Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons

by Justine M. Williams

The wealth of this nation was built, and continues to be constructed on, the backs of our people, and this has left us with deep, inheritable scars. Returning to the land requires that we address emotional and spiritual healing with at least as much intention as we invest in training and material resources. Yonette Fleming, a farmer, healer, and organizer with Hattie Carthan Community Garden, was raised in Guyana by a family and society that cherished sustainable agriculture. When she moved to the US, she was swept up by a corporate culture that demanded that she sacrifice her body and spirit to advance capitalism. Fleming shares, “I learned to be a ‘white male’ and put money above every other interest. I worked for 12-14 hours daily with mandatory overtime. I became grossly overweight” (Fleming 2016). On September 11, 2001 Fleming emerged from the subway on Chamber St., Manhattan and witnessed her office towers fall, and with them, everything inside of her. With dust on her pressed suit and patent leather heels, she walked all the way back to Brooklyn and began to examine how she had lost herself in the money structure and artificial constructs of success. She deconstructed her false life and built it again on integrity and ancestral wisdom. She became a “servant to this planet.” “I came to the earth with an open heart and said ‘teach me, mold me, shape me, inform me with a new intelligence.’”

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