Black/Land New Questions NOFA-VT Feb 2012
Download as PPTX, PDF0 likes576 views
The document discusses key questions about relationships to land and issues of land loss, historical trauma, and expanding perspectives. It asks how government has defined relationships to land both positively and negatively, whether non-ownership relationships to land are valued, where new Vermonters have and have not established a sense of belonging, and how laws about land access connect to other groups besides farmers. It also asks how historical trauma related to agriculture can be discussed sensitively, how communities still feel the effects of past land grievances, and how to identify narrow frames that prevent seeing different relationships people have to land.
Black/Land New Questions NOFA-VT Feb 2012
- 1. Black/Land: New Questions From the NOFA-VT Winter Conference February 12, 2012 The Black/Land Project www.BlackLandProject.org
- 3. How would you describe your relationship to land and place? What forces shape that relationship?
- 5. Key Questions about Land Loss • How has government defined my relationship to land in positive ways? In negative ways? • Do I value relationships to land other than ownership? What are they? • Where have new Vermonters established a sense of belonging to place? Where have they not? Why? • Who, other than farmers, cares about laws governing access to land? How am I connected to these people?
- 7. Key Questions : Historical Trauma • How do we talk with people about the value of organic farming when their history in agriculture is a source of pain? • How have you transcended your peoples historical trauma related to land? What helped you to do that? • What past grievances about land and place still shape your community today? How does this grief show up?
- 8. Who developed and popularized the U-Pick and CSA models for financially sustainable small farms?
- 9. Key Questions: Expanding the Narrow Frame • Where do you have a narrow frame about relationship to land? What has it kept you from seeing? • What are all the different ways people in your community have a relationship to land? • What historically black models and sources of knowledge inform your organic farming practice ?
Editor's Notes
- #9: Organic faming has often been narrowly framed as a set of practices primarily engaged in by farmers in the northeastThis frame obscures the wealth of organic farming science that historically come from HBCU in the south, particularly the Tuskegee UniversityThis frame allow us to use black knowledge from historically black institutions, while rendering black people invisible.When I hear thelitany of heroes of organic farming, I hear the names of Rudolph Steiner and Helen and Scott Nearing, but rarely the names of George Washington Carver, or the man who refined and popularized the U-Pick and CSA models, Booker T. Whately.