Learning to Back: white uplanders, bird dog training, and race in America
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the nationwide protests sparked by that killing and the hot embers of other highly-publicized accounts of police brutality that have fallen on the dry-as-bones kindling that is our nation’s unfinished business with race, Project Upland shared their Instagram platform with collaborator and contributor Durrell Smith, of the Gun Dog Notebook, for a discussion of race. Immediately, they were hit with some double barrel loaded questions from white people: “What does this have to do with bird dogs?” and “I go to sites like these to get a break from ‘politics,’ why do I have to hear about this here?” And so it went, scattered in with supportive words of encouragement from other posters. When Quail and Pheasants Forever posted a “blackout” post on their social media accounts, joining a trend of expressions of support for the peaceful protests and statements that “Black Lives Matter,” many responses were even more caustic and hostile. While some understood the need for statements about solidarity with people who have been underrepresented in upland hunting culture and conservation causes, it has become clear we still have a problem with many resisting the call to make our spaces welcoming to our black brothers and sisters and all who want to pursue this sport. This resistance is all the more maddening when one fully considers who is being welcomed by the statements provoking resentful complaint. For despite having contributed so much, in so many ways, to our upland sport and bird dog traditions, black Americans have often done so from a position of second-class citizenry, imposed upon them historically and currently, even if unconsciously.
Now, let me set my own personal context for writing about these issues. I write today in Virginia’s capitol city, almost literally in the shadow of the behemoth monuments erected over a century ago as an homage to the Lost Cause that have only this week been slated for removal by gubernatorial decree and action by our city council (for the long - but good - story, you might start here). I am a ninth-generation son of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and possess a thoroughly ambivalent mixture of pride and shame about that fact and especially shame about its relationship to the enslavement of other human beings and the complex family history it represents. I appear as - and am afforded all the privileges of - a Southern white male of middle class origins in America. I have white, wealthy, land-owning ancestors I know a fair bit about who owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. I also have roots among the hard-scrabble Scots-Irish Appalachian peoples of the Virginia mountains who resisted secession and Virginia’s wealthy landowners’ decision to join the Confederacy. And, if one of the most popular DNA heritage testing services is trustworthy, I also have some measure of blood of recent (within the past two centuries) West African ancestors beating through my veins that I know exactly nothing about beyond knowing that the story of how that came to be is surely searing and exploitive, and likely forever lost to history. Finally, I know that a family history like this is commonplace in the South as Southern culture worked out the rules of who would continue to rule and be privileged by systems of economy and governance and who would serve and be under the boot of elaborate social hierarchies. I also know the truth of what William Faulkner described well with “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
So, I bring all of the above to my mid-life discovery of a deep and abiding love for bird dogs and upland hunting. I quickly realized this upland hunting pursuit and community that I was becoming a part of was by and large a white space, and I wondered why? While these traditions have for the past half-century or more been on the decline, that is less true in rural America, where communities can still be very segregated - either largely white or largely black, with other ethnicities scattered throughout, and, of course, largely spread out. If you want to keep to your own in rural America, you certainly can, a situation considerably more difficult to achieve in a dense and deeply interdependent urban environment. Was that the issue? But, then I saw it, scattered here and there: a respected guide, a preserve client or two. I happened across a group of black field trialers out at the preserve where Lincoln and I train one Sunday by happenstance. That’s interesting, I thought. Maybe it wasn’t true that black Americans by and large weren’t interested in upland hunting and bird dogs anymore. Maybe they were still by default and by the contours of unspoken and often unconscious social mores, segregated out. Maybe they did not feel welcomed among the white individuals and groups pursuing the same pastimes or there was the desire on the part of black uplanders and field trailers to have spaces of their own. Maybe the very specific route of my recent entry into this pursuit as a newbie was guided more by the fact of my own race than I was consciously aware. I looked around at the conservation groups I was part of, that had welcomed me and mentored me, and I saw few black faces, if any. Now I’m sure many in those groups and organizations would recoil to think there was anything they were doing to exclude non-whites from participation. “They just aren’t that interested,” they might say. “We’ve tried,” they might say. But is that true and have they really … have we really? And if we did, would it be welcomed or perhaps wisely resisted for question of motives and agendas and inherently unequal ground upon which to host engagement with one another?
