Introduction

When I walk around campus, it’s hard to feel the soil underfoot. The Vassar campus is covered in sidewalks, roadways, and gravel footpaths determined to encourage students and passersby to refrain from feeling the grass and the give of the soils below as we move through the space. Instead of cultivating native grasses and self-sustaining perennials in the rich beds that line these footpaths, grounds workers replant fully-formed annuals seasonally, with seldom regard for the health of the ecosystem, the growth of the world around us, and the opinions of the more environmentally conscious students, faculty, and staff that witness the frequent uprooting. This past summer, Vassar even planted tropical flowering and leafy plants in the round-a-bout that faces the main entrance. And on the east border of campus, instead of being met with efforts at rejuvenating the old-growth forests that littered the Northern Appalachians, our eyes take in a sprawling, barren golf course. Even as the campus hails itself as an arboretum and plants trees for each student class in the fall and spring, my memory always circles back to the gingko tree that deposits litter across the sidewalk on the south edge of main circle and the japanese maples that encroach across the center of the quad, never to belong on any landscape in the Northeast except ones comprised of artifice.

The first person to really introduce me to the idea of native foliage, old-growth forests, and reveal to me the false naturality we’ve constructed in most suburban landscapes was my dad. On the weekends where he didn’t have to spend all night in the hospital, we’d drive an hour or two into the Blue Ridge Mountains and hike, swim, and camp in the dozens of National and State parks in the region. As we’d wander along the trail paths, he’d answer as many questions as he could about the plants, fungi, and animals growing and living around us. The first time I asked about a young American Chestnut sapling, his eyes lit up with excitement and a forlorn sadness about the eventual fate of the tree. The rest of the hike, he explained the histories of the Chestnut blight, the danger of Emerald Ash Borers, and the local concerns about the rapidly dying Eastern Hemlocks in the forests around us. I haven’t been able to see the forest the same since. Now, when I hike the trails I did as a child, I spot the woolen tips of Eastern Hemlocks almost instantly, cannot un-notice that I’ve never seen a Chestnut that appears older than a decade, and am always nervous I’ll spy an Emerald Ash Borer weevil its way into a tree older than my dad and I combined.

For a long time, I hiked and could only see a graveyard. I paid less attention to the thriving rhododendrons, the blooms of edible mushrooms growing just beyond the footpaths, the trout determined to outlast the fishermen casting their flies at every accessible creek-bend, my eyes fixated only on the markers of settler-colonial industry destruction. Even when my dad managed to acquire four American Chestnut seeds from TACF (The American Chestnut Foundation), it was difficult to understand how this could possibly change the course of what I understood as the land’s inevitable fate.

Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is one of the first texts I read about old-growth forests that gives me hope. In “Old-Growth Children,” she writes about Franz Dolp, a farmer who dedicates the latter portion of his life to re-growing the cedar trees that once dominated the Pacific Northwest’s forests to the land he’d purchased at Shotpouch Creek. This land, called “Burnt Woods” on a map “was razed by a series of clear-cuts, first the venerable old forest and then its children. No sooner had the firs grown back than the loggers came for them again”(1). Instead of simply planting cedars and hoping for the best, Holp used the land’s process of ecological succession to assist his process of restoration. He used the knowledge of the land’s natural instincts and the cedar’s inclinations to influence how he planted, tended and supported his project. As he worked, he came to even further recognize the ways that not only humans, but all the animals, plants, and the landscape itself rely on the ecosystem holistically to survive and thrive. When he noticed that beavers were also taking their own harvest from the saplings, in order to both support the growth of the cedars without denying the local beaver population their share, “he then planted a thicket of willow, beaver’s favorite meal, along the creek”(2). Even now, the cedar of Shotpouch creek are nowhere near the stature of their clear-cut ancestors, but they will continue to flourish and one day might form an ecosystem that resembles the old-growth forests our settler ancestors took for granted.

Crucial to Holp’s and Black and Indigenous food and land sovereignty activist’s work at restoration is understanding that the work is not so much about engaging in “a personal forestry of regeneration than in a forestry of personal regeneration. In restoring the land, [we] restore [ ourselves]”(3). It requires a shift from understanding the lands we live on as sites of lack/nothingness and re-form what we have into a potential for abundance for ourselves and our descendants. Regardless of the environments we live in, food and land sovereignty activists and organizers are committing to this, from the rural and remote to the urban. For the Deanwood community in Washington, D.C,

Residents demonstrated … that the unequal spatial geography of grocery stores in the District reflected systematic failures in the food system but that those failures did not necessarily translate into lack in their lives. Even … as participants pointed out what was missing … they also demonstrated the opposite of lack: strategizing, informed decision making, and nuanced understandings of not only the systematic failures of the food system but also what they desired in a shopping experience. (4)

Rather than simply living in the lack or living in denial that the lack exists, food and land sovereignty activists take account of the current perceptions of lack in their communities and seek to transform the resources they have within their communities into communal abundance and futured access. Instead of continuing to rely on extraction from external sources or subsist on non-sustaining foods and practices imposed by white supremacist and settler colonial forces, food and land sovereignty work utilize a refusal of external dependence, sourcing communally inter-dependent nourishment from within in order to ensure the futurity of their descendants.

