The Dive, Season 02

REST REVOLT REPEAT

Dear friends,

The need for solidarity–that deep, disciplined, action-oriented expression of love for others–is clear and urgent as we witness one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in recent history. The same forces of settler colonialism, capitalism, and militarism driving the current genocide in Gaza are also behind the displacement of Indigenous communities and communities of color around the world. Because the struggle for a Free Palestine is part of the struggle for land justice here and abroad, this second issue of The Dive finds us uplifting the voices of collaborators to reflect on the meaning of solidarity in the current moment.

Last year, we spoke at a conference on alternatives to settler colonial farming practices. We met one of this issue’s collaborators there, sarah sao mai habib, who approached Minnow wanting to understand intercultural solidarity from our different colonial legacies. A series of interviews came about from her inquiry, with some happening in the first weeks of the USbacked invasion of Gaza by the state of Israel.

At about the same time, we met Palestinian visual artist, storyteller, and educator Lorain Khalil Rihan, who graciously reached out to Minnow to offer a solidarity contribution. We wondered if the intercultural solidarity that sarah inquired about was also behind Lorain’s gesture, so we invited her to share more about her motivations and what solidarity means to her as a Palestinian in forced

exile and in the context of the Zionist occupation of her homeland.

We also welcomed the unique perspective of MvskokeJewish naturalist Noah Schlager, who reflects on the concept of home, homelands, and the limits of language to describe our relationships between ourselves, the land, and our nonhuman relatives. He takes us through lands near and far connected to his life story, inviting us to think deeper about Indigeneity, invasion, and occupation.

Lastly, we offer two reflections on how our approach to communications and our critique of philanthropy fit into Minnow’s expression of solidarity and our mission to advance land justice.

All our gratitude goes to sarah, Lorain, Noah, and this issue’s featured artist, Colin Kimzey, for giving their time, creativity, patience, and passion at a time of immense heartache. In receiving each of their voices through written word or visual art, we hope you find the same solace and good company we’ve discovered working to share them with you.

In solidarity,

Javier Roman Neil Thapar Co-Directors Minnow

Background photo on previous spread: Lucio Patone on Unsplash

PRELUDE & OUTLINE FOR A SLOW COMMS MANIFESTO

By Javier Roman-Nieves

The thinking behind Minnow’s strategic communications

NEXT SPREAD: Some examples of printed goodies that our supporters get in the mail. Flip to the last page and learn how you can get in on it, too.

By Javier Román-Nieves

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni–we go round and round in the night and are consumed by the fire–wrote the poet Virgil. In 1978, Guy Debord turned this palindrome into a film, his last critique of consumer society and capitalist alienation. Little has changed since. The unsettling angst of the phrase still captures the churning and turning in the night for the discontent. It’s only the flame that’s different nowadays.

We toss and wind around luminous screens, handheld like torches, or hearth-like in our homes, nannies to our babies behind vehicle seats–our existence, interconnections, and sense of belonging have become co-opted, mediated, dictated by the liquid crystal displays of these devices. Philosopher ByungChul Han describes our tics with them as rosary-like praying with machines that tie us to a greater sense of self, others, and the world. It is, of course, not just the devices by themselves.

The luminous and acoustic flux they deliver draws us to them as if we were bugs flying toward the light. Like societal spells, our rhythm, pacing, and attention span have become intertwined by that flame. Now, we are expected to be not only consumers but also producers whose data is exploited for profit without compensation. Exposure and likes are at the mercy of algorithms we have no control over, “I used to enjoy your posts, but now they don’t show up for me.”

Content trends come and go as fast as the platforms they populate our screens with–Cory

Doctorow calls the process enshittification. They start out giving us what we want for free but ruin themselves and our feeds the moment they are pressed for monetization. “Video is where it’s at” was yesterday’s mantra, and who knows what tomorrow’s mantra will be. We are tired of it. Our lives, struggles, and work should not be subject to invisible tolls, gatekeepers, or algorithmic whims.

Our alienation is being exploited. What desktops hard-wired to the internet used to connect between our alienating spatial infrastructure–suburbs and cities with little or no public spaces–wireless and handheld technology now tether out into the open. Physically, the extent of their spell is held by battery-stored power and fake plastic trees with repetition antennas mingling among real ones–an electromagnetic matrix potentiated by rare earth minerals taken from distant lands by weary hands. It’s a long way from church bells and chronometers of seafaring imperialists, but who keeps the time now anyway?

