I am here in Missouri. A few days ago, I tried to talk with folks about Marcellus Williams, about what it means that there are large holes in his case and that the family of the deceased, the prosecutor’s office and thousands of others don’t and didn’t want this execution to go forward. People largely didn’t know this was happening and weren’t interested in talking with me. I was here in Missouri and yet everything about the truth of this moment felt far away, farther than it would have felt at home.

I remember that geographic and psychological distance are not the same thing. 

As I have been walking, I have been focusing hard on the land and on some of the stories that have been intentionally disappeared from these lands, particularly those of the original people. I have written about and thought about the shape of colonization and settlement and how it layered up to be these spaces I am passing through. What I haven’t written as much about is the second great wound forced on these lands: the histories of African enslavement, abolition and what is still unfinished. 

For most of this walk, I have been passing through towns that will somewhere in their histories proclaim their role in the Underground Railroad. This was especially true as I got into the lands of the Western Reserve - Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and on to Iowa and now Missouri. Doing local research and learning about these histories, the stories felt so disembodied: something disconnected from the lives of Black communities today. Depending on where I am, the only people I see are white folks and then sometimes people who are speaking Spanish as they work on house projects and street crews.

I am in Kirksville, MO. I came through here because someone who reads my work kindly reached out to offer me a place to stay. It was after that offer that I realized she lived in the same town as the Museum of Osteopathy and AT Still University. These are sites that I write about in two blog posts - Aligning the Relational Field and Giving the Bones Back. I had some good conversations with folks at the Museum but am not going to go too deeply into that now other than to say, all rematriation and repatriation work has to be done in relationship with and led by Native people. 

Sometime in 2011, a friend and I pulled together a group of white folks to weave together somatic practices with political education. Our question was how to support white folks to become other kinds of people. Nothing new about that now but in 2010, it was unusual. This was a period when naming “white supremacy” as opposed to “white privilege” was embattled. At that time, a newspaper now website called Vanguard News Network posted our names and photos as race traitors - not unusual - and for a bit of time, we got a bunch of hate mail and a few calls. Vanguard News Network is - or was - based here in Kirksville, MO. Started by Alex Linder, the website was taken down after the violence in Charlottesville, but Linder is consistent and focused. His new site, called Kirksville Today, continues to push forward a fascist-pagan agenda that shares heavily researched material. It hates Christianity, loves Hitler and asserts a wide range of theories that I have never previously encountered. 

Four days ago or so, I was in Keosauqua, Iowa. Keosauqua, a word in Sauk and Meskwaki which means “bend in the river,” was one of the primary points in Iowa for the Underground Railroad. Iowa - both when it was a territory and when it was a state - was “free”, but there were a lot of enslaved Black people in Iowa because there were rich white slaveholders who traveled and/or moved here. There were also a number of Black folks and families who moved to Iowa because it was a free territory and was a stop on the Underground Railroad. I am thinking of people I know who are the children of these family lines, their grandparents have started the NAACP and other Black organizations in the state. Keosauqua became a town that had the largest Black population of any town in Iowa. During the late 1800s, between 17 and 20% of the population of this small town was Black. In 2010, the population was .04%.

A beloved friend of mine, Jason Sole, is part of a crew called the Institute for Aspiring Abolitionists. Their work includes a lot of projects but one is to visit sites like the ones in Keosauqua and to do education and organizing around the gap between these historical stories and the truth of the present moment. Meaning, showing how abolition is NOT finished and that often - always - there is a profound contradiction between how a town holds this story of its 19th century past with the racism in the present moment. The Institute is currently raising cash for their next wave of work so if you are moved, go to the link and send them some cash. Jason has shared stories with me that are not mine to pass along but they are giving even more context to what I am passing through.

What does it mean to live on this land in a good way together? I have been writing stories of corn and farms and colonial settlement. I have talked a little bit about migrant farmworkers and a lot about how the layers of farming and rural communities have shifted. Also a lot about colonization and settlement. What I haven’t written about yet is Black farming. Hello beloveds. I have many friends who are part of the resurgence of Black farming taking place right now. As is always the case as I share stories that are outside of my experience and people, I claim responsibility for anything I write that is incorrect or not honoring complexity and care enough.

