Kareem A. Dieng is the Director of Outdoor Education at Camp Beech Cliff on Mount Desert Island—Pemetic, the unceded ancestral homelands of the Wabanaki peoples. An outdoor educator and backcountry guide since 2012, Kareem strives to help reconnect youth and communities to the natural world while addressing inequities and nurturing leadership and resilience in lifelong learners.
He is a Registered Maine Guide with specializations in sea kayaking and outdoor recreation, a Certified Wildlife Tracker, Wilderness First Responder, Youth Mental Health First Aid Instructor, and a Soldier in the U.S. Army Reserve. Kareem serves on the Boards of Friends of Acadia and the Schoodic Institute, and sits on the Tracker Certification North America Access Committee and the American Camp Association New England’s DEIB Committee.
He lives year-round on Mount Desert Island with his wife Taylor, their French Bulldog, and two fat cats. When not leading programs or mentoring emerging guides, Kareem can be found birding, sea kayaking the Maine coast, hiking the trails of Acadia, and observing the more-than-human world with curiosity, compassion, and care.
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Tracker Spotlight: Kareem A. Dieng
Intro Questions
What do you love about tracking?
I feel like tracking is an explicit practice and way of being. It’s something that has helped me to qualify a part of my life that is part of the fabric of who I am. It has given language, implicit skills, and practices in a way that feels inherent in how I show up in the world. It feels like water tastes. It feels essential to my being—to my connection to the more-than-human world, to my ancestry, to the lineage I come from. It puts me into deep relationship with everything around me and encourages and forces me to think about the stories that are going on around me—the people that are not human who are living their lives, loving, communicating, overcoming. It’s a way for me to engage deeply and to learn, not just superficially but to relate. And in that way, through those stories and relationships, I can dive into the western conventional qualifications that exist in the field guides and research articles.
It bridges traditional ways of knowing that have resided in me for millennia to the outlets that exist in science and conservation today. Before tracking, I didn’t have the pathway—it created a conduit for me to connect in a way that nothing else has, or I think ever will.
Tracking is experiencing a renaissance and a renewal. It is thrusting Indigenous ecological knowledge into the spotlight and forcing people to acknowledge and accept the profound value that this way of knowing and being provides (not as a resource but as something embodied). It’s an invaluable opponent to the reorganization of power structures and the resistance—the shifting of paradigms and tipping scales, as nature does.
Tracking is an accessible entry point; it doesn’t require expensive equipment. It requires community, relationship, mentorship, and intense observation—and you can do it anywhere! And always!
What do you bring with you into the field?
I’m always in the mode that I could be in the field at any moment:
- Water filtration system
- First aid resources (SAM splint, tourniquet)
- Water
- Extra clothes
- A field guide or two
- Sense of wonder
- Sense of curiosity
- Backpack
- Communication devices
- Walking staff
- Sharp tools (axe, thick-bladed knife)
- Cordage
What I leave behind is the requirement to know, and expectations. I invite surprises and learning at every turn.
Favorite field guide or reference (tracking-adjacent or related)
- Naturally Curious by Mary Holland—it’s holistic, connected, and intriguing. At every turn I’m learning something inspiring, and it’s fun!
- Mammal Tracks and Sign by Mark Elbroch
- Tracking and the Art of Seeing by Paul Rezendes
Advice for new trackers?
Walk the trail together—don’t go it alone. There is wisdom in community. Find mentors and alleviate yourself of ego and the need to know. Just be. Let it be. Always be curious (the ABCs).
Name a favorite type of habitat where you like to track and a bit about why.
I’m in unceded Wabanaki homelands, Pematic, Mt. Desert Island, Maine—mixed forest. Where I live: woodland areas, forest ecosystems.
Why? It really requires that I tune in and notice the subtleties, because it would be so easy to see nothing. For much of my life, I wasn’t seeing. Tracking has shifted my perspective immensely. You have to tune in when there are no track traps and not many muddy or sandy areas.
Deeper Insight Questions
What advice would you give to people who are just beginning their tracking journey?