To many, the pandemic and its lockdowns brought liberation from the workplace. This came with the shackles of screenified meetings, a gesture-changing remote-work reality complete with Zoom-waves, as assessed by Faith Hill. Even if it’s blacked out with only our names, being ever-present for the screen brought a new fatigue to an already exhausting reality. We love screen breaks for a reason.

But for all these downsides, the reckoning that followed the summer of 2020 would not have happened without the viralization of George Floyd’s murder

that our screenified reality enabled. The same goes for the Arab Spring that came before and the current mobilizations in solidarity with a Free Palestine. However, new technologies are consistently implemented with little or no idea of their effects on human societies. Improvements or phase-outs are only brought about after the fact by mounting death tolls. On social media, the jury is still out.

We acknowledge the potential of this luminous screen interconnectivity, yet we pause and consider its contradictions, profiteers, and underlying material reality. Along with constant reflection, we propose a different approach, a slower way of communicating that may, ironically, accelerate our interconnectedness.

An outline for a manifesto

Analogous to Slow Food, Slow Communications entails an alternative outlook on how we communicate and create meaning outside the whims of algorithms. Slow Comms places itself and its practitioners outside the time-is-money logic of capitalistism. It undermines the dictums of productivity and strives to liberate time from all exploitative logic.

Slow Comms is outside the daily grind of press rooms and doesn’t submit to their editorial mandates. It sees journalists as co-conspirators in unraveling our truths. It rejects tabloids and corporate media with their draining turnarounds and ad-driven deadlines. It prioritizes doing things well and justly over expediency. It’s about living first and communicating as a function of liberation.

Slow Comms is late when it has to be, stays silent when it has nothing to say, and cedes space and attention to others when more pressing messages need to be communicated. It strives to disarm, change, and replace prevailing narratives and their harms. It strives to give voice to the unheard and to shut down the drowning noise of propaganda.

Slow Comms seeks media justice. It recognizes how white supremacy lingers in the way we are expected to tell stories and find our truths. It acknowledges how the written word has been centered and extolled for centuries over oral traditions. It embraces unjustly neglected ancestral traditions and brings them forward to their rightful place.

Slow Comms may be entertaining, but does not seek to entertain. It may be enjoyed anywhere, but prefers you sit down and take time to take it in. It does not like disposable containers or vanishing, ephemeral appearances on feeds. It is not meant to train algorithms, but

rather to enrich the ways we see, hear, and share our world, lives, and struggles.

Slow Comms takes its time to think about our stories, how they are told, and by who and for whom they are shared. It rejects parachute journalism and fast news production while prioritizing context and nuance. It embraces individuals as content producers while respecting expertise and community-building through sharing. Only there does it create meaning.

Slow Comms understands language as a living, malleable tool shaped by people, culture, and other languages instead of a rigid, algorithmically predictable, or policed practice of empire-building. It is critical of the cloud and data exploitation and turns towards the tactile and the haptic, returning to print and the richness of the graphic traditions.

Slow Comms knows that images are produced behind the interface of photo editing software as much as they are behind the camera lens. It does not pretend

to be objective but embraces subjectivity in purposeful ways–liberation over virality.

Slow Comms doesn’t cancel social media but finds value in different things altogether–not the likes, views, or shares–but in the replies, handwritten notes, and in-person gratitude, comments, and conversations inspired by what is communicated. It does not strive to convert to any cause. It’s itself cause and conversion through praxis. It’s time-liberated.

Slow Comms operates under a different valorization of time, not as a resource to be commodified, but as a decolonized dimension, a right whose enjoyment is a prerequisite for life–right to time–and one that necessitates the urgent, pressing need for improvement to make life worth living for all.

Slow Comms takes a while. Sit down. Take it slow. ◆

Javier (he/they) serves as Director of Strategic Storytelling at Minnow. Visit our website for staff bios.

Photo: Miguel Urieta on Unsplash

COLLECTIVE LIBERATION & COLONIAL LEGACIES

An introduction to a series of conversations on intercultural solidarity to be published soon in Minnow’s blog

By sarah sao mai habib

Ifirst learned about Minnow at the Regenerate conference in late 2022 while supporting a cohort of majority BIPOC land stewards in attendance. The cohort started to open up after a few speakers (out of dozens) elucidated the history of land ownership and the potential for land return to Indigenous communities in the so-called US. Minnow’s Director of Land and Financial Redistribution, Neil Thapar, was one of the speakers. I was grateful for their disruption of the status quo; the usual sanitizing of agriculture & climate discussions from the ongoing effects of colonization.

