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Leah Penniman: Land Based Liberation: Jay Dugar, Gisele Brandt, Josette Thornhill, Anoushka Barkawitz, Amelia Jarolim

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Leah Penniman: Land Based Liberation: Jay Dugar, Gisele Brandt, Josette Thornhill, Anoushka Barkawitz, Amelia Jarolim

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link here! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qa5cFgmUb0j6vQttePcwEZe9bGS3XfyE/view?usp=sharing

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Reworking the Metabolic Rift: Charles Halstead, Caroline Schloss, Orla Hagan

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Reworking the Metabolic Rift: Charles Halstead, Caroline Schloss, Orla Hagan

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This week we are honored to host activist, farmer and educator, Leah Penniman. Leah lives in steadfast dedication to her mission of weaving the vast and vital threads of honoring heritage, building relationship to land and ending racism and injustice in the food system.

Soul Fire Farm in Upstate New York is a hotbed for regeneration, grassroots activism and education based in agroecology and Afro-Ecology, a form of art, movement, practice, and process of social and ecological transformation that involves the re-evaluation of our sacred relationships with land, water, air, seeds and food.

In 2009, Soul Fire's soil was initially ranked on the worst level by the USDA Agricultural Soil Classification, with only 6 inches of topsoil. From 2009 to 2017, their topsoil increased by 300% (6 to 18 inches) through regenerative and ancestral farming practices now sequestering up to 4,000 pounds of carbon.

Leah and the folks of Soul Fire Farm leave no stone unturned in the integration between social and environmental justice. Leah serves as a true leader of our generation, asking us to show up to these times with full heart rooted tangible action, healing the earth and one another.

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LEAH PENNIMAN on Land Based Liberation - FOR THE WILD

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This week we are honored to host activist, farmer and educator, Leah Penniman. Leah lives in steadfast dedication to her mission of weaving the vast and vital threads of honoring heritage, building relationship to land and ending racism and injustice in the food system.

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Hannah Whittman

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Reworking the metabolic rift La V a Campesina agrarian citizenship and food sovereignty

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Agrarian anarchism and authoritarian populism: towards a more (state-)critical 'critical agrarian studies'

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Agrarian anarchism and authoritarian populism: towards a more (state-)critical 'critical agrarian studies'

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Agrarian anarchism and authoritarian populism towards a more state critical critical agrarian studies

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In the Shadow of the Shadow State. The Revolution Will Not be Funded

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In the Shadow of the Shadow State. The Revolution Will Not be Funded

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Tuck and Yang - Decolonization is not a metaphor

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Queer Futurism: Denizens of Liminality, Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd

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Queer Futurism: Denizens of Liminality, Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd

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Queer Futurism_ Denizens of Liminality — Queer Nature

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Take the houses back/take the land black: Black and Indigenous urban futures in Oakland

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Take the houses back/take the land black: Black and Indigenous urban futures in Oakland

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Ramírez - 2020 - Take the houses backtake the land back Black and

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Indigenous science (fiction) of the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises

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Indigenous science (fiction) of the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises

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The Problem of Land: Jose Carlos Mariategui

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The Problem of Land: Jose Carlos Mariategui

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Food Sovereignty Education across the Americas

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Food Sovereignty Education across the Americas

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Where is imperialism? Look at your plates.

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Where is imperialism? Look at your plates.

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If you have been enjoying Vittles, then you can contribute to its upkeep by subscribing via Patreon https://www.patreon.com/user?u=32064286, which ensures all contributors are paid for the month ahead. Any donation is gratefully appreciated, and all patrons are automatically added to the paid-subscriber tier on Substack. If you'd like to subscribe for free or otherwise via Substack, please do below.
What is the most historically significant crop in the world and why is it tea? Follow tea's journey around the world, and you can trace a story of Empire ─ the Opium Wars in the East, the theft of tea from Wuyi with plants brought to West Bengal, the fuelling of the Industrial Revolution in the north of England, the leaves left to stew in Boston Harbor. How many wars have been waged, how much blood has been spilt, how much labour has been produced just to process a bud and two small leaves? The days of the British Empire has gone, but where is imperialism now? Look at your mug, as Thomas Sankara never said. Imperialism lies dormant under other name. Go to a supermarket and open up any bag of tea: it could be PG Tips, Yorkshire, some fancy Twinings job in a black packet, or anything else you feel like being a snob about. On average half of it will be produced in Kenya, another quarter might be produced in South America, the rest in places like Sri Lanka and India ─ two countries which dominated the tea market and now are too expensive for most teabags. What links these places? With the exception of India, which had tea bushes in Assam, tea is not indigenous to any of these countries. Tea was planted by the British and Spanish, eager for a cash crop to satiate demand in their own countries ─ at first this was driven by slave labour, then rebranded as indentured labour. Now these plantations may have new ownership but the system remains in place: labour is extracted to fill the demands of people thousands of miles away, wealth is extracted through the artificially low prices paid for tons of tea. Imperialism continues in a new guise. Today's newsletter by Waithera Sebatindira looks at this new guise of imperialism that is encoded in trade agreements that the West has with Africa, how both imports and exports are symbolic of an unequal relationship that extracts wealth and labour to this day. At the same time it poses possible solutions for the continent, solutions that will be won through self-organising and a wholesale rejection of the current system at the most granular level. People often ask me which tea they can buy that's ethical, whether they should only buy Fairtrade, or given a label by the Ethical Tea Partnership, whether there's some charitable (Western run) scheme that's out there doing good. Having seen the effect of strikes and self-organisation, my answer has increasingly become "donate to the Communist party of West Bengal". This answer doesn't please a lot of people, but perhaps it's better, necessary even, that it shouldn't.
"Where is imperialism? Look at your plates", by Waithera Sebatindira "Where is imperialism? Look at your plates when you eat. The imported grains of rice, corn, and millet - that is imperialism. Let's not look any further"
I'm standing in the fruit and veg section at a Carrefour in Abidjan, examining already-mouldy punnets of blueberries and searching desperately for just two hundred useable grams of imported fruit, when I'm once again haunted by these words from the Burkinabè revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara. Sankara rose to the presidency of Burkina Faso in 1983 and led the country on a Marxist-Leninist agenda that was staunchly anti-imperialist. By the time he was assassinated in a foreign-backed coup in 1987, his ideas about food sovereignty had spread across the continent.

I was prompted to engage with Sankara after I made what was supposed to be a temporary move from London to Abidjan, the capital city of Côte d'Ivoire, at the start of this year. Like many people, my plans were shifted by Covid-19 and I've found myself here for an extended period of time. To be fair, this has only presented a minor problem. Abidjan is a city that has always been close to my heart; I lived here for a few years as a child before the First Ivorian Civil War and my parents moved back seven years ago once the political situation settled down. But the city has never been more than a pit stop for me - a place to recharge over the summer before returning to my "real" life in the UK.

Something I've clung to while trying to process the move has been British food. Some elements travelled here easily with me. Circuitously, it's been the advocacy of British West Africans which has revived my lost childhood love of plantain, so leaning into that has been straightforward. But it's British desserts I've been missing the most, quietly bookmarking a recipe for a damson crumble and fantasising about freshly griddled peaches topped with a hefty dollop of ricotta. The greatest challenge involved the blueberries, which were intended to adorn a cinnamon pavlova alongside some fresh figs. Three supermarkets and many webs of mould later I switched out the cinnamon for cardamom and replaced the berries with chunks of Ivorian mango and pineapple.

The piles of imported, slowly rotting fruit that I encountered during my search offered a useful metaphor for imperialism, but to focus on them does not go far enough. When Sankara said 'let us try to eat what we control ourselves', his statement went beyond advocating localism and encouraging middle-class migrants to rethink their desire to make seasonal Diana Henry recipes. Rather, he was making a point both about Burkina Faso's dependency on food aid and about how Burkinabè wages make their way into French pockets rather than enriching the country itself. So, in addition to laying off the not-so-fresh berries, I decided to engage with Sankara by reaching out to activists across a range of African countries to learn about what food imperialism looks like today and if much has changed since his speech in the 1980s. What I learnt is that the struggle for independence is ongoing in Africa, and that the terrain of industrial farming is where many of our battles are being fought.

Clare Rono is a Kenyan environmental activist and member of the Ogiek tribe, whose ancestral land is the Mau Forest located in the Rift Valley. The Ogiek's livelihood has been devastated by deforestation of their land, caused in part by the planting of Kenya's biggest cash crop on its outskirts - tea. The tea plant was introduced for industrial farming by the British in 1903 and now Kenya is the world's largest exporter of black tea, almost exclusively as a commodity product. Encroaching plantations have had terrible consequences for the environment and led to the displacement of the Ogiek who, as Rono states, are reliant on the forest for honey, fruit, and wild meat. Some have been forced to take up farming to survive, effectively being pushed into the cash crop economy.

In Côte d'Ivoire, something similar is happening with cashews. Cashew trees were introduced in the 1960s to tackle deforestation, and since then the country's cashew nut export market has grown immensely. Most of the nuts are sent to Vietnam and India for processing before they are exported to markets across the rest of the world, including top importers such as the USA and Germany. As cashew orchards expand to meet growing global demand, the néré tree - indigenous to west Africa and used for both medicinal and food purposes - faces an existential threat. One of the many usages of the tree is in the production of the popular condiment called soumara, made from fermented néré seeds and likened to miso paste. According to Yacouba Yeo, an Ivorian organiser committed to preserving the production of soumara, the two markets are in direct opposition and néré trees are now felled to make room for cashew orchards. The trees have become so rare that their seeds are frequently replaced with soybeans, which both change the taste of soumara and risk eliminating the traditional knowledge surrounding its production.

Stories like these form part of a colonial legacy of monoculture, an agricultural policy in which colonial economies were organised around one or two cash crops intended primarily to feed the Global North. While African economies have diversified somewhat in the decades since formal independence, the needs of imperialist nations still dictate African policy. This is what independence fighter and first President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah defined as 'neo-colonialism', a global system in which ostensibly sovereign states have their economies - and therefore their political decisions - directed by foreign actors. This results in environmental destruction, displacement and epistemicide, all phenomena that impoverish Africans culturally and economically.

