Shakara Tyler: Black farming as joyous, victorious, and glorious (ep387)

Written By kamea chayne
“We often forget that Black farmers were the foundation of the civil rights movement. Actually, a lot of Black agrarian scholars and organizers, and even some policy advocates that have been doing this work for a long time, would say that there’d be no civil rights movement if it wasn’t for Black farmers.”
— DR. SHAKARA TYLER

How were Black farmers integral to the Civil Rights movement? What does it mean to reclaim and reframe Black agrarianism as joyous, victorious, and glorious? And what is the significance of “rematriation” in orienting towards abolitionist and decolonial futures?

In this episode, we welcome dr. shakara tyler, a returning-generation farmer, educator and organizer who engages in Black agrarianism, agroecology, food sovereignty and environmental justice as commitments of abolition and decolonization. She serves as Board President at the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), board member of the Detroit People’s Food Co-op (DPFC) and co-founder of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund (DBFLF) and a member of the Black Dirt Farm Collective (BDFC).

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Transcript:

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

shakara tyler: [There are] so many historical points in history that have led us to where we are today.

I always start with the colonial era because we can't talk about present-day injustices without talking about the atrocious beginnings that the colonization has created for what we experience today, like gross wealth inequities and terrorist violence against people of color, and so on.

So the present doctrine of discovery in 1455, the 15th century, is a common starting place for me, because that's when we bring in the theft of land, or the intentional calculation of what it would mean to steal land from people that have been there stewarding the land for centuries prior to that beginning. So this present doctrine of discovery that was led by the Spanish and the British, that came together as this aggregated colonization of various European countries. And then the transatlantic slave trade, or enslavement trade, from the 16th century to the 19th century—and some people will consider 1619 as the dawn of enslavement here in the United States or here on Turtle Island.

The 1862 Homestead Acts, which basically provided massive welfare subsidies through land to white settlers, and some stats will say that white settlers received around 250 million acres of fertile prime land with abundant "natural" resources embedded in those particular places. And the Homestead Acts, which basically granted land to white settlers, which was land stolen from Indigenous peoples, is the foundation of why there are such gross wealth disparities through land today. 98% of the acres owned here on Turtle Island, are owned by white folks—and that's agricultural land, just as a clarification.

And then 1865, the Special Field Orders No. 15, which was the false promise of 40 acres and a mule, that was supposed to be granted to newly emancipated African peoples from enslavement. And we know that that was short-lived. Only a few thousand Africans were actually able to hold on to those acres that were granted through their program. Some still have it in their families today. And many, many, many, many, many of us do not. And this is why still in 2022, we are still requesting reparations. 40 acres and a mule, as an example, for the thousands of years that we worked this land without any kind of benefit, and any kind of reparations that were paid to us at all.

1865, which again was a big year, the Black Codes. Convict leasing began at that time, which was a way to sustain the system of enslavement through carcerality, or imprisonment. The system of sharecropping from 1865 through the 1940s, and then the Freedman's Bureau that was created by the federal government in 1865, which attempted to govern the land distribution to African peoples through various mediums. While it did produce some kind of a moderate benefit for newly emancipated Africans to receive land, it actually failed as an approach to create equity, for lack of a better term, within the system by granting African peoples land.

Because we were never in control of that process, the government completely controlled the land distribution process, and the land distribution process was highly inequitable. In 1865, we barely received any government subsidies of land, and that expanded through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century where we had to actually purchase land, while white settlers continue to get free land or land grants through various federal efforts and state efforts.

Then the Jim Crow laws through the early 1880s through 1965, the present theft of Black-owned land, which again I talked about, we are still experiencing that today. Heir property exploitation, which really started, I guess, around the beginning of the 20th century. Heir property is essentially land that has rolled over to the children of those that have passed on and the heir property exploitation process was one of the key ways that Black land has been stolen over decades, when there wasn't a will in place or there wasn't any kind of documents or a paper trail that ceded or explicitly directed, the land to any beneficiaries or heirs after the person that owned it transitioned.

The system that be, federal state, whoever, the white supremacist system, to be more explicit, chose to use that as a way to take the land from these Black families. And again, this is still happening today. The Pigford v. Glickman class action lawsuit, which was, at the time, the largest federal class action lawsuit in US history. This is a lawsuit that Black farmers filed against the USDA, for decades of discrimination within federal farm loan programs. The redlining housing practice from the early 1900s through the late 1900s, really, into the early 2000, and [even] through today. There are various waves of redlining that we even see through today, how the gentrification that's ongoing that started around the 1950s through today, that's escalating in various metropolitan areas around the country—Detroit being one of them.

