maybe because I identify as a woman–is a woman's wilderness. For me, it is a call to really meet that unmet self. My relationship to nature is one that invites me into this unknown, and holds me, cares for me in a way that only a mother–like a capital “m” Mother can. The Mother. Earth. The land. The land can hold it all. Even as I say that, we know the great pain and destruction that is being visited on the earth right now. At the same time, she knows how to heal. We don't know the havoc we're wreaking. We also don't know the vast potential for healing, reclamation, and reconnection and remembering that the land and connection to the land can offer to us. 

You know, sometimes when I first started sharing the places that I've gone, I had some family members saying, “What are you doing out there? Black people don't go–you chasing the bears, we don't do that.” And you know, it's funny, we laugh a little bit. But that doesn't come from nowhere: in the media, we didn't–until very recently–see people of color engaging in the outdoors. It was always people who were financially well off. People who were white, people who like, “Oh, we just grew up camping. We just always went camping all the time.” And being in this current position–what a gift to be able to extend an invitation to grown women to go camping for the first time in their lives. That doesn't mean they're deprived or hardscrabble or anything. It means that that's just not what they did up until this point. Because that's another misconception that the industry tends to have about people of color: “Oh, you're disadvantaged and marginalized. Poor you, you haven't been able to go outside, we've got three spots we want to fill with–get some brown and black bodies in here.” So you don't see yourself represented engaging happily in nature. Or you don't think that the way that you as a person of color get outside, maybe it's a picnic, maybe it's like planting flowers. “That's not nature engagement, you're not really doing it.” Add to that: segregation and laws that said, “You can't go to these places.” Add to that: the terrorism, the domestic terrorism and intimidation that has happened and still sometimes happens to people of color in the outdoors. So that's real, I get that. 

I also get that access to nature as a right. We can go out in nature in ways that are safe and supportive, feel healthy and welcoming. We can share our stories of the land with each other, which also helps us remember. And when I say “remember,” sometimes in a life experience, you know how sometimes we might be inclined to cut off certain pieces of ourselves in order to fit through certain doors to get to where we think we want to go…So we're dismembering ourselves, right, by cutting off those pieces. Reconnecting to the land allows us to re-member and call those severed parts of ourselves back home. And so we leave more wholly than we came every time. That's why I'm here.