How do you define land defense?

I think that for me, when I think about land defense, I’m thinking about not just the more obvious threats to our land (like the gentrification that’s happening), but also environmental issues. When I think about land defense, I think about strategies, anti-capitalist strategies. I think about land defense as creating a system, working with other farmers and land stewards together to hold land. I think that land defense is a multi-prong strategy, and that we have to be really creative to outwit the systems that have been in place for a very long time.

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What are your thoughts around land ownership?

It feels a lot like liberation. It feels like the freedom to move differently. When you have land, you’re able to meet the basic needs, right? Feed yourself, have a place to live, have some stability.

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But it’s also something that, hopefully, you’re passing down. It goes from generation to generation. For my neighbors, it holds a lot of history and stories. People’s lives are built in and rooted in land.

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But I also think about ownership, and I’m starting to think about what ownership versus stewardship means. As a people who were displaced from our original homelands and have made the best out of what we’ve been given to work with, I don’t know that I will ever feel like I fully own this land.

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But I think it’s important, as I consider myself a steward of this land, to be working, to listen to it, to hear the ancestral call, but also to think about new forms of (I don’t even want to call it ownership), new forms of holding land that are outside of capitalism and colonialism.

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What is the history of the land you’re on?

I’m learning more and more about it. This is Muskogee land. From what I understand, this was never a place that was farmland or even gathering land for Muskogee people. This was always hunting ground, a passing and traveling space.

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Later, as most of Birmingham was, it was really exploited through steel, coal, and mining. There was a lot of extraction, and you can feel that in the land. When we were farming, there was a time when we were farming very intensely, and it was a frenetic kind of feeling that we got from the land. That was also pushback.

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There’s also a history of this being very wealthy white land. The neighborhood of Fountain Heights was originally an upper-class white neighborhood, then an upper-class Jewish neighborhood that bordered an upper-class Black neighborhood. As Black people continued to move into this area, white flight and then redlining happened. This is an area that holds the pain and terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist acts and bombings.

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It holds a lot of the pain of our elders who were once activists, people who participated in the Children’s Marches here, who participated in multiple organizing efforts, and maybe didn’t see the results they thought they were going to see. So this is a very tumultuous place, and we’re learning more and more.

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How do you use the land?

This is a learning farm, so we have a lot of on-farm opportunities for people to come and touch the land. In this main space, we do pretty intensive, market-garden-style farming (multiple crops, pretty high rotation and turnover), and that’s to make sure we have enough vegetables to fill our CSA.

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My husband put in the greenhouse and our aquaponics system, and that’s to show folks (especially in the neighborhoods that surround us), how to grow without being in soil. Part of that is because we’ve experienced so much pollution in Birmingham that there are places, neighborhoods next to ours, where you can’t touch the ground because it’s so poisoned. So we want to show people that there’s another way to still be able to grow your food and invest in your community.

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We have one lot that is wooded, and we want to keep it that way. We feel like green spaces in urban environments are important. So we have a mushroom farm over there, and it’s especially nice when it’s hot August [in] Alabama to go into that space under the trees and sit with the mushrooms. It’s just a really cool, refreshing kind of feeling.

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We also have a space that’s on a hill, and as part of our erosion prevention, we’re putting in an orchard. Our latest space that we acquired is right across the street from Carrie Tuggle Elementary School. That’s an elementary school that was first started by a Black woman for young Black orphaned children who had been abandoned by the system. Her burial site is actually in front of the school.

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How does it feel to own and steward land in one word?

Healing.