Gardens as spaces for celebrating decolonizing
This can be pretty interesting, although it can also be pretty prosaic. But I am never happier than when I get to celebrate with people how their gardens make them free. I start this story with the Hamline Free Vegetable Garden, then dig into some layers of what it can mean for gardens to support freedom, even beyond free vegetables:
Naima Penniman and Alixa Garcia, the music and spoken word duo Climbing PoeTREE deliver a hard hitting analysis of the contrast between disinvested urban landscapes and the power of gardens to heal in their song and music video collaboration with Toshi Reagon and Rising Appalachia, Love Will Triumph. I include four clips here that highlight the role of the garden, along with their place-animating STITCHED project, which combines clothes meaningful to people from the many places they did workshops stitching story quilts, and which they weave through the broken down landscape to help heal intergenerational and intergroup traumas they sing about:
Naima's sister Leah Penniman, widely recognized as one of the country's central food and agriculture justice leaders, and the author of Farming While Black, adds additional layers to this exploration of food production as liberation:
[add video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO34aqr-bE0]
[add and edit video from here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1601-d_5f4aZXFAOaJBU_8qZRLZURe7ip?usp=sharing ]
And together with their community, they build many entry points to this vision, such as Harriet's Apothecary:
The Solution Spotlight:
And the Hurricane Season Curriculum:
