“We are descendants of futurists, carrying on the legacy of our ancestral grandmothers who braided seeds in their hair before boarding transatlantic slave ships, believing against odds in a future of sovereignty on the land.”
INTRODUCTION
In 2019-2020, the Institute for Mindful Agriculture (IMA) had the opportunity to facilitate learning with an extraordinary cohort of young people through the Place Corps program (www.placecorps.org). Our task was to introduce the group to IMA concepts through the lens of Regenerative Agriculture and to help them plan and implement a garden on the Place Corps campus. We met Jordan Williams as a Place Corps participant at that time and asked him to contribute the blog posting you are about to read.
We continue to be challenged with the idea that most of us in the United States farm on stolen land. How can we understand our relationship to the land that holds and nourishes us as part of our Earth? At IMA we took this question to heart and it caused us to ask further questions: Should we as individuals actually own land? Is individual land ownership justifiable in the context of an emerging Earth consciousness? In the United States we have a long, violent and painful history of applying the idea of private ownership not only to land but horrifyingly, even to people, causing tremendous and ongoing trauma to Indigenous, Black and Brown individuals. We can sense that this trauma continues to live even within the land itself. We cannot transform our thought patterns and practices around land and agriculture without reckoning with these questions.
In an upcoming series of blog postings and articles, the Institute for Mindful Agriculture will explore the question of land from a historical/social perspective – the story of land as a living being, interwoven with the lives and histories of the soil, plant, animals and humans who live upon it and from it. What is our human history and relationship with land and agriculture? How did our human ancestors steward land? How did they think about it? Why did agriculture come about? Is agriculture by definition exploitative? What can we do to transform our thinking about land?
We asked Jordan to introduce this deepening inquiry into “Earth History” that we are braiding into our IMA work. Please take a moment to read their inspiring blog posting that challenges our current thinking through the “three soils” IMA framework: caring for our ecological, social and inner soils. Here is a quote from this posting:
“[The West African concept of the Akan people] ‘Sankofa’ teaches us that we must go back to our roots in order to move forward. That is, we should reach back and gather the best of what our past has to teach us, so that we can achieve our full potential as we move forward. Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone, or been stripped of can be reclaimed, revived, preserved, and perpetuated…”(and perhaps even transformed?)
— University of Illinois, Springfield Black Student Union page
We very much look forward to your reflections as we continue these explorations
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Photo of a large field with a white high tunnel & fall-colored trees in the background, taken by Jordan in October 2019 at Soul Fire Farm (Mohican land)
Jordan Alexander Williams (he/they) is a Black, Afro-Descended, Queer earth lover honoring their ancestors through land and spirit based healing and liberation. Born and raised in the so-called Chicagoland area — ancestral lands of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations, as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo and Illinois Nations —I’ve spent the last four years building community and connection with magical beings (human and more-than-human) along the eastern coast of the so-called United States… including, most recently, the ancestral homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.
This piece, inspired by alexis pauline gumbs’ dub and informed by my many teachers and relations, is a compilation of storytelling resources (excerpts, poetry, audio, and more) for love and liberation on the land. I invite you to take your time with them.
May we consider, remember that so-called reality is based upon the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what is possible. May we root deep into our divine power to shape reality itself, manifesting our most spectacular imaginings of life.
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Prayer To The Ancestors
Photo of a cloudy, sunset-colored sky & treeline, taken by Jordan in July 2019 at the Omega Center for Sustainable Living (Schaghticoke land)
great, loving, powerful ancestors
at a time when the planet, our people witness
increasing exploitation of our bodies for endless profit
may storytelling be a divine accomplice
upon our evolutionary journey of restoration, return
please guide our work to compost colonial cosmologies
please awaken our capacity to reclaim earth, spirit based wisdom
as we remember, reimagine life rooted in love, liberation on the land
àṣẹ
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What Stories Do You Tell
what stories do you tell about where you come from
about the people who claim you, the lands they call-ed home
about the names those lands are, were given, the names they give, gave themselves
about how your people came to leave their home, remain there, return
about how your people shared, stewarded, protected their home
about how your people grew, gathered food in cosmic rhythm with the earth
about how your people honored the divine feminine, womb bearer, queen mother
about the living legacies, complexities of your interwoven lineages
about the trauma your people imposed, the trauma they endured
about where in the collective mind-body-spirit this trauma lives
about where in our epigenetic, ancestral memories lie the remedies to heal
about the overflowing wells of our ancestors’ love
about who you are, the infinite power you hold
about where you come from, what stories do you tell
what stories do you tell about the land
about the more-than-human beings who inhabit
about the people who were violently displaced to, from elsewhere
about the state-sanctioned ecocidal tribulations of their descendants
about endless extraction for progress, politic, profit
about a mountain top, river side, city block sold
about the land’s actual inability to be owned
