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10 - Land in Our Names: Building an Anti-Racist Food Movement
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- By Sam Siva
- Edited by Dimitris Papadopoulos, University of Nottingham, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, University of Warwick, Maddalena Tacchetti, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- Ecological Reparation
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 28 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2023, pp 161-163
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970sLand in Our Names (LION) began in 2020 as a young collective with big plans for the year. At the Oxford Real Farming Conference in the UK, in January 2020, we facilitated a workshop with Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm on the topic ‘Farming So White: Land, Ownership, Race and Racism in Britain’ and held the first ever Caucus for Black and People of Colour (BPOC) growers, land workers, environmentalists and food justice organizers at Willowbrook Farm. It was an emotional experience for everyone who attended. We all remarked that we had never been in the countryside in Britain surrounded by People of Colour before. The care, excitement, community and safety that we shared with each other was energizing and made us even more dedicated. We want to speak to BPOC growers, land workers, land and food justice organizers.
Then our plans for the year took a dramatic turn with the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the US, Britain and elsewhere. We have been humbled by the amount of people who have reached out to us asking for our thoughts and feelings. The truth is that we carry each life lost to racism with us always. It is a grief that we must manage every day. This is one of the reasons why we founded Land in Our Names – we want to create an anti-racist and inclusive land and food justice movement that speaks to Black and People of Colour. Racism is a structural and systemic problem that needs reparative justice in order to stop the unnecessary violence that People of Colour experience. That is why we see land reparations as crucial towards building resilient and sustainable anti-racist communities. We want to continue nurturing our fledgling network of BPOC growers, land workers, organizers, educators and enthusiasts with empowering and inspiring events. We want to create resources that look at food and land justice through an intersectional lens. We want to support BPOC growers’ access to land and work.
11 - Land Reparations and Ecological Justice: An Interview with Sam Siva
- Edited by Dimitris Papadopoulos, University of Nottingham, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, University of Warwick, Maddalena Tacchetti, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- Ecological Reparation
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 28 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2023, pp 164-174
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Dimitris and Maria: We would like to thank you again, Sam, for contributing your text ‘Land in Our Names: Building an Anti-racist Food Movement’ to this book and accepting to follow up with an interview. We reached out to you for an intervention because we felt your voice and the work of LION are absolutely necessary for this book. We are immensely grateful for your time as we know how precious and precarious activist time is. To start maybe we would like to ask a bit more about LION about the organization, how you work, and about your plans.
Sam: So Land in Our Names is a collective of BPOC. We are an antiracist, land justice collective using a reparative justice framework to achieve land reparations, and increased access and support for BPOC to land and farming and nature more generally. An example of what we have been doing recently is a micro-grant programme (up to £1000) providing support to BPOC who want to get into growing or already do it as a hobby, or who want to follow related courses or have projects, who want to set up projects and so on. We also organize events about gardening or growing, skill sharing or just healing spaces where BPOC come together, connect with each other to learn in London, the city where most of us are based. We have also done a lot of research around access to food growing as a livelihood. Our eventual goal is to get some land to set up a BPOC land cooperative, a land cooperative, where we’re growing food, creating a space for people to rest and heal, that’s in the works. We’re quite young, we’ve only been around for two years and we’re doing quite a lot of stuff all the time, and have changed formations a lot, but, yeah, it’s great.
Dimitris and Maria: We have been following LION’s work and different interventions about your vision and have felt inspired and challenged to think and act. We strongly felt we couldn’t speak about ecological reparation in Britain today without including the voices, ideas and struggles you stand for. So maybe right away we’d like to ask if, and how, the notion of “ecological reparation” that we are trying to explore in this project resonates with you and your work.