March 2023
Arlington, TX
About a year ago, a friend of mine asked if I might like to document the creation of a new seed farm she was leading, one committed to restorative justice for Black, Indigenous and other communities in the northeast who have been systematically (and systemically) dispossessed over centuries of seeds that are culturally meaningful to them. These are plants with deep and often entangled histories—Long Island Cheese Squash, Lenape Blue Corn, Ultracross Heirloom Collards and Okra, Ukrainian Sunflowers, Korean Hibiscus Cannabinus, a Slovakian pepper called the Zipser Turkenspitz.
At first I demurred. "You know I don't really do redemption," I thought. Often, my work feels like an elegy—like a visual record of the end of the world as we know it. She insisted that the seed farm aimed to undo a whole lot of damage. Maybe it could provide a platform and resources for communities at the center of important and protracted battles for seed and food sovereignty—people who have been underestimated and ignored by the USDA, their state departments of agriculture, research universities and the industrial GMO seed industry.
But as I sat with the idea, and the more I learned about the importance of seeds—as human sustenance, living expressions of culture and arks of biodiversity—the moral heft of the opportunity accumulated. I've since come to understand my friend's invitation as a gift I simply wasn't prepared to grasp the meaning of at the time it was offered.