This short writing is in response to my (me being Anastasia) favorite map and honestly an excuse to share it in video above. The current view is of winds that blew during narration.

I’d like to tell you another story. It’s a story of what was but also simultaneously what is and what remains to come. There is a time when land was not owned but known. Known in the way you know the shape of a loved one’s hands, or the way the air becomes heavy before rain fall. All over the world, the law of place emerges not from texts, but from a knowing, a knowing of the water, wind, animals and ancestors. These relationships are lived with all the beauty and uncertainty that comes with life tightly bound to place. Land’s rhythms hold people accountable: its seasons, dangers, and cycles demand care, respect, and attention. Life and death as parts of the same whole. The legal systems humbly bow their heads to correspond to these landscapes and protocols are developed in response.

Then came the rupture.

It does not arrive all at once. It unfolds slowly, through trauma, enclosure, conquest, map, and measure. It comes with new words for land (survey, title, deed, estate) and a new way of seeing the world: not as an extension of ourselves, but as disembodied property. Where once place was lived with, land is now something to be owned as a unit of value, a thing to be held in fee simple and to passed on without memory. And though these new systems claim universality as a natural right, but they are neither natural nor inevitable. They are constructed, maintained by force, artificial scarcity and forgetting.

Still, all is not lost, my love.

The quiet memory of what was and is carries forward in the language itself. The word for ownership shares a root with the word for oak. In ancient Indo-European tongues, the oaks (aiks) are a sacred tree of life. They are the tree of thunder gods and holy groves, of boundaries and burial sites. Perhaps, to own something, in this old sense, does not mean to control it but to know a place and to hold that place across generations. Slowly, impossible to replace, and always more than itself. Let us sing to this meaning of ownership. In the idea that care is stronger than claim. That law is written in the land, it’s whether we choose to see it.

The rupture is so very real. But the root runs deeper and so do you.

My daughter recently made a new friend on our morning walks, a polypore mushroom. I hadn’t noticed her friend and couldn’t figure out why she was drawn to a corner of the woods off our path but she was insistent. When close enough, she sat down next to polypore and said hi then bye and we were on our way.

I know this story is banal and familiar to many caregivers of young children. The mundane magic of a developing mind; however, her recognition of sentient beings beyond human is more than poetic, it’s felt. Her worldview is animated. She constantly reminds me to feel (not think*) into all the ways I touch the sentient and the sentient touches me.

Animacy doesn’t have a single definition and is very much based on the culture composed in. In Latin, the root of the word (anima) translates to life, breath, spirit or soul. I think about animacy as the way everything expresses some form of inhalation and exhalation, how everything at all moments is living, dying or being reborn in loops. It often has found expression in earth-based traditions and folklore tied to place. It doesn’t have to be the same thing as anthropomorphizing because it recognizes and differentiates the experience of each being. In intact cultures of Original People, this is perhaps an understood lifeway; for those of us severed from our place-based traditions of origin, animacy is the universal hum we are trying to find again.

For the sake of this essay, I very much reduce the wonder-filled landscape of animacy by bringing in the legal fiction of personhood. Abridged, legal personhood essentially is a being “for the whom the law recognizes to have certain rights or duties.” It is the top-down acknowledgment that allows for active participation in society rather than the passive role of “objectified beings” like children, animals, plants, fungi, water and land.

For most of the United States’ recent history, personhood has meant the adult human (note for the greater half of that history that human is likely cis-male, property-holding and white). Throughout the decades, personhood has evolved with the most contemporary developments including more-than-human beings as persons, distilled in what is formally known as the Rights of Nature (“RoN”) movement.

I’ll be honest, rights frameworks in isolation taste hollow. I focused my legal education on international human rights and walked away feeling a little empty in the application of the various doctrines and treatises. This weariness extended to the RoN when first introduced to me a couple years ago. Since then I’ve kept a pleasant distance from it, unsure how to hold something as slippery as “moral guarantees.” To me, individuated rights (whether for forest or human being) can suck the relationality out of a situation.

“Eagles build their houses in trees; people call them eagle nests because in the eyes of human beings it is a nest. To the eagles it is a house and home.”

