[00:00:00] Narration (Rae): I remember traveling to Kenya in 2014 to teach a wildlife ecology field course. And I was super excited because I was finally in that expert role, but there was this one particular moment that really bothered me.

On the first day that I was returning my students from being in the field and seeing wild animals to come back into our camp, we were stopped at the gate by one of the guards. He looked at me kind of strangely and asked for my name and my identification and why I was driving this car full of white American students.

And I was able to explain that I was their professor and I was leading this field course. And you know, I was an American scientist. And he actually chuckled and started laughing as if I had just told the funniest joke he had ever heard, but then he realized that I wasn’t laughing and maybe I was serious.

And when headquarters was able to confirm that I was who I said, I was, I remember him saying, you know, “Okay, well, sorry. Uh, you can go through.” And then he paused for a second and he said “Hey, I’ve never seen a Black scientist before.”

THEME

[00:01:07] Narration (Rae): I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant and this is a different kind of nature show: a podcast all about the human drama of saving animals.

This season, I want to share my story, but I also want to introduce you to other amazing wildlife scientists: some of my friends who study hyenas in Kenya, work with coyotes in California, and even track sharks in Florida.

The animals we study are great, but who we are as people and how that affects our work is just as interesting. And we’re going to talk all about it. This is Going Wild.

[00:01:46] Narration (Rae):Kenya is a hotspot for conservation work. But historically, that work has been done by white scientists and often in ways that have been harmful to Kenyan communities. So it makes sense that when I showed up in Kenya to do my field work, the response I got from some of the local Kenyans was I guess, skepticism.

They didn’t expect a Black woman to be a scientist. Like there was no way. And that skepticism, that questioning, you know, it really had an impact. Because it actually made it harder for me to show up and just do my job as a scientist, because it was like I had to constantly prove myself to the Kenyan folks, to other white scientists around me, and even to myself.

Because the way other people see me really matters, perception matters.

And no one knows this better than Dr. Christine Wilkinson.

[00:03:00] Christine W.: I actually kind of like the smell of hyenas when they haven’t been rolling in anything dead.

I used my sense of smell to find a den once.

[00:03:08] Rae WG.: My gosh used. You are like queen naturalist.

[00:03:13] Narration (Rae): Christine is a hyena researcher. Online she’s known as the scrappy naturalist because she’s spent her childhood in Queens, New York, running around the city catching hornets and other animals that most people don’t really think about.

And, in a way, she’s still doing that now as a conservation scientist who studies hyenas.

[00:03:37] Christine W.: I can count on maybe one and a half hands, the number of hyena conservationists that I know. And I definitely do not know of any organizations that are funding hyena work exclusively. And that’s because they are just misunderstood.

[00:03:53] Narration (Rae): One of the reasons hyenas are misunderstood is because they’re kind of weird looking.

[00:03:59] Christine W.: A lot of people confuse them and think that they are more closely related to dogs when they’re actually more closely related to cats. So things like lions and leopards, the big fuzzies.

[00:04:09] Narration (Rae): But the big fuzzies are the ones that get all of the attention. And as someone who studied lions for a long time, I can definitely attest to this. I mean who doesn’t love lions, right? They’re so majestic and charismatic.

Because of this celebrity status, there are so many conservation efforts to save lions…but here’s the thing. Lions are often involved in conflicts with humans, for instance, every so often they might kill someone’s livestock. And so an important part of conservation work is actually figuring out how humans and animals can coexist peacefully because when humans and lions get along, it’s good for humans. And it’s also good for lions.

So there are important reasons to study lions. But it’s important to study hyenas, too.

[00:05:14] Christine W.: When looking at the data from Africa, even the scientific literature was saying sort of anecdotally, uh, that hyenas were involved in as much, if not more conflict than those big cats.

Narration (Rae): In other words humans and hyenas interact a lot, and mostly not well….

Christine W.: So I started to wonder why we weren’t studying human-hyena interactions to the extent that we were studying all of the other cat-like species and their interactions with people.