And the mass incarceration that started with the convict leasing system, that proliferated through sharecropping and peonage and other land-based terrorist systems against Black people, mass incarceration—of which Black people are one of the more dominant victims of this white supremacist system—is a way to control and ensure that people of color, and particularly Black people, remain within enslavement conditions, to continue to produce wealth for this country, and no benefit to us. So that's a semi-short or semi-long, depending on how you look at it, brief exploration through history.

Kamea Chayne: That was such an incredible wealth of information on the historical timeline. I know we could focus entire conversations just on any of these events but really appreciate this overview. It really helps to illustrate how the present racial injustice in agriculture came to be.

We know that Black farmland ownership peaked in 1910 at 16 to 19 million acres, and it's decreased since then to less than 3 million acres today. We also know that Black farmers represent just over 1% of all U.S. farmers. So this just illustrates the incredible challenges that Black farmers have faced over the past centuries into the present day.

And you've noted how the civil rights movement is often touted as a significant period of political, economical, and overall societal advancement for Black communities. Yet this broad stroke of an assessment leaves out some crucial details in terms of what this time was like for Black farmers. And this seems really important to weave into the picture as well.

So what role did Black farmers play in support of the civil rights movement? And at the same time, what hardships in regard to land stewardship and access were they facing?

shakara tyler:

We often forget that Black farmers were the foundation of the civil rights movement.

Actually, a lot of Black agrarian scholars and organizers, and even some policy advocates that have been doing this work for a long time would say that there [would] be no civil rights movement if it wasn't for Black farmers. Because at the time, Black farmers were battling rapidly declining land loss, during the civil rights era, which was motivated by various federal legislations and formal and informal efforts that were systemically, strategically and intentionally dislocating, dispossessing, displacing Black people from rural and urban land spaces, generally speaking.

And so this rapidly declining land loss during the civil rights era, which is usually considered to be a significant period of political, economical and overall societal advancement for Black communities, is sort of an ironic situation because Black farmers continue to lose land rapidly during this time, while they also bolster the civil rights movement by using their land to bail activists out of jail, providing security, housing and food for traveling activists such as the Freedom Riders. And there are many, many other examples of how Black farmers have really been the fuel of the civil rights movement, by providing safe havens for gatherings on their farms.

Many of the wins that were achieved during that historical period couldn't have been achieved, if it wasn't for the economic power, through wealth and land ownership of Black farmers, the political clout that land ownership created for Black farmers, [among] many other factors.

It was always ironic to bring up or to illuminate how Black farmers were, as a population, as a community, losing enormous amounts of land while still feeding and bolstering this massive civil rights movement that was inspiring other movements around the globe.

A lot can be gathered from the understanding of Black agrarian movements fighting for economic and political autonomy, through land ownership and environmental justice movements generally—like fighting for livable communities through community-controlled land, among other tactics.

And this is why we always say that Black movements generally have a lot of intersections. The civil rights movement heavily intersects with the Black Power movement, the Black arts movement, and now the movement for Black lives that has emerged. And overall, the environmental justice movements that started with Black, rural and urban communities in the mid-20th century. So this intersection of movement building among and across the Black communities is a really beautiful thing to illuminate, because we often forget that there were very few silos at that time.

Everyone worked together. The housing justice folks worked together with the education justice folks, and the education justice [folks] work together with environmental justice [folks]. That's what created such a dynamic unity and assured the wins that were gained during the civil rights movement. Everyone was working together in a more unified fashion than we are today. And so we really need to take those lessons, in more profound ways, so that we can start to attain the wins or continue to attain the wins that were spurred at that time.

Kamea Chayne: Absolutely. You've talked about how the Black community has been integral to trailblazing growing food within cities, during a time when agriculture and growing food were understood predominantly as activities reserved for the countryside.

Could you shine a light on this for us, perhaps highlighting Detroit more specifically as it's often known as a mecca for urban agriculture, as well as how your work with the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and The Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund have helped to lead the reclamation of Black agrarianism in the city?

shakara tyler: I'm going to start with The Great Migrations.

I'm intentional about saying “The Great Migrations” because it was plural in nature and not singular.