Twining of Ecological and Community Consciousness: Buffalo Lessons

Before and despite the construction and narrativization of lack in predominantly Black and Indigenous communities, there has existed and continues to exist a collective consciousness which recognizes the inseparability of food, land, culture, community, ecologies, and collective survival. Because of the cultural importance of the reciprocal food and land relationships that developed from Black agrarian and Indigenous philosophies, separating these communities from their food sources and ancestral lands has historically been one of the numerous violent tactics of white supremacy and settler colonialism. The forced seizure of land and subsequent displacement and migrations of Black and Indigenous people has been both predicated by and brings on US government-funded methods of starvation, malnourishment, and eventual dependency. The lands and foods left behind are then subject to ecological devastation from over industrialization, resource depletion, unsustainable farming practices, the introduction of invasive species, monoculturization, and species endangerment/extinction.

One of the most devastating examples of this is the massacring of the Plains Buffalo, as an attempt to starve and destroy the way of life for Native tribes on the great plains. For Euro-American settlers in the mid 1800s, the hunting of Buffalo for sport was incentivized and celebrated, as the federal government understood that without access to their most sustaining and culturally significant food source, Plains Natives would not only physically starve but would be forced to alter any and every part of their lifestyle which involved the gifts of the Buffalo. When “during the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, granting 90 million acres of western lands to railroad companies,” Buffalo hunters would ride trains westward through the plains, shooting down hundreds of Buffalo from the refuge of the train cars, leaving the dead animals to lie where they’d been shot down (5). By the time Buffalo hunting was no longer deemed necessary for settler expansion, the once flourishing Buffalo population had been “reduced to a scattering of around a thousand remnant animals teetering on extinction” (6). Without their major food source, Plains Natives were also massacred, starved, and confined to small tracts of reservation land, with nothing to eat but the least desirable byproducts of the rapidly-expanding cattle industry. The US government set up “The federal commodity program (a.k.a. “commods”) [which] allocates canned beef, pork, and other food to Indian families…. This intergenerational distortion of subsistence, and its replacement with industrialized dependency, continues today”(7). 

Through all of this, Plains Natives have fought for their rights to life, to their ancestral homelands, and for the lives of the Buffalo they share their lands with. Continuing this fight today are Fred DuBray and his daughter, Elsie. After graduating from college, Fred DuBray took over his parent’s cattle ranch and has made restoring Buffalo to the Cheyenne river his life’s mission. In Gather, he says “if we want to maintain our [Lakota] culture, then we have to have Buffalo as a vital part of our communities, we have to restore that”(8). Spending decades of his life working collectively against the money and land grabbing cattle and big agriculture industry, DuBray understands the way that capital-driven domination mindsets fueling these industries are not only a threat to the health of the Buffalo, but a threat to his community’s health. Another member of the Intertribal Bison Co-op, C.A. Tsosie, calls their work “basically an Indian War Party,” understanding their work today as a legacy of the histories of violent struggle and resistance that Plains Natives carry with them (9). 

Even as Buffalo populations are growing across the country, “number[ing] around 500,000,” most white sustainability and animal rights groups struggle to recognize the intricate cultural ties between the Buffalo and Native Plains communities and their importance in the Buffalo restoration efforts (10). “A lot of non-indian people can understand the need to [bring Buffalo back to the land], and the good it can do for the land, whereas they can’t really understand the need to bring the culture back” (11). Even as Lakota people and other Plains Natives have always understood the Buffalo as a community with an equal and inseparable right to collective survival, it is often far easier for non-natives to understand the Buffalo as deserving of personhood than the Natives who have lived, died, and survived colonization alongside them. The struggle, then, becomes how do we teach non-natives about the ecological and cultural effects of colonial violence, when so many of us are intent on understanding Indigenous land-based culture as a mythic artifact of the past?

The effects of long-standing food-based cultural traditions on the body are more than mental, they’re physiological and physical, which is where Elsie’s continuation of her father’s work comes in. Struggling with the dangerous realities of high rates of diabetes among Native youth living on reservations, the younger DuBray has engaged in scientific research which aims to prove traditional Lakota knowledge about the health benefits and cultural necessity of Buffalo meat in the Lakota diet. Rather than seeking to prove to the non-native world what Lakota people and other Native Plains tribal communities have known and passed down through time immemorial, she uses Western science to open up the possibilities of her family’s teachings to reach a wider audience than her immediate community (12). By using Western science to fight for the rights of Lakota youth to consume healthful, culturally important foods, DuBray turns the tools of settler colonialism upon their heads, ensuring that the knowledges that have sustained her family and their intergenerational passion are not only impacting their present livelihoods and descendants but that of those around them. 

Foraging and Gathering

In the documentary Gather, Sanjay Rawal follows five different Natives (White Mountain and San Carlos Apache, Cheyenne River Lakota Nation, Yurok) across what we now call the United States as they use Indigenous land and food knowledges to restore traditional foodways for their communities (13). One of the main figures, an Apache woman named Twila Cassadore, is first introduced to us with a scene of her taking a young Apache girl foraging in the desert. For so many of us, the desert is the quintessential site of natural nothingness, so much so that in order to naturalize the unequal distribution of food access within American communities, sites that have less access to nourishing, healthy, and affordable foods are often referred to as “food deserts”. But Cassadore uses the teachings and long history of her San Carlos Apache ancestors' survival and thrival on their desert homelands to educate this young girl on the many possibilities of nourishment from this landscape. Cassadore forages not only to provide sustaining foods for herself and her community, but also to pass these practices onto the next generations and to find healing for herself (14). The San Carlos Apache community, like many other Native nations who have been continually violently oppressed, stripped of their lands and ways of life by white supremacist settler colonial ideologies, is faced with high rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure as a direct result of the continuous attacks on tribal living. These Nations, confronted with dispossession, visions of governmentally-designed lack, and forced reliance on the very powers that hold them down and desire their extinction, are also driven to substance abuse, sexual abuse and domination, and suicide. For Cassadore, the ability to gather her own food in line with her ancestors’ teachings, and to then provide that same food and education as an alternative to the white supremacist death drive, is an intense force of healing that allows her to reclaim her body for a higher purpose (15).