[00:05:34] Narration (Rae): So Christine set out to change that. She decided that hyenas were going to be the focus of her studies in grad school. And the more she researched them, the more she realized that hyenas are an amazing species.

[00:05:49] Christine W.: They are known as the bone crushers.They are one of the only species that can chew and digest bone.

 

[00:06:15] Narration (Rae): And then the more Christine studied hyenas, something started to happen. She started to really see herself reflected in them.

[00:06:25] Christine W.: I do feel that, you know, they, similar to me, look really ambiguous as far as what their ancestry could be. Like, people look at them and they’re like, that thing looks like a dog or maybe like a bear.

[00:06:37] Narration (Rae): Christine feels that she can relate to being seen as ambiguous. She identifies herself as a Black multiracial woman. Her father is white. Her mother is Black, and she spent a lot of her life feeling misunderstood.

[00:06:54] Christine W.: As someone who identifies as half African, so half Black, half white, I’ve always felt really out of place.

You know, growing up, I would be teased by white folks for being not white enough and by Black folks for being that Black enough. Like, where people are referring to you as an Oreo half the time, I would say more frustrating things that have persisted into adulthood because people don’t really call, call me Oreo anymore, thankfully.

The thing that I get a lot still is “what are you?” which is a question that is an extremely rude thing to be asked. People are asking what my ethnic background is, which of course like I could list for you, like the 70 countries that I’ve been told my ethnic background is from, or you could just not ask me that question.

[00:07:42] Narration (Rae): But the truth is people do, and being questioned all the time, like that being asked to explain yourself, your existence, what are you? That’s really demoralizing.

[00:07:59] Christine W.: And it was always like, really hope that there’s a nation of Half-frica that I could just make for all of the mixed kids.

[00:08:06] Narration (Rae): So when Christine got an opportunity to study hyenas in Kenya as a graduate student, she was super excited.

[00:08:14] Christine W.: So I was like, I can’t wait to go back to my roots and kind of be in a place where maybe I can fit in a little bit better and not have all of this confusion around me. And that was of course a very naive point of view.

[00:08:26] Narration (Rae): In 2019, Christine went to do research for her PhD in Lake Nakuru National Park, and in Soysambu Conservancy in Kenya. They are two protected areas that are essentially across the street from one another.

And when you imagine a national park or a nature conservancy in Kenya, you might picture this open grassland with wild animals, roaming freely, you know, like in nature shows, but what’s special about the area that Christine chose to study is that it’s actually pretty densely populated with both people and animals.

And when humans and wild animals are living together side-by-side in what’s essentially a small town, they, you know, run into some conflicts. And Christine was really interested in learning how to create a better relationship between humans and hyenas in that area. She was excited to work with the local community. And she was also just excited to be in Africa, the land of her ancestors, and to get back in touch with that part of herself.

But when she got to Kenya, well, it wasn’t exactly the grand homecoming she was hoping for.

[00:09:36] Christine W.: I can be in a car or walking or driving along, and You will have like throngs of children, for example, running after you saying, “Mzungu! Mzungu!”

[00:09:45] Narration (Rae): Mzungu is a Swahili word that locals use to describe foreigners, usually white foreigners.

[00:09:52] Christine W.: So like I’ve had, Black friends of mine who are quite a dark in skin color go to east Africa and not be Mzungu’d immediately, but like for me, like I’m getting Mzungu’d from skin color immediately. And that’s really unfortunate because along with that comes this association with colonialism and all of the things that white conservationists have done throughout the years.

[00:10:21] Narration (Rae): A lot of times white researchers would become what might be called “helicopter scientists.” So, you know, like these white saviors who would drop in and save the lions in a particular area, but often they wouldn’t involve the local community at all.

And sometimes these conservation efforts would end up taking land away from Indigenous people to preserve it as lion habitat, without even asking how it would affect their livelihoods.

And Christine understands that history; she understands why the Kenyan locals might be skeptical of her. But for a Black multiracial person like Christine, it can just be really painful.