about the interbeingness of all beings
about the radiantly trans, queer nature of creation
about decolonizing, rematriating, returning indigenous land
about uprisings for black liberation, passionately waged wielding lover fire's rage
about the right to self-determine, sovereign future with the land
about all the land holds, back to whom all shall fold
about the land, what stories do you tell
what stories do you tell about love
about the radical invitation to love ourselves first
about the non-binariality of love’s pleasure, expression, desire
about how justice is what love looks like in public
about love’s inability to be contained by language
about how love at the same time belongs to every thing, no thing
about the sweet water river who followed her children cross the sea
about love, spiritual wellspring of earth-bound vitality
about the way love defies time-space, regenerating boundlessly, infinitely
about our roles as future ancestors, sowing seeds of love for those once, yet, here
about the power to heal generational entanglements of fear
about loving who you are, the infinite power you hold
about all the land holds, back to whom all shall fold
about love, what stories do you tell
Photo of a stormy sky over grazing pasture, taken by Jordan in August 2019 at Hawthorne Valley Farm (Mohican land)
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The People Of The Waters That Are Never Still
Photo of a fenced & mulched summer garden, taken by Jordan in July 2020 at Place Corps (Mohican land)
This offering has been gathered, woven, and nurtured upon lands that have loved and been loved by Mohican peoples since time immemorial.
Excerpts from the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community website:
“Reaching the eastern edge of the country, some of these [First Nations] people, called the Lenni Lenape, chose to settle on the river later renamed the Delaware. Others moved north and settled in the valley of a river where the waters, like those in their original homeland, were never still. They named this river the Mahicannituck and called themselves the Muh-he-con-neok, the People of the Waters That are Never Still. The name evolved through several spelling, including Mahikan. Today, however, they are known as the Mohicans [...]"
"The Mohican lands extended from what is now Lake Champlain south nearly to Manhattan Island and on both sides of the Mahicannituck (Hudson River), west to Scoharie Creek and east into Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut.”
Before continuing, I invite you to read the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community’s “Our History”. From this rich history, you’ll learn how “the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians were pushed from the Eastern seaboard across half a continent, forced to uproot and move many times to our present Land in Wisconsin[...]”.
During this journey, a group of Munsee people, “part of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware people [who] settled near the headwaters of the Delaware River just west of the Mohicans [...]”, joined with some Mohican people and together became named the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community, or the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. And while many Mohican descendants no longer live on their ancestral lands, their connection remains. The Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community honors and protects their deep cultural heritage through a historic preservation office based on Mohican land, in so-called Troy, New York. They’ve also partnered with folx at Soul Fire Farm to develop a cultural respect easement.
Excerpt from the Soul Fire Farm website:
“Soul Fire Farm is located on 80-acres of land that historically was stewarded by the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation. The Mohican people were forcibly removed from their territory in the 1800’s to a reservation in northern Wisconsin. We have been building a relationship with members of the community over the past several years and are currently in the process of establishing a “cultural respect easement” which would allow Mohican citizens to use the Soul Fire Land for ceremonies and wildcrafting in perpetuity. Additionally, we have a native seed exchange with some of the farmers and herbalists in the community and are working with Mohican people locally on the fight to preserve their ancestral burial grounds from development.”
In these examples, we find that the love story between land and people is one that continues. We also find a vital reminder: to nurture this love story and others like it, we must heal ourselves, our spirits, and the land from the wounds and strongholds of colonization.
Learn more:
Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community “Our History” - https://mohican.com/?url=our-history
Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Homework - https://resourcegeneration.org/land-reparations-indigenous-solidarity-action-guide/
How can you rise in solidarity with First Nations peoples and keepers of the lands on which you live and love?
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Making Ourselves Anew
Photo of an orange & black Pearl Crescent butterfly resting on a yellow flower, taken by Jordan in July 2020 at Salt Creek Woods Nature Preserve (Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Miami, Peoria, and Sioux land)
Excerpts from dub by alexis pauline gumbs (pages ix - xi):
“Sylvia Wynter learned every colonial language. She studied the philosophical and theological patterns in the understanding of life, personhood, and environment leading up to colonialism based on a core proposition: if the ways of thinking, being, and understanding that made colonialism and slavery imaginable were constructed over time, and heretical to the ways of thinking, being, and understanding that came before them, it must be possible to understand life, being, and place differently by now [...]”
“Wynter has argued that scholars in the humanities, and cultural workers more generally, have a responsibility for what is and is not imaginable in their lifetime. Police brutality, the destruction of the physical environment, the theft of resources from the so-called developing world, and every other horror of our time are based on a dominant and now-totalizing understanding of what life is, a poetics of the possible [...]”
