The Land

Turtle Island

(There are  many names, but I  defer to contemporary decolonization movements and their adaptation of the Haudenosaunee Great Turtle creation story oral tradition often modified to "Turtle Island" when speaking of this continent as a whole.)

We live on stolen lands.

We support First Nations' Land Back! efforts.

In "Maryland" we live on lands that the Piscataway and  Susquehannock peoples were forcibly removed from. We live within the Patuxent watershed.

In Ohio, the mound building Adena culture inhabited these lands. Later the Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, and Wyandot peoples were forcibly expelled from them over a period of years by the American government and its so called "Indian removal act." We live within the Scioto watershed.

By nature of being born here, we were born into a system that benefited by those thefts. A system predicated upon demarking "others," to this day, continuing to live out those myriad of forms of directly benefiting from the suffering, deaths, and losses of Indigenous peoples.

We recognize the clusters of ideas and practices falling under the modern term "Permaculture" have always been forms of what has come to be called "Traditional Ecological Knowledge" (TEK) inseparable from Indigenous peoples and cultures. They remain part of the body of knowledge gained through direct experiencing of our shared world.

We work for change and justice.  

That takes many forms, as but one example, in our growing, we prioritize supporting marginalized and Indigenous growers and those involved in seed re-matriation work.