Indigenous People & Land Statement
Phoenix Farm is committed, however imperfectly, to collaborating, reimagining, and supporting Indigenous People and the Land.
We are actively listening, learning, and engaging when appropriate with Native American communities, organizations and individuals and seeking equitable partnerships.
Pennsylvania’s particular racist history with First Nations is deeply tragic, compounding, and troubling with the founding, history, and replication of the Carlisle Indian School, multiple massacres, as well as having no state or federally recognized land or tribal councils in the commonwealth.
Phoenix Farm does not claim to have answers to the questions of, “how do we begin or support this necessary historic and social repair?”, but we do aim to be as present and supportive as possible in the process and unfolding of the reestablishment of Indigenous Values, leadership, and well resourced continuation of the cultures, lands, and people.
If you or your organization that supports First Nations folks is seeking land and native plant access, please be in touch on our contact page.
The Fuller Statement, Part 1: My Process in Getting Honest about Indigenous Land and People
I love this sacred and rugged land that I live with- it is so deeply precious to me, and over the past many years, a reckoning has unfolded within my heart, mind, body, and spirit, because this farm, 72miles west and slightly north of the Carlisle Indian School, in the place known as Penn's Woods since 1681, is indeed stolen land.
These beautiful rolling fields of turtlebacks are the very gorgeous grooved and hued segments of Turtle Island’s carapace. They along with the ridged, rocky woodlands and the low marshy areas of creek bottom and stream have come to be Home, but they are not mine.
If there is any “belonging”, it is I, we to the land.
Devotion to this place is now etched into my bone and sinew, and perhaps always has been, as it’s been nearly a century that my family has dwelled here. This land has absorbed me, saturated my psyche, and continues to heal, challenge, and speak to me. I am ever so grateful to be in relation to ki’s Living Spirit, but this land is not mine. I am a white settler on unceded ground and if there is any “belonging”, it is I, we to the land.
I have spent years aiming to reconcile the fact that although I have my own personal and collective trauma, as all of us have, my greatest privilege is that of my whiteness and colonial settler identity.
Because of this, I have come to understand that there are things that have been put out of my sight and knowledge- intentionally. There are things about our history that have been erased, intentionally bleached from our memory, and that pattern has set us up for tremendous misunderstanding.
Because of this, there are things in this life that are just not reconcilable- for some things there is no “fix”.
There is no un-doing the past, or the subsequent centuries of gagging the truth.
There is no understanding how physical or cultural genocide of one people, so that another people can make their home freely, makes any sense to the human heart, spirit or body.
There is no “good” reason for racism, sickening hatred, putrid ignorant judgment, or the rape and pillage of families and their ancestral home.
(Although there is no good reason for any of this, there is much to understand and unpack around white settlers having been the European descendents of the colonized people of the Roman Empire, and after a few hundred years of their own terror, they became so accustomed to colonized rule, they were able to take that mindset across the Atlantic and destroy others physically, economically, spiritually, and culturally..but that unpack is a statement for another time, so back to centering Indigenous Folks and their Land)
There is no one thing that can be “done” to make any of these atrocities right.
There isn’t a checklist or program that can be done on weekends that will make amends for this shared history of white settlers and Indigenous folk.
There just isn’t, and that is the heartbreaking truth.
For some time I wondered if that was the end of it- just despair and grief about the colonial project and it’s oppression of all black, indigenous, people of color, and anyone not white, rich, male, and heteronormative. After some time and the deep embodied knowing that there is no going back, and there is no current repair to engage with in this region, I came to the point in my own grief that just as a destructive fire takes everything down to bare ground, if you give it time, new life will begin to show itself, and there is potential for another iteration of being.
I do not know how that iteration will happen, or when, or with whom, but I pray that Phoenix Farm, or however it is known in that time, will be a place of sustainment, enhancement, and authentic support of that beautiful vision and work.
Although I don’t know how it will all unfold, I knew that the next best step was to start with making the most of what I can, with what I have, from where I am.
So I listened.
I listened and had the honor of learning from a number of teachers and leaders who are indigenous folks, and other folks of color, and I was told, that is the first step. Listen.
Listen to indigenous voices, listen to indigenous women, listen to black and brown women- listen to folks of color and their stories. Listen to their experience- and know that their stories are their truth, and their individual truths build a collective truth.
What I’ve learned is that there is potential for growing capacity to hold multiplicity, expression of truth, compassion, deeper understanding, which can then lead to how to apply that deeper understanding in word and deed. And it is from that place of irreconcilable knowing, that very privilege, and humility that I offer this flawed but heartfelt statement of Indigenous Land that has come to be named Phoenix Farm, and the people that would move through this place.
