“You Belong Here” comes out on all streaming services in 2025! Stay tuned!
Today, I am sharing with you a new music video for a new song I wrote called “You Belong Here”. This video is being released in collaboration with Black in Nature and Child and Nature Alliance of Canada (CNAC). Black in Nature is an Ottawa-based forest school who aims to get Black children outdoors, and CNAC is a national organization focused on supporting children and youth in developing meaningful relationships with the outdoors. The three of us are working collaboratively, in the hopes that the music video might support more people in learning about a new resource CNAC has created called “Anti-Racism and Belonging in Outdoor Play and Learning”.
In the video, you will hear my voice and the beautiful instrumentation and production skills of Joel Schwartz. During the time of COVID, I worked with Joel to record the album “Songs for Tree”, with both of us working in isolation. “You Belong Here” marked the first time we met in person, and we had a great day working in the studio to track vocals.
In the video, you will see children from Black in Nature playing with the land: exploring, creating, building and laughing. Black in Nature is led by Lukeisha Andrews, and you will see her in the video, too! Lukeisha is focused on creating positive, safe spaces for Black children and their families to build meaningful connections with the outdoors. In the video, videographer Milano Bonaparte captures the joy and adventure that children experience when they get to spend a day in the land with Lukeisha.
Lukeisha and I met through our work with CNAC. We are both members of their facilitation team, and we first spent time together in the summer of 2022 facilitating courses. One of the first days we spent together, a colleague asked if I might sing a song. “You Belong Here” was newly penned, and I shared the tune with our small group while we sat alongside a beautiful lake. When I finished, Lukeisha turned to me and said, “Tiiu, our slogan at Black in Nature is ‘We Belong Here’!” It was a beautiful moment of connection, and I then shared with Lukeisha what inspired the song, which is as follows…
In 2020, when I learned of the passing of George Floyd, I realized that I had a lot to learn about racism and non-white lived experiences. I opened my ears and eyes to opportunities to learn and hear stories, and one of them was a panel discussion, led by Demeisha Dennis of Brown Girl Outdoor World. The event was called “Black Like Me: Writing Our History” and one of the panelists was Elladj Baldé, a competitive figure skater. In the discussion, Elladj shared about how he never saw people who looked like him on the ice, and how that impacted him as a youth and throughout his career. Elladj is now focused on inspiring BIPOC youth to feel a sense of belonging on the ice through his authentic, beautiful art and through his work with Skate Global Foundation. If you haven’t yet come across his amazing videos on Instagram, get to it! They are so beautiful and inspiring.
Elladj’s words stuck with me, and I sat with my guitar, imagining him on the big ice sheets out west, surrounded by mountains, skating with the youth he is inspiring. I imagined creating a song for them to skate to, and that is what “You Belong Here” is.
In the summer of 2021, when Lukeisha told me that “We Belong Here” is the slogan for Black in Nature, a seed was planted. A few months later, I reached out and asked Lukeisha about what she thought about collaborating on a music video. I was just winding down working on “Songs for Tree”, and Joel had capacity for recording another tune. Everyone was interested in the project, and so we started working on it.
I went to Ottawa to visit Lukeisha and meet the families with Black in Nature, sharing the work Lukeisha and I were exploring together. The families were supportive of the video, and so we spent time together capturing the many magical moments the children were experiencing in the land.
We realized that this music video was a part of a much broader conversation around racism and the outdoors, and our hope became that our work might support more people in engaging with it. We also discussed that it was important that conversations around belonging in the land included Indigenous voices. As both Lukeisha and I work with CNAC, we reached out to Petra Eperjesi, Director of Learning at CNAC, and had a great conversation about what it might look like to support this conversation through the organization. Another seed was planted, and Lukeisha and Petra ran with it.
Two years of hard work later, CNAC is releasing an online resource, designed to raise awareness of racism that is experienced by visibly racialized communities in the outdoors. “Anti-Racism and Belonging in Outdoor Play and Learning” is an online course that shares stories and offers tools to foster understanding and inclusivity.
I’m really proud of this work, and I’m grateful that I was able to be a part of it. I, myself, am starting the course this week, and I hope that you will join me. Let’s work together, learn together and support each other in creating more outdoor spaces where everyone feels a deep sense of belonging.
This work is important, and there are things you can do to get involved and support it. Here are some actions you can take!
- Share with others all the links, so they may learn about this work! Here are the quick links: this post, the video and the course!
- Take the course!
- Talk with family and friends about anti-racism and outdoor spaces!
As always, thanks for being here. I really appreciate your time and interest in this work, and I look forward to continuing to learn alongside you! Let me know how this work lands with you!
Land Heart Song 