Foraging is something that everyone can do, and provides a grounds for self-reliant nourishment that runs counter to the disconnect between land and the meals on our tables that modern, white-led big agriculture seeks to widen. For migrants in particular, foraging offers an opportunity to find familiarity in foreign, often hostile environments, thus returning a sense of autonomy to the subjected body. In Tastes Like War, Cho grapples with her ever-changing relationship with her now-late mother, a survivor of the Korean War and the ensuing power of transnational military imperialism that forced her mother to engage in sexual slavery for survival. Before her mother develops paranoid schizophrenia and spends the last decades of her life as a shut-in, she supports her two children by overworking herself to compensate for their dad’s inaccessible marine salary. For many of her summers as a child and adolescent, Cho’s mother takes to the woods behind their house and forages wild blackberries and mushrooms, selling the extra produce to the local community. For Cho’s mom “the forest was the one place in Chehalis that called her. It felt familiar, and at the same time, was rich with discovery” (16). While the predominantly white, severely racist rural town that Cho grew up in treated her and her mother horribly, her mother used “the capacity to feed the very community that had treated her as a second-class citizen, to rise above the fray and be the gracious one,” to find a purpose for herself that didn’t rely on her femininity or sexual desirability, and to ensure that her children would never feel the hunger that she felt growing up (17). And while foraging alone wasn’t enough to give Cho’s mother the healing that she so desperately needed, this was one of the many ways she communicated to Cho the importance of food-making in relationship building. And in the final years of her life, Cho’s mother teaches her an astounding array of traditional Korean meals that they’re able to share together, an act of love that provides her with stability and safety until she passes. 

Foraging and gathering connects us to the land in incredibly intimate ways, and opens our eyes to the abundance around us that we’ve been taught to ignore in favor of the pristine and sterile aisles of the supermarket. For Alexis Nikole Nelson (a.k.a. @blackforager on tiktok), who was raised by two Black parents with Indigenous ancestry, learning to recognize and forage the plants growing in her backyard and suburban community is something she’s been learning and doing since childhood. In an interview with NPR, she calls deliberate attention to the ways that foraging and living with the land has been denied to Black Americans through historic legislation, post-bellum cultural norms, and ideologies of property and white understandings of land-ownership. She says 

You have this really weird thing happen in the 20th century where everyone is, like, wanting to show off wealth. So foraging kind of became taboo even if you did have the knowledge to do it — and that was regardless of race. Foraging very much got looked down upon because the thinking was, why would you be heading down to the creek to gather pawpaws when you can go to the grocery store and get a banana? (18)

Not only is Nelson combatting norms of politeness, property, wealth, and appropriate food collecting methods through her work as a forager and internet educator, she’s also using her growing relationship with the land and food to learn how to fall back in love with food and nourishment after grappling with an eating disorder. Instead of food being a source of fear and control, food and nourishment becomes a celebration of her body, her intergenerational teachings, and Black people’s right to live with the land and engage with the outdoors. 

The Garden as Commons; Putting Community First

Gardening was an attempt to beautify while feeding. It was a method of active resistance in which residents exhibited agency in shaping some of the contours of the community. For these gardeners, flourishing was not simply about producing food. The desire and need to flourish were evident in all their programming. (19)

The garden was a literal and symbolic spatial reflection of their commitment to building a healthy community. This commitment, however, was unmatched by the city …. The garden itself did not radically redistribute wealth, decrease reliance on supermarkets, or, as Dametria aptly observed, bring any noteworthy attention to how the residents were trying to help themselves. In some ways, their work could possibly be deemed unsuccessful because of the limited reach and capacity of the garden, especially since gardening goals are typically framed in terms of capacity to transform the local food system. Even with these tensions, however, Ms. Johnson’s metaphorical use of flourishing stands out as what makes this garden and the gardeners’ efforts extraordinary. In their attempts to address the effects of structural inequalities, they affirmed and claimed their humanity for themselves despite the constant, state-sanctioned threat to Black life. Embedded in the various threats to Black life, however, was an optimistic love for community, a belief in a redemptive love that covered a multitude of sins-in this case the scars of systematic racism and disinvestment embedded in the spatial distribution of food. (20)

Foraging is only one of the myriad ways Black and Indigenous food and land sovereignty activists use nourishment to craft a community environmental consciousness, reclaim ancestral methods of teaching and healing, and envision abundant futures. When we think about farming and food sovereignty at the local/small community level, the spaces that most frequently come to mind are community gardens. These small, oft-overlooked spaces both provide neighborhoods with sustaining produce throughout the year and opportunities for community education, gathering, and collective reimaginatory healing. Because, quite literally, the “community garden” puts community first. In Poverty Scholarship: Poor People-Led Theory, Art, Words & Tears Across Mama Earth, Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia writes about the near impossibility of sourcing healthy food while in poverty. Food stamps, food banks, and other forms of food-based governmental support are not truly dedicated to ensuring the health and survival of poor people, but instead supply only the poorest quality and quantity of un-nourishing, GMO-ridden canned food. For incarcerated people too, access to healthful foods is impossible, even as prisoners are forced to work in plantation-like environments for little to no pay in order to feed Americans who aren’t subjected to such severe levels of food apartheid. She writes “it was all about survival and poverty. There was No Way we could prepare fresh vegetables, fruits, salads, or even beans and rice” (21). Tiny then calls out the people who are devoted to shaming poor communities for not “eating better” without doing anything to change the material reality of their food environment. The alternative she then uplifts are community gardens in poor neighborhoods, which she understands as “an act of revolution in a community where so many of our poor mamaz and daddys, elders and young peoples dwell and have ready access to a lot of GMO-ed fast food, chips, sodas and liquor in corner sto’s” (22). 