The effect of imperialism is not limited to what is grown on African land. Imperialist dynamics can also be found within international trade agreements that govern African import practices. One example is the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) made between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. These deals liberalise African economies, allowing European nations to use Africa as a place in which to dump the glut of cheap products that have exceeded demand in their own countries.

In return, African producers are given similar legal privileges in terms of accessing the EU market. However, in reality European producers disproportionately benefit. African smallholder farmers, who account for 90% of all farms on the continent, are generally uninterested in producing for a European market yet face intense competition from foreigners. Aloysius Tucker, District Coordinator for Slow Food in the coastal town of Bonthe in Sierra Leone, confirms that foreign imports hinder local production by discouraging local agricultural workers who can't compete with foreigners' low, subsidised prices. Small-scale fishers in particular have lamented the terms of EPAs as their markets are flooded with processed fish from EU factories which are sold at prices well below what these fishers would need to survive.

A final factor to consider here is the dependence of farmers on violent market fluctuations over which they have no control. In Côte d'Ivoire, where the farmers who have made the country the largest cocoa bean producer in the world are already paid poverty wages, the price guaranteed to them by the state was slashed by 36% in 2017 to account for a global oversupply of the crop. This was then raised again in 2018, but most farmers that year still did not earn a living income as defined by Fairtrade International. This is in spite of the fact that Côte d'Ivoire has been celebrated in recent years for having one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

The solution to food imperialism doesn't lie in the market. In fact, as economist Samir Amin predicted in his 1971 text Neo-colonialism in West Africa, the deeper African economies embed themselves into the global market, the worse some of the problems discussed above become. What is needed instead is direct action across the continent and a return to indigenous food practices.

And the work is being done. Zimbabwe offers a good example, where farmers are responding to worsening climate conditions - predominantly caused by the Global North - that prevent the growth of their staple crop maize (itself said to have been introduced by the Portuguese in the 16th century) by encouraging a return to indigenous, drought-resistant crops like millet and sorghum. This then allows them to bypass imported wheat and rice foisted upon them. One of these farmers is Dr Chidara Muchineripi, who set up the Chinyika Communities Development Programme in Gutu, a district in southern Zimbabwe, in 2005, a project aimed at persuading farmers to switch from maize to finger millet. By 2014, every farmer seriously engaged in finger millet production had a strategic food reserve of three to five years, and collectively they had the capacity to produce an annual surplus of 2000 tons. Families in the district then had a stable supply of food, achieved without foreign intervention and through the use of indigenous farming methods.

Mali also stands out as an example to follow. Following a food crisis in 2007, rice farmers organised nationally, pushing the government to restrict imports and support domestic rice production by giving small farmers access to sufficient land and water. By 2017, rice production was double the country's annual consumption and in 2019 Mali was the only west African country to meet its rice self-sufficiency targets. This illustrates that government support of local production can be more effective at tackling food insecurity than partnering with big business.

This pattern is happening across the continent, where some of the most crucial work is done through the Slow Food network, a global grassroots organisation that seeks to preserve indigenous food cultures and traditions. In Kenya and Sierra Leone, Slow Food works with schools and communities to promote sustainable food production while empowering activists to advocate for policy changes that are conducive to indigenous farming practices.

There are questions to be asked about how indigenous farming can be meaningfully developed from its current subsistence level to the point at which it can once again feed the entire continent. Tucker is not entirely confident. Under current conditions, he argues, traditional farming cannot grow beyond a certain point. But Ibrahim Mansaray, another Sierra Leonean and vocal advocate for agroecological farming, disagrees. He argues that indigenous epistemologies can spread if integrated into our notions of what counts as "development". Similarly, Ferdinand Wafula, a Slow Food activist in Kenya, offers solutions such as government tax relief for indigenous farmers that adopt more sustainable methods of food production.

Then there are those like Elphas Masanga, another Slow Food organiser, who believe the mould can be broken entirely. He stresses the importance of building numbers and connecting small-scale farmers across the continent because, even against the wall of transnational capital, "if we are many... we'll still win because we are the people and we're the ones in control. We only need to say we don't need your chemicals and we don't need your seed in this country".

I made poulet yassa the other day, a Senegalese chicken dish that is very popular in Abidjan. While searching for a recipe online, I found many heated arguments about what constitutes a "traditional" yassa, with some claiming that one can only use onions and lime juice in the marinade and others swearing that a yassa is simply not a yassa without the addition of a tablespoon of Dijon mustard and a handful of olives.

Africans are very much embedded in global culture, even if that embedding has largely been to our detriment. But listening to each person I interviewed I was struck by what I think is the greatest contradiction of imperialism: it has connected millions into a shared struggle. Colonialism armed an entire continent with a small collection of shared languages through which to communicate, and national units through which to render legible our calls for independence.

I think Masanga is probably right. The numbers are there. His work and the work of countless others like him affirm the existence of a continued struggle. Sankara's point, that the battle against imperialism is fought on our plates, remains true today. It's where the battle can be won, too.

Waithera Sebatindira is a writer based in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. She has co-authored a book, "A Fly Girl's Guide to University" published last year with Verve Poetry Press. This is her first published piece of food writing. Many thanks to Elphas Masanga for photos.

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"Where is imperialism? Look at your plates."

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Words by Waithera Sebatindira; Photos by Elphas Masanga

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Freedom Farmers, Monica White. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. 

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Freedom Farmers, Monica White. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. 

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https://vimeo.com/548672517

The code is GoFarmBears!

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Bronte Velez; On the Pleasurable Surrender of White Supremacy

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Bronte Velez; On the Pleasurable Surrender of White Supremacy

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https://forthewild.world/listen/bronte-velez-on-pleasurable-surrender-of-white-supremacy-1-139?rq=bronte

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BRONTË VELEZ on the Pleasurable Surrender of White Supremacy ⌠PART 1⌡ — FOR THE WILD

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In Part One of this expansive conversation, Ayana and brontë delve into topics surrounding authentic expression, the distortion of feminine and masculine powers, beauty and aesthetics, queerness, dominatrix energy, and power as agency.

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"Skywoman Falling" & "The Gift of Strawberries," from Braiding Sweetgrass. 

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"Skywoman Falling" & "The Gift of Strawberries," from Braiding Sweetgrass. 

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The Mushroom at the End of the World. Selected Works.

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The Mushroom at the End of the World. Selected Works.

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On the culture of foraging in Mapuche Communities of Chile

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On the culture of foraging in Mapuche Communities of Chile

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Factors that support and hinder women's participation in Agroecology in Costa Rica

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Factors that support and hinder women's participation in Agroecology in Costa Rica

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New Materialist Feminist Ecological Practices: La Via Campesina and Activist Environmental Work

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New Materialist Feminist Ecological Practices: La Via Campesina and Activist Environmental Work

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"The Earth Gives Us So Much": Agroecology and Rural Women's Leadership in Uruguay

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"The Earth Gives Us So Much": Agroecology and Rural Women's Leadership in Uruguay

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Oliver - 2016 - “The Earth Gives Us So Much” Agroecology and Rura

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Indigenous Queer Normativity, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

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Indigenous Queer Normativity, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

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Womanism as Agrarianism: Black Women Healing Through Innate Agrarian Artistry

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Womanism as Agrarianism: Black Women Healing Through Innate Agrarian Artistry

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The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline

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The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline

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Re-thinking agrarian reform, land and territory in La Via Campesina

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Re-thinking agrarian reform, land and territory in La Via Campesina

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Re thinking agrarian reform land and territory in La Via Campesina

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Land-Based Ethics and Settler Solidarity

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Land-Based Ethics and Settler Solidarity

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Settler colonialism has been defined as a structure, not an event, meaning that settler societies like the U.S., Canada, and Australia endure over time through racist laws and ideologies that naturalize the dispossession of Indigenous populations. One of the most effective strategies that settler states rely on to eliminate Indigenous peoples and their power is the idea that their knowledges are primitive and superstitious, examples of failed epistemology. This view is rooted in an Enlightenment-born materialism that asserts that legitimate knowledge can only be produced through narrow empirical methods, relegating the negotiations of immaterial life to the social margins. As the colonial project progresses, legitimate knowledge production is simultaneously tethered to race and power (reserved to the white and landed), resulting in what we have come to know as modernity.

Indigenous peoples are not only still fighting for their land, they're fighting for the protection of all land.

Settler colonialism seeks to eliminate Indigenous populations in order to monopolize resources for the sake of capital. It operates through laws and racist ideologies, but also through conceptualizations of the natural world as white men's for the human taking. Settler colonialism operates from its own metaphysic, producing what I call a settler ecology, which dispossesses peoples but also lands. If settlers want to understand how to effectively address environmental crises, then they have to interrogate the logics of settler colonialism-racialization, white supremacy, and myths of development-as structural dimensions of modern life. Our collective quarantine has dovetailed into an all-out revolution; one that is an all-out indictment of colonialism itself. This time is ripe for this very conversation.

Challenging Ideological Assumptions

As a scholar of Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism who is also a Chicana of Apache descent, I am personally interested in how Indigenous peoples operationalize religious action as an expression of refusal-a refusal to give up their lifeways and claims to their lands in the face of ongoing settler colonialism. This refusal is most powerfully expressed when Indigenous populations defy racialized characterizations of their lifeways and continue to live and act in ways that accord with the ethics and realities embedded in their respective metaphysical worlds. I choose to amplify both Native and Tibetan voices in my research because they challenge these ideological assumptions by continuing to invoke and honor the unseen world and its role in human wellness. In doing so, they help make the deeply racist hierarchies around knowledge, power, and peoples that drive existing settler colonial projects around the world more visible.

Personally, I have grown weary of the liberal left handwringing that expresses horror and concern for dispossessed peoples yet makes little to no effort to challenge or transform these structures of oppression. These laments have grown in the time of Covid-19, and have led to mass protests after the murder of George Floyd, but now it is settlers and not just Indigenous peoples who are made vulnerable to the violence and neglect of the state. In this essay, I call on all settler allies, Buddhist and otherwise, to refuse the structures that uphold settler colonialism in solidarity with Indigenous peoples by building on the ideological and ethical connections forged since Standing Rock, such as land-based ethics and ecological wellness. My intention is to help connect the dots between settler ideologies/praxis and the material dispossession of peoples/lands for settler allies, so that they may use this period of quarantine and crises to recognize their power and mobilize to these ends.