- John Jackson, Haa Atxaayi Haa Kusteeyix Sitee

Recent conversations have led me to investigate my hesitation to play with these legal tools. One of our current projects is with a member of Land Clinic’s advisory council, Wanda Culp. Wanda is many wonderful things. Her warmth and honesty bring me so much joy whenever we meet (just thinking about her actually makes me smile big). She is Tlingit, specifically from the Brown Bear (Chookeneidí) clan. We are working on a mapping project examining land claims in Southeast Alaska. During the process, Wanda has sent me many books and art as research guides, including a collection of oral histories. These interviews with Elders in Tlingit bring the practical aspects of what has been deemed “subsistence living” in union with the stories of the many beings that animate the landscapes of Southeast Alaska.

Wanda’s art of “Xooyenah” Hoonah waterfront clan houses before the Hoonah fire of 1944. The fire was caused by jet fuel from an overturned WWII barge.

It would feel incomplete to not include the spirit of these stories in our project, leading us down a path that feels miry and creative. We are learning the contours of what is appropriate to share (including what is appropriate to share with me) and what is absolutely necessary to share to adequately reflect the thefts and loss caused by colonization. We are incorporating Wanda’s art as foundation. We are dancing in a space that many don’t understand because we are not necessarily looking for solutions, we are recovering what the United States has invisibilized.

To aid us, my mentorship with Creature Conserve starts this month. Creature Conserve is “[a] support system for artists, writers, and scientists as they collaborate and explore the human connection to nature, creating new pathways to a healthier world for all creatures.” I’m really not sure the outcomes of any of this but I’m excited to share our process out as it develops.

In returning to my question (how do we hold a hum), the answer that seems to arrive for me is we don’t. Just as land holds us and we don’t hold the land, the hum holds us we don’t hold the hum. We just need to listen.

Parting gift: A playlist to play with animacy. May the reverb produce echoes of that universal hum.

This piece is co-authored by the founders of The Farmers Land Trust, Kristina Villa and Ian McSweeney. Kristina narrates for us.

Kristina Villa is a farmer, communicator, and community coordinator who believes that our connection to the soil is directly related to the health of our bodies, economy, and society. With over a decade of farming, communication, and fundraising experience, Kristina enjoys using her skill sets to share photos, stories, and information in engaging ways which help to inspire change in human habits and mindsets, causing the food system, climate, and overall well-being of the world to improve. Kristina has spent the last several years of her professional career saving farmland from development and securing it in nonprofit land holding structures that give farmers, stewards and ranchers long-term and affordable access and tenure to it. Most of her work in the land access space has focused on equitable land security for BIPOC growers, addressing the inequities and disparities in how land is owned and accessed in this country.

Ian McSweeney’s life’s work is centered on the human connection to land and each other, framed through the understanding that food is a universal point of connection and agriculture is one of the greatest polluters of land and water, and a primary activity that separates people from the land. Ian has been a social worker focused on developing and operationalizing outdoor experience-based education, a real estate broker and consultant focused on prioritizing conservation, agriculture, and community within land development, and a director of a private foundation focused on assisting landowners and farmers through customized approaches to farmland ownership, conservation, management, and stewardship.

Our relationship to land is based on our cultural context. Land can represent seemingly opposite concepts simultaneously: unchecked power and community justice, reparative equity and wealth hoarding to name a few. Many experience and witness our disconnection from the land and from each other through the global and local impacts of colonization and privatization. These realities are magnified by historic and present day land injustice and are even more felt by those who grow food and cultivate land through experiences of significant financial, market, climate, and stress factors. 

Our cultures and societal structures are built upon belief systems that are created by the stories we are told. Land ownership, access and tenure, equity, and connection are unjust, and the truth of this is beginning to be understood by a greater percent of the population. The narrative of pioneering homesteaders acquiring land as the fabric of our national manifest destiny necessarily crumbles as we acknowledge that many of us live on stolen land. We need stories and models that strive toward land justice and reconciling our relationship with land. 

As it relates to our farmlands, new and beginning farmers identify land access as a primary barrier to farm viability, while existing and retiring farmers must destroy what they have built over a lifetime or more by selling their farms for development and speculation, simply to afford to retire. On average, 37 mid-size farms close permanently every single day in this country given these barriers and others. The successful transition of agrarian land and businesses is what will sustain agriculture, culture, and community resilience. 

Farms are on the decline while farm sizes are on the rise. This is indicative of things like Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and large scale monocultures. The landowners see farming operations solely as a financial investment rather than community one. 