The commitment to a community garden and delivering affordable but nourishing food to communities and people living in food apartheid is, in the words of Ashante M. Reese, a way to use “self-reliance as a practice of refusal” (23). Acts of refusal in urban/suburban spaces can be as small as Mr. Jones’ refusal to sell certain kinds or quantities of food to his community in attempts to maintain the health of the youth population of Deanwood, or as large as the installation and maintenance of the community gardens in Deanwood, Oakland, Richmond, Milwaukee, and in other urban neighborhoods across the country. Materially, these acts of refusal, manifestations of self-reliance, and food-based revolution replace the unhealthful and lacking foods that contribute to the long-term health issues that these communities face with nourishing, fresh alternatives that tie people to the communities they live in. But the material benefits of community gardens are only one piece of the puzzle, as gardeners in both Deanwood and elsewhere understand that “it [is] not enough to feed families with food from the garden. Instead, the gardeners’ wished to feed more than bodies. They [aim] to feed the soul a serving of hope with a side of self-reliance” (24). The work of community gardens is inherently holistic, as traditional Black and Indigenous relationships with food and land require us to conceptualize food and its impacts as in relation to all aspects of our collective lives, past, present, and future.

For many community gardens, understanding the relational impact of food means that food production is only one facet of the garden’s structure. Many gardens are located in public community spaces, either near public housing units or on community center grounds, and in the case of Alice’s Garden Urban Farm in Milwaukee, feature a number of other outdoor activities for patrons to participate in while collecting produce. Two initiatives/projects at Alice’s garden are the Labyrinth and The Table, which invite patrons to exist freely among the gardens and to eat and share in community with one another. The Labyrinth, a self-guided maze on the property, is freely accessible to the public, asks those who enter to use the time to walk and reflect with yourself either as you meander through the space or while sitting on the meditation benches located throughout. The space invites those who enter to make time for themselves, to breathe through all the weights they carry with them in their daily lives, and to affirm “the Power/Spirit of life in the present,” an act that allows the community to consider their immediate ability to invite radical, life-giving change into their lives even as they grapple with the deathly realities of the fast-paced corporate rat-race of late-stage neoliberal capitalism that seeks to deny this kind of affirmation (25). The Table is a weekly gathering sponsored by the urban farm that invites members to bring food to share in a pot-luck style as they also share personal stories and experiences and cultivate a collective imagination of alternative, community-based futures. While this is one of the only gardens I’ve looked at with explicit ties to Christianity, Alice’s Garden uses religion to uplift the local community’s spiritual leanings and to strengthen the bonds already forged in religious spaces in Milwaukee. Holistically-inclined community gardens not only affirm resident’s rights to live in the communities they reside in, but invite members to actively participate in reimaginings of life beyond mere survival. 

How do we define the limits of community, particularly when ascribing to Indigenous philosophies such as the Anishinaabe ideas of kobade and Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg ogamig? Defined by Leanne Simpson in I am Not a Nation-State, kobade refers to a way to refer to one’s great grandparents and great grandchildren, in a way that understands them as “a link in the chain between generations, between nations, between states of being, between individuals”(26). Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg ogamig is an extension of this, an understanding of the links in the chains not only between people but between us, the earth, and everyone who resides on it, in “an ecology of relationships in the absence of coercion, hierarchy or authoritarian power”(27). A community can be local, it can be tribal, and it can be larger than either of those two things. Crucially, a community in this sense is all-encompassing within the lands we live on, and extends forwards and backwards in time, and so initiatives that seek to benefit the community must take into account the needs of past, present, and future generations of the community, affirming all their needs as worthy of being met. 

One of the most important ways that community gardens use ideas of Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg ogamig in their work is through community education of traditional food growing, harvesting, and preparing practices. This intergenerational transference of knowledge is a major feature of youth-oriented community garden programs like the Cheyenne River Youth Project and Acta Non Verba. At the CRYP, Lakota youth are exposed to outdoor education and the importance of traditional Lakota foods from a young age, so that they too can pass along this knowledge to their children one day. At their Winyan Toka Win garden, there are after-school and summer opportunities for young children alongside internship opportunities for teenagers. One of the primary goals of the garden is not just to feed Lakota youth, but rather “fostering a sense of connectedness,” with the land, food, and community elders, so that the youth not only receive these important teachings but can recognize their material and historied significance (28). Furthermore, the Winyan Toka Win garden education project is only one facet of the CRYP’s work: the organization also has a number of projects dedicated to Family services, social life, art, casual youth gathering spaces, water rights, and more. Food is both a much larger part of our lives than white supremacist colonial agricultural norms wish us to believe, and at the same time is only one piece in the imagining of a more just, equitable, and sustaining communal future.

