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I was really struck while reading Solomon Northup's narrative, 12 Years a Slave, by how the environment was such a barrier for him. I hadn't really thought in the past about the natural world being a part of the imprisonment of African American slaves that planters overseers could count on the threats posed by the natural world, drowning or, you know, attacks by wild animals as being a part of the infrastructure of containment. But at the same time, the natural world could be an ally for enslaved people.

And that does take us to the story of Dunbar Creek in the Igbo uprising, which goes back to an event in 1803 when a number of Igbo slaves were brought to Dunbar Creek on Saint Simons Island, knowing that they were going to be going to a life of bondage, decided to reject that future. And they did so by basically capsizing the ship. Two of the white men who were working on the ship, who were helping to transport them, jumped off the boat and ended up dying. And the enslaved Igbo members of that group also jumped into the water, and many of them died.

But the interpretation of their story that comes out of African American folklore is that they didn't simply drown but that instead they flew away back home to Africa. So in this case, I think that that natural place in the land, that creek, is an inspiration for thinking about how people can resist inhuman treatment, how they can resist a lifetime of bondage. They can do it by, in this case, joining their lives up with the life of the natural world.

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Tiya Miles on environmental containment and the Igbo uprising

Transcript