The #NoDAPL movement at the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas in 2016-2017 brought Native sovereignty efforts back into the national, even global, consciousness. One of the major impacts of that movement was the visual narrative it provided: Native Americans on horseback or lined in up prayer, facing off against hyper-militarized police forces. The coordinated efforts by federal, state, and local police with private security forces to protect Energy Transfer Partners' aims of building the pipeline at all costs communicated to the public that once again Indigenous lives and lands would be sacrificed for the sake of capital. While these acts of violence were generally ignored by mainstream news, they went viral on social media, stoking waves of solidarity from Native and non-Native supporters around the world. Many U.S. citizens were shocked to learn that Native peoples still battled with the state over land rights due to broken treaties, and were forced to grapple with the banal reality of settler colonial aggression that claims lands for settlers at the expense of Indigenous lives.

A critical discourse that emerged from this struggle was the assertion by Native peoples that they are "protectors," not protesters; they are stewards of the land, responsible for protecting and nurturing the life force within it. In the few years since Standing Rock, Indigenous peoples around the world have strengthened their networks to support land-based stewardship efforts along with environmental wellness more generally, helping all of us to reconceptualize our ways of living and being in relation to the land.

Earth-Centered Ethics

If we, collectively, want to fight climate crises, then we need to reclaim land-based ethics-ethical relationships to the land and the other-than-human. These ethics are earth-centered, meaning they are driven by the immediate needs of the land, not peoples. Land-based ethics in an Indigenous context can be understood through the stand-off at Standing Rock itself, particularly through the discourse of "protector, not protester." Here, Native peoples are citing a sacred responsibility to care for the land-to act as its stewards, responsible for protecting and nurturing the life force within it. In short, the needs of the people are met through the land, so the needs of the land must be met by the people.

This ethic was most clearly articulated through the daily activities of the Sacred Stone Camp, the central hub of the #NoDAPL movement. Sacred Stone Camp was named for the sacred place where the pipeline would pass near what Lakota and Dakota or Oceti Sakowin peoples call "the river Inyan Wakan Kagapi Wakpa, or River Where the Sacred Stones Are Made- wakan translating as sacred or holy." Historically, this had been a place of ceremony, so naturally the camp itself held ceremony around the clock, whether in the form of sweat lodges, all-night singing and prayer, or tribally specific dances; all actions, great and small, were directed at protecting the lands in their entirety were an expression of this larger ceremony. Here, Oceti Sakowin's land-based ethics are communicated through praxis: Protecting the water is about ensuring the future life and wellbeing of the people and the land. The two are co-extensive, in the same way that affirming their sacred relationships to the lands and the spiritual power within them affirms Oceti Sakowin sovereignty, since it is this mutuality with the land that evinces Indigenous expressions of sovereignty.

Inspired by these acts of refusal, Indigenous peoples from all over the Americas (and beyond) gathered at the camp to collectively honor these sacred lifeways as the source of all authority. Together, they supplicated the spirit world and coalesced their spiritual power, singing, dancing, and praying this protection into being. These expressions of ceremony were celebratory and community building, but also pedagogical: They were teaching non-Native people about Indigenous land-based ethics and protocols.

Buddhist resonance with Indigenous stewardship helps us understand how earth-centered ethics as an existential goal tethered to human/land survival are viable to many.

In addition to the diverse Indigenous peoples who joined the camp, there were many settler allies, some of them Buddhist. A number of Buddhist clergy and practitioners joined with other religious leaders in prayerful solidarity, several even putting their bodies on the line through nonviolent forms of protest. A first-hand account by one Buddhist ally, Wendy Egyoku Nakao of the Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA), asserts both the intention to bear witness to Native suffering, given the ongoing effects of genocide, as well as an embodied realization that settlers in the U.S., collectively, reside on Native lands. She intimates that the Native land-based ethics articulated at Standing Rock resonate as a result of a deep somatic awareness developed in meditation practice, describing how she has experientially come to know the land as it speaks to practitioners of its storied history:

The little Zen mountain of ZCLA is a power spot; one can certainly feel the energy of the place just walking in. The roots of spiritual energy go deep. We are on sacred land of people going back thousands of years. I feel that the energy and voices of the Native Americans from all those generations past are continually speaking to us when we listen to the sense of this place.

Its power motivates her and others to act: "Indigenous peoples throughout the world, and non-native allies, are being drawn to the energetic vortex of these encampments to offer support," demonstrating that this realization is worthy of some sort of action of support on her part.

Similarly, a statement of solidarity with Indigenous land protectors from One Earth Sangha referred to Buddhist tenets on the preservation of life and earth-oriented directives from Buddhist leaders, such as Thích Nhất Hạnh: "We have to start learning how to live in a way so that a future will be possible for our children and our grandchildren. We need a kind of collective awakening. We have the dharma; we have the means; we have enough wisdom. We do not have to sink into despair... we can act." In essence, this support is Buddhism in action. It is living the dharma to its fullest integrity.

Importantly, this statement of solidarity links ecological atrocities to colonial domination and even legal discourses, such as the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal bulls that declared lands not inhabited by Christians open to seizure by right of "discovery" (theft). Shawnee/Lenape legal scholar Steve Newcomb argues that the Doctrine of Discovery is rooted in Christian conceptions of a "natural order"-in essence, a Christian metaphysic that justifies human (specifically Christian) dominion over the earth. Settler colonial projects relied on such ideologies to justify Indigenous enslavement, genocide, and dispossession. The use of the Doctrine of Discovery in the U.S. legal system redefined Native title, opening the doors for Indian removal but also for Native nations to be redefined as domestic dependent nations under the purview of the state.

The Radical Agency of Earth

Like these Buddhist allies, Ven. Bhikku Bodhi argues that climate crises will not be solved by technology; it necessitates a paradigm shift-another way of viewing the world entirely. He refers to settler colonial logic as the corporate paradigm, one that operates through objectification: "It treats everything-people, animals, and trees, rivers, land, and mountains-as objects to be utilized to generate financial gain for corporations, their executives, and their shareholders." Buddhist teachings brought to the West have been so impactful partly because of their ability to offer a new paradigm-an alternative to the Christian metaphysic that drove manifest destiny as well as its secular, materialist cousin that drives development. Buddhist views often center land-based logics as not just fundamental to practice but also fundamental to understanding what it means to be human. In Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa emphasized the earth's role in the process of knowing our true nature but also the nature of reality, in its rawness, in its " nowness." As we behold each element and its natural expression, such as raindrops and flowers, we are confronted with a neutral and apparent world, with an opportunity to be radically present to who and what we are.

Beyond the earth's role in our own awakening, Trungpa offers up a Tibetan metaphysic that distinguishes the greater world into three sections ( lha, nyen, and lu), each with their own characteristics. He calls these an "order of the cosmic world" that provides a protocol for living "rooted in the laws of the earth." In this context, lha refers to "the highest points on earth" (e.g., snow-capped mountain peaks); nyen to "the great shoulders of the mountains... forests, jungles and plains; and lu to water, "the realm of oceans and rivers and great lakes." Here, "human beings can weave themselves into that texture of basic reality" by understanding themselves as a microcosm of the natural world, from its snowy heights, such as mountaintops ( lha) to its watery depths ( lu), that must accord to its cycles, cultivating the land and nurturing it through its seasons. In doing so, we can wake up to what Trungpa refers to as basic goodness and with it our responsibility to care for others. As we develop a sense of intimacy with the earth through understanding ourselves as co-extensive with this dynamic order, we can better realize the mutuality at work-it provides for our needs, and in turn, has needs we must tend.

One can't help but hear the earth's agency intimated in Trungpa's words; the earth has its rhythms that humans must learn to accord with them. I hear a land-based ethic here-one that centers land, but provides a clear goal for human life: to steward land. This goal serves both the land, but also the ultimate purpose of human insight. In essence, as one learns to be responsible to oneself and others, one is awakened to what it means to live in the world. These existential goals are resonant with Native American worlds. Native peoples in the Americas understand the universe as alive and sentient. Since all persons-human and other-than-human-such as plants, animals, rivers, winds and mountains are expressions of life-force or spirit, they are understood to be interconnected and contingent. Relatives. Native peoples seek to honor this life force through prayer and ceremony because it has given them life and continues to secure their survival. The spirit world responds dialectically to minute (and concentrated) propitiations by the people in order to effect change on their behalf. As a result, the people act as stewards of the land, protecting and nurturing the life within it.

If we, collectively, want to fight climate crises, then we need to reclaim land-based ethics-ethical relationships to the land and the other-than-human.

This reciprocal relationship is mutually self-sustaining. While spirit is understood to be everywhere, some spiritual forces are place-specific. Native peoples have built relationships with the spiritual power of those places over time. The spirit world communicates to the people through the land and greater cosmos, instructing the people on the protocols for living in this place. The foundation of Indigenous religious life is maintaining an individual and collective relationship to local bioregions and the spirit world. Protecting sacred places is important because it ensures the future life and wellbeing of the people as well as the lands.

The Ethics of Dispossession

Land-based struggles have only escalated since Standing Rock. Indigenous land defenders in the U.S., Canada, and around the world are criminalized and often targets of violence. The murder and extrajudicial killing of Indigenous leaders has become commonplace in Central and South America, but also in places like Nigeria, Congo, Gabon, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Environmental devastation is no accident. The environmental dispossession of Indigenous peoples is directly produced by specific but overlapping histories of colonialism. The dispossession that founded the Americas is born out of the same set of ethics that bore unmanaged resource extraction. Climate scientists now date the start of the Anthropocene-the geological period where human activity has made the most impact on climate and the environment-to the 16th century, the start of the colonial period, which initiated a singular global economic system that increasingly relied on the exploitation of lands and peoples. The large-scale annexation of lands by European powers catalyzed the death of millions of Indigenous people through the introduction of new pathogens, resulting in massive reforestation that literally cooled the planet enough to disrupt agriculture cycles and cause famines across Europe. Since that time, this new global economy has had the opposite effect. Deforestation for agriculture and urban development has accelerated the release of greenhouse gases, warming the planet by around 1°C over the past century. Environmental crises have been unintentionally cultivated for centuries by settler ecologies that singularly focus on the production of capital and retention of power for wealthy elites and first-world nation-states.

