The College of Liberal Arts/School of Language, Culture and Society presents a talk by Gwendolyn Trice, Founder and Executive Director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center (MHIC), a museum located in Joseph, Oregon, and Carl Wilmsen, Ph.D., a geographist with more than 20 years of experience working on social justice issues in the management of U.S. public lands and a board member of the MHIC.

Their talk will cover the contributions and history of Black loggers and migrant labor to forestry in Oregon. The lecture is open to students, faculty and staff in Strand Agricultural Hall Room 163 and to those off campus via Zoom.

Gwendolyn Trice is the Founder and Executive Director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center (MHIC), a museum located in Joseph, Oregon. She also served on the Oregon State Advocacy Commission of Black Affairs and serves today on the State Advisory on Historic Preservation. She is a 2015 recipient of the Oregon Women of Achievement Award, a nationally certified interpretive guide (NAI) 2017 and the 2020 Stewardship Award recipient from the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon. Trice’s work is featured in the May 2021 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

Carl Wilmsen (Ph.D., geography) has over 20 years of experience working on social justice issues in the management of U.S. public lands. From 2009 to 2020 he was executive director of the Northwest Forest Worker Center where he worked to empower forest workers and harvesters of non-timber forest products in northern California, Oregon and Washington. Prior to joining NFWC, he was program director of Community Forestry and Environmental Research Partnerships at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also evaluated sustainable agriculture programs, worked as an oral historian, and (before college) worked as an apple picker and orchard hand, landscape laborer, school bus driver, and truck driver.

Wilmsen was the lead editor of Partnerships for Empowerment: Participatory Research for Community-Based Natural Resource Management (Earthscan, 2008), and has authored several book chapters and journal articles on occupational safety and health of forest workers, race and the environment, oral history methodology and participatory research. He is a board member of MHIC.

MHIC was inspired by an Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) documentary titled “The Logger’s Daughter” which shed light on this little-known history of African American loggers and their families who migrated to Maxville from all over the South and Midwest. Their mission - To gather, preserve, and share the rich history of African American, Indigenous, and immigrant loggers in the Pacific Northwest. We utilize inclusive stories of multicultural logging communities to better connect the experiences of immigrants and migrants to a larger American narrative.”