FAITH E. BRIGGS

ALL OF MY WORK IS about representation, whether it’s for Soul River, a fly-fishing nonprofit that brings veterans and inner-city youth into the outdoors, or my work as a documentarian. I just finished a film about the National Brotherhood of Skiers, an all-black organization that started in the 1970s, and I’m working on another about national monuments. We’ll be trail-running in each place, and we’ll talk about different perspectives of these public lands—an immigrant’s or a Latino’s or a first-generation’s.

I’m biracial, and I think a lot about the context of being outside, the kind of language that is inviting, and the barriers to entry for different people. I was a camp counselor as a teenager and a runner in college. Afterward, I was lucky enough to serve as Columbia Sportswear’s director of toughness in 2017, and they f lew me all over the world for things like trekking across glaciers in Iceland and fishing in Kamchatka. When people asked, ‘What’s the one thing you’ll keep doing?’ I was like, ‘Fly-fishing!’ and that’s how I got interested in Soul River. I was just up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with them. It was insane. We’re taking bush planes into the middle of nowhere.

People are realizing that it will take all of our voices to protect these places and with that comes the question: Why haven’t certain voices been heard before? The answer is they’ve been here, but their stories haven’t been told. And so that’s what I’m trying to do, too.