Indigenous movements of stewardship have already shifted our national consciousness. Settlers can no longer ignore the damaging effects of white supremacy and settler colonialism, mostly because it is directly impacting the health and wellbeing of the land, as well as their own health. Environmental crises are not just about climate change or ecological collapse, but also lethal pandemics such as the one we are current experiencing, Covid-19. These kinds of lethal diseases are introduced to human communities as we increasingly over-develop lands: "Emerging diseases have quadrupled in the last half-century, experts say, largely because of increasing human encroachment into habitat, especially in disease 'hot spots' around the globe, mostly in tropical regions." Settler ecologies have failed to acknowledge or understand that lands are delicate ecosystems. Their attendant global economy is decidedly asymmetrical: "Demand for wood, minerals, and resources from the Global North leads to the degraded landscapes and ecological disruption that drives disease." Settlers must understand that Indigenous dispossession was never about a people's inferiority or need for "civilization"; it was about greed and the hoarding of land/resources by a class of elites-elites that coordinate the operation of nation-states and industries. In a time when intersectional forms of analysis have become critical to understand the connections between race, class, gender, and sex disparities, we, collectively, must understand the link between the horrors of racist land dispossession to the very methods of development that drive our modern world, and to the additional horrors of Indigenous death, disease, and environmental devastation they bring.

I call on all settler allies, Buddhist and otherwise, to refuse the structures that uphold settler colonialism in solidarity with Indigenous peoples by building on the ideological and ethical connections forged since Standing Rock, such as land-based ethics and ecological wellness.

While many have become acquainted with the Gaia hypotheses, or the idea that the earth is a living, self-regulating system, they assume that the land is totally autonomous. Not quite. In a Native context, the land relies on its human relatives to care for it because they are uniquely equipped to do so. However, the people are not set apart from the land; they are understood to be an extension of all life, which includes the land. As the human expression of the larger cosmic order, stewardship provides the space for humans to demonstrate their responsibility to the land and one another and with it the possibility of maturity, maybe even the wisdom that comes from ecological intimacy. As noted above, Native ceremonies produce power that contribute to the wellbeing of the peoples, human and other-than-human, but also the land. Again, all these players are understood to be interdependent. The Buddhist expressions of allyship outlined above are also rooted in this non-dual understanding of human life as interdependent with the greater world, and thus beholden to care for all beings with compassion. Buddhist resonance with Indigenous stewardship helps us understand how earth-centered ethics as an existential goal tethered to human/land survival are viable to many. Both lifeways challenge materialist assumptions of the natural world and re-evaluate its role in relation to human life.

Deeper engagement with these views helps us collectively reconsider the nature of reality and think about the world in a new way-as a place that is sentient and alive, even invested in our collective wellbeing. As a place that is in conversation with us, not just a passive object for us to do with as we will. Settlers in particular are better enabled to recognize that they can no longer leave the burden of environmental wellness to Indigenous peoples. The power to dismantle settler ecologies lies in the collectivization of our skills and resources, much like the mutual aid that has sprung up in response to Covid-19. But it also necessitates learning what it means to be an ally to Indigenous peoples and the land, and to act in solidarity with both. When we, collectively, consider the ethical stakes of Indigenous stewardship, we are forced to grapple with what it means when Indigenous peoples assert that the land-and its inhabitants-are sovereign. We are forced to rethink the hierarchical nature of power that produces racialization, colonialism/imperialism, and Indigenous dispossession. We are forced to reevaluate the stigmatized assumptions of Indigenous knowledge, specifically Indigenous ecology and science, which are rooted in religious worldviews. In the process, Indigenous stewardship as a political project that refuses continued settler colonial violence is made legible, even tenable.

The land-based ethics that drive Indigenous stewardship movements and expressions of Buddhist solidarity remind us that Indigenous peoples are not only still fighting for their land, they're fighting for the protection of all lands. These land-based movements are waging a response to the total war that has been directed at Indigenous peoples for centuries, waging refusal against settler ecologies and the multiple logics of colonialism that maintain them. This is a struggle for power that we are all entrenched in, depending on our positionality and access to power and privilege. Indigenous peoples are cueing others to recognize an earth-centered metaphysic, an interconnected and sentient reality that is already recognized by many Buddhists and is emerging among other like-minded allies. Settler allies have the power and means to boost Indigenous voices and views. The forced stillness that Covid-19 has brought to the most privileged among us can and should be used to strategize. To re-assess how to move forward equitably with more coherent ethics. How might we, collectively, use this time of reflection but mass protest against racist extrajudicial killings to better ground into our sense of reciprocity and find ways to support the most vulnerable among us? How might we interrogate and challenge all forms of bias and corrupt power? How might we deepen our awareness that we are the ecological world? These ideological shifts are our future; may their recognition help us dismantle settler structures of dispossession as if our lives are at stake. Because they are.

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Divesting the Mind of Colonialism * Natalie Avalos

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We live in the legacy of colonialism, a human-, white-, and settler-centered view of reality. Buddhist scholar Natalie Avalos shows us how Indigenous and Dharma wisdom call us to live in Right Relationship with Earth and all beings. 🌏

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Freedom Farmers.  A Pig and a Garden: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative.

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Freedom Farmers.  A Pig and a Garden: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative.

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This week we are honored to host activist, farmer and educator, Leah Penniman. Leah lives in steadfast dedication to her mission of weaving the vast and vital threads of honoring heritage, building relationship to land and ending racism and injustice in the food system.

Soul Fire Farm in Upstate New York is a hotbed for regeneration, grassroots activism and education based in agroecology and Afro-Ecology, a form of art, movement, practice, and process of social and ecological transformation that involves the re-evaluation of our sacred relationships with land, water, air, seeds and food.

In 2009, Soul Fire's soil was initially ranked on the worst level by the USDA Agricultural Soil Classification, with only 6 inches of topsoil. From 2009 to 2017, their topsoil increased by 300% (6 to 18 inches) through regenerative and ancestral farming practices now sequestering up to 4,000 pounds of carbon.

Leah and the folks of Soul Fire Farm leave no stone unturned in the integration between social and environmental justice. Leah serves as a true leader of our generation, asking us to show up to these times with full heart rooted tangible action, healing the earth and one another.

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LEAH PENNIMAN on Land Based Liberation - FOR THE WILD

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This week we are honored to host activist, farmer and educator, Leah Penniman. Leah lives in steadfast dedication to her mission of weaving the vast and vital threads of honoring heritage, building relationship to land and ending racism and injustice in the food system.

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At the Pores of the Plantation; The Black Shoals Chapter 3

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At the Pores of the Plantation; The Black Shoals Chapter 3

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Anthropocene, Capitalocene, ... Plantationocene? A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises

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Anthropocene, Capitalocene, ... Plantationocene? A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises

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Davis et al.

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Sara Kozameh

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Solo en Español

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EZLN COMPARTE POR LA HUMANIDAD. [DOCUMENTAL]

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EZLN COMPARTE POR LA HUMANIDAD
En el sureste mexicano, una lección de arte y solidaridad con los maestros en huelga. 

Este documental se grabó en julio de 2016, en el sureste mexicano, en el marco del festival, “CompArte por la humanidad, que organizó el EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), coincidiendo con la celebración de los 22 años del levantamiento armado y de los 13 años del caminar autónomo con resistencia y rebeldía, es decir del nacimiento de los Caracoles y las Juntas de Buen Gobierno. En estas mismas fechas los maestros y maestras llevaban tres meses en paro luchando contra la reforma educativa que pretendía imponer el gobierno mexicano. Por lo que las y los zapatistas se organizaron y dieron a la humanidad una lección de arte y solidaridad apoyando la lucha de la CNTE (Coordinadora Nacional de Educación).

CORTO DOCUMENTAL. MÉXICO 2016. 17MIN

Una producción Audiovisual de Entrelazando
(An Entrelazando audiovisual production)
Realización Audiovisual (A film by): Ariel Arango
Apoyo Logístico e investigación (Logistical support and research): Laia Costa Gay
Gráfica (Graphic Design): Nanu Kubler
Música (Music): Guazú / Nicola Cruz / Tomash / Hombre de Barro
Música trailer: https://soundcloud.com/shikashikacollective/sets/guazu-guazu
Traducción al Inglés (English translation): Blossom Ah Ket
Agradecimientos (Acknowledgements): Amparo Prada  / Anitze y Giacomo / CIDECI / EZLN
Estado de Chiapas, México, 2016.
entrelazando.com
+INFO: http://entrelazando.com/portfolio-item/ezln-comparte-por-la-humanidad/
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ALGUNAS PROYECCIONES:

- Festiva de Películas Nativas Arica Nativa. #Cuarentena de Películas Nativas Online. Chile. 30.03.20
- ARANDU III Muestra Latinoamericana de cine indígena y comunitario. 28. 10.18 Buenos Aires, Argentina
- IX Festival de Cine de los Pueblos Indígenas. Valparaiso. Chile. 13.01.18
- Rincón Zapatista, Cafetería Comandante Ramona, San Cristobal de las Casas, México. 9.12.17
- Cine Club La imagen Viajera. Bogotá Colombia. 25.11.17
- Occupazione Viale Corsica. Florencia. Italia. 6.12.17
- LATIUM Festival Internacional de Cine. México. 11.17
- 6º Festival Internacional de Cortometrajes de la Diversidad Social Todos Somos Otros. (Mención Especial). México. 13.11.17
-14 Festival de Cine y Derechos Humanos de Barcelona. 15.11.17
- Latino-Docs #9. "Paz y Resistencia" Toulouse. Francia. 14.11.17
- Casa de Arte Panajachel. Guatemala. 22.10.17 
- Çxhãçxha Wala, Los Andes, Corinto. Norte del Cauca. 9.10.17
- TUWUN- II MUESTRA DE CINE INDÍGENA DE WALLMAPU. Chile. Villarrica 15.09.17, Valdivia. 22.09.17. 
- Casa De La Solidaritat De Barcelona. España. 7.09.17
- IV FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE CINE POR LOS DERECHOS HUMANOS. Colombia. Bogotá 16.08.2017
- Kinoki Foro Cultural. México. San Cristobal de las Casas. 11.08.17
- La Cosecha Librería, México. San Cristobal de las Casas. 10.08.17
- II FESTIVAL COMPARTE POR LA HUMANIDAD. México. Chiapas. CIDECI. 23. 07. 17 
- Maraton de Cine de Bogotá MBI. Teatro Ditirambo. Bogotá D.C.,Colombia (05.12.16)
- VIII Minga de Pensamiento y Memoria de Tulpas ” Carlos Gonzalías Paví”, Popayán, Colombia. 11.11.16 
- III Vialibre Foto Fest, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 09.10.2016

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January 1, 2019 marked 25 years since the Zapatistas captured the world's imagination with their brief but audacious uprising to demand justice and democracy for Indigenous peasants in southern Mexico. While never formally laying down its weapons, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN) has since become known more for its peaceful mobilizations, dialogue with civil society, and structures of political, economic, and cultural autonomy.