Enter Durrell Smith, his Gun Dog Notebook, and Project Upland. If you haven’t caught Durrell’s and Project Upland’s cinematic collaboration debut, Hard Day Riding, you need to see it right now - this post will be right here when you get back:
You’ll find some more of Durrell’s description of these field trialers here:
Hard Day Riding and Durrell’s other offerings to date merely scratch the surface of the vast history that points us beyond European American gun dog traditions to an awareness of the rich depth of foundational contributions black Americans have made to bird dog training and upland culture, but they’re a brilliant and promising start and I hope we’ll see a lot more. Durrell strikes one as an enthusiastic ambassador, here to point us to the ways African American field trialers, bird dog trainers, trialers, and upland hunters have built much of the rich culture and traditions that we all benefit from today, in the same way black Americans have built so much of this country, often completely unheralded or unnoticed … until someone catches our eye and draws our vision toward it, so our minds can know what we’ve missed and our eyes can finally see. Should Durrell Smith be required to open our eyes to this in upland and bird dog traditions and history? Nope. Do he and other black uplanders and bird dog enthusiasts have a responsibility to be our teachers? Certainly not. But, I’m grateful for what he's offering and I will be grateful to receive whatever he gives as long as he’s not exhausted by what can often become the soul-crushing and frustrating burden many black Americans feel from having to ceaselessly explain the black experience in this country to white people who can’t be bothered to work to educate themselves and one another.
Almost every good white person I know who’s started down this road, myself included, seems to make the mistake of expecting black Americans to be our teachers about race and to serve that role gratefully and are often surprised and hurt when they get the very understandable (and correct) response: go educate yourselves, I don’t owe you anything. But, we don’t have to make that mistake. I can assure you, there’s a ton of easily available educational materials and opportunities online and even in our own communities where you can be a part of racial dialogue and exchange with participants willing and prepared to engage, provided you are there seeking to understand and communicate, not argue and debate. Here’s just one in Virginia: the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities. So please consider making the effort to seek them out for yourself - but don’t fall into the early trap many of us do and make the lazy demand of one of your black co-workers, acquaintances, or friends to break it all down for you, on-demand, when you want it - they may be exhausted and raw, especially right now. After viewing Hard Day Riding, I’d encourage all my white bird doggers and upland hunter compatriots to stick around for the additional opportunities Durrell is making available to you via his podcast: ““Still Can’t Breathe” with Randy Shrewsberry - Policing, Racism, and Reform for Hunting and Criminal Justice.” Here you can hear from one of your own, a fellow upland hunter and bird dog enthusiast, about what it’s like to live as a black man in America and, by extension, what it’s like to pursue our sport as a black uplander. Take the opportunity to view the world through his eyes and those of a white former police officer, and trust they are very sincerely reporting on their own experiences about policing, hunting, and race in our country.
Then expand your exposure. If you do nothing else, start regularly finding, reading, and viewing first person accounts to engage with others’ experiences, not to debate, but to understand what the world might look like when viewed from others’ eyes, with different skin. This preparation will put you in a much better posture when you begin to have conversations in person. Online, you’ll find plenty of first-hand accounts of what it’s like to be black while trying to enjoy the natural resources, spaces, and beauty white Americans take completely for granted. Google “Being Black Outdoors” for a start. Here’s one to get started and another. When black people report that they don’t feel safe in our natural parks and wildlife management areas, I promise you that’s not all bears, wolves, and mountain lions (the reasons white people might say they sometimes don't feel safe in the woods). A great deal has to do with their feeling of safety around us: armed white people who they know frequently view black and brown people with fear, resentment, and anger (look no further than our latest “birding while black” incident for why) or, in the case of black hunters, armed white and black law enforcement and game wardens who may view armed black people very differently than armed white people in the same outdoor recreation spaces.
And this leads me past the question “What does this have to do with bird dogs?” as I hope that question now seems as silly to you as it does to me and to any black upland hunter who has ever had to navigate our sport under the white gaze in this country. If it doesn’t, Durrell has some more introductory comments about this that you might find helpful. Either way, I’d flip that question instead to “What do bird dogs have to do with this?” I’d suggest the answer is a lot, and, even if you were to look past your common humanity and the clear moral imperative (which you shouldn’t, not even for a moment), and were interested only for the most selfish reasons, white uplanders should desire that non-white participants in our sport and traditions feel safe in the woods. White uplanders are aging and dying while the demographics of our country are changing. We cannot expect our traditions and our sport to survive without expanding beyond our demographic and justifying the share of state and national resources that must be spent on habitat and wildlife management to bring our game bird populations out of their death spiral. And that upland hunter demographic expansion won't happen until we do much more to welcome black and other communities of color. And I’d suggest there is something else white upland hunters and dog trainers can do to work on ourselves in these efforts: we could learn a great deal from our best dogs about how we might contribute to this moment. Put simply: We need to learn how to back.