The Great Migrations happened over a series of decades, starting around the 1910s to the 1970s. And during this time, what was usually considered the second industrial revolution, millions of Black people migrated heavily to the urban North and West to escape the white terrorism of the rural and urban South. And, of course, employment in the North through factory jobs and other means provided opportunities for thousands of Southern Black people to escape Jim Crow and racial oppression and lynchings and so on.

But it's important to emphasize how we were running from the terrorism that governed the land at that time, and we weren't just leaving the land in the South to seek money in the North, which is often the whitewashed narrative. In order to correct that and to ground a more accurate historical depiction, we need to understand that it was the white terrorism, the white supremacist terrorism that in part caused a lot of The Great Migrations over many decades during the 20th century. So many southern Black migrants followed the rail lines and settled in the major cities that included Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland. Many of these cities that are not in the South.

And while they left the land in the South, the agricultural knowledge used to build thriving Black communities, and one of the quintessential tools in building the agricultural industry of the US was brought with them to the northern cities.

While we may have left the land, we brought that knowledge and that agrarian brilliance with us because we didn't have a choice. We had to survive.

This knowledge was often a midwife of sorts for us to survive in unfamiliar areas, unfamiliar climates, racialized geographies that we were arguably forced into—depending on who you ask.

So Black people have been growing in cities of the North prior to the Victory Gardens in response to World War Two during the 1940s. We were growing in cities because that's how we fed our families, even when there were grocery stores, supermarkets emerging at the time and in bustling metro areas. Sometimes we didn't have access to those mainstream food sources. And so we always had to grow to sustain our families and our communities; we've always been growing on little pieces of land that we could find, whether it was on our windowsills or our backyards, our frontyards, vacant lots at the end of our blocks, little pieces of countryside land that we purchased while we were still living in the city.

Like all kinds of situations, we utilized pieces of land that we could attain in various ways to grow our own for personal consumption and entrepreneurship means, because we had to survive, we had to continue to keep our stories alive through the land and through the food that we ate and the food that we use as conduits to our ancestors, and so on. And so there's a lot wrapped up in what is now considered to be urban agriculture. We've been doing this even prior to it having a name, "urban agriculture", "food justice", "food sovereignty", like we've been doing it because this is what [was] spiritually, physically, culturally necessitated.

And Detroit has been such a dynamic example of food justice and food sovereignty that is led by Black people. Detroit is a majority Black city—like 83%, I think at the moment, of the population is Black. If I'm not mistaken, that makes Detroit the blackest city in the country. And it is only right that Black people are in leadership of developing equitable food systems here in this particular area, because we are the most affected by the injustices and the inequities around food and land. And so Detroit, as this really unique city with enormous amounts of vacant land, I think it's about 30%—which is unheard of for a major city—it's given us the opportunity to grow food, agricultural businesses, agricultural enterprises on multiple levels, in ways that other cities may not have the opportunity to do, because of land availability.

And so the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network has been working to build self-determination through urban agriculture, and through the reclamation of Black food history and stories, and so on, because this is what we have to do to sustain ourselves spiritually, physically, economically, politically. And the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund, going back to the 30%, that's approximately 5000 acres of vacant land available in the city—and when I say available, I mean it may be owned by the Detroit Land Bank Authority or it may be owned by a private investor of sorts, many of them are white, wealthy people that don't live here, so I don't mean that it's just lying idle and just waiting for someone to purchase it, like there is a very calculated process to obtain that land, specifically to own the land.

The Black Farmer Land Fund has been working with Black growers in the city to purchase these pieces of land, that many have been growing on without owning them—what people would call guerrilla gardening, or occupying the land, because we don't we've never really had the means to own these pieces of land, while we continue to grow on the land to feed ourselves and our communities, and to clean up the blight and to beautify our neighborhoods, to cleanse the soil and the air and the water from contaminants that make our bodies sick. All of these motivations have driven the work of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund. And we were created as a mechanism to help Black growers navigate the gruesome bureaucracy of land purchasing here in Detroit.

I actually have to lift up Tepfirah Rushdan, who is the co-director at Keep Growing Detroit. And she—knowing that racialized capitalism and all of the intersecting systems of white supremacy create these systems that make it harder for us [Black people] to attain land and other resources to build thriving farm businesses—was really the originator of this process, and brought people together so that we can start this institution, as a coalition of three longstanding urban agriculture organizations in the city. So Keep Growing Detroit is one of them. And the others, as I mentioned before, are the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which is actually soon to be the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network, illuminating the difference between food security and food sovereignty, which we can get into later. And then the third organization in the coalition is Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, led by Mama Jerry Hebron.

