Healing Grounds Chapter 2 - Sorrel

    Reading about Olivia Watkins and her family’s forested land in North Carolina was really interesting. There’s something powerful about a Black woman taking care of land that’s been in her family since the 1890s – especially knowing how rare that kind of inheritance is due to the long history of Black land dispossession in this country. Watkins isn’t just managing trees and soil – she’s stewarding memory, protection, and resistance. That forest has absorbed generations of her family’s care, and now she’s continuing that legacy through agroforestry.

I thought it was a neat perspective how Watkins sees the forest as a living archive. It holds a record of survival, not in words but in roots and canopy. Her approach to agroforestry isn’t just about ecological sustainability – it’s about preserving something sacred. In a world where land is so often reduced to its monetary value, her story is a reminder that land can also be refuge, kin, and history. It’s easy to talk about climate solutions in abstract terms, but Olivia Watkins’s work brings it down to Earth (literally) and ties it to lineage, healing, and the right to belong.

    Indigenous farming practices approach land as something to be in relationship with – something to respect, care for, and listen to. There's a strong sense of reciprocity embedded in these methods: the land provides, but people also give back, not just through physical actions like planting or harvesting, but through ceremony, intention, and care. In contrast, Western agricultural systems often treat land as a resource to be maximized, commodified, and controlled. This extractive mindset prioritizes short-term gains over long-term health, both for ecosystems and communities. The difference isn’t just in technique – it’s in worldview.

    What really stood out to me was the critique of how some regenerative agriculture movements co-opt Indigenous practices while failing to include Indigenous people. It’s not enough to adopt a few “sustainable” techniques and call it justice. Without addressing the historical context – land theft, displacement, erasure – it’s just another form of extraction.

    This chapter reminded me that healing land is about more than soil health or carbon storage. It’s about restoring relationships – with the earth, with each other, and with the histories we often choose to forget. If we're serious about building a better food system, Black and Indigenous voices can’t be an afterthought – they need to be leading the way in changing our system.