Lincoln being backed by a naturally backing Llewellin, Blanco
If you’ve ever seen a well-trained bird dog back another dog, it’s a sight to behold and every bit as spine-tingling as the blessed sight of a handsome bird dog on point, full of pride and style. In some ways backing is more extraordinary than pointing because it involves a more complex process in the minds of our dogs. It means the backing dog honoring another dog’s point actually understands in their infinitely fascinating doggie brain that the other dog has something very, very important cornered - in other words, that other dog is on birds! Our best dogs know how to back a great and stylish point, even when - especially when - they can’t see what the lead dog sees and can’t smell what the lead dog smells. Our best dogs do it because they are taught to do that to be good hunters for us so that they won’t bust the birds another dog has found. But we have to understand that they possess this capacity to be taught to back because they would have learn to do it in the wild, in a pack of other wild dogs, so they wouldn’t ruin the pack’s ability to find food. Being able to back is fundamental to being a minimally competent pack member. They learn to take their turn finding birds themselves, and to back their hunting companions in a point of scent leading to prey that the backing dogs cannot smell or see but know is there because their trusted comrade indicates that it is.
When it all comes together: Lincoln and his French Britt buddies pointing and backing in a hunt
Some dogs back other dogs’ points naturally and don’t have to be taught by their human handler. Those are not that common in my limited experience. Lincoln most definitely did not naturally back. I like to say my boy, while awesome at so many things, was simply behind the kennel door when the good Lord was giving out natural backing ability. Lincoln is a pent-up bottle rocket of a dog who streaks through the field in a blur right off the chain, and is an incorrigible alpha in the bird field, an “I’m first and you’re gonna eat my dust” sort of brace mate to the other dogs in the field with him, racing as hard as his legs will carry him past the other dogs to sniff out birds first. Left to his own devices, he certainly wouldn't choose to stop at another dog’s point, but would push forward until he landed on the scent himself, sometimes knocking the already pinned bird if I didn't give him the cue to whoa in time. When I ran Lincoln in his first field trial earlier this year, I just knew he was going to get picked up for not being able to back, and so I spent days in the week before being sure he’d at least reliably whoa for me without an e-collar (e-collars for cues are not allowed in trials) when another dog went on point. I’d essentially tell him verbally with a whoa when he needed to back. While this felt a little like cheating, it was allowed, and I didn’t think he’d have a snowball’s chance without it. Turned out, his backing was never even tested. He raced well ahead of his slower moving brace mate, who was still a pup, and before his field partner ever got a chance to get a whiff of birds, he had found every single one of them. I was secretly very relieved that the judges hadn’t gotten a chance to see just how bad he was at backing … and especially so when he won the trial.
All this to explain why our first and most important spring training goal this year was backing. I went in with a friend and got a mechanical backing dog to use to startle him into the association between the sight of a still dog staunch on point and flushing birds, which he already knows means stop. It is the startling sight of a mechanical backing dog silhouette popping up out of the grass, associated with birds being launched at the same time, that produces a breakthrough for a dog not naturally prone to back another dog on point. As we worked through this process over a few weeks this spring in the shadow of a pandemic and then civil unrest, I realized that as a white individual I had been at times in my young life a lot like my dog first being terrible at - and then later learning to - back the lead dog on point on a find I could neither smell nor see for myself.
