[Food Loop Northwest]

Great question Melony!!! Booker T., Carver, F.L. Hammer, G.W. Bush. The Ancestral innovation over thousands and thousands of decades passing on and nurturing a respect and honor for the land, water, seeds. Their excellence and skills legendary and often revolutionary in a non-violent way, changing the way health, wellness, and balance in our lifestyles as people of the Diaspora, pre-enslavement and post-enslavement (500 years isn’t long in the meta of it)! Those three words, for me, provide both meaning in sum, as meanings in each word; Black, having both a global clap-back against colonialism and a US political movement context, is the “easiest way to explain it to ‘white’ food sovereignty realities” meaning Black Food Sovereignty can be, and for many of the Diaspora, is a strategic economic development movement that takes the approach, methodology, conversation, investment, money, land ownership, and benefits away from anyone who is not completely and explicitly working towards creating environments in the complete food system (**ref any 5-7 connected circle image you know of…) that provide Black and African people the ability to freely innovate, dream, create, propagate, formulate, ferment, or reestablish our solidly and sustainably owned farms, forests, facilities, services, products, profits, and our own futures in a healed and whole manner.

African/Black/Diaspora Food Sovereignty in many ways cannot happen without a formal establishment of healthy relations with the Indigenous Peoples of these lands. (I hear the eyes rolling)…However it is a real thing. Our relationship to the land, our trauma, is the thing that has us thinking that we “deserve 40 acres” for what happened to us, my family, yours, all of our ancestors.

And yet still, we are not “owed” stolen land, from another hand. So, how do we find a new way, a shared path to restoring balance in nature, in our minds, and in our souls before it is too late. Our work is unique in the Pacific Northwest and black people helped found some of Washington’s first towns; Centralia and Tumwater. Black women in Oregon, married and widowed from white “husbands” won two court cases in the Oregon Supreme Court in the 1880’s for the Carson Ranch.

We are all making history as we reside here in the PNW as well. It’s not like you haven’t participated in the 1st Black centered Farm and Food Gathering, in fact March 17th -20th 2023, at Evergreen State College, Tacoma in honor of it’s history of doing the work and creating more doers of the work!! Shout out to Dr. Maxine Mims, Dr. Gilda Sheppard, RIP Dr. LaVersa Sullivan. There are food justice folks all around this region that have been putting in the work for decades and newer leadership, like you, BIPOC growers of all styles and products! We are in, a….Black Food Renaissance of sorts, which could be considered a moment when Sovereignty or self-determination and statement of Parity is made formally to make it real for us, and no one else, then share our bounties, like we always have for eons, and become our Ancestors visions!