[00:11:02] Christine W.: Being associated with sort of white science and white colonialists conservation is particularly infuriating because my Black ancestry is slave Black ancestry. And all of my ancestors have been impacted by white colonialism that trickles down to my family today in a lot of ways that I won’t get into.

And so I feel like when I am being perceived as being just this white scientist, white colonialist scientist, it’s, it’s erasing all of that and it’s sort of sticking a little knife into that as well, and making me feel not only, okay, is this part not being seen of me, but it’s also yet another way to not feel like I belong somewhere.

[00:11:40] Narration (Rae): But on top of not finding belonging, something she was really hoping to find, being seen as a white scientist made it harder for her to actually do her job.

Going into the project, Christine knew that people didn’t exactly like hyenas. But in order to help humans and hyenas get along better, she needed to collect data on what kinds of conflicts humans and hyenas get into, why, and how people deal with these conflicts… and that meant that she needed to talk to local people and get them to open up to her, which was really hard.

But even before doing a thorough survey, she was hearing these hyena stories from the local folks that were pretty telling…

[00:12:23] Christine W.: You may live in a community where there was a hyena attack like 20 years ago. And even though there hasn’t been anything that happened since then, everyone is still fearful of hyenas and does everything to keep them away.

Narration (Rae): It’s true that occasionally hyenas do attack people’s livestocks, but this wasn’t the sole reason for people’s hostility towards them.

Christine W. Hyenas in a lot of cultures have been associated with witchcraft, not all cultures, but a lot… and sort of have a fear of them. That’s disproportionate to how they actually behave on the ground.

Narration (Rae): There’s even a Swahili word, Mafisi. It literally means “hyenas,” but in slang, it’s also used as a curse word. Like, you might call a sleazy politician a Mafisi or someone who had wronged you, which gives you a sense of how people view hyenas in Kenyan culture.

How people view hyenas matters because as Christine herself knows personally: perception matters. And how people view hyenas affects how they treat them.

Christine W: Even though it’s illegal, people do poison in this area. And another thing that we’re looking into, where there are rubber tires being fed to hyenas that block up their digestive system.

Narration (Rae): Basically, what Christine discovered is that human-hyena relations are bad. So bad that humans are living with a lot of stress and fear and hyenas are actually being killed. And that’s a problem for the ecosystem too, because hyenas are an integral part of the ecosystem. Remember, they’re bone crushers, so they can chew and digest bone, which makes them a very effective cleanup crew for the environment.

Christine W: That would be a lot easier on hyenas… If people knew more about them or understood how cool they were, more conservation can happen.

[00:14:14] Narration (Rae): But to change people’s minds about hyenas, Christine found that she had to earn their trust and to do that. She had to change their perception of her.

[00:14:25] Christine W.: How do I get people that I’m meeting for the first time to immediately stop calling me something like Madam, which is like a term reserved for, you know, rich Mzungus, which is like foreigners, and realize that like I’m a student? I’m someone who’s just here to listen. I’m someone ready to bring your concerns to the people in power.

[00:14:47] Narration (Rae): So what’s the secret weapon that would prevent Christine from getting Mzungu’d? Well, the answer is hyenas actually, but how exactly these vilified animals end up helping Christine, we’ll find out after the break.

MIDROLL (15:30 in audio)

[00:15:06] Narration (Rae): So it was 2019 and Christine was in the middle of her hyena conservation work in Kenya. Even though it wasn’t the homecoming she was hoping for, she was still determined to help create a better relationship between hyenas and the people in the national park and the Conservancy.

A big part of understanding how hyenas interact with humans and their environment is to track their movements, and to do this Christine and her team would need to put collars with GPS tracking devices on some of the hyenas.

[00:15:48] Christine W.: I actually have a collar here by the way, if you want to see it.

[00:15:51] Narration (Rae): Imagine a super thick dog collar with two battery packs; one sits on top of the hyena’s neck and the other kind of rests under the neck.

