Community
The word “community” is thrown around so much that it’s become almost meaningless, constituting any group of people anywhere interacting with one another in some way. Generally, the constitution of a community entails a dialectic of “us and them,” as some people are a part of the community while others are not. No matter the size, scope, physical spread, or unifying factors among the amalgamations of people that are considered, the word community traditionally “concerns boundaries between us and them that are naturalized through reference to place, race, culture, or identity”(Joseph). In any understanding of the word “community,” some people are a part of it while others are not, regardless of whether or not the fact of their exclusion is intentional.
For the Keyword writer Miranda Joseph, community is used to denote a common linkage between people/groups beyond the globality of capital and modernity, and “can be understood as a necessary supplement to the circulation of state power and capital; as such, it not only enables capital and power to flow, but it also has the potential to displace those flows”(Joseph). In this project, we’re focusing on community as it relates to the displacement of this flow.
This displacement begins when we look at how food sovereigntists and Black and Native groups concerned with food, land, life, and future survival understand who or what is a part of community. Many understandings of community focus on interpersonal linkages and networks, but what if a community is composed of the people, the beavers, the river, the birds, the cedars, the salmon, the salmonberry plants, and the soil? Community, in this sense, is about all our relations, and how they tie us together in a world that exists outside of the state, capital, and power-thru-domination. Further, who is excluded from community in this sense? If “we are all links in a chain,” as Leanne Simpson understands kobade(the Anishinaabe word used to speak about great grandparents and great grandchildren, ancestors and descendants) to imply, then who is excluded from a community that grounds itself in kobade(Simpson)?
Crucial to all understandings of community, traditional or otherwise, is a sense of relationality. Whether this is predicated on a dialectic of exclusion or eternal linkages, what binds communities together is the desire and “hope that through this sharing we can be truly in relation with each other” (Gray-Garcia 22). Community is about forming connections with one another as a group, and coming to recognize individual struggles, dreams, desires, needs, and everything in between as something that requires collectivity. To believe in community is to believe that humans and/or all living things require each other to survive and thrive in mutual benefit. For some, this is what love means.
In communities centered around food and land sovereignty, environmentalism, and sustainable futures, the tie that binds us together is a reciprocal love for the earth. And “knowing that you love the earth changes you, it activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond” (Kimmerer 124-5).