Over the past quarter-century, the Zapatista movement has made significant gains in its own territory, with a ripple effect in Mexico and around the world. The Zapatistas stepped onto the world stage as the Cold War was drawing to a close. With communism no longer providing a blueprint for liberation struggles as it had in the past, the EZLN played an important role in broadening the possibilities of what the next wave of popular movements might look like. From a historical perspective, it is even clearer now what a critical contribution that was-the Zapatista movement has influenced grassroots activists and social movements like few others of the late 20 th century. And although it's been many years since the EZLN was the darling of the international solidarity scene, the Zapatista movement continues to offer lessons to social justice advocates and activists that, in the current political landscape, might be more valuable than ever.
Breaking Chains of Colonialism and Exclusion
The Zapatista uprising stood against the backdrop of colonialism and its legacy-centuries of poverty and inequality, racism, and exploitation. Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, is rich in natural resources but one of the poorest states in Mexico. It has one of the country's largest Indigenous populations, along with some of the highest rates of malnutrition, maternal mortality, and illiteracy. Chiapas also has a long history of conflict over unequal land distribution. After peaceful movements for land reform in the 1960s and '70s were met with government indifference and increased repression from large landholders, many Indigenous villagers concluded that armed struggle was their only viable path. In November 1983, they founded the EZLN as a small guerrilla cell. The founders named the group after Emiliano Zapata, a hero of the Mexican Revolution, and took up his rallying cry of tierra y libertad (land and freedom).

After 10 years of clandestine organizing in the mountains and jungles of Chiapas, recruiting Indigenous peasants into their guerrilla army and civilian support base, the Zapatistas came to a consensus that they would rather risk dying from a bullet than continue watching their children die from preventable diseases. They chose a symbolic date for their uprising: January 1, 1994 was the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. The EZLN was one of the first popular movements to recognize neoliberalism as a dangerous new stage of global capitalism and called NAFTA a death sentence for the Indigenous peasants of Mexico.

As night fell on December 31, 1993, the armed forces of the EZLN had begun to gather. It was an army made up almost entirely of Indigenous people, and about a third of the soldiers were women. As dawn broke on New Year's Day, Zapatista troops occupied seven towns throughout the eastern half of Chiapas, including San Cristóbal de las Casas, a quaint colonial city nestled in the misty highlands of Chiapas and a major tourist destination, where Indigenous peoples have long been oppressed and stigmatized. The Zapatistas occupied San Cristóbal for less than 48 hours. They stayed long enough to read their declaration of war from the balcony of the municipal palace but slipped away in time to escape the full brunt of the Mexican military. The uprising lasted less than two weeks, but transformed the EZLN into one of the most well-known social movements in the world, and one that, over the next decade, would inspire an extraordinary level of solidarity.
Fighting Patriarchy in Zapatista Territory
Since then, the impact of the Zapatista movement has been visible at the local, national, and international level. In Zapatista territory, land takeovers carried out after the 1994 uprising-where Zapatistas occupied large ranches and reapportioned property to landless peasants-impacted the distribution of wealth in Chiapas and continue to shape living conditions for Zapatista villages farming on reclaimed land today. The Zapatista structures of Indigenous autonomy have extended access to rudimentary health care and education to rural villages in Chiapas. The Zapatistas exercise self-determination through local and regional governments, and their economic cooperatives organizing the production of goods generate resources to invest back into their communities, which I detail in my book.

Women's involvement in the EZLN helped shape the Zapatista movement, which, in turn, opened new spaces for women and led to dramatic changes in their lives. When the EZLN began organizing in the rural villages of Chiapas, women there experienced an extraordinary level of violence and discrimination. But the Zapatista movement radically redefined gender roles in the context of the Zapatista movement, as women became guerrilla insurgents and political leaders, healers and educators, and members of economic cooperatives. The tremendous changes in women's lives have included public roles of leadership and participation in community affairs and the ability to choose their romantic partner and decide how many children to have. Women's organizing led to the banning of alcohol in Zapatista territories, which women credit with helping significantly reduce domestic violence. A generation of young Zapatistas, born since the 1994 uprising and growing up in Zapatista territory, today represent the promise of the revolution.

The Zapatista movement's approach to women's rights has also evolved over time. In its early years, the EZLN's leadership acknowledged the discrimination and oppression that women face, but its sole focus was on encouraging women to participate in the revolutionary struggle. There was initially little or no discussion about how to end violence against women, address economic inequality, or lessen women's workload at home. However, the EZLN proved able to change and, over time, developed a much more nuanced gender analysis. Over the years, EZLN leadership paid greater attention to gender-based demands, and dismantling patriarchy became a goal of the movement in of itself.
Facing Dialogue and Betrayal with the Mexican Government
The Zapatista movement has had a deep social, political, and cultural influence at the national level as well. For many sectors of Mexican society, the Zapatistas represented the voice of the voiceless, and inspired a new sense of hope for Mexico's poor and Indigenous citizens after decades of desperation. By empowering civil society, undermining faith in the Mexican government, and demonstrating that it was possible to challenge the status quo, the EZLN arguably contributed to ending decades of one-party rule in Mexico when the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) lost the presidential elections in 2000.

Soon after the 1994 uprising, the EZLN and the Mexican government began peace negotiations. Yet the entire time the Mexican government was negotiating with the EZLN, however, it was also waging low-intensity warfare against the Zapatistas. The violence was primarily directed at the EZLN's civilian support base, including a military offensive against Zapatista communities in February 1995. Instead of returning fire, the Zapatista insurgents and tens of thousands of Zapatista civilians fled to the mountains. Mexican soldiers ransacked the abandoned villages, leaving behind destruction as they advanced through Zapatista territory. The government eventually called off the attack and peace talks were renewed, but the Mexican army established formidable army bases in the heart of Zapatista territory.

The strained relationship between dialogue and violence would continue to mark this stage of the Zapatista movement, and women would end up on the front lines in defending their communities from military attack. In 1996, two years of negotiations culminated in the San Andrés Peace Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture, which recognized Indigenous rights and promised Indigenous autonomy. The Mexican government, however, never implemented the San Andrés Accords. In 2001, after a Zapatista mobilization throughout Mexico pressured the federal government to sign the San Andrés Accords into law, the Mexican Congress instead passed the Indigenous Law, which was such a watered down version of the San Andrés Accords that the EZLN rejected it immediately. The center-left Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) voted for the law, which the EZLN considered a deep betrayal. Current Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, was mayor of Mexico City at the time, and a key leader of the PRD. The Zapatistas have never forgiven AMLO, and the conflict could shape their relationships with the new president over his six-year term.

At the time, this split between the EZLN and the PRD also triggered a broader fracture across the Mexican left. Many had considered themselves supporters of both the EZLN and the PRD, but were now forced to choose sides. Some on the Mexican left criticized the EZLN for their lack of pragmatism and, although it is widely believed that electoral fraud stripped AMLO of his rightful victory in the 2006 presidential election, some still blame AMLO's narrow defeat on the Zapatista boycott of electoral politics. Others have applauded the Zapatistas for their unwavering anti-capitalist stance and ongoing commitment to truly holistic solutions.

Since being elected president, AMLO has proposed incorporating the San Andrés Accords into the Mexican Constitution, indicating his interest in reestablishing trust with the Zapatistas. There would, however, remain an ideological divide. The Zapatistas have long argued that, under neoliberalism, the capitalist class is always in control, regardless of which political party is in power. The EZLN's Sixth Declaration, which includes a lengthy critique of neoliberalism, encourages political formations and alliances outside of the electoral system, to build power from below. It was published in 2005, just as the 2006 presidential elections were getting underway, but the EZLN has continued to be critical of AMLO since then.

The AMLO-backed Maya Train project to build a railway across southeastern Mexico is just one example of why AMLO and the Zapatistas are unlikely to see eye-to-eye anytime soon. Many environmentalists and Indigenous groups, including the Zapatistas, oppose the project. Since AMLO is Mexico's first left-leaning president in decades, it will be telling to see how the relationship between AMLO and the Zapatistas continues to unfold.

And while the Mexican government never implemented the peace treaty it signed with the ELZN, the San Andrés Accords created a framework that the Zapatistas and other Indigenous groups throughout Mexico have implemented on their own. After the passage of the 2001 Indigenous Law, the ELZN turned away from any further efforts to engage with the federal government. Instead, the movement has concentrated on the construction of Indigenous autonomy within its own territory.
Inspiring Anti-Capitalist Movements Across the Country and Around the Globe
Since 1994, the EZLN has also engaged in dialogue with international civil society, inspiring a generation of young activists to organize for social justice in their own contexts. Through its national mobilizations and dialogue with other sectors of society, many credit the EZLN with strengthening Mexican civil society, as Chris Gilbreth and Gerardo Otero have written. The Primer Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo (First Intercontinental Gathering for Humanity and against Neoliberalism) in 1996, and other international gatherings organized by the EZLN, helped jumpstart a worldwide anti-globalization movement.