Land trust and nonprofit land ownership structures have had a profound impact on defining and structuring ownership, access and tenure, and connection; however, by and large, they have not addressed land justice and equity on the scale needed. At The Farmers Land Trust, we are taking parts of the land trust structure to build new models of land tenure alongside and within the communities and cultures farming today.  The Farmland Commons builds upon and evolves precedents set over the past 100+ years by conservation land trusts and 50+ years by community land trusts, and focuses on agriculture, food systems, and agrarian communities.

We believe land should be held in commons and that so should knowledge and resources. We believe our only hope to counter climate, food systems, and farmland soil and ecosystems collapse is to decommodify farmland and establish new and old relationships with the land. We believe that the Farmland Commons is a necessary and innovative land-ownership model that addresses and transforms the current realities of how land is owned, how tenure and equity are conveyed, and how land stewardship is carried out. This model challenges the current model of land ownership that is biased towards the wealthy and large-scale agricultural corporations, and offers a new, sustainable approach for the small, regenerative farmer.  

The Farmland Commons Model connects local, regional, and national nonprofit structures through 501(c)(2), 501(c)(25), 501(c)(3), and other aligned entities. Nesting multiple entities, partnerships, and relationships in the land-holding structure is needed to bring about a resilient and durable framework to support the individual farm, the local community, and the national network. We think that by balancing local voices and autonomy with regional and national support a collective mission grounded in aligned values, vision, and diverse perspectives is possible.

The Farmland Commons brings about farmland decommodification into community centered nonprofits for agricultural stewardship, cultural refuge, and the commonwealth by ensuring active use by farmers and stewards who hold secure, equitable tenure for regenerative, chemical-free agriculture. Commons are community centered, democratically run, limited scope non-profits that are established to hold title to lands, steward and manage those lands, and convey secure and affordable lease tenure to those practicing regenerative agriculture and ecological stewardship.  Removing barriers to farmland tenure advances economic justice by allowing farmers who would otherwise not have access to land and capital (down payments and debt financing) to get on land, and for their investments in their farm equipment and natural assets (like soil) to accrue in value. The model also enriches communities by building sustainable, local food systems managed by people who live in the community, rather than a farming ecosystem dominated by outside large-scale farms. This directly addresses the deleterious hallmarks of conventional agriculture including (1) absentee landowners, (2) production of bio-fuels, animal feeds, and a narrow range of staple crops, and (3) the precarious working conditions of the people working the farm.

The seeds of change must be viable, diverse, abundant, and adaptable.  We see the Commons as a localized and evolving seed bank that is beginning to germinate and flower across the country. Our work within the Farmland Commons is to support local communities through raising awareness and engagement, connecting stakeholders, and collaborating on fundraiser campaigns. Our hope is that more farmers and farming communities may have secured, long-term tenure to their local lands to engage in ecological stewardship and the decommodification of land as well as catalyze and feed their communities without harmful chemicals or depleting our soils. Our work is also to provide the resources and tools necessary to create Farmland Commons, making them an open-resource for other organizations and communities to use. Combined, these two complimentary efforts show the world what is possible with a third, and new type of land trust, the Commons Land Trust. We believe this is one way the land trust movement may evolve to be reflective of an ancient past, and a potential future where everyone has the ability to be in relationship with land, healing injustices and building collaborative, resilient networks for land, food, people, and planet. 

Heather Bruegl (she/her) is a public historian, activist, and decolonial education consultant who works with institutions and organizations for Indigenous sovereignty and collective liberation. She is a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and a first-line descendant Stockbridge Munsee. She is a graduate of Madonna University in Michigan and holds a Master of Arts in U.S. History. Heather is the former Director of Education at Forge Project and travels frequently to present on Native American history, including policy and activism. Heather respectfully acknowledges that she works and resides on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral lands of the Three Fires Council- the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi- along with the Peoria, Miami, and Wyandot. Through forced removal, these nations are now located throughout the United States including parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kansas, and part of Canada.

When beginning to think about how to write this essay about land surveying, one concept kept coming to my mind: boundaries.  As someone who travels a lot, primarily by car (I mean, who doesn’t love a good road trip?), you always seem to know when you enter a new state.  There is a sign that lets you know you have entered New York or Michigan, or wherever you may be traveling to, but the sign indicates that you have entered a new space.  The same is true when you are entering different countries.  Currently living in Detroit, I always see the signs for Canada.  And when I travel to a friend's home, there are usually fences or something that indicates where their property ends and the neighbor begins.