I later learned that Minnow was led by collaborators of Vietnamese, South Asian/Indian, and Puerto Rican descent who have dedicated themselves to securing land tenure for Indigenous communities and farmers of color on Turtle Island. As someone who believes in the necessity of supporting movements beyond borders, I wanted to learn more about them.

And so I reached out to Minnow with a series of questions about both the purposeful challenges and resources within our respective legacies, myself embodying Kuwaiti, Iraqi, Vietnamese, diasporic, and interfaith lineages. I asked about their organization and how it fits into a vision of intercultural partnerships in land sovereignty work. Fast forward to Autumn of 2023. I was able to speak with Minnow’s co-directors from September through October, just as the latest aggression on Gaza started and amidst growing global awareness of the 75-year genocidal Israeli occupation of Palestine.

We were not planning on sharing these conversations during a time of sharpening contradictions and heightening consciousness around Palestine and the interconnectedness of global movements, yet that is where we’ve found ourselves. We spoke about carrying unique resiliencies & colonial subjectivities that form a broader picture of how we move toward collective liberation. I do not take for granted that more of us are remembering our shared histories; learning and unlearning our oppressive conditionings, and remembering our collective power to change this trajectory.

As you’ll read later in the full interviews, Palestinians’ relentless spirit of resistance is echoed

in other occupied territories, like Puerto Rico. Minnow’s Director of Strategic Storytelling, Javier Roman, was born and raised there. Reflecting on his lineage as a colonial subject, he shared with me that “there is a component about resistance, particularly among folks who stay in the island no matter the circumstances, which is just saying no–we’re going to stay here [...] this is our piece of rock between the Atlantic and the Caribbean and we’re just going to make it here.” Puerto Ricans have endured worse conditions with much fewer resources, he says, and they’re going to make it there while also being themselves, “It doesn’t matter that we have a US passport and that we’re second-class US citizens. We’re still Puerto Ricans. We’re never going to be ‘Americans.”

I am deeply changed each day as I continue to witness this resistance, awakening a defiant recognition of my many embodiments and legacies. My inner architecture is continually reorienting as I observe organizers & protectors wisely act on the indivisibility of our liberation; Palestinian, Indigenous, Diasporic, Migrant, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, and many more. Thanks to them, I’m learning how the same colonial tactics from before 1492 to 1948 to today are deployed on land and people.

In reviewing my conversations with Minnow, I was reminded of how colonial powers collude. For example, the way Great Britain, which enables the Israeli state and its decades-long settler project, has also divided lands and peoples elsewhere. Neil attested to that in our conversation. His ancestors were directly impacted by the 1947 partition of India, after which they moved from what’s now Pakistan into India. “In some ways, it’s strange to say that I’m Indian. I tend more towards the term South Asian because they’re just a series of lines that got drawn at a certain time that determined what name one had to use. And even though my parents heavily identify as Indian because of their experience and what they grew up around–including significant antagonism towards people on the other side of that made-up border–I don’t carry that with me because that was not my experience.” He remarks that while distance disconnected him from many aspects of his culture, it also allowed him to cultivate a different understanding of place and history.

Zooming out to other recent conversations, we are reminded how ecocide and genocide are one and the same. We remember the massacre of bison in the 19th century Plains as deliberate attacks on Indigenous people. We remember the violent uprooting of olive trees as deliberate attacks on Palestinians to this day, and the cruel forced starvation we are witnessing in Gaza due to the compounding effects of Israeli land theft, siege, attacks on farming, grazing, fishing, and thus manufactured reliance on humanitarian aid.

During Unheard Palestine: a press conference with Palestinian land-based groups, held on November 6th, 2023, and organized by A Growing Culture, Yasmeen El-Hasan of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees said, “Just two days ago, Israel bombed fisher people’s boats. The farmers whose land has not been destroyed already can’t access their land […] Agricultural lands, poultry farms, fisheries have all been damaged to the point that they are non-functional.”

During the event, Mariam Al Jaajaa of the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN) also shared that: “There is a systemic attack on trees for their value for the agricultural sector [...] Israelis know that if they uproot these ancient trees, it’s more easy to uproot people.”

In her film Foragers (2022) and her article Where Nature Ends and Settlements Begin, Palestinian visual artist Jumana Manna speaks of the Israeli settler state outlawing Palestinians from their ancestral lifeways of relating to za’atar (thyme) and artichoke-like ‘akkoub, as just one of many prohibitions undermining food and cultural sovereignty.

