, the parallels between her own story and Laila’s could not be more apparent. Having been adopted and raised outside of her native land and culture, she too felt both a disconnect from her roots and a yearning to recover them, eventually finding her way back to them through food. Also like Laila, she explained how her personal experience fit into a broader – and also highly intentional – process of alienation. Starting in the 1800s, Indigenous children were sent to boarding schools to rid them of their cultures in order to “kill the Indian and save the man.” Such a practice eventually evolved into widespread trends of adoption of Indigenous children, toward similar ends.
Brit also noted parallels in control over territory and foodways in the Palestinian nation and in Indigenous nations of the Americas. Many of the existing treaties between the US government and tribal nations explicitly include rights to access customary lands and waterways outside of the bounds of reservations, which were historically prisoner of war camps. Nevertheless, acts of hunting, gathering and growing food on these customary lands have repeatedly been criminalized. Much like Gaza, this has especially been the case with the fishing of salmon and other aquatic life considered sacred to tribal communities, with Brit sharing the example of a person who was jailed 50 times in the 1970s for fishing and asserting his people’s right to fish. Such injustices persist into the present, with the Algonquin people’s struggles over sacred moose hunting grounds and the struggles of the Mi’kmaq people over lobster fisheries being two examples of countless others.
Creating spaces of empowerment and healing
For Jonathan Wilson, a multi-racial farmer of Black and Indigenous ancestry who is engaged in various farming projects along the US East Coast, “growing food and reclaiming land is about reclaiming identity that’s been stolen from all of us.” Jonathan’s approach to farming is rooted in abolition, which he sees as inextricable from food sovereignty:
“Food sovereignty looks at how we create autonomy and self-determination against that colonial landscape, that extractive landscape, that we’ve dealt with here on Turtle Island for almost half a millennium. Abolition in farming is rooted in creating spaces where people can choose to heal themselves, where people can choose to empower themselves… It’s a philosophy and practice that we need to embody versus an end road.”
Part of what motivates Johnathan is his personal experience – though he recognizes that this is part of a much greater collective struggle – of “the trauma of trying to farm under capitalism and imperialism and how much we internalize that and how much we actually then put that back out to the universe.” Abolitionist farming, he explains, is challenging that, “challenging the concept that settler colonial practices, whether in Palestine or on Turtle Island, are the foundation that we need to work back from and (acknowledging that) all land is stolen.” It eschews approaches based on reform, focusing instead on getting to the roots of the problems plaguing society. Of course, pushing for transformation within the existing system is rife with contradictions, but Johnathan considers grappling with these to be part of the work. He cites as an example the necessity of working with his local department of probation, with all of its problems and contradictions, in order to create transformative experiences for formerly incarcerated youth. The bottom line, as he sees it, is “What does it mean to hold up our community, our people, our comrades? How do you be an abolitionist in spaces where abolition is not welcome?”
The creation of spaces of empowerment and healing under otherwise hostile conditions is a theme that also arose in the research of Maggie and Laila, who recounted their moving visit with a small organic farmer in Gaza, who had created a safe haven on tiny terrain, surrounded by utter devastation, making it “a place of richness and beauty and joy and wealth.” “We saw that same spirit repeated in almos