But we often don’t think about how boundaries were made to facilitate European colonization of Indigenous lands in what has become the United States. As we know them today, borders can be dated back to the first settlers arriving on the shores.  The British, French, Spanish, and Dutch had colonial settlements in the “New World” and had drawn up these boundaries to ensure each territory was separated.  What they were doing was dividing up land that had been stewarded for centuries by Indigenous peoples. Prior to the colonization, Indigenous territories were communally held by Native Nations with quite a bit of overlap between different communities.  There were and continue to be shared hunting and fishing grounds, but no defined borders or fences to keep each other out.  In contrast, colonists created boundaries that would fit the societies that they were working towards, one based on private property and individualism. These were foreign concepts to many Native Nations.  As a result, this would lead to shady land deals between federal and state governments, colonists and Native Nations; the latter signing treaties written in a language and conceptual framework they didn’t understand with the result usually being forcible removal.

On the East Coast, many modern boundaries began after the American Revolution.  After the war, the newly created United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783, establishing the new country's boundaries.  What the two countries did not adequately take into consideration was the existing Native Nations whose land they were dividing up.  The Indigenous people had no meaningful say on how this new country would take into account the people and cultures that had been living and stewarding the lands since time immemorial.  

The United States continued to grow, eventually expanding to the Pacific Ocean taking land as settlements spread.  In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was passed. This led to the forcible removal of Indigenous Peoples from the Southeast onto lands west of the Mississippi River, like in present-day Oklahoma.  At that time, these lands had not been settled by the United States but were occupied by other Native Nations. Oklahoma remained Indian territory until statehood, while settlements and homesteads continued to move westward and the reservation system was formalized by federal law. 

Reservations are legally designated pieces of land held in trust by the federal government, and Indigenous peoples live on them.  Usually, the land surveyed for reservations are plots isolated from surrounding communities and not the best pieces of land in terms of resources and cultural relevance.  The policing of Native people and culture continued with acts of congress like the General Allotment Act of 1887.  Introduced by Senator Henry Dawes, the General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes Act) was designed to divide land held communally by Native Nations into individual allotments and given to the male head of household.  The legislative history indicates the reasoning behind the Act was to force assimilation through farming and creating a more Euro-centric lifestyle than on a reservation.  In addition to this cultural erasure, the realities of the Dawes Act demonstrate an even more insidious plan to take land away from Native Nations and individuals through the creation of “surplus” land. The “surplus” from the subdivisions of Native lands were sold to non-Native settlers.  A direct example of how land surveying was used to create artificial boundaries and borders that led to the fences and walls built to shut out the land’s Original Stewards.

Borders that we see today are colonial constructs and are used as a way to keep people out.  When the Dutch settled the island of Manhattan, they constructed a wall to keep the Lenape people out.  This wall later became Wall Street.  Land surveying was and continues to be a tool used to keep people out of certain areas, create boundaries and borders that cross Indigenous lands and facilitate land thefts from Indigenous peoples.  It is a practice that is still harmful, not just to Indigenous communities but also to communities targeted for urban renewal.  Surveyors come in and draw new lines, and people lose their homes.  

But like all things, this isn’t to say that land surveying and boundary marking as a practice is all bad.  Land surveying can be used for good and movements, including Land Back.  Land Back is an Indigenous-led movement calling for the return of all public lands back to Indigenous stewardship.  The concept of land surveying could be used to help return public lands to their rightful caretakers by using the cartographical information to match oral traditions.  By combining oral histories and land surveying, we can find the traditional territories for Indigenous Nations to reclaim their relationships with those lands. Using land surveying in a way that helps to return lands helps to right a wrong that is centuries in the making.   Across the country, the land is being returned, and it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that a practice that has been highly harmful can be part of our collective healing.

It is a funny thing.  When I am on those long road trips, I’m not usually thinking about what state border I just crossed or even what state I am in.  Most of the time when I am on those road trips, I am thinking about the land.  I am honoring and sending prayers to the Ancestors who stewarded that land, and I am incredibly mindful of whose land it is, regardless of a settler-imposed border.

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Quick Note: this conversation contains jagged edges, pregnant pauses and tattered ends. While the transcript is here for those that want to read it, we invite you to listen to the recording (if possible). If you don’t have the substack app, you can listen here.