I am in Missouri. In the 1920s, there were close to 3,000 Black farmers registered in this state. In 2017, there were 207. In 1900 in Iowa there were 325 and in 2017 there were 72. 

It is not possible to talk about “rural” without remembering that the reason for the violence of the institution of slavery was to increase labor capacity in order to “capture” more land for agricultural profit. When poor English farmers, free Black people and enslaved Africans began to build solidarity with each other, the racial category of Christian land ownership moved to the legalized racial category of white land ownership to cut a hard line between poor white - who might eventually own land - and free Blacks, even if they were Christian, who never could. 

I was on the phone a few minutes ago with a beloved through REP. While we were talking, a huge - as in HUGE - eagle flew by overhead. And as we were talking about movement and belonging and fear and attachment, I felt enraged - like heart beating faster and fists clenched - at the dangerous brilliance of the Virginia Slave Codes, this moment when economic and cultural solidarity was destroyed and the concept of “race” moved to become the organizing element for injustice in the United States. I thought about this as I was glancing through the Vanguard News Network where class and cultural awareness was rooted in to white supremacy and fascism rather than a potential for solidarity and community.  

When the United States government passed the Homestead Act in 1862, “opening” land in the west for settlement, land that had just been stolen from multiple tribes, of the 160 million acres given away through the Homestead Act, only 960,000 was given to Black farmers, even as the majority of farming east of the Mississippi River used Black labor. 

On the other side of the 14th Amendment, even as tribal rights to their own land continued to be attacked and destroyed, there were some specific moments focused on increasing Black access to farming. In 1864, after meeting with freed Black farmers and after slavery was abolished, approximately 400,000 acres of land were “set aside” by General Sherman along the Georgia and South Carolina coasts to be given to Black families in 40 acre parcels. Later, a mule was included with each parcel. This is where the 40 acres and a mule promise of Emancipation was first named. 40 acres was the amount of land that white farmers were given through the Homestead Act. It was believed to be the right amount of land for someone to start a viable farm. Called Special Field Order No. 15, the promise for this land is worded like this: “The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.” Also, these new communities were to be governed by Black people alone ” … on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves … By the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro [sic] is free and must be dealt with as such.” And finally ” … each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel, with not more than 800 feet waterfront, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title.” President Lincoln also established the Freedmen's Bureau, designed to give “unoccupied” land to free Black people at 5 to 10 acres per family. After Lincoln was assassinated, President Johnson overturned Special Field Order No. 15.

In 1866, the Southern Homestead Act “opened” 46 million acres of public domain land, or land owned by the federal government, in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Organized in the same way as the Homestead Act of 1862, the intent was to make land available for purchase to freed Black farmers. Within ten years, as part of the rise towards Jim Crow and the white Southern push against Black land ownership, the Act was repealed. Nonetheless, Black land ownership in the South continued to rise until 1919, the peak period when Black families owned 16-19 million acres of land, or 14% of all agricultural land, with 218,000 Black people as farmer-owners or partial-owners of that land, most of it in the South. Missouri is considered a border state and so some of this included parts of Missouri in ways that it didn’t include other states I have walked through. Both direct force through local laws and white violence meant that after 1910, Black land ownership declined.

A small aside. I just learned that after the farm crisis of the 1980s, a number of the farms that were mortgaged and lost reverted into public lands. Some of the farms were bought by large scale companies, but some of them became the property of the state.

In 1972, the Emergency Land Fund was created by multiple Black organizations to focus on Black land ownership, paying particular attention to the concept of heir’s property. “Heir’s property” is the legal right for a landowner to name an heir and then pass their land on to that heir. Many Black farmers who received or bought land right after Emancipation did not have access to the legal structures needed to name heirs and legally pass on their land. For this reason, thousands of Black families lost access to land upon the death of those who first claimed ownership. It is estimated that 90% of Black land loss is the result of the lack of legal protection and scams.

