Hunting: It's not just for white guys

I know a lot of hunters in America live in places that are not very ethnically diverse - regions where mere black and white is considered diversity, or where a Norwegian-German couple counts as a mixed marriage.

But I live and work in one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in the nation. My students at Sacramento State are black, white, Mexican, Asian, Filipino, Russian, Central American and a hundred mixes thereof (because we got over that whole interracial marriage freakout decades ago). Ethnic diversity is like wallpaper to me.

Well, at work. Not so much out in the field, where white guys still constitute the majority of my gun-toting compadres.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a white-guy hater. Boyfriend is a white guy! But growing up in a state like this has taught me to relish diversity because I love basking in different perspectives.

When Kristine at the Outdoor Bloggers Summit challenged us to write about why the outdoors is for everyone, I was sold. Great idea, I thought.

I would love to do one of my classic Holly posts about hunter statistics, because the last report I saw from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service showed Latinos to be one of the fastest growing segments of the hunting community. Considering their growing place in our population, that's important to hunting. If hunting remains largely the domain of white guys, we are doomed to ever-shrinking numbers.

But the best data I have available is from 2001 - I'm still waiting for the F&WS to crunch the numbers from its 2006 survey. So that's out. No one wants to eat yesterday's biscuits.

I could write one of my personal tales about being a woman hunter, but dang, you've heard all that from me before.

So what I wanted to do was share with you a couple things one of my friends wrote. Hellen is the woman who asked me to help her get into duck hunting. She got her first duck ever this past season - a greenhead! And she's written a couple times about what it's like to be the one who gets stared at, bigtime. White sistahs, if you think guys look at you funny, you should see how they look at an Asian woman - aren't they supposed to be docile mail-order brides or something?

So I'd encourage you to look at two blog posts Hellen has done. Here's a sample from the first, which she wrote after we went on our famous All-Girl Hunt with Bald Pete. It starts where two other hunters had just passed by our blind along the river and stopped to chat.

Dana's friends were two white men, youngish middle age. Under normal circumstances, I would have been wary of them. They look like the kind of men that have given me a lot of grief at various points in my life. And even though they were enthusiastic and welcoming of new hunters, two of which were women of color, I couldn't help wondering if their kindness was based on us being with Dana, a local woman that they know. I couldn't help wondering if it had just been Jenn and me, if they would have been as nice. (Holly's note: Jenn is a Latina.) It's hard to say. I'd like to think that they would be. But then, Jenn and I would have had several strikes against us: women, of color, not local, and in the good blind.

I was on that hunt and had no idea what had been going through Hellen's head - the prejudice she had faced that made her ever-wary.

And here's a sample from a more recent post on being the other in hunting.

While I have not been subjected to hostile and mean-spirited discrimination in the hunting world yet, I have been subject to that kind of treatment all my life as a Asian-American growing up in the U.S. during the post-civil rights era.

I know what she's (another female hunter) talking about when she describes feeling outcast for no other reason than her gender. But now add to that being called names, excluded, ignored, or screamed epithets at for being Asian when I was a young girl on the playground or a grown woman seeking service in a store. For some Asian=Invisible, for some Asian=worthless, for some Asian=punching bag. Welcome to my world.

Or, having people come up to me and say "You don't sound Asian" or meeting someone for the first time after only talking to the phone and having them say with a feeling of betrayal "You didn't sound Asian on the phone." Or having someone speak really slowly and loudly to me, "DO... YOU... UNDERSTAND... ME?" Uh, I'm Asian, not deaf.

This is stuff most of us in the hunting community just don't have to deal with. Even I tend to assume that when we're out in the field, we're all just brothers and sisters in camo. But to all my white homies out there, I hope you read Hellen's words and think about what she's saying. And next time you see someone who's not just like you out in the field, maybe you could go out of your way to extend a hand and say, "Nice to meet you."

You cannot change the past experiences that person has faced. But you can be part of a better future. And if hunting is to have a future, people like Hellen need to be a huge part of it.

© Holly A. Heyser 2008