And so these three organizations are three long-standing, highly respected, highly dynamic, Black-led organizations in the city that are doing food justice and food sovereignty, work with minimal resources, like without a lot of the resources that predominantly white or all white organizations do, as they claim to be doing, the work of the people.

Kamea Chayne: With greater acknowledgement of how land has historically been taken away from or denied access to for various groups of people who have stewarded and contributed to the richness of that land, there have been more and more conversations about repatriation—which refers to the return of land to someone, though with the roots of the word, perhaps more specifically returning land to their forefathers.

I know that you've been keen to center on rematriation instead, which, as you note, “refashions the conditions and standards that have constructed relationships produced for us and in which we sometimes remain complicit to survive within the violent expansions of European colonialism. Imperatively, it helps to reimagine life beyond the settler state, honoring the ongoing building toward abolitionist and decolonial futures.”

I would appreciate it if you could share more about the significance of the reframe to rematriation for you, and also, how you've contended with working within the confines of a system which upholds the idea and domination-based relationality of private land ownership, especially when seeking to maintain and re-establish food sovereignty, which does necessitate land ownership? To this point, I wonder if there are some alternative models of relating to community, to collective labor, and to the land that could offer some inspirations for our listeners here.

shakara tyler: To rematriate, to me, means to seek out and honor the motherlode in a settler-colonial state that exploited Black and Indigenous laborers on Indigenously stolen land to build the US empire before us.

Rematriation inevitably is a feminist orientation that illuminates the mutual accountability, the relationality, the kinship that's involved in actively working to restore responsibilities to the land and building toward abolitionist and decolonial futures.

So rematriation overall is the discursive set of relationships that are practically situated within radical struggles that start and end with the land and it illuminates how communities have to begin to work across these false divides, like rural-urban, racial, ethnic divides, religious, faith divides, education and so on.

If we don't find a way to first heal our relationship with the land in ways that illuminate not our rights to the land, not our ownership over the land, but our ancestral roles as stewards of the land, ensuring that the land has what she needs so that she can continue to feed us while we feed her—that reciprocal relationship is really important. I'm trying not to sound too romanticized and cliché, but I think we have to start with a spiritual grounding of our relationships with the land, that are really completely opposite to this whole mindset of land ownership that retreats back to European feudalism various centuries ago. So again, we have to get to the root of it all.

Angela Davis talks about revolutionary change being a radical act that draws from the root, that dislocates something from the root of it. And a lot of movement building, whether it's food or land oriented or both, or something beyond that can sometimes be more symptomatic, like we're putting Band-Aids on these wounds, without getting to the root of why the wound is there in the first place. And that's where colonialism and heteropatriarchy and imperialism [come in], like all of these interconnecting systems that have created what we see before us in the world today and.

A lot of pulling from the root, like the radical act of getting to the root of all of these issues, starts and ends with land.

This is why rematriation is so important, because it connotes a spiritual component of what it means to reconnect and reclaim and regenerate our relationships to, with, and through land. And it also connotes the cultural reclamation that's deeply tied to our memories and our identities and our experiences as people that have been dispossessed and displaced from our ancestries, physically, spiritually and politically, just through whitewashing of the entire system that we see before us.

Land is this very dynamic being that doesn't exist solely to feed people. Land isn't just this nutrient-dense soil that exists to produce food so that humans can live. Land is an integral being just in and of herself. And there is no way that we can sustain and thrive within this particular place, on this particular land, in this particular time, if we're not aligning our vibrations with the land naturally.

Kamea Chayne: What comes to mind for you, when contending with working within the system to maintain and realize food sovereignty, [in a system which] does entail being complicit in the system and working with the idea of buying land and owning land, and that way of relating to the land, [while also] challenging it through other ways of practicing more community-centered forms of agriculture and stewarding the land?

shakara tyler: So it really sucks that land has been commodified into this thing that dictates wellbeing, like economic wellbeing, but also social well-being, political, cultural... Racial capitalism, just to be very clear, has created this dynamic where land has become this thing that we use to take back our power within this system that was never really built for us in the first place, and can never really work for us at all, in every sense of the word.

The work of the food sovereignty movements that are taking the world by storm right now is pushing for land ownership as a means of taking back our power that was stolen from us in various ways, so that we can merely survive, but also continue to thrive. So I'm thinking of the Black Panther motto, survival pending revolution—we have to, in order to build these systems that are in complete opposition to the systems that we currently exist within, at first survive within these systems, and we're at a time in the world where we are barely surviving. That's why land ownership is really an important tactic in taking back our power, ensuring our survival so that we can get to a place where we can transcend these systems.