Nkem Ndefo (she/they), MSN, CNM, RN, is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit. She is known for her unique ability to connect with people of all types by holding powerful healing spaces, weaving complex concepts into accessible narratives, and creating synergistic and collaborative learning communities that nourish people’s innate capacity for healing, wellness, and connection. Nkem serves on the founding advisory council of Land Clinic and is a dear friend.

Anastasia:

Well would it be okay to ask you to do just a quick introduction?  There's a lot I can share about you but maybe just anything you'd like to share for the substack?

Nkem:

I've been calling myself lately, a liberatory change alchemist but sometimes alchemy gives the feeling of like metal, right? A metal cold metal feeling, maybe it smells like sulfur but this is an alchemy that has blood and soil in it. So I play in the areas of trauma and resilience, and stress and wounding, and healing at different scales from the very intimate and intrapersonal and the relational to big systems and structures, across geography, across identities to develop and test out different approaches. Yeah. As my friend Farzana says that Healing Justice London, rehearsing freedoms.

Anastasia:

What I just want to note that when I think about the word alchemical, I have like, I have a body reaction of tasting metal tasting blood. So when you said soil and blood that tracks for me too. I think it would be helpful to begin is to just have you describe what you think a healthy boundary is?

Nkem:

Oh, I'm going to question the word healthy.

Anastasia:

Good question.

Nkem:

And maybe reframe that as a supportive boundary, a nurturing boundary, a protective boundary appropriately. So, I think of boundaries as responsive,  limits of what we will or will not tolerate. I think of them as semi permeable membranes. Like, it's not a wall per se, right? It's semi permeable. You can respond to the environment like a contact lens, lets in oxygen, and moisture to the eye but you cut onions and you don't quite get the onion in your eye, you know. And boundaries are not demands on other people. They're not rules for other people to follow. They are not even expectations, it's just, I will. If this happens, I will do X Y or Z or if this doesn't happen, I will do X Y or Z and so they are personal. I think of boundaries as qite upersonal Yeah. And that's it. Personal sense, right? That's an interpersonal sense of boundaries but the even intrapersonal right? Like how I care for myself, right? Like what are the boundaries I have abound? Commitments, often they are commitments. You can be commited. So that's in that sense of the word ("boundary"), but I do think of like a semi permeable responsive membrane the where there is a choice about what you let in or out.

Anastasia:

I love that image and it it's really in contrast to how property law works, right? And how property line boundaries are these very rigid boxes or hexagons or whatever shape it ends up taking. It feels like the boundaries of the land and how we have relationship to those boundaries very much shows up in different areas of life, right? Like that shows up in how we build community. And so, I don't know if there's anything coming up for you as you think about the semipermeable, the porous membrane you just mentioned and just contrasting that to property law or are at least conventional systems of "owning" land.

Nkem:

Those aren't boundaries. Those are walls.

Anastasia:

Mmm.

Nkem:

They actually are because a natural boundary, like, is an ecotone, right? I was thinking about ecotones as like crepuscular or liminal spaces, they are in betweens, right? Where something gradually shifts into something else. It's not very often in the natural world that those boundary lines  are so sharp. The demarcation tends to have some kind of gradation a little ombre, right? As night goes into day, dawn rises or the sunsets that is crepuscular time. It's a boundary. But there's this liminal space in between and so like you know the shore - where the ocean and shore meet? That there's agive-and-take. It's not like try doing a boundary line at different tides. If it was a property line at the shore with different tides, it'd constantly be moving. So it (ecotones) defies what the law is trying to rigidly hold into place? I don't think boundary is the right word. I know they'll say it (in the law). This property is "bounded by" right?  I think about property addresses. Like, how in theUnited States, it's a numeric system by and large, you know, it's your address is 45 whatever, the street,  zip code and then in other parts of the world, it's like the shop above the corner. You see it in England, sometimes, you know, it's The Farmhouse at the end of the road. Like, post, you know, the postal codes are quite different the way we locate things. It has much more fluidity and it's a formal system, right? Like, people can get mail from anywhere in the world. It's a formal system, but it's, it has a more informal quality to the naming of it.  It's almost it's always relational.  When it gets so rigid, it gives the illusion of permanence. It gives the illusion of it is always been this way and this is the best way to do it because it is the most precise. It is the most permanent. It is the most standardized because these are the values that we have  standardized. But what if those weren't our starting point.