Lincoln starting to associate another dog on point with birds - and learning he needs to honor that point even if he cannot see or smell the birds the other dog smells and/or sees …
To extend the metaphor, like Lincoln, I did not come out of the gate naturally gifted at backing my black brothers and sisters when they stopped to tell me to pay attention with them to an important something they could easily smell and see but I could not because I had never been discriminated against for my race, and had never routinely been in circumstances where I was not in a fully empowered ethnic majority. My angle of approach was therefore fundamentally different than theirs and I was nowhere near the scent cone of systemic racism. I had always assumed the feeling of being white was “normal” and not actually what it really was - a highly privileged position in our society. I had never known anything else, and my family and most everyone I grew up with socially had never known anything else, so it was as unnoticeable to us as the air we breathed. I could dimly recognize that black people faced some discrimination and prejudice, but it seemed more historical and far less than advertised from my lazy survey of the contemporary situation. Things were so much better than they had been, right? Why wasn’t everyone grateful for progress and why weren’t they worried it might go too far to threaten the opportunities and rights of everyone (“everyone” always being consciously or unconsciously a stand-in for “white people”)? And yet, black acquaintances and friends sometimes tried to tell me, no, I didn’t understand, that they instead lived, ate, and breathed every day with the fact of their race - with bias, discrimination, and often open hostility from white people at work or in school or out in the community, and maybe, sometimes, even from me, especially when I downplayed their experiences or didn’t fully trust what they were trying to tell me.
Here I was a dog busting the covey, failing to back, failing to recognize what was there because I could not easily see it for myself. By not seeing or smelling it myself, I thought it wasn’t there, or if it did exist it must be the exception to the largely mythical rule of the fundamentally just society I wanted to believe we all lived in together. But then folks I came to know and trust kept telling me about their personal experiences. Later still, along came these instructive aids, startling mechanical backing dogs newly arrived on the scene - the cameras everyone now has in their pockets - and the white world began to see through others’ eyes just a little bit, here and there, and make immediate associations between tales of racialized brutality and actually witnessing it happen. Time after time, the mechanical backing dog popped up via smart phone video to shock our awareness into the necessary associations, until perhaps now a critical mass of us more reliably stop in our own tracks, transfixed by the horrors of witnessing most recently the brutal murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd at the hands of white vigilantes and police officers. Just as with Lincoln, the next trick is to no longer require that the visual aid to know the truth. We should know without doubt that systemic racism and the existential threat of racialized police brutality and extrajudicial vigilantism our black brothers and sisters have so long been telling us they live in fear of, lurking behind way too many hedgerows in our common field, is very real and stalks our common life still. Going forward, knowing what we now know, when our black brothers and sisters lock up on this critically important life and death point, we should immediately and instinctively back them. When they lock up on how glorification of slave-owning Confederates who fought to preserve the enslavement of our black sisters’ and brothers’ ancestors (and, let’s face it, in some greater or lesser degree, all of our ancestors) corrupts our common spaces and places of veneration, we should snap to honor their point and stand with them against an often unconscious and insidious white supremacy which corrupts us all. When someone like Durrell Smith tells us about his experience as an upland hunter and what he wants and needs from those of us who are white, both to make his experience as a hunter less fraught and dangerous and to recruit more black uplanders and bird dog fanatics, we should snap with pride and high style to honor his point and back him in whatever ways he and others are asking us to involve ourselves to support those efforts.
Lincoln backing a mechanical backing dog and being rewarded for ceding leadership and honoring the point
Lincoln is my only bird dog and he learned at my side in our solo training sessions. Finding and pointing birds, being the lead dog, was his and only his job. Introducing him to hunting alongside other dogs in a pack was something that required him to uncomfortably cede his role as pack leader when another dog found a bird. He had to be taught to cool his jets not just when he fell into the intoxicating scent of game birds, but also when he saw his hunting companions take the lead position in finding their own birds for the pack. His success then went from relying solely on his own speed and skill in finding birds himself, to supporting the leadership of his companions when their noses led them to be the first among the pack to discover their feathered quarry. In that white males in this country had for so long been the only people allowed in the role of leader, up to and including the presidency until a little over a decade ago, it is perhaps no surprise that so many white males in this country are so awkward in ceding leadership to men of color and white women and women of color. We could well learn from our best dogs that with the right exposures and experiences and openness to learn, we could quickly pick up a give and take flexibility in leading and following. This flexible give and take of distributed, alternating leadership is now a prerequisite to being competent pack members as it strengthens the effectiveness of the hunting pack as all of our cultural and social strengths within the rich American cultural tapestry, every bit as rich and diverse in assorted skills and talents as our panoply bird dogs, are brought to bear on the challenges and opportunities facing us in this twenty first century.