The work at Acta Non Verba echoes this, as a women-of-color-led organization dedicated to bringing a safe, accessible, and nourishing greenspace to East Oakland communities. Even as their work centers around re/introducing urban youth of color to the environment, the food-growing process, and safe outdoor play, they recognize that it’s also their job to include and educate these kids’ parents in their mission. Their programs are structured to make it easier for parents to leave their children at the farms without having to choose between their children’s enrichment and economically supporting their families, and the farm also offers CSA shares so that the children can bring home physically nourishing ingredients to their families. At the same time, parents are also able to “volunteer and lead field trips, like to Cal Academy of Sciences, and overnight camping trips, where kids hike, ID plants, learn Leave No Trace, tell stories around campfires, and study the stars, all within an hour of home,” thereby enabling them to become as involved with the program as is feasible for them (29). In a place like East Oakland, which is categorized as a “food desert,” and where “99% of their students qualify for free and reduced school lunches,” education about nutrition, nourishment, and access to safe outdoor play where their bodies won’t be heavily surveilled and policed is crucial both for creating an environment where these kids can be kids and in providing them with the tools to have agency in their lives when learning how to navigate the environment of severe food apartheid that they’ve been born into (30). 

Even as some of these community garden projects are geared towards youth and future generations, many others understand that ensuring the futurity of traditional foodways means educating everyone in the community presently. Nephi Craig, Diné and White Mountain Apache head chef and founder of Café Gozhóó, uses his cafe—with produce sourced almost exclusively from Apache farmers—both as a site of communal eating and as an educational opportunity for all Apaches (31). By creating affordable meals from traditional ingredients, he reunites his community with the foods and flavors of their ancestors, offering them food-based healing as an entry point to re/learning traditional Apache food culture, practices, and knowledge. While Craig has garnered sway and influence in the culinary world, “he could work almost anywhere, but right now what holds interest for him is his homeland, and his desire is to serve the people who live there”(32). This desire is seen in his two largest projects to date: Café Gozhóó and the Rainbow Treatment Center. Café Gozhóó, featured in the documentary Gather, is a diner by and for Natives in the region, and allows Craig to create modern culinary dishes with traditional and locally-sourced ingredients (33). The restaurant itself is located within what was once a gas station, which for years provided the community with unhealthy, unsustainable, and potentially toxic foods and alcohol. By reclaiming this building for the work being done at Café Gozhóó, Craig engages in a politics of refusal, refusing to let his community eat the very foods that poison Natives and reduce life expectancy on reservations across the country without any nourishing alternatives (34).

The Rainbow Treatment Center is a continuation of this work as a community resource dedicated to the prevention, intervention, treatment, and rehabilitation of Apache adults who, due to the emotional distress of settler colonialism and painful material realities of life on the reservation, have turned to substance abuse (35). Craig understands the Café as one part of the larger treatment program, because as he and his community re/connect to food and foodways, they take one step towards healing from the lingering and ongoing traumas of colonialism. Crucial to this work of food healing is the RTC’s Mindful Kitchen program, which allows community elders to share their stories of community and recovery with current members of the program. As Craig frequently acknowledges in his interviews and in Gather, while non-natives and even non-Apache natives might enjoy the tastes of food at Café Gozhóó, only Apaches will be able to fully take in the healing potential of consuming their ancestral foods. Likewise, the stories shared in the Mindful Kitchen program are only for fellow Apaches in the program, and are not publicly accessible precisely because the healing being facilitated is inherently community-specific. Food-based community learning is based around sustaining and nourishing present community into futurity, but it is also about recognizing the toxins plaguing the minds and bodies of community members and offering interventions that, rather than leaving a gap where that toxin once thrived, supplant it with healthy, life-giving alternatives. 

Soil and Regeneration

We looked, touched, and the braved among us smelled and tasted. After only five minutes we produced a detailed description of each soil. The first was gray, compacted, dense, waterlogged, sour tasting, and brittle. The second soil was friable, dark brown, slightly sweet in taste and smell, moderate in density, and sticky. The third soil was undecomposed, structureless, black, and smelled richly of humates. The participants, none of whom had studied soil, were able to accurately predict which would be best for growing annual crops and which needed amending. We revealed that the first sample was the soil we found on this land when we arrived in 2006—heavy clay, rocky, impenetrable to tools. The third soil was what we found in the top layers of the forest—high in humus, rich, and young. The second soil was the one we created in partnership  with nature over the years—a high-nutrient clay loam exploding with organic matter. We explained that the restoration of organic matter to the soil was part of healing from colonialism. (36)

The toxins of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and imperialist military action are not just consumed at the individual level through substance abuse and GMO-ridden, overly packaged foods, but have seeped into the entire landscape in ways that disproportionately harm the same communities afflicted with food apartheid. The land holds the memories of these traumas: clear-cut forests, damaged waterways, polluted air, and nuclear and industry waste dumps are only a few of the many ways that white settler colonial imperialist ideologies have caused unspeakable harm to the land and the life of those residing on them. For Black and Indigenous farmers, who seldom can afford access to anything but what big-agriculture understands to be the poorest quality of land, these toxins are often held in the soil underfoot. For urban and reservation communities, healthy, land-based lifestyles are constantly under threat by the greedy claws of industry and military byproduct. Food and land sovereignty activists recognize these threats to life and futurity, and are both actively fighting against the continuation of toxification and are equipping their communities with the tools to restore the land. From George Washington Carver to Leah Penniman, Black farmers have continued to share their knowledge on soil restoration techniques to protect both their present and future communities alongside other communities. 

