\n<\/p>\n
Nelson\u2019s story, \u201cThe Land Back Movement Is Also About Foodways,\u201d<\/a> recounts the 19th-century seizure of Indigenous hunting, fishing, and gathering grounds by settlers and the military across the United States. \u201cNative peoples have lost nearly 99 percent<\/a> of their historical land base in the U.S. . . . With it, they lost access to important hunting and fishing grounds as well as myriad places to gather and prepare food,\u201d writes Nelson, an Alaska Tlingit tribal member.<\/p>\n The Land Back movement, she says, is driven by a desire for \u201ca powerful yearning to rebuild relationships to actual places\u2014and the countless living things that inhabit them.\u201d And, from Minnesota to California, tribes are managing to do just that, she reports, reclaiming grasslands for bison, farmland for sacred corn, and forests for harvesting wild rice.<\/p>\n Nelson also points out that land under Indigenous stewardship holds benefits for all of us, citing studies that support the power of traditional ecological practices to offset climate change. \u201cThe future we\u2019re fighting for is not just a future for Indigenous people\u2014it\u2019s a future for people everywhere,\u201d says Oglala Lakota Nick Tilsen, the CEO of NDN Collective, a Native-led activist coalition.<\/p>\n In addition, Nelson\u2019s story was recognized by the James Beard Journalism Awards<\/a> committee as part of The Deep Dish, our member newsletter, which is a finalist for the Columns and Newsletters award (the winners will be announced on June 14).<\/p>\n We\u2019re also celebrating \u201cBlack Earth,\u201d<\/a> a lyrical profile of a North Carolina farmer that we cross-posted<\/a> from The Bitter Southerner<\/em><\/a>, written by Civil Eats\u2019 Associate Editor Christina Cooke, whose nuanced, graceful writing appears regularly on our site. \u201cBlack Earth\u201d is in the running for a James Beard Award too.<\/p>\n In telling the story of Patrick Brown, who recently purchased the plantation where his ancestors had been enslaved, Cooke deeply explores hundreds of years of Brown family history against the backdrop of American racism and discrimination, showing the family\u2019s struggles and triumphs in an epic feat of reporting. She dives deep into Brown\u2019s own many-chaptered life, too, recounting his farm childhood and his work in real estate, as an agricultural advisor in Afghanistan, with the Department of Defense, and now as a regenerative hemp farmer and grower of vegetables for his community. All of this richly told history resonates in the story\u2019s final scenes, with Brown on his farm, \u201ccarrying out acts of reclamation, finding ways to push back against the systems designed to oppress people of color.\u201d<\/p>\n To arrive at the final selections for the anthology, series editor and food writer Jaya Saxena combed through submissions from print and online publications, as well as doing her own research. Then she and guest editor Bryant Terry, the cookbook author and food activist, reviewed them. Both Nelson\u2019s and Cooke\u2019s pieces, she said, \u201chit that great intersection of speaking to the food and travel conversation happening in America right now, as well as being just genuinely beautiful writing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n