[00:16:02] Christine W.: The material is very thick because as I said, hyenas are the bone crushers. So you need a thick material, but you want any tracking device to be less than 5% of the animal’s body weight.

[00:16:14] Narration (Rae): Once Christine collared a hyena, she would use the GPS data to track how it was moving through the landscape.

[00:16:22] Christine W.: How are they choosing their next step? Why did it choose this one? And where are you most likely to find the hyena?

[00:16:29] Narration (Rae): In the weeks that she was in Kenya, Christine collared seven hyenas from five different hyena clans, which may not sound like a lot, but putting a collar around a hyena’s neck is no small feat. Okay? As someone who’s collared a lot of bears, I can tell you that collaring a large carnivore, like a hyena, is super intense.

So to collar a hyena, first, you have to capture one. And this part of the collaring process sounds kinda a sting operation. And for that you need a proper team.

[00:17:11] Christine W.: Two armed Rangers with guns and a veterinary technician and a driver.

[00:17:18] Narration (Rae): And instead of walkie talkies, in true Kenyan style, Christine started a WhatsApp group.

[00:17:25] Christine W.: The Battle Plan WhatsApp group! You want to be able to text and plan – you don’t want to have to call anyone and talk when you’re near skittish hyenas.

[00:17:33] Narration (Rae): Christine was the coordinator: texting everyone, making sure they were in the right positions to catch the hyena, and then, like a proper sting operation, you basically do a stakeout. There’s a lot of waiting in cars and looking through binoculars to monitor if a hyena shows up, and after doing it a few times, the process becomes pretty routine.

But there was one collaring operation that really stood out.

[00:18:07] Christine W.: So that particular day there was a zebra kill from the lions the night before, and they had left it and it was still relatively intact.

So my friend Simon decided to help me strap it to the back of his truck and drag it the few kilometers to the spot where we wanted to do the hyena collaring effort. So once it was there, we made it super appealing. We covered it. You know, water, because it was all dusty because we dragged it. We kinda made it juicy again and just kind of gross.

[00:18:39] Narration (Rae): Then they waited.

[00:18:41] Christine W.: I’ll use my speaker to call the hyenas in using their sounds.

One of the calls that they use to sort of, it’s like a homing signal, like there’s something exciting over here. Come here is the woop, which sounds like this.

Or sometimes we’ll use dying animal sounds as well, like a dying warthog, or a dying buffalo calf, kind of like.

And it really works.

Typically those sounds will bring in quite a lot of hyenas, but this time, for whatever reason, it only brought in one hyena, and that one hyena happened to be Smiley.

[00:19:24] Narration (Rae): So, Smiley was special because Christine’s been observing him for quite a while.

[00:19:30] Christine W.: The reason it’s called Smiley is because he has a portion of his upper lip missing which makes it look like he’s perpetually smiling, cause his teeth are exposed. It’s actually rather ugly when you get close enough to it. And so he’s really noticeable, right?

[00:19:45] Narration (Rae): Smiley was pretty notorious on top of being noticeable. He was also really bold and powerful and he would go places in the Conservancy that other hyenas wouldn’t go, and tracking his whereabouts would give Christine really interesting data to work with. So when he was the only hyena that showed up to her calls that day, Christine was super excited.

[00:20:13] Christine W.: We drove up in this narrow strip of land between the zebra kill and the lake shore, and this whole time, by the way, I’m both driving and trying to hold my speaker on top of my car to keep the hyena nearby, which is very difficult if you are driving a stick shift vehicle.

[00:20:33] Narration (Rae): So Christine slowly pulled up her car close enough to where Smiley was. The vet was in the passenger seat and he had his dart gun aimed at Smiley getting ready for the right moment.

[00:20:46] Christine W.: So finally Smiley went onto the zebra for like a second, and I knew he had that moment to dart him.

[00:20:53] Narration (Rae): Christine gave the signal to the vet. He aimed his dart gun, fired, and it was a perfect shot.

