Name Change Celebrates Inclusive Future For Seattle Audubon Society

The non-profit organisation, Seattle Audubon Society, has formally modified its identify and can now be referred to as Birds Join Seattle

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Final August, I advised you in regards to the Seattle Audubon Society, a community-based fowl conservation and birding organisation the place I used to be a member, and its choice to vary its identify to be extra inclusive to folks from all walks of life (extra right here). They’ve made their option to formally change their identify to “Birds Join Seattle”.

That’s fairly a mouthful, isn’t it?

This daring choice contrasts with the Nationwide Audubon Society’s latest choice, reached after one 12 months of deliberations, specifically, not to vary their identify.

“I perceive folks could also be questioning how that’s potential if ‘Audubon’ stays in our identify. That could be a query the Board has grappled with, and in the end, they determined that the group transcends one individual’s identify”, Elizabeth Grey, Audubon CEO and ex officio board member, defined in a press release. “‘Audubon’ has come to represent our mission and important achievements that this group has made in its lengthy historical past.”

Sadly, this image is much from very best.

“The group is known as for John James Audubon, a racist white man who enslaved no less than 9 Black folks and contributed to Samuel George Morton’s ‘race science,’ which claimed white superiority over different races — concepts criticized on the time and now discredited”, notes The Chicken Union (previously; The Workers Union of the Nationwide Audubon Society) on their official web site.

Along with shopping for and promoting Black folks “like horses”, Audubon ransacked native Indigenous burial websites and stole their skulls. He additionally claimed different folks’s ornithological discoveries as his personal, even inventing a few of his so-called discoveries (extra right here).

The group was named 50 years after Audubon’s dying, when considered one of its founders, George Chicken Grinnell, who had been tutored by Audubon’s widow Lucy, selected the identify due to the artist’s contributions to ornithology.

However, it’s fascinating to notice that even the nationwide group acknowledged its namesake’s “problematic legacy”, as they described it in 2020:

“His contributions to ornithology, artwork, and tradition are monumental, however he was a fancy and troubling character who did despicable issues even by the requirements of his day. He was contemporaneously and posthumously accused of — and most definitely dedicated — each tutorial fraud and plagiarism. However far worse, he enslaved Black folks and wrote critically about emancipation. He stole human stays and despatched the skulls to a colleague who used them to say that whites have been superior to non-whites.”

Predictably, this choice outraged staff, culminating in a tense all-staff Zoom assembly that drove three board members to resign in protest.

“Beginning right this moment we disavow the identify. We is not going to elevate and have a good time an individual who would reject and oppress our union members right this moment”, The Chicken Union writes. “We name on the Nationwide Audubon Society to affix us.”

However The Chicken Union’s grievances go additional than a dedication to preventing in opposition to racial and ethnic injustices and theft of different folks’s discoveries and concepts.

“We’re preventing for a contract that helps guarantee inclusion is the norm and never an afterthought, that gives underrepresented teams with help and safety, and that ensures working circumstances which might be useful and accommodating for all of our members”, writes The Chicken Union in a proper assertion.

Moreover, the motion to cease whitewashing the Audubon identify has been rising amongst the Aububon Society’s member chapters since July of 2022. Already, chapters in Washington, D.C.; Madison, Wisconsin; Chicago, Illinois; and Portland, Oregon, have declared their intent to take away the Audubon identify with extra following go well with.

“We select otherwise. We select the antiracist path”, Birds Join Seattle stated in a proper assertion.

“During the last eight months, we now have heard from greater than 1,000 inside and exterior group members”, Birds Join Seattle said. “Our Title Choice Committee thought of greater than 250 strategies and introduced a suggestion to our board of administrators, who accredited it unanimously this previous weekend.”

Contemplating that birds are in a steep decline globally because of human actions, it’s crucial that everybody feels welcome to affix ongoing efforts to preserve the dwindling avian populations that stay.

“Birds encourage and inform conservation in a singular and highly effective method”, Birds Join Seattle level out. “Our identify shouldn’t be a barrier to our mission to advocate and manage for cities the place folks and birds thrive.”

SHA-256: 9ab94921e06b203a216cb219d873f92ea4083642075e2e0be632939cd42949aa

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