So this parallel of fighting the bad while we build the new, these have to happen simultaneously. And land ownership because of its deep connection to wellbeing, has to be a strategy in that. Because that's what capitalism and white supremacy has built. So that's a non-negotiable strategy that we have to use just to ensure that we could eat at the very least, so we can keep food on our tables and we could continue to breathe. Just using a very general metaphor: we just have to be able to breathe, so that we can transform the world before us. And there are some really dope strategies that use land ownership as the impetus to build something that's in complete opposition to land ownership.

So, for example, community land trusts, which actually started with Black rural farmers in Georgia, New Communities Inc., which is now called Resora, started the first community land ownership in the country here on Turtle Island, as a way to build more economic and political power for Black farmers at the time that were increasingly being displaced during the 1960s, through various federal and state efforts to basically steal land from Black people—so there's a longer story there that has a lot of literature on it, if folks want to do some research. New Communities Inc. starting the first community land trust in the country has been a model where we could practice what land stewardship looks like through collective land ownership.

We don't want to govern and dictate, as individuals, what happens on the land.

We own the land as collectives so that our entire community can benefit. It's not just about one individual or one family. It's about the entire community flourishing through this collective ownership model.

That, to me, leads to the ecological and spiritual stewardship that comes with that collectivity. There's something about kinship and relationality and relationships and ethical responsibilities that create this beautiful dynamic, in stark contrast to the racialized oppression that we've been socialized within.

And so community land trusts [are] an example of what that looks like, when we forefront collectivity and solidarity and kinship and relationality and mutual accountability, all of these things that capitalism, white supremacy, wants to destroy and wants to not encourage because it will render this system ineffective. So we actively practice these things as successful strategies in dismantling the system, as we still work to survive within that very system.

Kamea Chayne: That's a really beautiful reminder.

With everything we've discussed, I know you've been keen on shifting away from the deficit perspective of what Black agrarianism is to a more joyous, victorious, and glorious lens of what Black farming is. What have been your motivations to support this narrative shift? And what are some final calls to action or deeper inquiry that you'd like to leave with our listeners?

shakara tyler: I can't end without mentioning the huge call to action that Sankofa means for me. So Sankofa is a symbol within the Adinkra cultural system that means essentially to go back and fetch it. Like we draw in history and memory, while looking forward. And this brings up a lot of things for me. So on one hand, the veneration of our sacred foodways is extremely important for racial healing, whole mind, body and spirit healing, again dismantling these current systems and building new ones to replace them. All of these things come together in ways that I think lead to the veneration of our sacred foodways as a sacred process of reclamation. This is the spiritual ecology of Black food.

We can't talk about freedom if we're not talking about the inter-relationality and the mutual liberation that is encompassed in that through the spiritual component of the work.

To add onto that, I'll say that healing is a collective work. Many Black people would say that. Those that are not already sold on Black agrarian strategies to liberation, or even just food sovereignty generally as a tactic in building more sustainable communities and whole freedom, mind, body and spirit freedom for people at every angle of the world... Many Black people have a deep, deep, deep, deep trauma with the land. And I think Leah Penniman said it best. She said that we have confused what happened on the land, with the land itself.

And I'm just speaking within a particular vein of Blackness because that's how I identify and that's where a lot of my work resides, to call in my folks to heal ourselves based on this deeply internalized trauma around land. And we can't do that if we're not doing that together. So healing is a collective work, and that's why many of the groups and institutions that I'm a part of, whether it's the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network or the Black Dirt Farm Collective or the Detroit Peoples Food Co-op, many, many other organizations that I love dearly, like we all have this common theme of collectivity and solidarity, and using land work as an example of what it means for Black people to pull from our abundance and create something so drastically beautiful that it can't be defeated.

And to me, that has to start on land, because…

Land is ultimately the source of our sense of belonging. It stewards healing in ways that nothing else can.

And one of my mentors, Baba Malik Yakini, he says that food is the first economy of any civilization. And I'll extend that and say that land has to be the basis of that process. Since everybody has to eat, and everybody lives, works, plays, has some connection to land in some ways, whether it's healthy or not, we have to interrogate our relationships with land. We have to interrogate our relationships with food and use food and land, in particular, as the two keys that we use to unlock our greater liberation to other avenues.