Moving from interspecies relationships within place and towards time, Minnow’s former Director of Farm and Policy Programs, Mai Nguyen, shared temporal wisdom from their Vietnamese heritage. Mai remarks how they’ve learned from their lineage the power of resistance to colonialism, which goes back for thousands of years; “we would have periods of like 400 years of independence, then 200 years of colonial subjugation under China.” This taught Mai to think on longer timelines; “to say: yes, Indigenous peoples in the Americas have been colonized for 500 years of Western European presence, but how does that

fit into a longer time scale of resistance? And then saying that those 500 years are not predictive of the next 500 years.” From that lineage, they draw the experiences of “maintaining the persistence; the commitment to resisting colonial powers to be a part of a solidarity movement for sovereignty here.”

Lastly, it’s important to notice the colonial severing and distortion of relationships extending to language during this time. We see consistent racist Islamophobic redefinition and censorship of Arabic words such as Intifada and Jihad. South Asian American writer Fatima Asghar shares: “All of these words, these specific concepts, this poetry, reduced to being considered ‘terrorism’; because the machines of Western propaganda have been intent on making Muslim people into savages, to justify the way that they bomb us, undercut our governments, pit us against each other, and deplete our lands.” And Lebanese-American musician and writer Hamed Sinno clarifies that Intifada means: “An Awakening. A brisk, vigorous motion or movement, the way a bird shakes to remove the dust weighing down its wings.”

In writing this introduction to my conversations with Minnow, I am reminded of the vigorous shaking that animals (including us) do after traumatic events, which helps us to metabolize the fear and return back to ourselves. We are living in a time of mass, vigorous movement in response to mass systemic, colonial, and imperial violence. Unapologetically sharing our truths can unearth our connections and just how much power we have in each other’s mutual care and commitment to all of our liberation. I believe we come from long lines of resistors, of people who managed to not only survive, but also create beauty amidst many endings. And I believe an honest reckoning of our personal histories will strengthen our collective bloodline. ◆

sarah (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker with diasporic Vietnamese, Iraqi, and Kuwaiti roots. She holds a Master of Architecture with a focus on infrastructures of care from Columbia University. sarah created Home Sovereignty Studio, a twofold practice centered on narrative and material change while returning to lineages of collective liberation.

THIS ZINE-LETTER’S ARTIST

NEXT SPREAD:

COLIN KIMZEY is the commissioned artist for this issue of The Dive. Colin (he/him) is a mixed-race Chinese American from Yelamu (San Francisco), currently based on unceded Kumeyaay land (San Diego). His subjects intersect “histories of migration, labor, urban development, and radical politics” and are often grounded in the artist’s Asian American heritage as it relates to place and time.

Colin’s work is a conceptual articulation of traditional silkscreen printing and illustration that hinges on historical and archival materials. His projects usually interrogate public spaces and art–monuments, street graphics, or cultural iconography–to inform site-specific interventions in that flux of meaning through original, repurposed, or derivate graphics. Each medium and display employed also refers back to the subject at hand, reinforcing the context-dependent nature of his work. As an artist in residence, Colin has been part of ag and food initiatives like Food Shift and Art Produce. He is also an archivist for Kearny Street Workshop.

For this issue of The Dive, Colin researched the rich history of Palestinian visual graphics. One source particularly caught his attention: the Land Day Special Collection at the Palestine Poster Project Archives. His main piece is a celebration of the ancient tradition of the olive harvest, a national occasion that roots Palestinian culture in the land and that has also made it a target of Israel’s colonial aggression. Additional imagery consists of appropriations and derivatives of motifs from posters made for Land Day ( ), which commemorates the general strike organized by Arabs from Israel and Palestine on March 30, 1976, against land expropriations by the Israeli government.

Check out some of Colin’s projects, silkscreen work, illustrations, and writing on his website at colinkimzey.squarespace.com. We accept applications to collaborate with artists on a rolling basis. Refer to the last page of this issue for more info on how to subscribe to our newsletter and stay informed of our upcoming publishing dates.

Colin Kimzey’s original artwork based on Palestinans’ traditional olive harvest

ON SOLIDARITY AND BEING PALESTINIAN

Lorain Khalil Rihan on family, food, and collective liberation in the face of the US-backed genocide in Gaza

By

Javier Roman-Nieves

Photographs courtesy of Lorain Khalil Rihan

We first learned about Lorain and her project, Lulu’s Kitchen, in September 2023. She spontaneously reached out through our website’s contact form with an offer to donate a portion of the proceeds from one of her events to Minnow. Lorain’s gesture moved us, and once we learned more about Lulu’s Kitchen, we immediately saw how it was consistent with the aims of her project.