It was as recently as 1990 that the first lawsuit was filed against the United States government by a coalition of Black farmers in an attempt to gain redress for these years of manipulation and land loss. In 1990, I was 27 years old. This was just yesterday. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Black farmers by the Farmers Legal Action Group with the assistance of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/ Land Access Fund. Close to ten years later, in 1999, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Access Fund won on the Pigford Class Action Lawsuit, filed against the United States Department of Agriculture on charges of bias and discrimination against Black farmers seeking to access USDA loans and assistance. The terms of the lawsuit’s settlement allowed those who experienced racism to file claims of up to $62,500 ($50,000 and $12,500 to pay federal taxes). Nearly $1 billion dollars has been paid to more than 13,000 farmers, making this suit the largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history.

Multiple legal cases since then have attempted to redress this form of land stealing and land loss. Some of the most recent include the 2018 Farm Bill, the Heir’s Property Relending Program, and the American Rescue Plan Act. Each of these reparations or accountability programs have met significant legal pressure from various farm lobbies.

And still, the level of discrimination against Black farmers found in the United States Department of Agriculture has not ended. In 2019, an investigative report found that the United States Department of Agriculture had been falsifying data in an attempt to hide its poor civil rights record and its years of mistreatment of Black farmers, resulting in a loss of land and wealth.

Every four years, the USDA releases a Census of Agriculture and many of the reports outlined an increase in Black farmers and Black land ownership. These reports resulted in numerous headlines and generated excitement that some kind of repair was taking place, guided by the USDA. Instead what was happening was the opposite. USDA employees foreclosed on Black farmers who had made discrimination complaints, threw out many of those complaints, minimized their number and continued the discrimination.

At the time of this writing, the Justice For Black Farmers Act is in front of Congress. This is the most multi-tiered response to the generations of discrimination against and attempted destruction of Black farming. The bill would establish an agency within the USDA to track and respond to discrimination claims, would establish a training program for young people interested in farming and ranching, would provide funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities to establish agricultural programs, and would establish a series of legal expectations to ensure that Black farmers and ranchers are financially supported and hired within the industry.

In the last blog post I wrote, I wrote about the disappeared farming towns that were all over Iowa and Missouri. The settler towns established after the Homestead Act and other land grabs that were then razed to make way for big agriculture. Some of those towns were Black farming towns. In Kansas, I will be walking about 100 miles from Nicodemus, a Black homestead community now protected by the Park Service. While there were over 600 people who lived and farmed there in the early 1900s,there are now only 14 people. The town still exists because it is protected. Other Black homestead communities across the Midwest have long disappeared. Nicodemus is still there but that doesn’t mean that lots of Black farmers live there.

The Missouri Black Farmer’s Network. The Kansas Black Farming Association. And of course the Minnesota Black Farmers Association where I live and many others across Turtle Island. Isn’t it amazing that a land whose farming was, for hundreds of years, completely dependent on Black labor manages to lift up the idea of a wizened white man when the phrase “American farmer” is uttered? That this is part of what is referred to by the phrase: make America great again?

This is all memory work, but not memory work as a kind of stuck place but memory work as the activity of grief and action. Of celebration and commitment. 

Walking is not slow enough. There are so many stories to listen to, so many questions to ask. Right now I am in a library and there are a lot of Mennonite people here looking at books and working on the computers. There are Mennonite people all throughout the countryside I’ve walked through the last few days. People with bonnets and homespun clothing. Farmers who increasingly refuse to use pesticides and chemical fertilizers. There are headlines in some of the newspapers that cautiously name the ways that tightened immigration control is making it hard to find farmworkers. The top crops here, just like in every state I have passed through since leaving New York, are corn and soybeans. While walking along the Mississippi River, Luca and I asked some local folks about the intensely lit factories we were passing. Oh, they said, that’s for grain processing. What is being processed, we asked? Just animal feed, they said. Luca and I looked at each other, perplexed. Why would you need a factory of this size to turn corn into animal feed? When we did a bit more research, we learned that they were turning the corn into alcohol and a whole range of chemicals that are found across industries and personal care. 

