In a statement, Claire Catania, executive director of the Seattle chapter, said, “The shameful legacy of the real John James Audubon, not the mythologized version, is antithetical to this organization’s mission and values.”
The move is part of a reckoning in ornithology, birding and the broader American conservation movement to address historic racism in their organizations and practices. Seattle Audubon said it will likely take six months to come up with a new name.
In recent months, conservation groups such as Audubon, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund have dealt with national parks and monuments made up of land stolen from natives and honorific bird names given to men who were grave-robbing, enslaving and racist Indians who in some cases Blacks were compared to orangutans.
Audubon, an accomplished illustrator of American birds, stands out as one of the most recognized names in conservation. He had been dead for about 45 years when, in 1896, two Massachusetts women created a society to protect endangered egrets. They named it after Audubon, without taking into account his more disturbing past. Now, the organizations that he spawned are weighing his entire history.
Both the Seattle organization and the national group have considered a name change for more than a year. Last year, Elizabeth Gray, then acting executive director of the National Audubon Society, said that she was “deeply concerned” for Audubon’s racist actions, but that the group had a lot to unpack when considering what to do about it.
Society is still unpacking. “The National Audubon Society is still in the process of a thorough exploration of John James Audubon and has not yet made a decision on our name,” Gray said in a statement Wednesday.
Gray acknowledged the actions of Seattle Audubon, describing the chapter as an independent organization whose work “we respect…as…they represent themselves to the community they serve.”
But Seattle Audubon isn’t alone, said Glenn Nelson, community director for the chapter.
After its board drafted a resolution last year calling on the national society to reexamine its name in the interest of diversity and inclusion, it followed up with a letter recommending steps to that end and a request to make the process more transparent. Three other chapters in Wisconsin, New York City and San Francisco signed the letter, Nelson said.
Another group, the Audubon Naturalist Society in Chevy Chase, is expected to complete its name change process in October. Its executive director, Lisa Alexander, said last year that the society has considered a name change since 2010. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer brought the issue to the top of the group’s agenda.
The January 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill made change an even higher priority. “Did that speed up the conversation?” Alexander said. “You can bet.”
Although the Seattle Audubon resolution passed unanimously, it came at a price, some of its leaders say. After the resolution was announced, a board member resigned and asked that his biography be removed from his website. The official remains unnamed.
As the national organization weighs a name change, it has to consider possible pushback from chapters in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and California, where conservative members and donors are likely to be hostile to Seattle Audubon’s justification for the change.
Even in liberal Seattle, there was resistance during this week’s virtual call. While most members praised the move and said they were proud to be part of an organization that was taking such a bold step, some disagreed.
“Do you have empirical evidence that… maintaining the Audubon name causes substantial harm to society? Are people of color boycotting us? a member wrote in the chat.
Aside from Nelson, who is Japanese American, there were no people of color actively participating in the discussion about the call. It was basically white people talking to other white people in an organization that is more than 90 percent white.
“I am concerned that the Audubon name will be removed because historical figures should not be held up to today’s standards,” another person wrote. “I think it’s tragic for the natural world.”
Audubon was a brazen enslaver. When Britain emancipated enslaved people in the West Indies, he wrote to his wife in 1834 that the government “acted recklessly and too rashly,” Gregory Nobles wrote in Audubon magazine. It was not out of place for a man who 15 years earlier “took two enslaved men with him down the Mississippi to New Orleans in a skiff, and when he got there he put the boat and the men up for sale.”
Nine slaves worked for the Audubons in Henderson, Kentucky. When he needed money, he sold them.
Audubon was condemned during his own era by the abolitionist movement that worked to free the enslaved. In exchange, he fired abolitionists “on both sides of the Atlantic,” Gordon wrote.
Beyond Audubon, racism and colonialism are in the DNA of conservation. Everything, including mountains and types of grass and parks, has had offensive and racist names that cannot be repeated.
In the archives of the American Ornithological Society, Wallace’s owl and five other birds honor Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist who helped Charles Darwin conceive the theory of evolution.
Wallace frequently used the n-word in his writings, even when referring to a “furry little brown baby” that he bragged about caring for after he fatally shot its mother in 1855. He was talking about an orangutan.
Mount Rushmore was carved out of native land that tribes keep claiming. There were at least six native tribes in what is now Yellowstone National Park. Everglades National Park was once the domain of the Seminoles, who were forcibly removed.
“The assumption when you say you’re going to drop the name,” Nelson said, “is that you’re trying to cancel Audubon. We’re not trying to write off John James Audubon entirely. Most of his art…was important at the time and continues to resonate.
“We’re just saying that the things he did during his life don’t reflect our values and don’t fit our vision of what the present is and what the future should be.”