I offer this because I believe that most of us, even if we did not know someone, but knew that they lost everything- their family, their homes, all that they knew, would hold that sorrow with compassion and empathy, and that is what I’ve come to know as a the beginning of the greater healing. To be in our humanity, to acknowledge the great losses, to have deep compassion for that grief, and to allows ourselves to move through that together, honoring what once was, what happened, where we find ourselves now, and through a great deal of truth, love, and heartache, we can move forward, and genuinely build something together.
Part 2: Forthcoming and emerging...
I love this sacred and rugged land that I live with- it is so deeply precious to me, and over the past many years, a reckoning has unfolded within my heart, mind, body, and spirit, because this farm, 72miles west and slightly north of the Carlisle Indian School, in the place known as Penn's Woods since 1681, is indeed stolen land.
These beautiful rolling fields of turtlebacks are the very gorgeous grooved and hued segments of Turtle Island’s carapace. They along with the ridged, rocky woodlands and the low marshy areas of creek bottom and stream have come to be Home, but they are not mine.
If there is any “belonging”, it is I, we to the land.
Devotion to this place is now etched into my bone and sinew, and perhaps always has been, as it’s been nearly a century that my family has dwelled here. This land has absorbed me, saturated my psyche, and continues to heal, challenge, and speak to me. I am ever so grateful to be in relation to ki’s Living Spirit, but this land is not mine. I am a white settler on unceded ground and if there is any “belonging”, it is I, we to the land.
I have spent years aiming to reconcile the fact that although I have my own personal and collective trauma, as all of us have, my greatest privilege is that of my whiteness and colonial settler identity.
Because of this, I have come to understand that there are things that have been put out of my sight and knowledge- intentionally. There are things about our history that have been erased, intentionally bleached from our memory, and that pattern has set us up for tremendous misunderstanding.
Because of this, there are things in this life that are just not reconcilable- for some things there is no “fix”.
There is no un-doing the past, or the subsequent centuries of gagging the truth.
There is no understanding how physical or cultural genocide of one people, so that another people can make their home freely, makes any sense to the human heart, spirit or body.
There is no “good” reason for racism, sickening hatred, putrid ignorant judgment, or the rape and pillage of families and their ancestral home.
(Although there is no good reason for any of this, there is much to understand and unpack around white settlers having been the European descendents of the colonized people of the Roman Empire, and after a few hundred years of their own terror, they became so accustomed to colonized rule, they were able to take that mindset across the Atlantic and destroy others physically, economically, spiritually, and culturally..but that unpack is a statement for another time, so back to centering Indigenous Folks and their Land)
There is no one thing that can be “done” to make any of these atrocities right.
There isn’t a checklist or program that can be done on weekends that will make amends for this shared history of white settlers and Indigenous folk.
There just isn’t, and that is the heartbreaking truth.
For some time I wondered if that was the end of it- just despair and grief about the colonial project and it’s oppression of all black, indigenous, people of color, and anyone not white, rich, male, and heteronormative. After some time and the deep embodied knowing that there is no going back, and there is no current repair to engage with in this region, I came to the point in my own grief that just as a destructive fire takes everything down to bare ground, if you give it time, new life will begin to show itself, and there is potential for another iteration of being.
I do not know how that iteration will happen, or when, or with whom, but I pray that Phoenix Farm, or however it is known in that time, will be a place of sustainment, enhancement, and authentic support of that beautiful vision and work.
Although I don’t know how it will all unfold, I knew that the next best step was to start with making the most of what I can, with what I have, from where I am.
So I listened.
I listened and had the honor of learning from a number of teachers and leaders who are indigenous folks, and other folks of color, and I was told, that is the first step. Listen.
Listen to indigenous voices, listen to indigenous women, listen to black and brown women- listen to folks of color and their stories. Listen to their experience- and know that their stories are their truth, and their individual truths build a collective truth.
What I’ve learned is that there is potential for growing capacity to hold multiplicity, expression of truth, compassion, deeper understanding, which can then lead to how to apply that deeper understanding in word and deed. And it is from that place of irreconcilable knowing, that very privilege, and humility that I offer this flawed but heartfelt statement of Indigenous Land that has come to be named Phoenix Farm, and the people that would move through this place.
I offer this because I believe that most of us, even if we did not know someone, but knew that they lost everything- their family, their homes, all that they knew, would hold that sorrow with compassion and empathy, and that is what I’ve come to know as a the beginning of the greater healing. To be in our humanity, to acknowledge the great losses, to have deep compassion for that grief, and to allows ourselves to move through that together, honoring what once was, what happened, where we find ourselves now, and through a great deal of truth, love, and heartache, we can move forward, and genuinely build something together.
Part 2: Forthcoming and emerging...