As the director of agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver developed and popularized crop rotation as a method of nitrogen restoration in the soil. Using peanuts, and later sweet potatoes and pecans, Carver taught American farmers to alternate their crops of cotton with these plants to reverse the nitrogen leaching done by the cash crop (37). But while Carver was one of the first to use Western science to display the importance of crop rotation and sustaining soil health, Indigenous Americans and Africans who were forcibly brought through the middle passage to work as slaves for white farmers have understood the importance of sustaining soil health and utilize/d a variety of farming techniques in various sustainable agricultural traditions. Arguably the most widely known Indigenous farming method, the Three Sisters technique of growing corn, beans, and squash in a mound style functions similarly, as the beans restore nitrogen to the soil through Rhizobium cultivation in its roots (38). Furthermore, the corn provides a support for the beanstalks to climb, and the squash sprawls across the ground, gathering the nutrients from run-off in its wider root structure and preventing weeds from taking over. Several Native nations and tribes have utilized the Three Sisters’ farming method for millennia, and it not only restores the soil but provides us with lessons about reciprocity and community. Because,

Alone, a bean is just a vine, squash an oversize leaf. Only when standing together with corn does a whole emerge which transcends the individual. The gifts of each are more fully experienced when they are nurtured than alone. In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship. (39)

Restoring nitrogen and nutrients to the soil is not the only task Black and Indigenous farmers are faced with. In Farming While Black, before even beginning to talk about planting, Penniman spends two whole chapters on restoring and caring for the soil. Two of the major focuses of these chapters are “Remediating Soil Contaminated with Lead” and “Healing Erosion with Terraces,” which are directly influenced by her experiences farming in an urban community garden and tending to the land of what’s now Soul Fire Farm (40). Urban community gardens often use the soil available to them, and in cities, particularly neighborhoods that power structures both legislative and social have deemed “other,” “food deserts,” or otherwise “beyond help/lacking,” this soil is often contaminated with dangerous amounts of lead or other toxic chemicals. Rather than letting her communities unknowingly consume toxins absorbed by the produce they grew in their gardens, Penniman provides the tools and resources for farmers of color to properly nourish their communities, both through the instructions provided in her guidebook and through Soul Fire Farm’s numerous urban outreach initiatives. By implementing terrace-style farming on the hilly, eroded landscape of Soul Fire Farm, Penniman and her co-workers transform land deemed nearly unusable by white farmers into verdant, rich, restored land by using Indigenous farming practices. Now, rather than a deeply eroded and depleted soil system, Soul Fire Farm has created inches of healthy, nutrient-dense topsoil that doesn’t wash away with each rain. This has taken nearly a decade of intense effort, composting, and other sustainable farming practices gathered from ancestral and modern teachers, because soil grows and restores itself far more slowly than most edible plants. The practice of restoring soil is one that relies on faith in the future, because the fruits of this labor are slow-growing.

Not only is the soil itself ever-changing both due to the negative impacts of settler colonial and imperial practices and the positive effects of restoration taken on by Black and Indigenous farmers, but the very knowledge of soil itself is changing. “The land and water are gravely wounded, and Indigenous linguistic shifts reflect this fact. It is in this subaltern realm where we may find especially poignant examples of hope for the resurgence of Indigenous biodynamic and related agroecological practices to heal the land, water, and people”(41). Just as the understanding of sustainable growing has been understood for time immemorial by Indigenous farmers, so has the understanding of soil health and maintenance. Much like Peña’s grandmother, who constantly composted and used mustang and goat manure as natural fertilizer for her crops, Indigenous peoples have employed countless strategies to engage in a reciprocal relationship with the land they reside on, homeland or otherwise. And while modern white permaculture and sustainability movements have begun to employ these techniques, their origins are seldom credited and ecological philosophies of origin rarely included in tandem. Not only is it crucial to restore soil health on the lands we reside upon so that we can nourish our communities, but we must also do so while crediting and keeping in mind the intentions and cultural understandings of those who invented and currently uphold these practices despite the oppressive violence of colonization. As Peña argues, regardless of where settler colonialism and white supremacy have forcibly relocated Black and Indigenous peoples, “the work of regenerating soil health is a vital part of [our] decolonizing environmental justice and food autonomy work”(42). 

But some toxins, like nuclear waste, cannot be removed from the soil or land. As of right now, “there is pretty much no knowledge in the human repertoire on how to handle such long-lasting toxic substances,” and as a result, industry powers choose dump locations based on where they believe it will have the least impact on human life (43). But when these industries only care about present human life, and struggle to recognize Black and Native people as fully human, Native reservations and Black urban neighborhoods are forced to bear the brunt of the aftereffects of these waste dumps. Native nations all across the US have struggled with the terrifying proximity of these life-threatening byproducts of industry, and food and water from their ancestral lands that was once safe to consume now potentially carries radiation and other dangerous minerals. Alongside the other negative health effects from forced dependency on the US government’s unhealthful food supply, communities like the Western Shoshone in Nevada “suffered significant radiation exposure from the [nuclear weapons testing set up by the Atomic Energy Commission], on average 200 times more than the amount indicated by the government,” and the community has been seriously affected by high rates of radiation-induced cancers (44). Despite this irreversible violence against Shoshone land and community, the Western Shoshone have refused to accept a multi-million dollar settlement from the US government, because “they want their land, and they want to heal their community” (45). This claim to ancestral homelands regardless of the damages done to it by colonial powers is echoed through every other example LaDuke provides. The land is a sacred thing, and even if there aren’t yet tools to heal this kind of ecological damage, Indigenous tribes and nations across the US have faith in their foodways, lifeways, and teachings, understanding that settler colonial power structures will never give their lands the respect it deserves and the tools it needs to heal. Instead, Native anti-nuclear waste activists like Faye Brown implore all of us to reconsider our reliance “on this type of energy that kills people and poisons things…[and] engage in a discussion about alternatives” (46).

