The Norton Shorts team sat down with award-winning historian Tiya Miles to discuss her new book Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation. Tiya discusses the inspiration behind the project, what she hopes students will take away from the book, and more, below. 

How did your personal and academic journey lead you to this project?  

After attending my first environmental justice conference that included a tour of toxic sites in Detroit around 2010, I wanted to do something, even something small, to help build up the community’s social and psychological resources in the face of environmental risk. I had young twin daughters at home (in Ann Arbor), as well as a sabbatical that gave me time to think. Through the combination of these influences—environmental justice exposure, motherhood, and the luxury of time—I created ECO Girls, an environmental education program for kids at the University of Michigan. With the invaluable contributions of graduate and undergraduate students from various departments and schools and the community outreach coordinator in the Department of Afroamerican & African Studies, Elizabeth James, I co-ran a weekend and summer camp program. We took girls (mainly from Detroit, Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Saline) to outdoor places all around southeastern and northern Michigan and encouraged them to reexperience their relationships with their ecological home, a process that led them to embrace new senses of identity and confidence while making friends and developing an ethic of environmental stewardship. I loved this work. The project was transformative for me and my coworkers as well as for many of the young people enrolled. I ended ECO Girls in 2017, but details about our program (philosophy, activities, and funding mechanisms) are still available on the organizational website. When the opportunity to write about women’s history for Norton arose, I wanted to do it in a way that captured the spirit of ECO Girls. 

Beyond this animating spirit of community service, Wild Girls gave me the satisfaction of returning to my personal archive, lecture notes, and primary materials collected over the years. Many of the historical figures and events discussed in the book have appeared briefly in my previous articles or on my syllabi. For example, early in my career I was asked to record a teaching video about Harriet Tubman as part of a digital humanities project. I have assigned Harriet Jacobs’s narrative for as long as I can remember. I researched Laura Smith Haviland for midwestern history articles and a public history web page. For several years, in a class on Native American women, I covered Pocahontas, Sacagawea, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and the Fort Shaw basketball team. Wild Girls feels like a book that was waiting to be written.  

What do these stories, and others, tell us about the history of American women, and American history more generally? How might your book help people teach the history of U.S. women, or the history of the environment, with broader horizons?  

Wild Girls is a little book about girls who dreamed big outdoors. Drawing on firsthand accounts and weaving together stories from the 1800s and early 1900s, I argue that girls lived rich and consequential lives outside that we have barely noticed. I aim to show that when we see girls as outside actors—individuals acting in relation to their specific environments—we can begin to understand familiar narratives and historical moments in new ways, and we can realize a finding of environmental history—that human culture and what we call “nature” are inseparable. For example, enslaved girls like Harriet Tubman and Harriet Jacobs interpreted and navigated complex ecological worlds as much as the dangerous social worlds in which they lived, and writers like Louisa May Alcott and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Anishinaabe) were writing as much about nature as about culture—because they saw (and we can see through their work) just how much these two categories interacted in identity formation, social life, and strategies of societal change. And finally, at the end of the book, I suggest that this thesis about girls outdoors in the past should compel us to preserve “natural” and “wild” space and access to it in the present, encouraging a different kind of conservation ethic.   

Each chapter presents a subtle case for an expansive definition of the outdoors and a re-envisioning of girls’ experience in a natural world that is simultaneously “wild” and built. Together, the chapters compose a mosaic of diverse experiences while following a loose chronology that traces social advances, cultural innovations, and political developments affected in some way by teens and women who, as girls, had formed an attachment to the outdoors. As they unfold, the chapters explore pivotal moments in U.S. women’s history and the history of race and gender, such as racial slavery and abolitionism in the South and North, gender proscriptions during the Victorian era, and American Indian schooling compelled by the federal government and American colonial expansion into Native space in the West that preceded it. Each chapter simultaneously follows individual figures from girlhood to womanhood and addresses interrelated themes, such as identity, (dis)ability, illness, captivity, work, wonder, movement, violence, risk, creativity, resistance, and representation. The book presents a series of research-based tales of intrepid girls in the cultural wilds of nineteenth- and early twentieth- century America. This joint environmental-cultural lens reveals familiar eras of the past with greater dimension and an element of surprise.

How do you hope students will take the histories you’ve compiled and apply them to their own coursework and, more broadly, their lives? 

History can be a resource (a repository of material) full of models, analogues, and cautionary tales that are useful for people questioning the world around them. And practicing the historical method can offer students intellectual tools that can help them to analyze their own social and political contexts with an awareness of change and contingency. I think of Wild Girls as a social, cultural, and environmental history with an applied aspect. I always hoped the book would inform student readers while serving as an inspiration for them in the challenging moment that is the 2020s. I wrote this book during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when so many young people were feeling isolated. I thought that the courageous figures described in the chapters could offer examples of how to live lives of hope and action despite difficulty. Some of the women profiled are household names and even cultural heroes who are made real through the focus on their childhood yearnings. Through engagement with these women’s stories, and by connecting with others through shared reading and discussion of the stories, I hope students can feel a kind of transtemporal affirmation and companionship. 

How do you envision seeing Wild Girls used in classrooms at institutions across the country? 

I hope that Wild Girls can help to illustrate and enliven classroom topics in women’s history, Black history, environmental history, Native American history, and western history. The book addresses major moments and events that would be covered in a survey or seminar. Chapters are short enough to be assigned for one class meeting and could function as interesting enhancements alongside textbook readings or other materials on slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Reservation Era and federal boarding schools, and women’s suffrage. Another way to incorporate the book into the classroom would be to assign chapters alongside the autobiographical narratives discussed in those chapters. For example, the chapter “Nature Writers” could be assigned to help students interpret memoirs by Harriet Jacobs and Mamie Garvin Fields and to encourage students to question my arguments and evidence about these same texts.  

The book could also stand alone as a reading assignment in a women’s history course, and it is short enough for students to read for one class session, or within one week (explore the Wild Girls reading guide here). Classroom discussion of how the book considers well-known historical actors in new ways could also be used to encourage students to think of history as an active process of posing and pursuing questions—doing a kind of detective work—rather than as a closed domain of static knowledge. The biographical bent of Wild Girls makes it accessible and teachable, even for high school students, while the interpretations make it compelling for college students. I have been delighted to hear from parents and grandparents who say they have been reading the book aloud to younger children. 

MEET THE AUTHOR