And Audre Lorde, who is a prophet and my spiritual mentor, in so many ways, who is now an ancestor, she's a Black queer feminist, who has really beautiful writings on so many things that I won't even just nail down to one topic. She says that revolutionary change is not just fighting the good fight—and I'm paraphrasing—but it has to be about uprooting the pieces of the oppressor that has been supplanted within each of us through white supremacy culture, just through living in this society. And so I think we're at a time in the world, during this critical decade, where the planet is warming at alarming rates and there may not be a livable planet here or even 20 years from now, when my one-year-old is my age, there may not be a planet here—which is so heartbreaking.

To face the reality or that possibility at this time in the world, we have to really figure out a way to create healing spaces without relying on the systems of power that reinforce the oppressive systems.

And this has various manifestations. I've been doing this work long enough to know that if we're not finding ways to work through personality differences and find creative ways to share power with one another and to work through conflict in transformative and restorative ways, we aren't going to get to where we need to be. And I've been so heartbroken, being involved in various movements and having the wins truncated and having our work diluted on various tiers, because we're not healing together. We're not using this work as a healing modality to heal our internalized trauma. And maybe some of us are, but we're not doing this work in a way that heals ourselves in whole ways, and heals our communities as a return to that.

I think we have to figure out ways to heal together without reenacting queerphobia, transphobia, misogyny, anti-Blackness, internalized racial capitalism, fatphobia—all of these completely ostracizing mechanisms that create divisions within our movements.

If we're not unified and working as a healing collective that can interrogate the really atrocious shit that we bring to the movement spaces, like reflect on how we can grow as individuals so that our communities are stronger, then I often say, I don't know what we're doing. So to me, transformation is an inside-out process. That's why movements have to also be about the self-growth as well. And I don't see a lot of that.

And I came to this realization through my own mistakes. I've showed up in really shitty ways and started moving in spaces, I showed up in ways that subtracted from the divinity of the work. And I've learned my lessons and I'm doing my due diligence to work in ways that that is more aligned with movement building that will get us to our liberation, just to keep it very frank. And not all of us are there. If we don't find ways to heal from our internalized traumas and work through various differences that are based on interpersonal relationship building, then there is no grant that we could get that will get us to our liberation. I promise. And I'm speaking very directly to people that I love in movement spaces, and it's very hard to have certain conversations like this.

~ musical intermission ~

Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?

shakara tyler: Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, has been divine reading for me, for multiple reasons. In an interview that's published in the book, she talks about [how] everything worthwhile is done with other people. And this illuminates, again, what I've been talking about previously, the beauty of collectivity and cooperativism, and just how we need one another to do this work. There is no liberation, healing, justice, in any way, shape or form, if we're not doing it with one another, in ways that ensures that everyone is loved and respected, and probably most importantly, trusted.

Kamea Chayne: What is a motto, mantra or practice that helps you to stay grounded?

shakara tyler: [It']s [a] saying that I heard from a dear agrarian sister of mine, Aleya Fraser, who now resides in Trinidad and leads really beautiful Black agrarian co-op work there. She says that our hands have been here before. And she has a whole story based on her grandmother that lives in Trinidad, and the ancestral memory of the work for her, based on her grandmother's stories. But the motto, that we've been here before, brings up for me the importance of our ancestral memories in this work. And that actually, employing our ancestral memories is an indispensable way to achieving the wins that that we deeply seek in this work, because we're not alone in this battle.

So if we're not employing the power of the ancestry, the people that have been doing this work, even prior to us coming to the planet, and pulling from that divinity and that sacred power, that resides around, that none of us could ever touch because we're in human form... And at this particular moment, I think we're not employing our power in totality. And that's a huge part of our power that we often don't tap into just because sometimes we can't see it or we can't touch it or we can't hear it, depending on how you conceptualize that form, [but] the power comes within.

Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

shakara tyler: Mary Hooks, from the Atlanta chapter of Black Lives Matter, says the mandate for Black people in this time is to avenge the suffering of our ancestors, to earn the respect of future generations, and to be willing to be transformed, in service of the work. And I hold this statement very close to me, because it inspires me every day, to continue to do this work. It really illuminates for me the importance of why I do it.

Kamea Chayne: shakara, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an absolute honor to have you here. What final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?

shakara tyler: Toni Morrison says that the function of freedom is to free someone else. To that note, I'll say, ground your quest of freedom in the quest of someone else's freedom.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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