I got to walk for a few days with two beloveds who are working with a group to organize white folks in the midwest. We were talking about farming. One of them comes from a multigenerational farming family. I asked the question I have been asking everyone: do you as a farmer or does your family miss when farming was about food? How does it feel to farm crops that are largely cash crops? I want to ask as many people as possible, even recognizing that my prejudices and biases are implicit in how I am asking the question. One of the friends I spoke with laughed and said, oh they love it. They get a lot of perks - trips to Cancun and elsewhere for being certain amounts of seed or fertilizer. It is very economically sustainable and once you get into the agro-industrial system, it is almost impossible to get out. Your whole farming routine and infrastructure is focused on that system and there are a lot of incentives to stay.

I thought about this as I walked past three different farms where the farmhouse was surrounded by industry: huge grain silos and massive barns and outbuildings. No trees, no kitchen gardens for food. Each had a small flower  bed in the front and a place to the side of the house for the family to sit outside but the whole thing looked more like a science fiction novel than a farm. It’s what the photo at the head of this story is sharing.

My conversation with beloved friend Yordi in the middle of writing this piece keeps staying with me. It was so helpful because as I start to turn more deeply into lands that are culturally very different from a place where I have lived, there is a voice in my head that has been asking me how I will embody this part of the walk. I am encountering far more homophobia and transphobia than before as well as more unapologetic racism and anti-immigrant mentalities. My cisgender self gets to determine when and if I come out and my light-skinnedness and gray hairedness are profound privileges at this moment. And still, I have choice. Moving through passively is not interesting to me, although moving with humility and care is important.  I am grateful for all of you who have shared resources with me about what it is like to grow up in an evangelical community, the specifics of that shape of authoritarian parenting. And as I was talking with Yordi, she reminded me through her reflections about something else, that we don’t move with a concrete set of premade strategies, but instead look to bring into our heart and experience the complexities of the people we are encountering. We are all created by the contexts we grow up within. These contexts give us understanding and stories about the world around us that we are attached to. They don’t shift easily. As John Mohawk named it, culture is a community’s collective agreement on the best way to survive. It is always a thing to encounter a people’s survival strategies that are different from your own. It is always a thing to listen for the layers of it, the motivation, and the places that are more like your own that at first glance would show.

So far nothing I am experiencing or learning shifts that base belief that our first attachment should be with the land that we are part of. As long as we protect and honor and care for the land - together - we ensure that our descendants will have a life that they too can honor and feel. I am and have been walking through the Great Plains for awhile now but I am about to move from one ecoregion of the plains to another, from one that is more defined by wetlands and proximity to forest to the next which is drier and further away from the memory of trees.

What all of this tells me is that, as I move west, I have always lived in places where there is plenty of fresh water. Even when the water was polluted to the point of catching fire, hello Cuyahoga River, the land was filled with fresh water that seeped up as springs and streams. I am now moving into land where fresh sweet water has not always been as available. A Lutheran pastor I met spent a lot of time explaining to me how to find sweet water in a cactus, telling me this is a skill I have to have. Right now I am just trying to feel deeply, as I cross what is an endless stream of corn and soy, sometimes on lands that are flat and sometimes filled with hills, that within these lands, maybe the biggest differences is how water and earth and plants and sky have lived together. The patterns of it. The survival strategies that emerged as a result. And how expansive or careful people became as a result. Both those who have lived on this land for thousands and thousands of years and those who came within the last 500, bringing agricultural strategies that emerged in places where some folks still lay garlands to the spirits of the springs.

This map shows the water bodies and channels of this land that is called the United States. How strange to see the land cut off from the rivers and streams and lakes to the north and south but here it is. We are water and in ways that I am still only just understanding, water is life.