The exchange between Zapatista and non-Zapatista women has been especially fruitful. Zapatista women have inspired women around Mexico and around the world, and recently held an international gathering for "women who struggle" in defense of its anti-patriarchal platform.

Meanwhile, the Zapatista movement continues to offer a viable example of local alternatives to global capitalism, albeit at a small scale. The economic cooperatives in Zapatista communities, for example, are strengthening a local and regional economy based on collective effort and the well-being of the community, rather than competition and profit.

Although the Zapatistas do not occupy the place they once did in the popular imagination, they continue to be an important reference point for social movements in Mexico and around the world, such as the Occupy movement that emerged almost two decades after the EZLN first put neoliberalism in its crosshairs, and the Mexican protest movement that emerged in 2014 after the disappearance of 43 students from the rural Ayotzinapa teachers' college. For example, Omar García, a student at the Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa and a leader of the protest movement, said in a 2014 interview with Radio Zapatista that "the most powerful reference point for us, in terms of knowing that it is possible to change things at their root, are the Zapatista compañeros and their autonomous municipalities."
Lessons for Contemporary Social Movements
As social movements in the United States grapple with the rise of white nationalism, the undermining of democratic institutions, deaths of migrant children in government custody, and attacks on voting rights, reproductive rights, environmental protections, and so on, some of the lessons that the Zapatista movement and its history offer might be more relevant than ever.

In 1994, the Zapatistas declared war on the Mexican government. They decided to take on global capitalism and aim to dismantle patriarchy in Zapatista territory. At the same time, they know that none of us have all the answers, that we make the road by walking. Contemporary social movements might do well to emulate this combination of chutzpah and humility. The Zapatistas also readily acknowledge that theirs is a long-term struggle. They view their project of Indigenous autonomy as building a world of justice and dignity slowly, step by step. There is much we could learn from the Zapatistas' understanding of the enduring nature of this work, and the patience that comes along with that.

Over the last few years, social movements seeking to dismantle patriarchy have surged, in the United States and in other parts of the world. In spite of very different contexts, what Zapatista women have accomplished-and how they accomplished it-offers women around the world an array of insights about how to achieve transformations on gender issues. In Chiapas, a handful of Zapatista women in key roles of leadership, combined with a broad push from women in the Zapatista base, succeeded in changing laws, institutions, behaviors, and expectations around gender roles and domestic violence, resulting in remarkable transformations for women in Zapatista territory.

In an era when social media has become such a primary mechanism for communication and community-building, it might be tempting to look back at the Zapatista uprising and point to their remarkable ability to communicate with outside supporters at a time when the Internet was only just emerging as a mechanism for global communication. But this outward facing communication was just one aspect of the Zapatista movement. Within the Zapatista villages themselves, the deep social fabric of community and the unquestioned assumption that the collective wellbeing takes priority over the individual form one of the strongest foundations of the Zapatista movement. So while one lesson for contemporary social movements might be to continue making the most of new technologies to reach new audiences, another equally important lesson is to heed the importance of building real, in-person communities, and to have rigor and discipline in old-fashioned, face-to-face organizing.

In a moment of heightened polarization in the United States and across the region, it is worth looking back on the Zapatistas' ability to unite many sectors of society under one banner, and their capacity to remind us what we have in common. The Zapatistas were fighting for land reform and Indigenous autonomy. But they also succeeded in communicating a vision of a just society so universal that people all over the world living in very different contexts from them felt included in their struggle. A quarter-century after their uprising, perhaps the most meaningful, lasting lesson from the Zapatista movement is a spark of hope, a sense of what is possible, even in dark and uncertain times.
Hilary Klein has been engaged in social justice and community organizing for more than two decades. She spent several years working with women's cooperatives in Zapatista territory and is the author of Compañeras: Zapatista Women's Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2015).

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A Spark of Hope: The Ongoing Lessons of the Zapatista Revolution 25 Years On

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What are the lessons of the EZLN's revolutionary struggle for Indigenous autonomy, a quarter-century after declaring war on Mexico and global capitalism?

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The Campesino-a-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba, Rosset (2011) 

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The Campesino-a-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba, Rosset (2011) 

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Rosset et al. - 2011 - The Campesino -to- Campesino agroeco

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Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) 

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Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) 

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Video: 1: https://www.mstbrazil.org/video/story-mst-part-i

Video 2:
https://www.mstbrazil.org/video/story-mst-part-ii

Video 3:
https://www.mstbrazil.org/video/story-mst-part-iii

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DeCal Workshop Sign Up 2022 - Google Sheets

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Create a new spreadsheet and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Sheets to edit Excel files. Free from Google.

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Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to Unlock the Economic Potential of Land

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Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to Unlock the Economic Potential of Land

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Miracle Foods: Quinoa, Curative Metaphors, and the Depoliticization of Global Hunger Politics.

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Miracle Foods: Quinoa, Curative Metaphors, and the Depoliticization of Global Hunger Politics.

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Thomas Sankara   the Upright Man   YouTube

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Vandana Shiva: The Future of Food-Part 2

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The Scramble to Pluck 24 billion Cherries in Eight Weeks.

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The Scramble to Pluck 24 billion Cherries in Eight Weeks.

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The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks (Published 2020)

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Every single one needs to be picked by hand — even in a pandemic. Seasonal workers say they may be essential, but they feel disposable.

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Stuffed and Starved.The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

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Stuffed and Starved.The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

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Free State Slavery: Bound Indian Labor and Slave Trafficking in California’s Sacramento Valley, 1850–1864

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Free State Slavery: Bound Indian Labor and Slave Trafficking in California’s Sacramento Valley, 1850–1864

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Free State Slavery– Bound Indian Labor and Slave Trafficking in California's SacramentoValley (1)

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Rowen White: Seed Rematriation and Fertile Resistance

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Rowen White: Seed Rematriation and Fertile Resistance

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Rowen White is a Seed Keeper/farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and a passionate activist for indigenous seed and food sovereignty. She is the Educational Director and lead mentor of Sierra Seeds, an innovative land-based educational organization located in Nevada City, CA. Rowen is the National Program Coordinator for the Indigenous Seed Keeper Network, which is an initiative of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a non-profit organization aimed at leveraging resources to support tribal food sovereignty projects. She is the chair of the Board of Directors of Seed Savers Exchange, the largest public access seed bank in North America.

She facilitates creative hands-on workshops and strategic conversations in community around seed/food security around the country within tribal and small farming communities. She mentors emerging leaders/mentors and community-based organizations to align their way of working with their cultural and core values. Rowen has a deep commitment to approaching food systems revitalization with a cultural context. She weaves stories of seeds, food, culture and sacred Earth stewardship on her blog, Seed Songs and other distinguished publications.

Rowen's words crack open worlds upon worlds - the magical, manifold creations that lay rest in the seeds that we tuck away in our closets, rattle in wild grasses, and ride the wind. An ode to this "talisman of adaptation and creativity," our interview with Rowen circles Native seeds, the myth of individual self sufficiency, the cultural dimensions of biodiversity, biocolonialism and safeguarding agricultural heritage against patenting, seed work as slow work, and reweaving cultures of belonging. In talking about reclaiming our responsibility and relationship to seeds, Rowen reminds us that we are also naming our birthright to nourish and sustain ourselves. Great healing awaits in these fertile, fecund soils.

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ROWEN M WHITE on Seed Rematriation and Fertile Resistance - FOR THE WILD

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Through eras of colonization and acculturation, we've seen the consolidation of seeds into a handful of corporations and the production of a soulless industrial food landscape. Rowen White shares her thoughts on Indigenous food sovereignty, seed restoration as rematriation, and what it means to brin

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Land-Based Ethics and Settler Solidarity

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Land-Based Ethics and Settler Solidarity

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Settler colonialism has been defined as a structure, not an event, meaning that settler societies like the U.S., Canada, and Australia endure over time through racist laws and ideologies that naturalize the dispossession of Indigenous populations. One of the most effective strategies that settler states rely on to eliminate Indigenous peoples and their power is the idea that their knowledges are primitive and superstitious, examples of failed epistemology. This view is rooted in an Enlightenment-born materialism that asserts that legitimate knowledge can only be produced through narrow empirical methods, relegating the negotiations of immaterial life to the social margins. As the colonial project progresses, legitimate knowledge production is simultaneously tethered to race and power (reserved to the white and landed), resulting in what we have come to know as modernity.

Settler colonialism seeks to eliminate Indigenous populations in order to monopolize resources for the sake of capital. It operates through laws and racist ideologies, but also through conceptualizations of the natural world as white men's for the human taking. Settler colonialism operates from its own metaphysic, producing what I call a settler ecology, which dispossesses peoples but also lands. If settlers want to understand how to effectively address environmental crises, then they have to interrogate the logics of settler colonialism-racialization, white supremacy, and myths of development-as structural dimensions of modern life. Our collective quarantine has dovetailed into an all-out revolution; one that is an all-out indictment of colonialism itself. This time is ripe for this very conversation.

As a scholar of Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism who is also a Chicana of Apache descent, I am personally interested in how Indigenous peoples operationalize religious action as an expression of refusal-a refusal to give up their lifeways and claims to their lands in the face of ongoing settler colonialism. This refusal is most powerfully expressed when Indigenous populations defy racialized characterizations of their lifeways and continue to live and act in ways that accord with the ethics and realities embedded in their respective metaphysical worlds. I choose to amplify both Native and Tibetan voices in my research because they challenge these ideological assumptions by continuing to invoke and honor the unseen world and its role in human wellness. In doing so, they help make the deeply racist hierarchies around knowledge, power, and peoples that drive existing settler colonial projects around the world more visible.

Personally, I have grown weary of the liberal left handwringing that expresses horror and concern for dispossessed peoples yet makes little to no effort to challenge or transform these structures of oppression. These laments have grown in the time of Covid-19, and have led to mass protests after the murder of George Floyd, but now it is settlers and not just Indigenous peoples who are made vulnerable to the violence and neglect of the state. In this essay, I call on all settler allies, Buddhist and otherwise, to refuse the structures that uphold settler colonialism in solidarity with Indigenous peoples by building on the ideological and ethical connections forged since Standing Rock, such as land-based ethics and ecological wellness. My intention is to help connect the dots between settler ideologies/praxis and the material dispossession of peoples/lands for settler allies, so that they may use this period of quarantine and crises to recognize their power and mobilize to these ends.