“What if what we believe is required of humans by nature is just a story that we told ourselves about what being human is and what nature is? What if who we think we are, what we believe at a gut level about our kinship loyalty and our perceived survival needs are responses to a story we made up and told ourselves was written by our genes? And what if one group of people colonized the whole world with a story that survival means destroying life on earth? What then? And by then, Sylvia Wynter means now [...]”
“Wynter says we are not Homo sapiens, we are Homo narrans, not the ones who know, but the ones who tell ourselves that we know. She says we therefore have the capacity to know differently. We are word made flesh. But we make words. So we can make ourselves anew [...]”
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Awakening
Photo angled as if looking up at a tree with a tall & straight trunk, taken by Jordan in September 2019 at Hudson Hemp (Mohican land)
“The concept of ‘Sankofa’ is derived from King Adinkera of the Akan people of West Africa. ‘Sankofa’ is expressed in the Akan language as ‘se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki.’ Literally translated, this means ‘it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.’
‘Sankofa’ teaches us that we must go back to our roots in order to move forward. That is, we should reach back and gather the best of what our past has to teach us, so that we can achieve our full potential as we move forward. Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone, or been stripped of can be reclaimed, revived, preserved, and perpetuated.
Visually and symbolically, ‘Sankofa’ is expressed as a mythic bird that flies forward while looking backward with an egg (symbolizing the future) in its mouth. This ties with our motto: ‘In order to understand our present and ensure our future, we must know our past.’”
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Ancestral Song Practice
This practice was received and adapted from Leah Penniman:
Invitation
Listen to Breaths by Sweet Honey in the Rocks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwLgxyVjwk4
Reflective Questions
What wisdom do your ancestors have to share with you?
Where, when, and how do your ancestors come to you?
How can you connect more intentionally with them?
How can you uncover, restore what is “hidden” within your ancestral lifelines?
I believe that all “things” are beings, and as the song suggests, our ancestors inhabit them and teach through them. When we pause and immerse ourselves in the more-than-human world, we can begin to hear and receive the deep wisdom that is our birthright…
Photo of a bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds hiding the sun, taken by Jordan in July 2020 at Place Corps (Mohican land)
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Resources To Root Deeper, Branch Inward
Podcasts
Honoring our Ancestors and the Earth with Leah Penniman (For the Wild Podcast) - https://forthewild.world/listen/deeplyrooted-honoring-our-ancestors-and-the-earth-with-leah-penniman-188
Homebound: Embodying the Revolution with brontë velez (For the Wild Podcast) - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Mn64X7Knjq4KR7Sd7Wzpa?si=_eka1YH4Q1mMF-jbGGkKIw
Articles
To Free Ourselves, We Must Feed Ourselves - https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/523/to-free-ourselves-we-must-feed-ourselves
African American History: A Past Rooted in the Hudson Valley - https://hvmag.com/uncategorized/african-american-history-a-past-rooted-in-the-hudson-valley/
Colonialism, the Hidden Cause of Our Environmental Crisis - https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/colonialism-the-hidden-cause-of-our-environmental-crisis
American Indian Law Journal, Volume III, Issue II, Spring 2015 - https://lawsdocbox.com/68863145-Politics/American-indian-law-journal.html
Transition Is Inevitable, Justice Is Not: A Critical Framework For Just Recovery - https://movementgeneration.org/transition-is-inevitable-justice-is-not-a-critical-framework-for-just-recovery/
Organizations
Northeast Farmers of Color Network and Land Trust - https://nefoclandtrust.org/
Reparations Map for Black-Indigenous Farmers - https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?ll=36.04297229383501%2C-77.67547230820321&z=11&mid=1YvB3PuH8jeR_yoFCLvrKOTQQ3p_5NmkK
New Communities - https://www.newcommunitiesinc.com/
Soul Fire Farm - http://www.soulfirefarm.org/
National Black Food Justice Alliance - https://www.blackfoodjustice.org/
HEAL Food Alliance - https://healfoodalliance.org/who-is-heal/members/
Cooperation Jackson - https://cooperationjackson.org/intro
Books
Farming While Black by Leah Penniman
dub by alexis pauline gumbs
Emergent strategy by adrienne maree brown
Sacred Instructions by Sherri Mitchell
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White
Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard
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Transition
THANK YOU for engaging what has been gathered here. This isn’t the end, but, rather, a transition along the great circle of life. May you be blessed by your ancestors, this day and every day, and find grounding and guidance in your own stories of love and liberation on the land.
In Black Radiance & Joy,
Jordan
“Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”