Anastasia:

It's actually a really interesting evolution to modern property law like some land surveying in looking at the english traditions of origin. They used to do something called "beating of the bounds"  where the whole community would go around and whenever they would find a monument or marker (kind of violent) but they would take a child and hit them on the bum or push them into a nettle bush. Have some sort of embodied mark on the child. If it was ever to go to court on what the boundary line is the child would testify.

Nkem:

So if I was there, I would say like oh yeah they hit me on the butt and now I can tell you that (the boundary) was there.

Anastasia:

Now this there they thought pain with it, with the reliable reliable witness, I guess. But yeah, it's I mean even there though. Like it's weird and there's some strange stuff around the church but just thinking about it as like a communal act. It's something the community does together. Rather than the way that the property lines are established now, it was very much like we're going to make this map. We're going to place it here with no real reference to the people, places or ecosystems that exist. And so that idea of standardization,making it easy, reducing it to a mathematical equation because if you look at and I'm sure if you've looked at like any sort of land-based transaction, the legal description is mumbo jumbo to me like I don't know what that means these angles. I don't know if there's anything to respond to there but I just wanted to flag the ridiculous origins of our system.

Nkem:

But that means, but the origins and also, you know, if we don't talk about, what our preconceptions are that if efficiency and standardization our values, but no one says but efficiency and the sanitation our values. We just say this is the way it is but once you can say, oh that it looks like these are the underlying assumptions. then we can start having a conversation. Are these are the assumptions we want? But you can't even have a conversation if the assumptions are invisiblized.

Anastasia:

Yeah. Yeah, that and so I'm thinking about what you mentioned before and just bringing the ecotone sand and thinking about safety. Like the the I feel like private property gives the illusion of safety for a lot of folks, right? Like this is where I find safety in my the four corners of my home. And so if we want to dream into something a little bit different and look to ecotones, look to the convergence points. Yeah, I'm curious because I know safety is really big for you, how to safely navigate the fluid boundary lines.

Nkem:

I think, when people don't feel safe inside, we do all kinds of funny things.Not funny, Ha-Ha like funny? Oh God. So, we grasp for security when we feel unsafe. Because you can have your four corners. Right. And still okay, I have my property lines. They've been drawn. I own this property, but I still don't feel safe. So now Ineed a gun and then that still is not enough. Now, I need to stand my ground law so that I can use my gun. So, there's like this implicit admission of failure of this property line to provide the safety it was supposed to provide. In that, it always is additive that they need to keep adding more and more which is saying the first thing didn't work. So what's really the problem is where are you? Locating your safety. So if the safety was in our relational bonds as people, right? If that was where we were seeking safety, in relational bonds, what would our relationship to property and land be.

Anastasia:

I think what I really love about the ecotones and I'd love to hear if you have some additional thoughts on it too, is the requirement to engage with environment that the current system doesn't allow for. Like you can just hide in your home and no one will bother you. You know like that's the thing and that's devastating. That's so sad. We're like a communal species. We should not feel that way and it sucks that it is a real feeling.  I think about the ecotones and how that perhaps could be a parallel, like there's discord, there's things happening, it's not all harmony and I don't think that's something we should try to do, right? And it's not possible for everyone to be harmonious. We're not all the same, we don't have one experience. But yeah, just if there's anything to reflect on their around unsafety, not being the same thing as variation, or differences or the emergence of something new, right?

Nkem:

Yeah, if you feel unsafe the unknown is terrifying. If you're already unsafe and then the unknown, it's terrifying. And so we really have a crisis of fear here and you're asking people to do more when they can't even do what they're doing. So the conversation has to be, let's talk about safety and let's talk about what is safety and what does safety mean to you? And how do you know when you're safe enough? And I think people would have to be in conversation, really? They need to be in conversation about what does this mean, what does it feel? Does a gun make you really feel more safe does being in your home and in what way and how do you know?  Letting people start to name some of these things. And I think meeting them and helping them understand helping, folks, understand themselves better opens up a softening that there might be additional ways of feeling safe and then you can start to have a conversation rather than saying, I see you in your home and we've got to get you out of your home. Instead can we stand at the doorstep and have a chat? Like where is the nature that lapping up with them in their homes.

Anastasia:

I'm pausing because I'm just thinking of the ways, my craft, right? As an attorney really enables people to not leave even get to their doorstep, right? Like, what within my craft can I shift and I don't know if it's my place.  That's another thing is like it doesn't feel like what we need is a new way to draw property lines at least not at the beginning, what feels the most important.