The #NoDAPL movement at the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas in 2016-2017 brought Native sovereignty efforts back into the national, even global, consciousness. One of the major impacts of that movement was the visual narrative it provided: Native Americans on horseback or lined in up prayer, facing off against hyper-militarized police forces. The coordinated efforts by federal, state, and local police with private security forces to protect Energy Transfer Partners' aims of building the pipeline at all costs communicated to the public that once again Indigenous lives and lands would be sacrificed for the sake of capital. While these acts of violence were generally ignored by mainstream news, they went viral on social media, stoking waves of solidarity from Native and non-Native supporters around the world. Many U.S. citizens were shocked to learn that Native peoples still battled with the state over land rights due to broken treaties, and were forced to grapple with the banal reality of settler colonial aggression that claims lands for settlers at the expense of Indigenous lives.

A critical discourse that emerged from this struggle was the assertion by Native peoples that they are "protectors," not protesters; they are stewards of the land, responsible for protecting and nurturing the life force within it. In the few years since Standing Rock, Indigenous peoples around the world have strengthened their networks to support land-based stewardship efforts along with environmental wellness more generally, helping all of us to reconceptualize our ways of living and being in relation to the land.

. . .

If we, collectively, want to fight climate crises, then we need to reclaim land-based ethics-ethical relationships to the land and the other-than-human. These ethics are earth-centered, meaning they are driven by the immediate needs of the land, not peoples. Land-based ethics in an Indigenous context can be understood through the stand-off at Standing Rock itself, particularly through the discourse of "protector, not protester." Here, Native peoples are citing a sacred responsibility to care for the land-to act as its stewards, responsible for protecting and nurturing the life force within it. In short, the needs of the people are met through the land, so the needs of the land must be met by the people.

This ethic was most clearly articulated through the daily activities of the Sacred Stone Camp, the central hub of the #NoDAPL movement. Sacred Stone Camp was named for the sacred place where the pipeline would pass near what Lakota and Dakota or Oceti Sakowin peoples call "the river Inyan Wakan Kagapi Wakpa, or River Where the Sacred Stones Are Made- wakan translating as sacred or holy." Historically, this had been a place of ceremony, so naturally the camp itself held ceremony around the clock, whether in the form of sweat lodges, all-night singing and prayer, or tribally specific dances; all actions, great and small, were directed at protecting the lands in their entirety were an expression of this larger ceremony. Here, Oceti Sakowin's land-based ethics are communicated through praxis: Protecting the water is about ensuring the future life and wellbeing of the people and the land. The two are co-extensive, in the same way that affirming their sacred relationships to the lands and the spiritual power within them affirms Oceti Sakowin sovereignty, since it is this mutuality with the land that evinces Indigenous expressions of sovereignty.

Inspired by these acts of refusal, Indigenous peoples from all over the Americas (and beyond) gathered at the camp to collectively honor these sacred lifeways as the source of all authority. Together, they supplicated the spirit world and coalesced their spiritual power, singing, dancing, and praying this protection into being. These expressions of ceremony were celebratory and community building, but also pedagogical: They were teaching non-Native people about Indigenous land-based ethics and protocols.

In addition to the diverse Indigenous peoples who joined the camp, there were many settler allies, some of them Buddhist. A number of Buddhist clergy and practitioners joined with other religious leaders in prayerful solidarity, several even putting their bodies on the line through nonviolent forms of protest. A first-hand account by one Buddhist ally, Wendy Egyoku Nakao of the Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA), asserts both the intention to bear witness to Native suffering, given the ongoing effects of genocide, as well as an embodied realization that settlers in the U.S., collectively, reside on Native lands. She intimates that the Native land-based ethics articulated at Standing Rock resonate as a result of a deep somatic awareness developed in meditation practice, describing how she has experientially come to know the land as it speaks to practitioners of its storied history:

"The little Zen mountain of ZCLA is a power spot; one can certainly feel the energy of the place just walking in. The roots of spiritual energy go deep. We are on sacred land of people going back thousands of years. I feel that the energy and voices of the Native Americans from all those generations past are continually speaking to us when we listen to the sense of this place."

Its power motivates her and others to act: "Indigenous peoples throughout the world, and non-native allies, are being drawn to the energetic vortex of these encampments to offer support," demonstrating that this realization is worthy of some sort of action of support on her part.

Similarly, a statement of solidarity with Indigenous land protectors from One Earth Sangha referred to Buddhist tenets on the preservation of life and earth-oriented directives from Buddhist leaders, such as Thich Nhat Hahn: "We have to start learning how to live in a way so that a future will be possible for our children and our grandchildren. We need a kind of collective awakening. We have the dharma; we have the means; we have enough wisdom. We do not have to sink into despair... we can act." In essence, this support is Buddhism in action. It is living the dharma to its fullest integrity.

Importantly, this statement of solidarity links ecological atrocities to colonial domination and even legal discourses, such as the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal bulls that declared lands not inhabited by Christians open to seizure by right of "discovery" (theft). Shawnee/Lenape legal scholar Steve Newcomb argues that the Doctrine of Discovery is rooted in Christian conceptions of a "natural order"-in essence, a Christian metaphysic that justifies human (specifically Christian) dominion over the earth. Settler colonial projects relied on such ideologies to justify Indigenous enslavement, genocide, and dispossession. The use of the Doctrine of Discovery in the U.S. legal system redefined Native title, opening the doors for Indian removal but also for Native nations to be redefined as domestic dependent nations under the purview of the state.

Like these Buddhist allies, Ven. Bhikku Bodhi argues that climate crises will not be solved by technology; it necessitates a paradigm shift-another way of viewing the world entirely. He refers to settler colonial logic as the corporate paradigm, one that operates through objectification: "It treats everything-people, animals, and trees, rivers, land, and mountains-as objects to be utilized to generate financial gain for corporations, their executives, and their shareholders." Buddhist teachings brought to the West have been so impactful partly because of their ability to offer a new paradigm-an alternative to the Christian metaphysic that drove manifest destiny as well as its secular, materialist cousin that drives development. Buddhist views often center land-based logics as not just fundamental to practice but also fundamental to understanding what it means to be human. In Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa emphasized the earth's role in the process of knowing our true nature but also the nature of reality, in its rawness, in its " nowness." As we behold each element and its natural expression, such as raindrops and flowers, we are confronted with a neutral and apparent world, with an opportunity to be radically present to who and what we are.

Beyond the earth's role in our own awakening, Trungpa offers up a Tibetan metaphysic that distinguishes the greater world into three sections ( lha, nyen, and lu), each with their own characteristics. He calls these an "order of the cosmic world" that provides a protocol for living "rooted in the laws of the earth." In this context, lha refers to "the highest points on earth" (e.g., snow-capped mountain peaks); nyen to "the great shoulders of the mountains... forests, jungles and plains; and lu to water, "the realm of oceans and rivers and great lakes." Here, "human beings can weave themselves into that texture of basic reality" by understanding themselves as a microcosm of the natural world, from its snowy heights, such as mountaintops ( lha) to its watery depths ( lu), that must accord to its cycles, cultivating the land and nurturing it through its seasons. In doing so, we can wake up to what Trungpa refers to as basic goodness and with it our responsibility to care for others. As we develop a sense of intimacy with the earth through understanding ourselves as co-extensive with this dynamic order, we can better realize the mutuality at work-it provides for our needs, and in turn, has needs we must tend.

One can't help but hear the earth's agency intimated in Trungpa's words; the earth has its rhythms that humans must learn to accord with them. I hear a land-based ethic here-one that centers land, but provides a clear goal for human life: to steward land. This goal serves both the land, but also the ultimate purpose of human insight. In essence, as one learns to be responsible to oneself and others, one is awakened to what it means to live in the world. These existential goals are resonant with Native American worlds. Native peoples in the Americas understand the universe as alive and sentient. Since all persons-human and other-than-human-such as plants, animals, rivers, winds and mountains are expressions of life-force or spirit, they are understood to be interconnected and contingent. Relatives. Native peoples seek to honor this life force through prayer and ceremony because it has given them life and continues to secure their survival. The spirit world responds dialectically to minute (and concentrated) propitiations by the people in order to effect change on their behalf. As a result, the people act as stewards of the land, protecting and nurturing the life within it.

This reciprocal relationship is mutually self-sustaining. While spirit is understood to be everywhere, some spiritual forces are place-specific. Native peoples have built relationships with the spiritual power of those places over time. The spirit world communicates to the people through the land and greater cosmos, instructing the people on the protocols for living in this place. The foundation of Indigenous religious life is maintaining an individual and collective relationship to local bioregions and the spirit world. Protecting sacred places is important because it ensures the future life and wellbeing of the people as well as the lands.

Land-based struggles have only escalated since Standing Rock. Indigenous land defenders in the U.S., Canada, and around the world are criminalized and often targets of violence. The murder and extrajudicial killing of Indigenous leaders has become commonplace in Central and South America, but also in places like Nigeria, Congo, Gabon, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Environmental devastation is no accident. The environmental dispossession of Indigenous peoples is directly produced by specific but overlapping histories of colonialism. The dispossession that founded the Americas is born out of the same set of ethics that bore unmanaged resource extraction. Climate scientists now date the start of the Anthropocene-the geological period where human activity has made the most impact on climate and the environment-to the 16th century, the start of the colonial period, which initiated a singular global economic system that increasingly relied on the exploitation of lands and peoples. The large-scale annexation of lands by European powers catalyzed the death of millions of Indigenous people through the introduction of new pathogens, resulting in massive reforestation that literally cooled the planet enough to disrupt agriculture cycles and cause famines across Europe. Since that time, this new global economy has had the opposite effect. Deforestation for agriculture and urban development has accelerated the release of greenhouse gases, warming the planet by around 1°C over the past century. Environmental crises have been unintentionally cultivated for centuries by settler ecologies that singularly focus on the production of capital and retention of power for wealthy elites and first-world nation-states.

