A Peace of My Mind

Ebony Woodruff is an agricultural attorney in Chalmette, Louisiana.

Ebony entered law school with plans to become a corporate attorney. As the daughter of a welder-electrician and a teacher, her initial goal was upward mobility. “It was really all about the money,” she said. 

But her professors at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, themselves first-generation attorneys, encouraged students to return to their communities and make a difference. Their words stuck with her after graduation.

Ebony combined her passion for food and her concern for civil rights—and found her place fighting Black land loss. According to a study by economist Dania V. Francis, Black farmers in the United States lost 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997. The reasons are numerous: state-sanctioned violence, racial discrimination by banks, and denied access to federal farm benefits by local administrators.

Ebony focused on another reason for this loss: a legal nightmare called heirs’ property. When a landowner dies without a will in Louisiana, their property is divided among all their children, and then might ripple out to the grandchildren and beyond. As the ownership spreads thinner, it becomes easy for predatory developers to buy up shares and eventually force the land out of family hands.

Now she works with families that are trying to hold onto their land, while also raising awareness. “I’m like the little mosquito,” she says. “You hear it. It’s buzzing. It’s annoying. It’s biting you. You want to slap it, but you just can’t see it. If I’m nothing more than that, I have done my job in this struggle. Because we can’t go down silent. Someone has to tell the story.”

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Kristian Bailey is a farmer, and he also considers himself a land steward and teacher. At Orais Hand Farm, located across the road from the Mississippi River, he is trying to move away from the idea of human dominion over nature. Instead, he is working in cooperation with it.

Kristian talks about farming with “tenderness”: recognizing that Southern land carries wounds (his own farm is on a former plantation site) and that part of his job is to help heal those wounds.

Credits:

• Interview and text, Barry Yeoman
• Photos, John Noltner
• Editing and production, summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
• Audio Engineering, Razik Saifullah

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Chief Devon Parfait spent his early years in Dulac, a bayou community at the watery edge of Louisiana. He caught fish from the dock, bounced on his neighbor’s trampoline, and went out on his grandfather’s shrimp boat. But Hurricane Rita destroyed his family’s home in 2005, when he was 8, setting off years of displacement. The extended family migrated inland and eventually settled in the New Orleans suburb of Marrero. 

Trauma followed Chief Devon for much of his childhood. Yet even as he struggled in school, the adults in his life believed and invested in him. His predecessor, Elder Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar, tapped him as the tribe’s future leader when he was 12. A mentor, geologist Rónadh Cox, helped prepare him academically until he gained admission to Williams College in Massachusetts. There, studying geosciences, he mapped Louisiana’s traditional Indigenous land and discovered that it was eroding faster than the state’s coastline as a whole.

He imagined becoming chief in middle age. But before he graduated, Elder Chief Shirell called him. “I think it’s time,” he recalls her saying. “You are so well equipped to help deal with the issues that we're facing right now.” He finished his undergraduate degree and was sworn in during a small, Covid-safe ceremony in 2022 at the age of 25.

Credits:

• Interview and text, Barry Yeoman
• Photos, John Noltner
• Editing and production, summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
• Audio Engineering, Razik Saifullah

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Nate Suppon's mother died when he was an infant. He says he was born into a home filled with depression, anxiety, and turmoil. A lack of love. And he tried to fill that void with drugs and alcohol. Between the ages of 15 and 38, he was addicted and spent time in and out of prison.

It was a self-absorbed cycle. He found both faith and sobriety and now lives his life in service to others. At the time of our conversation, he had been clean for six years and three months.

Many thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the arts and cultural heritage fund for supporting this work.

John Noltner is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Dan Brandt is a father, a husband, and an entrepreneur who says he likes to think of himself as a kind, decent person who tries to do the next right thing. 

Dan stopped drinking when he was 35 years old and he is now 56. He didn't lose his job, he didn't have a string of arrests, but he had seen alcoholism around him and he knew he was on a bad path. And he knew that he needed help.

Dan joined a 12-step program and surrounded himself with others who were pursuing sobriety, too. Along the way he has had a couple detours in his recovery and those detours have always happened when he didn't have that support network around him.

He lives by the motto, "Keep your side of the street clean." Control what you can control. Don't lie to others. Don't lie to yourself.

Many thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the arts and cultural heritage fund for supporting this work.

John Noltner is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Josue Gonzalez grew up in difficult circumstances that he said left a lot of holes in his life. Holes where the sense of love and belonging, and being cared for should have been. He tried filling those holes with different things.

He remembers sneaking his first drink at an early age in a house that always had alcohol available. In his teens he experimented with other drugs and found himself in active addiction that cost him jobs, relationships and hope for his own future.

He was homeless when he decided to finally make a change and now he has been sober for more than 14 years.

Many thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the arts and cultural heritage fund for supporting this work.

John Noltner is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Vanessa Weyaus is a member of the Lynx clan of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. Her name in Ojibwe translates as The Shining Light in the Sky Woman. 

Vanessa spent years in addiction, eventually living on the streets and running from the law. When she tired of it all, she turned herself in during a routine traffic stop. She was offered treatment, but chose to serve her prison sentence instead and has now been clean and sober for more than six years. Her recovery date is January 8, 2019. She now works as a substance use disorder counselor for the tribe.

Many thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the arts and cultural heritage fund for supporting this work.

John Noltner is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

John Gerber is a graphic designer and a fine artist in Minneapolis. He describes himself as someone who thinks and feels deeply. He has had an on again / off again relationship with alcohol. He stopped drinking completely between the ages of 30 and 40, but when his 40th birthday came around, he decided to celebrate. He describes it like this: "Then between 40 and 60, I think I drank probably to make up for those 10 years."

John never hit a rock bottom but he noticed things about himself that he wanted to change. He said, "Between 40 and 60, I think some things would've been better had I not been drinking at all." He has been sober since August of 2023.

Many thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the arts and cultural heritage fund for supporting this work.

John Noltner is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Casey Pytleski is a mother, a wife, and a recovering addict. Although she had experimented with my substances as a youth, it was an unexpected introduction to meth as an adult that led to a quick addiction and unraveled the idyllic life she and her husband had created. At the time of our interview, it had been 89 days since her last use. 

Many thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the arts and cultural heritage fund for supporting this work.

John Noltner is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.

Welcome to A Peace of My Mind, a project that uses storytelling and art to rediscover what connects us. I’m John Noltner, the founder and director of A Peace of My Mind and I have the good luck to travel the country and the world interviewing people to help reveal the beauty and wisdom that is all around us….if we choose to see it.

This new season of the podcast is called Sobr. S-O-B-R and we are exploring stories of addiction and recovery. I stopped drinking on August 10, 2022. It was the day I turned  55-1/2. And now I am gathering the stories of others who have decided that sobriety…for them…is easier than moderation. Whether their addiction was alcohol or drugs…these are stories of people who found a way to make a change in their lives when their lifestyles were no longer serving them. The road is not always easy and the path to recovery is not always a straight line. But there is always hope and tomorrow is always a new day. So together, we are going to explore the struggles, celebrate the victories, and reaffirm that we all have choices to make along the way. 

Welcome to A Peace of My Mind. Welcome to SOBR. I’m glad you’re here.

Thanks for listening to A Peace of My Mind's podcast. For photos, videos, and additional content, visit our website and follow us on Instagram.