Nkem:

It's not that it's not important. I mean it is important. What is important is to know what is often most useful when and it feels it feels early. It feels early in the conversation and the people and communities may be at current stages and phases. So go to the ripe spaces, go to the right, the places that are more right and do the experimentation because you're always going to have a leading edge, right, just going to be a leading edge and so you work there and then what diffuses? What filters into consciousness. It's a good place to experiment, right? With people who are engaging and are at the boundaries and in playing in the ecotones. Great like, then that's the place to play and I think that's where land clinic is. It's as you think about what helps other people get to and other communities get to that ripeness. That's a different question that you, I think you're right is not a legal question. And so, you know, here this is why we have multidisciplinary transdisciplinary anti disciplinary work to, you know what, what is needed? What is needed to get people on the bridge, to their front doors, and people can get to their front doors and they look out at, they're letting their manicured Lawns where they're pushing, you know, the boundary of the wildness of nature out as far as they can. So you could get them to their front step and it's nothing. It's still sanitary, or it's AstroTurf. 

Anastasia:

Side note: When we were in LA, our neighbors got AstroTurf and it was just so heartbreaking. It's like the worms. You're suffocating the worms.

Nkem:

But yeah, I don't go out and maybe you're not watering I don't know, you know so.

Anastasia:

Is there is there anything else income that? You feel? I know you prepared for this. So I want to I want to squeeze the juice out of this lemon to see if there's any other.

Nkem:

Was it a Meyer lemon, kind of sweet?

Anastasia:

Yeah it's sweet and it's got honey at the bottom like I'm making a whole lemonade.

Nkem:

I do think your question is important. Like is where is the role of law and what are the adjunctive, supportive, other approaches and when and how do they work in synergy? Who was part of the conversation? As we understand that boundaries are also artificial like things are all connected and all one and a boundary is artificial and it's a both/and.

Anastasia:

Yeah.

Nkem:

How is something whole and divided? How is something whole and partitioned? Do we have the capacity to sit with that nuance? That the land is whole, and it is partitioned even not by human hands even not by economic systems. The land is partitioned. I'm just thinking of a human boundary if somebody punches me I won't engage with them, right?  That's my boundary like no physical violence. Like what does the sand or the shore say to the ocean? What is my line? Or are there boundaries always forgiving always interacting? Does a tree say I will only do so much, I will only bend so much and then you give me enough wind I will break. I'm done. Like I don't know. Like is there a way of the analogy of a human boundary? Does nature have some of the same players? Or are they different animals.

Anastasia:

I love that question.

Nkem:

Because an ecotone is a relationship. Not actually a boundary. It's a relationship, right?

Anastasia:

I feel like there's just so much knowledge that is within, you know, where at the base of the tree and the roots, meet the soil and the conversations that are had, they are ancient and new and all the things all at once. It just like the time of you punched me and then I don't engage with you. Like, time doesn't work the same way. It feels like. The relationships seem a little bit more like long time. So maybe there are boundaries within that long time, but it's a really beautiful question to sit it with. And end our conversation on. 

This month we’re featuring one of our clinic client-collaborators, KHIMSTONIK, and the work they are doing in Southeast Washington, specifically lands on the Snake River around the Ice Harbor Dam. If you would like to support the work of the Palouse and KHIMSTONIK, please consider donating directly to the organization.

The Lady Who Does Tasks Quickly

My name is ILL-LAH-WAH-LITZ-TUN-MYE (Lady who does tasks quickly). My English name is Ione IronHorse Martel Jones. I am an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of Yakama Nation and a lineal descendant of the WOW-YICK-MA NAH-KHEE-UM NU-SHWA, the People from Lower Snake River Palouse.

I am also the Executive Director and President of KHIMSTONIK, a tax-exempt Section 501(C)(3) nonprofit organization. Named after my Kuthla (grandmother), KHIMSTONIK seeks to understand the systems affecting Indian Country and to identify the ongoing disparities arising out of centuries of cultural appropriation and land thefts. 

My current focus is to continue my family's mission of land return for the hundreds of acres taken by the US Army Corp via eminent domain in 1959.