Indigenous movements of stewardship have already shifted our national consciousness. Settlers can no longer ignore the damaging effects of white supremacy and settler colonialism, mostly because it is directly impacting the health and wellbeing of the land, as well as their own health. Environmental crises are not just about climate change or ecological collapse, but also lethal pandemics such as the one we are current experiencing, Covid-19. These kinds of lethal diseases are introduced to human communities as we increasingly over-develop lands: "Emerging diseases have quadrupled in the last half-century, experts say, largely because of increasing human encroachment into habitat, especially in disease 'hot spots' around the globe, mostly in tropical regions." Settler ecologies have failed to acknowledge or understand that lands are delicate ecosystems. Their attendant global economy is decidedly asymmetrical: "Demand for wood, minerals, and resources from the Global North leads to the degraded landscapes and ecological disruption that drives disease." Settlers must understand that Indigenous dispossession was never about a people's inferiority or need for "civilization"; it was about greed and the hoarding of land/resources by a class of elites-elites that coordinate the operation of nation-states and industries. In a time when intersectional forms of analysis have become critical to understand the connections between race, class, gender, and sex disparities, we, collectively, must understand the link between the horrors of racist land dispossession to the very methods of development that drive our modern world, and to the additional horrors of Indigenous death, disease, and environmental devastation they bring.

While many have become acquainted with the Gaia hypotheses, or the idea that the earth is a living, self-regulating system, they assume that the land is totally autonomous. Not quite. In a Native context, the land relies on its human relatives to care for it because they are uniquely equipped to do so. However, the people are not set apart from the land; they are understood to be an extension of all life, which includes the land. As the human expression of the larger cosmic order, stewardship provides the space for humans to demonstrate their responsibility to the land and one another and with it the possibility of maturity, maybe even the wisdom that comes from ecological intimacy. As noted above, Native ceremonies produce power that contribute to the wellbeing of the peoples, human and other-than-human, but also the land. Again, all these players are understood to be interdependent. The Buddhist expressions of allyship outlined above are also rooted in this non-dual understanding of human life as interdependent with the greater world, and thus beholden to care for all beings with compassion. Buddhist resonance with Indigenous stewardship helps us understand how earth-centered ethics as an existential goal tethered to human/land survival are viable to many. Both lifeways challenge materialist assumptions of the natural world and re-evaluate its role in relation to human life.

Deeper engagement with these views helps us collectively reconsider the nature of reality and think about the world in a new way-as a place that is sentient and alive, even invested in our collective wellbeing. As a place that is in conversation with us, not just a passive object for us to do with as we will. Settlers in particular are better enabled to recognize that they can no longer leave the burden of environmental wellness to Indigenous peoples. The power to dismantle settler ecologies lies in the collectivization of our skills and resources, much like the mutual aid that has sprung up in response to Covid-19. But it also necessitates learning what it means to be an ally to Indigenous peoples and the land, and to act in solidarity with both. When we, collectively, consider the ethical stakes of Indigenous stewardship, we are forced to grapple with what it means when Indigenous peoples assert that the land-and its inhabitants-are sovereign. We are forced to rethink the hierarchical nature of power that produces racialization, colonialism/imperialism, and Indigenous dispossession. We are forced to reevaluate the stigmatized assumptions of Indigenous knowledge, specifically Indigenous ecology and science, which are rooted in religious worldviews. In the process, Indigenous stewardship as a political project that refuses continued settler colonial violence is made legible, even tenable.

The land-based ethics that drive Indigenous stewardship movements and expressions of Buddhist solidarity remind us that Indigenous peoples are not only still fighting for their land, they're fighting for the protection of all lands. These land-based movements are waging a response to the total war that has been directed at Indigenous peoples for centuries, waging refusal against settler ecologies and the multiple logics of colonialism that maintain them. This is a struggle for power that we are all entrenched in, depending on our positionality and access to power and privilege. Indigenous peoples are cueing others to recognize an earth-centered metaphysic, an interconnected and sentient reality that is already recognized by many Buddhists and is emerging among other like-minded allies. Settler allies have the power and means to boost Indigenous voices and views. The forced stillness that Covid-19 has brought to the most privileged among us can and should be used to strategize. To re-assess how to move forward equitably with more coherent ethics. How might we, collectively, use this time of reflection but mass protest against racist extrajudicial killings to better ground into our sense of reciprocity and find ways to support the most vulnerable among us? How might we interrogate and challenge all forms of bias and corrupt power? How might we deepen our awareness that we are the ecological world? These ideological shifts are our future; may their recognition help us dismantle settler structures of dispossession as if our lives are at stake. Because they are.

Natalie Avalos is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder and will be joining the department as an Assistant Professor in the 2020-21 academic year. Her work in comparative Indigeneities explores urban Indian and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara and is currently working on her manuscript titled The Metaphysics of Decoloniality: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.

Artwork by Rae Minji Lee

Portions of this essay draw on a previously published work: Natalie Avalos, Sandy Grande, and Jason Mancini, "Red Praxis: Lessons from Mashantucket to Standing Rock," in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices From the #NoDAPL Movement, ed. Jaskiran Dhillon and Nick Estes (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

Before you go...

Notes

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Land-Based Ethics and Settler Solidarity in a Time of Corona and Revolution

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Settler colonialism has been defined as a structure, not an event, meaning that settler societies like the U.S., Canada, and Australia endure over time through racist laws and ideologies that natur...

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Robin Wall Kimmerer, “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place,” from Braiding Sweetgrass

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Robin Wall Kimmerer, “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place,” from Braiding Sweetgrass

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Food Justice as Racial Justice: Urban Farmers, Community Organizations and the Role of Government in Oakland, California

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Food Justice as Racial Justice: Urban Farmers, Community Organizations and the Role of Government in Oakland, California

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Curran and González - Food Justice as Interracial Justice Urban Farmers

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Sustainable Agriculture at the University of California: Knowledge, Technology, and Development for the Benefit of Whom?

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Sustainable Agriculture at the University of California: Knowledge, Technology, and Development for the Benefit of Whom?

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Agroecology: the science of natural resource management for poor farmers in marginal environments. 

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Agroecology: the science of natural resource management for poor farmers in marginal environments. 

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Perceptions of and Solutions to Inclusivity, Privilege, Wealth, and Whiteness in University Campus Gardens: Case Study of the UC Berkeley Student Organic Garden (SOGA)

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Perceptions of and Solutions to Inclusivity, Privilege, Wealth, and Whiteness in University Campus Gardens: Case Study of the UC Berkeley Student Organic Garden (SOGA)

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Photo: Kalen Goodluck/High Country News

Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone
Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system.

High Country News, April 2020 issue

Kalen Goodluck, Tristan Ahtone and Robert Lee
There are at least 16 land-grant universities making money from the expropriated Indigenous lands they retained from the Morrill Act.

High Country News, August 2020

This unique database was created through extensive reporting and research into primary source materials, including land patent records, congressional documents, historical bulletins, historical maps, archival and print resources at the National Archives, state repositories and special collections at universities and more. Information for the database was extracted programmatically where possible, primarily from the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office database, but in some cases it was transcribed manually from print records, microfilm and microfiche reproductions, or poor-quality digital images.

Methodology and Bibliography

Robert Lee, High Country News, March 30, 2020

Robert Lee, High Country News, March 30, 2020

Credits and Acknowledgements

The Land-Grab Universities team gratefully acknowledges the Wabanaki, Massachusett, Lenape, Piscataway, Nanticoke, Powhatan, Kickapoo, Wichita, Nʉmʉnʉʉ, Cáuigú, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱, Niimiipuu, Palus, Ktunaxa, Schitsu'umsh, and dxʷdəwʔabš peoples, on whose traditional territories this story was created.

Reporting, Research and Graphics

Photography

Web App Design and Editorial Direction

Web App Development

Logo Design

Help us further our reporting on land grant universities by filling out this secure form.

We invite feedback if you see omissions, errors or miscalculations. Since no other database of its kind exists-location and financial analysis linked to approximately 80,000 individual land parcels distributed through a Civil War-era law-we are committed to making it publicly available and as robust as possible.

The database administrator can be contacted at: landgrabu@hcn.org

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Photo: Kalen Goodluck/High Country News Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system. High Country News, April 2020 issue Kalen Goodluck, Tristan Ahtone and Robert Lee There are at least 16 land-grant universities making money from the expropriated Indigenous lands they retained from the Morrill Act.

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People's Park as Radical Land-Based Activism: A Primer

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People's Park as Radical Land-Based Activism: A Primer

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Corinna Gould on Settler Responsibility and Reciprocity, ForTheWild Podcast, 2020

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Corinna Gould on Settler Responsibility and Reciprocity, ForTheWild Podcast, 2020

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https://forthewild.world/listen/corrina-gould-on-settler-responsibility-and-reciprocity-208

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"Corrina Gould is the spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone. She was born and raised in Oakland, CA, the territory of Huichin. She is an activist that has worked on preserving and protecting the ancient burial sites of her ancestors in the Bay Area for decades. She is the Co-founder and a Lead Organizer for Indian People Organizing for Change, a small Native run grassroots organization and co-founder of the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women's community organization working to return land to Indigenous stewardship in San Francisco's East Bay."

This enriching conversation also explores Sogorea Te' Land Trust as the first urban Indigenous women-led land trust in the country, what land reclamation looks like in urbanized areas, and how land taxes can both begin to foster relationships on stolen lands, while also meaningfully supporting tribes in places like California that remain unrecognized by the federal government. Our conversation closes with a vision for land restoration and reclamation that does not disrupt the healing, sanctity, and rhythm of life after so many years of colonial violence.

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CORRINA GOULD on Settler Responsibility and Reciprocity - FOR THE WILD

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Corrina Gould reminds us that Ohlone territory still holds tremendous abundance and that the land can sustain us in a way that would provide for our wellbeing should we choose to really re-examine what it is we need to survive.

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Agroecology: Voices from Social Movements, 2015

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Agroecology: Voices from Social Movements, 2015

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Agroecology: Voices From Social Movements (Long Version)

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SYLLABUS Agroecology in Action: food sovereignty and land liberation, Decal Spring 2022 - Google Docs

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SYLLABUS Agroecology in Action: food sovereignty and land liberation, Decal Spring 2022