You’re not actually just beginning your tracking journey. You’re just learning that there is a quantified and qualified science and practice that exists, which you can tap into to help fully express the human way of being. We are trackers in our core.
I think about stories Louis Liebenberg and others talk about—when you’re in the grocery store and you need an apple. Typically, apples are in the produce section. Most of those exist on the right side opposite of the checkout. Fresh foods will be on the perimeter. Shelf-stable foods in the center. Those things are tracking.
Always be curious. Acknowledge and accept our ego-driven ways of being. Give yourself permission to flow through that. Let it be. Be where you are and be okay with that. Expect not to know. Find learning in everything you do.
What does tracking and connection to the more-than-human world have to teach us about resilience?
This exchange and interaction has taught me that it has to do with placing us in the ecology/ecosystem community that is nature. Tracking helps us navigate a path toward realignment with the nature of the self and to place us back into community alongside. In that way, it’s impossible not to develop greater empathy for the rest of us who are without human conveniences and creature comforts and who have ancient ways of being that have sustained them for millennia.
It forces us to acknowledge the brilliance and genius that is the deer in the freezing rain taking advantage of the resonant heat from the soil under the conifer; the scale on the osprey’s feet that allow it to grip the slippery fish; all of the physiological, psychological, and social behaviors that more-than-human kin have developed over the years. That all comes into focus and informs us that we also have resilience. We are here. We are thousands of years into our evolution. We are a success, a trial. Whether I want to acknowledge it or believe it, it is. The fact of that truth is hard to ignore. Tracking lays the trail and blazes the path toward that self-actualization.
How do you think we could get tracking to more people? How do we fold more people in?
The work that I do is my form of activism and resistance—community organization and development, uplifting folks around me. I say that because I think it comes down to this: if we are in a position to create opportunities for others, to extend our hands back and forward, left and right, up and down, to connect people and organize and create programs that serve underserved populations—folks that are just not involved yet—then we should. And I should.
Being intentional about directing and allocating resources, energy, and mentorship to folks who are not here yet. Having the intention that we are bridge builders, not gatekeepers.
What is your relationship to field guides?
I think field guides are invaluable resources. I feel like they are elders. They are magic. Books in general blow my mind. I’m able to receive wisdom through the portal of different temporal planes. Mentors can come to me at any time just by opening a book.
I’m cautious not to allow them to become a crutch or to let them drown out my internal wisdom. My relationship is complex. Early on, they felt required. They helped me to advance my skills in tracking and nature observation exponentially. But they also were a burden in my early experiences because I don’t have a conventional educational background in biology, ecology, etc. The language and jargon that exist in field guides was a barrier instead of a bridge. That was intimidating. Fortunately, it was not such a deterrent that I gave in. They encouraged me to do some introspective study.
Familiarity and understanding happen through relationship, story, and experience. Field guides made me get out and track and get the dirt time in. Through workshops and certifications at CyberTracker—whose methods are so rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing and being—folks are on the land, sharing, answering questions without hand-holding and guiding, learning together. Those experiences gave me the foundational awareness to go back into the field guides and start to make sense of the language and intricacies of the jargon and better understand why and how field guides are laid out. And then to use the field guides more effectively. It has been a web of connection to field guides. A multi-dimensional relationship.
How have you made tracking a practice in your life? What are other ways you wish it could be more of a practice?
A term that has surfaced for me is “omni-tracking.” I think of the prefix “omni” — there is tracking in everything, and I feel that. I’ve made it more of a practice in my life by always being in a state of tracking and thinking about how multifaceted it is. Thinking of it from a holistic perspective: tracking the wind, the weather, phenology, seasons, my family, my coworkers, micro-expressions, microaggressions, the political climate, the progression of our empire—as well as the obvious components of tracking: identifications, observation, finding.
More concretely, I have refused to conform. I have taken a difficult path that has not been without obstacles to get to a place where naturalist study and observation are in the fabric of my career, my academic aspirations, my friendships. It has been integral, not on the periphery. There are always opportunities to track, and it’s something now that I can’t turn off. I hear the bird song, feel the wind on my neck, judge the sun. Always there. Always aware. Always tracking.