Keepers of the Past

My family descends from WOW-YICK-MA NAH-KHEE-UM NU-SHWA, the People from Lower Snake River Palouse. The Palouse are a distinct band of Ichishkin speaking people located in the confluence of the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. My ancestors resisted signing onto the Yakama Treaty of 1855, so our family’s land claims are a bit different from others in the area. My relatives CHO-WAWA-TYET (Indian Jim), XILCH-KO-WAKS WACH-OM-KYE (Wolf Necklace) and AL-LI-LUYA (Thomas Jim) received land patents under the Homestead Act of 1862 that guaranteed title (rather than a trust relationship) to our ancestral lands. Our family remained in the area until 1959 when the US Army Corp instituted a “condemnation” proceeding (eminent domain) and forced us to move off the land.

I am not the first in my family to advocate for our land return. I follow in the footsteps of all my relatives that have held the U.S. government accountable since April 19, 1880. This includes my grandmother, KHIMSTONIK (Mary Jim Chapman). She was there the day that her relatives were taken from their final resting place on Fishhook Island (now under water due to the dam) in preparation for the Ice Harbor Dam. 

We have received so many false starts to the return. KHIMSTONIK and my Aunt AYATOOTONMI (Carrie) went so far as to testify  in the 1988 U.S. Senate Hearing Before the Select Committee on Indian Affairs before the late Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii and Senator Daniel J. Evans of Washington. During the meeting, promises regarding our relatives were actually addressed on the record. Though these promises did not lead anywhere, the family never stopped remembering our relatives and the fight for our land.

To read more about my family’s story, including first hand accounts from KHIMSTONIK and AYATOOTONMI, check out this article written in 1993.

What is Eminent Domain?

Eminent domain is the power of a governmental entity to take land for public use without the owner's consent. This power comes from the common law concepts of “necessity and sovereignty” but has been codified (made into a law) by the legislative branch. 

Common law is judge-created law. This means that a judge made an objective decision that turned into the precedent that other judges follow.

A judge looks at the following criteria when determining whether a taking is appropriate:

* The taking of the land (also known as condemnation) of the property is reasonably necessary.

* The land will be used for a public purpose.

* Just compensation is paid to the land owner for the condemned property.

In the case of my family, the judge found that the creation of the dam outweighed our (and others in the surrounding area) claims to our land. For the estimated 18 descendants, the US Army Corp collectively paid out just $3,500 (percentages received at varying rates) for hundreds of acres of our ancestral home.

It’s worth noting that after the construction of the dam, some of the settler families that were subject to the 1959 taking were given an opportunity to return to their land. We’d like the same opportunity afforded to us. 

Where is the Land Today?

I have dedicated years of my life to sift through government paperwork and FOIA requests, pursue higher education degrees (I am a professional accountant and real estate broker) and keep the traditions I was taught by my Kuthla. I’ve had my fill of sympathies with no leads and attorneys that have no understanding of the complexities behind these sorts of land transfer. Using my research as the foundation, KHIMSTONIK has partnered with Land Clinic and JD Calkins Law and Consulting PLLC to identify the parcels and reassess the legal standing of the government to do the taking in the first place. We continue to unravel the conflicting paper trails left in the wake of the taking. 

Wandering Minds

My family’s story is challenging for a reason, it’s been buried in a system that is intentionally complicated and emotionally draining.  This hard place is forcing us to think about other ways to imagine land return. Could there be such a thing as a reversal of eminent domain? Is there a way to collaborate directly with present-day private landowners that are not using the spaces? How can this begin an important precedent for the approximately 740 dams that the US Army Corp owns and operates? How are our learnings helpful frameworks for others searching for validation of their own family's experience?

The Ice Harbor Dam is one of the four dams being considered for removal by the state of Washington. This complicates an already complicated process but gives us a lot of hope in terms of the shift in political consciousness that’s arising.

Do you know wak amu?

To close, I’d like to introduce you to wak amu (“hamash” or the great camas flower). Wak amu grows in patches as a tuber. An interesting fact about the great camas is that it actually benefits from wild cultivation. It’s through its wound that the great camas are able to create new offset bulbs. Modern science has documented the large role gophers play in ecosystem development through feasting on the purple flower’s root systems. 

We gather and prepare wak amu bulbs in June. The total cooking process takes two to three days (not including gathering days). Our tradition reflects the ways in which all Original Peoples are meant to have a relationship to their homelands and teach others how to do so as well. Our Palouse culture is endowed with practices that can loosely be translated as sustainability principles. Through observing the way the plants and animals interact with the rivers, mountains, prairies and us (N’TITYTE, the human beings), we can weave together the stories of those who came before us and sustain our landscapes for those future generations yet to come.