People of the Seventh Fire, Seeds, and Futurity

“We are linked in a co-evolutionary circle. The sweeter the peach, the more frequently we disperse its seeds, nurture its young, and protect them from harm. Food plants and people act as selective forces on each other’s evolution—the thriving of one in the best interest of the other. This, to me, sounds a bit like love.” (47)

What is the alternative to the death drive of white supremacist settler colonial industrial greed? What does food futurity look like on stolen lands that have undergone potentially irreversible damage as a byproduct of this industry? What does land restoration look like for people and communities in diaspora? The land, and the Black and Indigenous communities who have listened and learned from it from time immemorial find one answer in what I’d argue is its greatest gift to us: the seeds. In her speech Uprooting Racism, Seeding Sovereignty, Leah Penniman begins by honoring her ancestors, thanking them for having the foresight to bring “what was most sacred to them, which was their seed—their millet, their sorghum, their cowpea ... because even though there were no reports back from across the Atlantic Ocean, they believed against the odds in a future of tilling and reaping on the soil, and they did not give up on their descendants” (48). Even as this agricultural knowledge was one of many reasons that Penniman’s ancestors and other West Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery, they do not deny their descendants access to this agrarian life-way, because seeds hold stories of life, resiliency, and continued survival. Each heirloom seed that has thwarted monoculturification, GMO takeover, and Monsanto sterilization is a testament to the continued survival and faith in the descendants of these communities. 

In line with this, there are an astounding number of Native-led seed saving collectives dedicated to the restoration and preservation of the rich heterogeneity of Native heirloom seed varietals. Organizations like the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank, Dream of Wild Health Farm, Native Seeds/SEARCH, Sierra Seeds, and the I-Collective represent just a handful of the intertribal efforts of Native seed savers and stewards working tirelessly to preserve one of many crucial cultural links between their ancestors and descendants. For Mohawk seed steward Rowen White, “these seeds are keepers of a record of plant-human relationships predating the written word. The seeds are the witnesses of the past, and also the hope for the future”(49). Indigenous food sovereignty is not just about picking up a seed packet at the grocery store to grow corn, beans, and squash, it requires growing and tending to the thousands of land-and-tribe-specific heirloom varietals of these plants in order to maintain and pass on the cultural memory and resilience held in the careful crafting of each valuable seed. 

To care for these seeds, vigilant cultivation, cooperation, and intergenerational care are paramount. It requires an understanding of the many ways the land will interact with the seed and eventual harvest, from the quality of the soil to the climate conditions to the altered agricultural climate as a result of extreme GMO manufacturing and overuse of pesticides. “Indigenous farmers have long understood how people, seeds, and soil merge capacities and grow together—we co-evolve”(50). A healthy seed requires rich soil and careful tending to develop into a rich harvest, the rich harvest then nourishes the soil, feeds a community, and produces seeds for the future, and the developed seeds grow stronger and more diverse with each successive harvest. It’s a continuous cycle that suffers when even one component is harmed, removed, or forcibly relocated. As such, seeds vary greatly from one region, tribal nation, or community to the next, and Indigenous farmers often cultivate multiple seed varieties of each crop each year, both to preserve this cultural tradition into futurity and because “each serves a different function and fills its own environmental, culinary, or cultural niche”(51). Unfortunately, this also means that once a seed varietal is rendered extinct, there’s often no way to re-cultivate that varietal in line with its cultural history, because these seeds have been cultivated and co-evolved through millennia of agrarian traditions. 

How, then, are communities and tribal nations who have been forcibly relocated to distinctly different climates and regions able to cultivate their heirloom seeds when the varietals have been carefully co-evolved to grow best on the homelands that were stolen from them? This was the dilemma that the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank faced over a decade ago. Despite the tribal nation’s long and prosperous agrarian history, generations after being forcibly relocated via the death march of the Trail of Tears to reservation lands in Oklahoma, “the traditional lifeway cycle had not only been broken, it had been all but forgotten”(52). Much like the over-hunting of the Plains Buffalo in the 19th and 20th centuries, this forced relocation was mandated by the US government not only to remove Native peoples from their homelands but also had the added effect of starving entire tribal nations, forcing their survival to be dependent on the poor-quality, unhealthy US government-supplied rations.

And so, when the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank first began its quest to collect, protect, and preserve their tribe’s once-rich heirloom seed collection in 2006, the initial struggle was the near-impossibility of finding any seed varietals that predated 1492. Even after a long search and the eventual gathering of a few select seeds from tribal members located across the country, Pat Gwin and the Cherokee Nation team struggled to grow their seeds on the reservation in Oklahoma, which resides on “the best swampland and rubble that money could buy”(53). Despite the hurdles of climate and poorly-treated land, over a decade later the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank distributes thousands of packets of seeds to tribal members each year. Some seeds have adapted more easily to the Oklahoma climate: the dent corns have not struggled nearly as much as the beans, which thrived in the moisture-rich, mountainous climate of Western NC. Even so, each year the project has expanded, new culturally-important plants are added, and “culturally appropriate propagation is [now] required to allow for annual harvesting and use to perpetuate the traditions” (54). Now that the worry is not whether the Cherokee Nation has seeds to preserve, or that said seeds will not sprout, the seed bank is able to consider issues of access and GMOs. With the reintroduction of the Nation to their seeding practices and traditions, there is an implicate promise of survival that allows the tribal community to now focus on seed thrival. 

