Before I became a lawyer, I was a full-time farmer. I had always dreamt of a world where my farming could be embedded into a larger vision of environmental justice based on  rematriation. Rematriation, as many of us have learned from Sogorea Te Land Trust’s definition, is not only a return of land, but more importantly, a return of sacred Indigenous relationships to the land. And it’s one based on Indigenous-women led work, which is meant to highlight the sanctity of nurturing life and connection. During my time as a farmer, a campaign for land access for young farmers was ramping up, and there was virtually no talk about how this campaign would advance rematriation. Instead, many folks envisioned a land access campaign that could take us back to the harsh homestead days, which was only made possible through the forceful removal of Indigenous people and Indigenous cosmologies. It paired well with small-scale farms, which was seen as the ideal mode of production. Homesteading was also the antithesis of Indigenous-women led work. It was a property system that saw survival in isolated self-sufficiency and patriarchy. I was so horrified with this vision that I decided to transition careers by becoming a lawyer to support farming embedded in rematriation and environmental justice. I needed to learn how to create the conduits for giving the Land Back, and, alongside others, learn how to change our relationships to land altogether. Since becoming a lawyer, I’ve refined my vision, though it hasn’t come exclusively through my legal training. A combination of organizing, research, and lots of listening has reshaped my vision, along with asking myself this question: What does intimacy mean when thinking about the land?

Back to the Land

I came to the land because I felt disconnected from my own sustenance. At that time, small-scale farming was the most accessible avenue for me to feel connected. It also felt like an obvious antidote to large-scale corporate farming, with its labor and environmental exploitation, and the feeling of alienation I felt towards my food. There’s an old idiom that says “the farmer’s footprint is the best fertilizer.” I had come to believe that I needed to live this idiom by focusing on a small-scale farm that I could travel, in its entirety, by foot. In a sense, I thought this is what connection to my sustenance meant. But as I began to feel a deeper sense of connection with the landscape beyond the four corners of the property, I started to believe that I could feel something more expansive. I traded my limited feeling of connection with the farm for a larger feeling of intimacy for and with the landscape.

What Do I Mean by Intimacy?

Intimacy is the ability to behold. It is also a feeling of closeness, though not necessarily physical closeness. Awe meets serenity, and intimacy evokes an expansive wholeness. My journey towards intimacy with the land started with small-scale farming. I remember beholding my first harvest of beets and carrots: Here was the food I was about to become after ingesting it. What could be more intimate?  But I also began to wonder, short of putting everyone on a small-scale farm, how could this feeling become widespread? I knew I wasn’t the only one who was suffering from this disconnection, so I knew I wasn’t the only one who was longing to find some larger sense of meaning.  As I began to work more with Indigenous tribes and groups, I started finding clues for alternative paths toward intimacy with the land. That very closeness I felt at harvest was what intimacy felt like for Indigenous homelands, at scale, for Indigenous folks. When I listened to the stories of creeks and salmon runs and the imperative of restoring a landscape that allowed for their vibrant existence, I realized that no small farm, within the confines of its property lines, could ever capture this feeling of intimacy with the entire landscape; the larger ecosystem. At least, not if it didn’t let itself become part of a larger movement for rematriation. This is when I began to question the ethos of small-scale farming as we know it, and to ask what small-scale farming was missing. Small-scale farming had been co-constructed, at least in the United States, in relationship to a particular property tradition. As previously mentioned, the homestead model was meant to reflect a particular settler - the yeoman - who is still lauded today as the spirit of America. This insularity and lifestyle needed to be re-imagined to include care for the larger landscape in which the farm is embedded and the living beings who move and work on the land. 

Why All Agriculture Needs to be Grounded in Rematriation 

Small-scale agriculture, in its most sustainable aspirations, focuses on the sustainability of its own land. And while it promises not to perpetuate harm, its ability to care for the larger ecosystem is limited when it constrains itself to its property lines. In contrast, there is an Indigenous ethos of care that transcends the property line. Only by being guided through an Indigenous ethos of care can agriculture orient itself to something larger than itself, and much more intentionally aggregate impact in a way that small-scale farming cannot. 

But it's not only the land. Or, rather, when we speak about the land, it’s never to suggest it’s different from human relationships. This ethos of care looks for how bodies move on the land as part of the land’s rhythm. We call this labor. An agriculture that is grounded in rematriation safeguards labor so that it can nourish the body rather than exploit it. In order for the body to experience intimacy, it must find it through its own volition and responsibility. Today, most of agriculture’s workforce of farmworkers are forcefully smeared onto the land, which is an intimacy by force. What does it look like for the land to host no exploitation? This, I believe, is a core ethos of rematriated agriculture. 

In the coming months, we will be exploring what it means to expand a vision of agriculture that is grounded in rematriation, that can take on the very serious task of feeding the world, all while making sure that those who work in the food system can afford to live well. This will require re-imagining the scale of our conviction and the production of alternative systems of agriculture that hope to make conventional agriculture obsolete.