By Nick Keehler, Community Engagement Coordinator
The SCL Land Justice Committee, represented by Sister Sheila Karpan and Nick Keehler, Community Engagement Coordinator, attended the Land Justice Futures National Gathering May 19-22 in Adrian, Michigan. Nick shares this reflection on the experience and the conversations shaping the SCL Community’s ongoing journey in land justice, racial healing, and ecological care.
During our trip, we discussed our journey in land justice with other communities of Women Religious who are also on this journey of racial and ecological healing. There were many exciting stories about new beginnings, deepening partnerships, and even a land return from the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration to the Lac de Flambeau Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa.
Together, we visited several urban farms in Detroit that are doing inspiring work to feed their communities, reclaim their heritage, and heal their city from legacies of racist practices. To witness the community come together to care for their neighbors and their land felt like catching a glimpse of God’s preferred future for all creation. It was also a good reminder that the work of land justice is not solely about repairing harms done to Indigenous communities, but to all who are impacted by colonization.
As we sat down for lunch above the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network’s cooperative grocery store, one of the leaders of D-Town Farm led us in a ceremony giving thanks to our ancestors who came before us. We offered symbolic libations to all whose shoulders we stand on, and to all whose resistance of systemic oppression has paved the way for us to create new systems of interdependent thriving. Though it utilized a spiritual framework I am not familiar with, throughout this ceremony I could not help but be amazed by how our hosts were reclaiming their traditional spiritual pathways. Our country’s historical obsession with “whiteness” and “blackness” has stripped us all of any cultural identity, amalgamating rich cultures, traditions, folklore, and worldviews into a handful of colors. Whether we assimilated into whiteness or blackness, we all assimilated for survival, the difference being who was allowed to assimilate into a position of power. In the game of colonization, we all lose something, yet it is primarily those who have gained the least that feel the urgency to reclaim what has been stolen. The praxis of land justice is more than merely healing the land and those who had it stolen from them. It is a praxis of co-liberation. It is a praxis of learning to be in deep relationships again. For us who assimilated into whiteness, it is a praxis of removing the scales from our eyes to see everything the narrative of colonization has hidden from our view, and then to make the conscious decision to choose a different path.
D-Town Farms
The SCL Community has learned a lot about antiracism, ecological healing, and land justice in the past few years. And in recent months, we have gone beyond just knowing and moved into practice by actively cultivating relationships with mission-aligned land stewards, land seekers, and those who care as deeply as we do about the common good, with the expertise to back it up. Being in Detroit with our sisters and brothers in land justice affirmed that we are moving in the right direction. We are looking at our land and resources, asking ourselves to listen to how they yearn to support a transition away from the legacies of colonization. We are moving into deeper relationships that empower us to choose a different path. And when the Spirit is ready, we pray, we will be ready to step into something new.