After a few minutes, Smiley fell asleep.

The rest of the operation was pretty straightforward: Christine fastened the GPS collar around Smiley’s neck, took some measurements, and waited for him to wake up.

[00:21:24] Christine W.: We were waiting for so long that like, I just like picked some burrs out of his fur for him because he was like covered in burrs.

[00:21:29] Narration (Rae): Eventually, Smiley did wake up, and they watched him saunter back into the wild.

[00:21:39] Narration (Rae): So now Smiley, this notorious tank of a hyena, was walking around the Conservancy with this collar around his neck. And, you know, people were starting to notice.

[00:21:54] Narration (Rae): News about her project was beginning to spread and Christine sensed a real change.

[00:22:02] Christine W.: The Rangers that work at the national park definitely viewed me as Mzungu from the very beginning because, you know, driving up in my own car to the national park, like they’re also seeing Mzungus all day long.

My field team and I were driving up in my little ratchet car, and we get to the gate and we pull open the door. We’re talking to Luke (he was the head ranger at that particular gate) and I was like, “Luke, our new name is Team Mafisi. Are you going to be part of the Team Mafisi?”

[00:22:38] Narration (Rae): Remember Mafisi means hyena but it’s also a curse word. So Team Mafasi is Team Hyenas. It’s also, basically means team F*** Boys.

[00:22:52] Christine W.: He started laughing. Like, he has this laugh where like his mouth opens so wide and his teeth are so white, laughing so hard. And I could tell that he thought that I didn’t know what it meant.

And he was like, “Do you know what that means?” And I was like, “Oh, I know what it means. I’m reclaiming it. We’re going to be Team Mafisi.” And he starts laughing and he’s like, sort of repeating Team Mafisi.

But when we came back from a day in the national park and the ranger crew was actually playing volleyball at the gate and they all were just like, “Team Mafisi!” So it caught on very quickly.

[00:23:33] Narration (Rae): People in the national park were starting to get excited about this project. They wanted to be part of this team Team Mafisi you know, like the ambassadors for the hyenas.

[00:23:47] Christine W.: They started sort of keeping track of what’s going on with the hyenas, people like texting me about where they’re seeing hyenas, just those like silly things, like Team Mafisi and like just talking to people seems to have planted some seeds.

[00:23:59] Narration (Rae): Eventually Christine had collared all of the hyenas that she needed. She had collected stories from the people in the community, and it was time for this part of her project to end. She needed to go back to the States to analyze all of the data she’d collected, but here’s this cool thing: because of Smiley and because of Team Mafisi, and just because of her consistent presence, something magical happened. Most people in her circle in Kenya were no longer seeing her as a Mzungu, like just a white scientist. They were actually real friends.

And so she left and went back home.

And she had plans to go back to Kenya several months later to do the next leg of her project, which was share all that she had learned from her data with the people in the national park and the Conservancy. And then also to decollar all of the hyenas, but then Covid hit.

[00:25:06] Christine W.: So yeah, the pandemic definitely upended a lot of my plans around coming back more frequently and reconnecting with people. Which made me feel like, oh my God, I am like essentially becoming a temporary helicopter scientist.

[00:25:24] Narration (Rae): Which was exactly what she didn’t want. She was worried that by not going back, she’d be repeating that familiar colonist history that she’d been working so hard to dismantle.

[00:25:36] Christine W.: Like, the whole purpose of me doing my dissertation in the first place was not about getting a PhD. It was about trying to help my friends who are asking me for tools to solve conflict. And so all of the work was about and for communities. And so building those relationships was like a major goal of the work. So when I was stuck in the US because of Covid, I was really worried that yeah, the momentum would be lost, that some of those relationships would be lost.Sort of folks forgetting about the work that we had already done together.

[00:26:12] Narration (Rae): What if no one remembered Team Mafisi?

[00:26:16] Christine W.: So I was kind of just like anxiously twiddling, my thumbs.

