What does it mean to farm/tend to stolen land? How do you hold that relationship?

Read this excerpt from SUSU’s collaboration with Loam Magazine.

what does it mean to farm stolen land, as the descendant of a stolen people? as the descendant of a displaced people? What does it mean to place my hands in soil that has seen the forced removal and genocide of it’s tenders and is still here today to welcome and receive us?

We aren’t here by choice, we were forced here, and many of us hold the contradictions in our bodies of displaced ancestors, of ancestors that are of this land, and of ancestors who have forced our people here. As a collective, we hold all those lineages in our bodies at once, all of their pain, trauma, resilience, and stories…and also the stories of the land. In a capitalist, racist, culture it is deeply important to name and center land and place and the people of land and place.

And it is also important to acknowledge the nuances of land and place, land belongs to no one, we all belong to land, and what does that mean? What does that look like? How do we be in relationship with land while also holding and being with the complexities and conditions that have been created by hundreds of years of genocide, murder, and torture on land. [...]

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