Environmentalist movements have a polluted history of excluding Black and Indigenous narratives. Rasheena Fountain’s work debunks myth and misconception to honor the full story.
Fountain is a polymath of the arts who has centered creativity in her decades-long work in environmental advocacy and social justice. Her essays, poetry, music, and film have garnered her fellowships with Jack Straw Writers Program, National Audubon Society, and Sundress Academy for the Arts as well as publications in HuffPost, collaborations with Natural Resources Defense Council, and a feature on Hamilton’s social media where a cast member did a reading of her work. Fountain’s art and scholarship carry a philosophical understanding of history, human experience, and naturalist insight. Fountain’s recently released book, Starfish Blues: A Memoir, is a deeply personal collection of nonlinear memory, poetry, and letters to family that details her experience as a Black queer mother moving from central Illinois to the Pacific Northwest. The artist and current PhD candidate queers typical categories of thought using her research on blues literature and the environment. Her work cracks open the boundaries of how we grapple with complex experiences and presents profound opportunities to think in more expansive ways.
“A lot of my work deals with memory, and specifically looking for ways to remember Black environmental relationships beyond what is promoted or seen in the mainstream,” says Fountain. “My grandmother was a sharecropper in Mississippi and migrated north to Chicago. She and my grandfather became homeowners and became very middle class, if you look at it on paper. I encountered a Chicago that didn’t feel like success or progression. There were a lot of systems that were weighing down on my family. Whether that’s mass incarceration, or gun violence and things like that. There’s a generation of my family where that’s all we’ve known, and so one of the things that is prevalent in my family is the desire to escape. I feel it’s a responsibility of mine to be a part of helping us remember a time before Chicago, before Mississippi, or even an afterlife that isn’t constrained. A large part of my work, and what I carry, is not thinking about ‘I’ve made it out’ and more about making sense of where my family is and remembering the abundance within the stories that we carry.”
Before moving to Seattle with her daughter, Fountain was taking environmental science classes with a goal of pursuing a master’s degree. “I’ve always been interested in what was left out. I didn’t grow up knowing that there was a field such as environmental science, or that people were studying air pollution, yet I was living in a community that was being disproportionately impacted.” She moved to Seattle to pursue an M.Ed. in urban environmental education at Antioch University.
After graduating, Fountain navigated opportunities in Seattle; having a rooted space for her daughter was a priority, but in the book, Fountain explains much of the racism that environmentalist spaces contained. She writes about the concept of “charismatic megafauna,” and the way endangered species—like giant pandas or orcas—are used as mascots for environmental efforts, used to soothe the collective conscience of the society that made life hostile for them in the first place. She then deftly connects this to experiences of tokenization and exclusion. In Starfish Blues, she writes, “I never wanted to be a charismatic megafauna for diversity and inclusion… but I’ve been made to feel this way. I’ve seen many Black people used in this way, no matter their credentials or expertise. I have often found myself symbolizing a fiction rather than a true inclusion and acceptance. In many situations, ‘inclusion’ for them has meant either just assimilation or an expectation to mimic the current ways of being and knowing.”
Fountain is hopeful that environmental spaces are changing, in terms of both opportunity and representation. “One of the highs was meeting people who were Black and passionate about environmental justice. One of my favorite authors, Dianne Glave, talks about how there’s this assumption of apathy with white environmentalism. It’s not a lack of care, it’s just that Black people engage with the environment in a different way. My own family was incredibly into nature. My grandfather would watch nature channels. That was his way to travel across boundaries that wouldn’t be possible as a Black man in that time. My grandmother gardened in the backyard, in what is considered a concrete jungle.”
In her book, Fountain examines how her ancestors’ relationship to the environment—and memory—was informed by slavery, cycles of forced migration, and escape from racial terror. “A lot of what I get into is about memory and why memory wasn’t transported to us. Instead, it was the continual act of forgetting and moving forward. My grandparents didn’t really talk about the bad things that happened.”
Fountain structured Starfish Blues around the 12-bar progression of blues music. “Blues has long served as an archive and articulation of Black relationships to the land, environment, environmental catastrophe, and social life.” The progression typically moves through three lines: The first states the problem, the second restates the problem, but with variation in tone and voice, and the third offers a resolution or irresolution. Fountain uses that final line to reimagine the problem, embedding environmental aesthetics within the musical framework—disrupting the conventional landscape of nature writing.
Although Fountain doesn’t shy from digging into the issues she’s experienced within environmental spaces, the book isn’t a litany of complaints; she hopes readers are able to geek out about nature and question their own relationship to place, as well as their relationship to this colonial system that has governed environmentalism for so long.
Fountain navigates these questions with generous vulnerability. “There isn’t one route to environmental advocacy. It’s important not to have a pristine look of what an environmentalist is. That pristine image is what keeps a lot of people out. I hope my book helps everyone reflect on our own relationships with movement, with our families, history, and identity. I’m excited about being one small part of diversifying the types of narratives that are out there.”