[00:26:21] Narration (Rae): During this time in the middle of the pandemic, while she was stuck in the US, she would occasionally monitor the GPS data from the collars watching the different hyena movements. But one day she was looking at the data transmitted from Smiley’s collar and she noticed something strange.

[00:26:40] Christine W.: You could see on the map he tried to leave the Conservancy a few times.

So it seemed like he had got kicked out of his clan or something. Then he walked into the next clan, the clan just north of his, and the Conservancy and his collar promptly stopped.

Usually if the collar runs out of battery, it’ll decline over a few days, maybe a week, a couple of weeks, and then it’ll look, it’ll be dead. The collar will be dead. But this one just like went from great battery to done.

So it’s like, oh my God, Smiley is dead.

[00:27:12] Narration (Rae): I know that as scientists, we’re trained to be objective and we’re not really supposed to fall in love with the animals that we’re studying, but even just hearing this my heart dropped. I mean, you know, Smiley was a hyena that a lot of people in the Conservancy recognized, and at least to me, he was kind of like the Team Mafisi mascot, and now he was gone.

And on top of all of that, Christine couldn’t even go back to Kenya to continue her hyena project. I mean, all of this was definitely just a big 2020 horrible moment.

[00:28:02] Narration (Rae): Thankfully 2020 ended. And earlier this year in 2022, after the travel restrictions were lifted, Christine was finally able to return to Kenya to continue the project as she had planned to do almost two years before.

And as she drove up to the national park gate for the first time in a long time, Christine was both excited and nervous.

[00:28:34] Christine W.: And I was like, they’re not gonna know who I am. I have to explain all these things. And I drive up, there’s like a crowd of rangers sitting there, which is not normal. And I got out of my car and they’re all like, “Team Mafisi!”

I was so surprised that not only were some of my friends there, that I knew from before, but even the new ones knew about Team Mafisi and they were all like, “Did you bring us Team Mafisi t-shirts?” And it had been like a year and a half because of Covid, that I didn’t even think any of them would remember it or that they’d be talking about it with new people or that they even want a t-shirts.

[00:29:10] Narration (Rae): It was a moment of pure relief for Christine to know that even after almost two years of being away, people still remembered her and they still remembered Team Mafisi and they were still excited about hyenas.

Riding high on that triumphant moment, Christine got right to work decollaring the hyenas. It was pretty much the same procedure as the collaring process. So she got her team together and she got some meat.

[00:29:41] Christine W.: We are bringing 75 kilos of rotting cow meat that we got from the butchery because their fridge went off the other day. Yes, it was as disgusting as it sounded.

[00:29:51] Narration (Rae): On this particular day, they were trying to decollar a juvenile hyena and the one big difference between this and the collaring operation is of course, when you’re trying to decollar a hyena, you’re essentially trying to lure just the one specific hyena who’s wearing the collar.

[00:30:09] Christine W.: And we had set up the cow meat, we strapped it to a tree. So I kind of went with a friend of mine to the top of this ridge to overlook the area and we saw the telltale gait of a hyena in the distance, kind of walking from the lake toward our general direction.

I looked at him with the binoculars and it was a collared hyena. And I was like, wow, what are the odds of that? Okay, everyone get in your car.

And I started playing the hyena sounds, and the collared one, along with several others show up to our meat tree pretty soon. And we’re looking at them and one of the people in my car was looking with her binoculars and she was like,

“Oh, it’s that one that you collared with the funny face.”

[00:30:55] Christine W.: And I was like, maybe she’s talking to me like a pattern on his fur or something. And then I just was looking with the binoculars and I was like, oh my God, this is Smiley, like he’s alive.

[00:31:07] Christine W.: He looked amazing. And in fact, like I say, he’s a tank, like as far as his like, ability to survive, but he’s also like sort of a tank because like the vet’s first shot that she got at him was perfect. And it just like bounced off of his stomach like he was made of metal. Like, it was very weird. We were like, how did that happen? Um, so he’s still making it, he’s very healthy. And uh, now he’s collar-free free, which is a good feeling.

