Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

You know, we built it all ourselves.

So when there was a hurricane, a bunch of trees fell down and we had those turned into

lumber and boards, and we had to build the fences for pastures to have sheep and things in them and horses, and we built a barn.

I was tagging along behind this elderly Yankee gentleman who was a really master builder.

He was an expert in stone walls and in building things.

I was following along behind him as his assistant.

From there, I really got into woodworking growing up.

I also got very interested in boat building, wooden boat building for a while.

And I went to Russia and to Kenya, you know, different places in the world where people were building traditional wooden boats of different sorts and just was trying to work with people there, with men there to build these things to understand.

how they constructed these beautiful straight boats that go in a line and that are controllable out of wood, that squirrely mangrove.

I just found that really compelling.

what fascinated me was that the kids started to ask me questions about why, when we talked about early humans and hominids, why they were always depicted with dark skin, like they looked like black people.

And I remember in particular, one girl, you know, bravely raising her hand and it just struck me that all the other kids were kind of

pushing her on like, yeah, yeah, ask the question, asking me, why is that the case?

Why do these early hominids always, why are they depicted with dark skin?

And of course they were on the equator where without dark skin, you would fry, right?

You would have skin cancer, you'd be sunburned.

And,

I think it was a turning point moment because the kids suddenly realized that the concept of evolution and of adaptation to your environment was applying to them as well in that context.

They were seeing themselves adapt to a new environment.