Map Legend: Navigating the Site
In order to properly interrogate the whiteness of WWOOFing, deconstruct false narratives of lack/nothingness in the agricultural world, and relearn what sustainable, sovereign, and self-reliant food futures look like as taught by Black and Indigenous food sovereigntists, a vision for a holistic website was born. Drawing inspiration from feralatlas.org and bdotememorymap.org, this project is made up of several key components.
To begin, we first pull images from the WWOOFusa website as an introductory display of the constructed lack-narrative that I encountered when I began to explore the world of farming. The WWOOFing maps depict a physical land map defined by the political borders of the United States, one of the largest colonial projects in existence today. I ask that you keep these maps in mind as you move through the rest of the site and to question the narratives of maps we are taught to understand as neutral. These maps are presented first because they illustrate just one example of how we’re conditioned to understand the processes of food apartheid, land theft, and other land-based processes of settler colonialism and white supremacy as passively inevitable realities.
Before moving straight into the counter-map of abundance, I offer a short essay which goes into more detail on the WWOOFing maps and describes the construction process of the ensuing abundance map. Here, there are also links to a keyword glossary page, which features several mini-essays on essential terms related to the central ideas of this project. These essays are always available to revisit through the link in the site header.
From here, we move on to the central facet of the project: the counter-map of abundance. This map, or artscape, seeks to illustrate several sites of Black and Indigenous food sovereignty action, each of which are notated with a plot point. When you click on each plot point, you are linked to a separate page. This page provides you with a basic description of the site/movement/person and a link to their website.
The final component of this project is a somewhat analytical essay which discusses the ways Black and Indigenous farmers are envisioning food futures and the ways their work runs counter to and often deliberately challenges the ideologies and emerging material realities of mainstream white sustainability and food justice movements. In it, I look at how the ever-present interconnections of environmental and cultural consciousnesses among Black and Indigenous food and land sovereignty organizers influence their relationship with the lands they live on and the foods they grow, share, and consume in a way which invokes desire for future survival as an integral part of their work from soil to seed. Because the work is so deeply rooted in the necessity of collective inter-dependence as a survival methodology, the very act of working towards food and land sovereignty builds intra- and inter-community relationships with both our human neighbors and the ecosystems we reside in. It relies on the grounding of place, intergenerational connections, and desires of mutual benefit, which inherently prohibits the extractive relationships so often present in WWOOFing.