[00:31:37] Narration (Rae): By the end of her trip, she was able to decollar all, but one of the hyenas she collared in 2019.

These days, Christine’s back in the states. She’s studying carnivores in California, but her hyena project in Kenya is still going strong and has taken on a life of its own.

[00:31:59] Christine W.: So now, like I’m working on the t-shirt thing.

[00:32:01] Narration (Rae): And you know, excitement really is contagious. Other members of the community are paying attention to the hyenas now and they want to join Team Mafisi.

[00:32:13] Christine W.: I think that like people outside of who I work with have gotten excited about or learned new things about hyenas are seeing them in a slightly different way.

One of the people who lives in the Conservancy has been really integral with like boosting the hyena ID books for the Conservancy.

And so it’s seemed to have made some sort of ripple effect.

[00:32:34] Narration (Rae): With her role as a conservationist, she’s been able to become the bridge that connects the people in the community with the officials who are in charge of the national park and the Conservancy so that people in the community can take the hyena project into their own hands and, you know, make Team Mafisi into their own thing.

[00:32:57] Christine W.: One idea that’s been floated as potential, long-term vision for the project like, have people within the communities actually being paid wages to sort of advocate for hyenas and other carnivores.

[00:33:09] Narration (Rae): And even though it’s too early to see the long term effects, because these things take years, it’s still really encouraging… Even changing the minds of a small group of people can have lasting effects. What’s important is that the seed was planted. Now there are people in the community who view hyenas differently – they see them as an integral part of the ecosystem and those people can help grow Christine’s hyena project into something bigger.

And as for Christine, she was able to change the way she was being seen, as well. She went to Kenya with the hope to find the kind of belonging that she never felt back home in the states. And while she didn’t find that sense of belonging at first, she persisted.

[00:33:59] Christine W.: You know, getting back to this whole Mzungu thing, yeah, I did hope that I would be able to feel a greater sense of belonging and you know, rather than just feeling that way, automatically what it’s taken is just building that for myself.

[00:34:13] Narration (Rae): She got to know people in the community and got people excited about Team Mafisi. And over time she found her way. She’s not just another Mzungu; many of the people she worked with now see her as something else: a friend.

[00:34:32] Christine W.: So my identity shouldn’t matter, but our identities do matter. How we bring ourselves to different spaces in science and otherwise and our positionality creates the space and creates the research.

[00:34:47] Narration (Rae): What Christine and I both learned in Kenya and in the spaces where we’ve done work since is that our identities do matter. People’s perception matters. And oftentimes that’s really hard and even unfair because we can’t control how other people see us, but we can plant the seed if we realize our own role in the community, and we do what we love to do, we can create belonging for ourselves. That’s what Christine did.

And she’s still doing that today, because the way we can change people’s perception of who gets to do science is by seeing more people like Christine, more people like me and other Black and brown scientists doing, studying, and talking about the things we love: science, wildlife, and ways to preserve it.

CREDITS

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Episode guest: Dr. Christine Wilkinson

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant – Host and Writer

Jakob Lewis — Sr. Producer/Editor

Rachel Aronoff — Editor

Caroline Hadilaksono — Producer and Writer

Cariad Harmon — Mixing and Sound Design

Nate Tobey – Consulting Producer

Danielle Broza – Digital Lead, Nature

Amanda Schmidt – Producer, Digital, Nature

Chelsey Saatkamp – Audience Engagement Sr. Specialist, Nature

Karen Ho – Sr. Social Media Specialist, Nature

Fred Kaufman – Executive Producer, Nature

Art for this podcast was created by Arianna Bollers and Karen Brazell.

Special thanks to Blanche Robertson, Jayne Lisi and the rest of the Nature team.

Going Wild is a new podcast by PBS Nature. NATURE is an award-winning series created by The WNET Group and made possible by all of you.

Views and opinions expressed during the podcast are those of the individuals expressing them and do not necessarily reflect those of THIRTEEN Productions LLC/The WNET Group.