We also might look to our best dogs to see that learning to be good backers requires failure and requires us to stay committed through our own failure. Assisting in training out at our training preserve, I have learned that almost every dog owner comes in the same way. They want desperately to show off their dog, but really they want to show off their own dog handling skills and prowess. Every task, even those their dog has never attempted, is an opportunity for these new handlers for extreme glory or shame. And I was just like them. You can just see the owner deflate when their dog struggles with its first attempt at a task. “I don’t know why she’s doing that, she’s so good at home,” or “He’s so smart, I don’t understand why he isn’t getting this.” Even when you tell them up front that there is no way their dog will begin to learn until she or he fails and has to work out the problem in their own mind, they don’t get it at the beginning. But eventually, with most, you finally see the light come on. You see their shoulders relax as they figure out that their dog is going to need to fail to start to learn and work out the answer.
Breaking it down for Lincoln with a mechanical backing dog
So, I need to state here that I’m not a paragon of racial “wokeness,” and that I’m just as fallible and prone to failure as I learn as any white person approaching these topics. I have had, and no doubt will continue to have, racial blindspots like any white person, some very likely plainly in evidence here, so strong is the subconscious lens of whiteness in a society that was first formed and built and bent in so many ways to privilege us in ways that are easy to think of as “normal” and not privileged but rather basic human rights … until we discover those rights in practice aren’t routinely afforded to others in the ways and to the degree that they are to those of us who are perceived as white. I have found myself engaging and re-engaging intermittently over the course of my life in ways that belie the privilege of not having to live life in the crucible of race the way many of my black brothers and sisters have to, day in and day out. Despite being occasionally accused of being a “social justice warrior” or other slurs meant to insult, when I’ve offered a word pushing back against a casual racist utterance or racially insensitive remark from a white person, labels that I’d actually take as a badge of honor if I really deserved them, my past is littered as any with as many mistakes and false starts and neglectful failures on the road of learning to become a more reliable ally and more self-aware as a white man in a still systemically racist society. I’m a work in progress, and I’m learning more and more that this is okay. Maybe, just maybe, making my peace with that inherent fallibility is a sign that I might have what it takes to move past a lack of accountability and white fragility that result from living largely protected from accountability by the markers of power in a society formed in the contours of inequity and by systems of justice bent to serve some categories of people to the detriment of others.
Starting to talk about issues of race for many white Americans is as awkward and impossible to do well as any complex task we could ask our dogs to perform cold for the first time without ever before being trained to do it. It requires concepts and a language with which we are not natively familiar. We make a ton of mistakes when we start out, we step on kennel rakes in the dark and the failures are often painful and embarrassing. We feel misunderstood and judged for our failures. But soon we might discover our pain is entirely rooted in a self-imposed expectation that, as white people, we have to always be right, we have to always be in command and in charge and judged competent and the tools of debate and argument are always in service of those expectations. We are as fallible and clumsy as Lincoln when he first started learning to back. Check out the video above: even as he learns, you can still see the awkwardness of Lincoln’s early response in backing, turned in exactly the wrong way and backing a point behind him. And that’s okay. He looks kind of ridiculous in these early sessions, but he’s actually doing great. He’s learning, and he’ll definitely get better at it with many more runs at it, when it all starts to make sense and he begins to internalize the learning in his mind and works it out for himself. White American males are so often taught from birth to exclusively project confidence and to “fake it until you make it” and failure means an irredeemable loss of status. But, just like our dogs learning to back, we aren’t ever going to learn without failing. We must work through it to discover for ourselves that ceding leadership is often called for and is not at all a sign of weakness, but the natural complement in our human pack to appropriately accepting the lead when our unique line of approach, experience, insight, and abilities are called upon by the pack and by the particularities of the task or opportunity at hand.
And so it will be for us white people to ask, as the tear gas and smoke clears and passions cool and congeal into sustained resolve, that we be given the eye of discernment for when to lead and when to back, when to stand up for what is right, shoulder to shoulder with our black brothers and sisters, and to start to look to new leaders to see the way forward. There will be times that we will be called by the winged prey hidden in the tall grass to stop and point, to lead in front, to draw in directly the sweet breath of purpose and to savor it. But in this moment and in the days to come, as we face the challenge of joining hands across our lines of difference to bend the arc of history toward justice, it is our sacred duty to learn that we are first and foremost called to back our brothers and sisters, standing tall and proud as we breathe new life from the vision of them on point and in the lead, bringing our attention and awareness to marvelous new things, challenging us to join them, to support them, to make common cause with them in dismantling the scaffolding of white supremacy and systemic racism wherever it hides, in the city streets, in the grouse woods, or in the bird fields. May it be that we learn our sacred backing lessons swiftly and well.