Just as the seeds have adapted and co-evolved with the people and communities who have tended them through history, so too does the understanding of collective futurity. Because “seed work is slow work, it is intergenerational work that is reliant upon the next generation to continue the stewardship,” understandings of relationships between plants and people become inherently intergenerational, requiring us to constantly think of our collective futures as we work in the present (55). This is echoed in the Anishinaabeg Seventh Fire Prophecy: “the people of the Seventh Fire do not yet walk forward; rather, they are told to turn around and retrace the steps of the ones who brought us here…to gather up all the fragments that lay scattered along the trail” (56). The change that this fire inherently brings, positive and destructive, requires a reconnection and re-membering of the histories, traditions, and knowledges that have led to this point. Whether through seed saving, soil regeneration, water protecting, community gardening, revitalization of foraging practices, language reclamation, the return of stolen land, and/or other methods of collective ecological and cultural restoration in the face of the death spiral of late-stage capitalism, this change is determined to craft a “move from a society based on conquest to one steeped in the practice of survival” (57). 

Ultimately, this seed work is one of the most powerful forms of healing for the intergenerational historical trauma that nearly all Indigenous peoples are carrying and trying to metabolize. As our communities begin to rise up and rebuild our traditional foodways, restoring time-honored relationships with our plant relatives, we make powerful strides toward healing the intergenerational wounds that were inflicted when our traditional foodways were violently deconstructed. (58)

Conclusion

The challenge lies, then, in transforming our society to uphold this twined ecological and cultural consciousness that celebrates collective survival rather than in moving towards exponential and constant expansion, conquest, and death. To survive, we all need land, healthful, culturally important, and nourishing foods, and communities which uplift the rights of humans and everything that lives within our ecosystem to exist and thrive sustainably. For many food and land sovereignty activists and organizers, this work begins internally, within the personal, local, tribal, and other community levels. But as this collective consciousness develops laterally, so too must it ascend through and subvert the hierarchies of the power structures we’re subjected to. To move up, we must move collectively: food and land sovereignty activists are aware of this, displaying the desire for expanded collectivity (acknowledging and developing the links in the chain) by forging networks that protect the collective right to engage in this work and inviting folks who are ready to learn into the fold. 

The Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, Black Family Land Trust, inc, the National Black Food & Justice Alliance, and the Southeastern African American Farmers’ Organic Network(SAAFON) all work regionally to connect and protect black farmers, families, and communities (59). They affirm the right to land, the long-historied black agrarian tradition in the US, and actively combat the efforts of white agriculture and the US government to pry black communities from their familial lands and cultural power of maintaining alternative farming traditions. They provide economic, legal, and community support, enabling the continued survival of food sovereignty and alternative food futures by listening to the needs of the farmers and communities, both urban and rural, and promoting a diverse series of initiatives aimed to support the different needs determined by place and race. 

Soul Fire Farm not only functions as a single farm site, but also offers dozens of initiatives aimed to uplift farms and gardens run by brown and black people as they enter into the difficult world of small-scale agriculture. Each year, they assist in the building and maintenance of dozens of urban community gardens and provide countless educational workshops on sliding scale pricing to bring nourishment and food to communities that they can’t directly feed. Additionally, on their website, they have a reparations map, which encourages site viewers to monetarily support the countless brown and black owned and operated small farms across the nation (60). The farms and gardens listed on the map are in need of land, resources, monetary donations, and workers, and Soul Fire Farm specifically requests that people contact these farms only to offer these reparations, not to extract labor or for anything other than to offer reparation-based outreach.

Native Seeds/SEARCH, Sierra Seeds, and Indigenous Food Systems Network are deliberately inter-tribal in their work, preserving feeds and promoting community-led food sovereignty initiatives both within and between tribal communities (61). They reaffirm the historied interaction, trade, and practices of mutual benefit that tribal nations have engaged in and continue to engage in before and despite settler colonialism, recognizing that the struggle for Native life and livelihoods in the settler colonial state requires collective, interactive action. Each of these networks offers workshops, educational opportunities, material resources, and the ability to connect with other organizations doing similar work at smaller community levels. 

What binds all these organizations, projects, communities, and ideas together is a sense of love and desire for a reciprocal relationship with the land and each other. Everyone doing this work understands that “we are bound in a covenant of reciprocity, a pact of mutual responsibility to sustain those who sustain us,” as those who came before us have done and passed onto us, so that we can sustain one another into futurity (62). As engaging in the fight for land and food sovereignty teaches us how to recognize our interconnectivity with the land, we also begin to learn “to rewrite the lie of co-dependence into interdependence, love, and caring”  in our relations to each other (63). This work, the task of decolonization, restoring the land, and restoring community practices of healing, is longer than our lifetimes allow us. While the harvest comes each year, the real fruits of this labor will only fully be received by our descendants. But it’s worth it, to know that maybe one day, my grandchildren’s grandchildren might walk through the forests of my childhood and see groves of old, healthy hemlocks, that the American chestnut sapling in my front yard might grow as large and grand as the elms that now tower over it.