Based on unceded Kumeyaay land, Lulu’s Kitchen is both a celebration and preservation of her family’s Palestinian story and heritage through the shared joy of food. Lulu’s Kitchen events are organized as intimate gatherings or haflat, which Lorain describes as a common cultural sharing among Palestinians. October 7, 2023, happened shortly after her event. Now, in turn, with nearly 30,000 Palestinians having been killed by Israel’s onslaught at the time of writing, we wanted to highlight her voice and thoughts on what solidarity means to her and on being a Palestinian in the United States of America at a time like this.

JRN Lorain, I’d like us to start with what could seem like a simple question, but one that can also be tricky in this country for people of color like ourselves, particularly given this historical moment. How do you identify yourself? And, could you tell us how Lulu’s Kitchen came about, where it is right now, what is next for it, and how it pairs with your artistic practice?

LKR I am a Palestinian visual artist, storyteller, and educator born in forced exile outside of historic Palestine. I was born and raised on unceded Kumeyaay land in Escondido, California. I create work devoted to the remembrance of Palestine, exploring intergenerational lived experiences of my family in the motherland and exile situated within the collective memory of Palestine.

Lulu’s Kitchen is an extension of my creative practice, but it approaches the act of remembrance in a way that differs from my other work. This project celebrates the regality of Palestinian hospitality, the sacredness of mundanity, and is an homage to my family’s history, my personal childhood memories, and the precious time spent in our kitchens and at our tables exchanging stories through the act of preparing food and eating. For me, practicing our food and storytelling traditions offers us a portal across time and space. My intentions for Lulu’s Kitchen are to honor my ancestral connection to Palestine and my family’s nuanced experiences, to create space for community joy, and to work in service of the transformative dream of a world free of colonial domination.

ABOVE: Lorain at her 5th birthday party. NEXT SPREAD: Her paternal aunt and uncle posing in front of an orange grove.

Teaching, creating artwork, cooking, joining actions, holding space with community, and bearing witness. For me, resisting settler colonial erasure has been a daily practice before October 2023, but at the moment, it is with an intensified urgency.

The US-backed Israeli offensive and its ensuing humanitarian catastrophe have been condemned around the world as genocidal, with the International Court of Justice finding that Israel must take action to prevent genocidal violence by its military, to “prevent and punish” its incitement, and to ensure humanitarian aid to Gaza is increased. Witnessing this state of affairs prompted us to reciprocate your support by amplifying your voice and Palestinian self-determination. It’s a notion of solidarity that we strive to practice in our work because it speaks directly to the reality of the interconnectedness of our movements. What made you want to donate to Minnow, and is there anything you would like to share about solidarity at this moment?

From an ingenious place as a kid, I wanted for others what I wanted for myself and my own family. Through student and community organizing work that I was involved in, I developed a consciousness

How has day-to-day life transpired for you since this dystopian nightmare began?

ABOVE: Lorain’s father poses with her maternal grandfather and uncle in front of an orange grove. RIGHT: Her maternal grandmother and a’amo (close family friend) harvesting prickly pear fruit.

that our communities are materially connected within oppressive systems, but also through our creative forms of navigating and resisting those systems. Lilla Watson’s wisdom comes to mind — “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Solidarity building across our communities has mostly been my focus in the classroom and the community spaces I am in because our collective survival and liberation require it. At this moment, we are witnessing a magnification of this calling.

I do try to reckon with the contradictions that emerge in my work and existence and try to make sure that my practices reflect my values as closely as possible. One of those contradictions is being denied my Right of Return to historic Palestine while living on stolen Indigenous land. So, designating a portion of the proceeds to Minnow was very intentional. Minnow’s framework of cultivating relationships with land that refuses to be extractive, with the intention of Indigenous land rematriation resonates with me.

I am not a diaspora scholar, yet diaspora has been a component of my identity since I moved to the US main-

NEXT SPREAD: Sido’s Orange, by Lorain Khalil Rihan. 2023. Stamped relief print, 8.5 x 11 inches.

land. As part of this experience and from what I have observed and discussed with other diasporic folks, I’ve noticed having to continuously tell myself and others a story of why I am here, what I am doing with my life, and at the service of what. This story changes as a function of what I live through, what I share with others, and the many negotiations I have to engage unilaterally to stay alive and sane in diaspora. Does any of this resonate with you, and if it does, what is that story now for you, and how has it changed in time?

White supremacy forces many of us to “negotiate” which parts of ourselves can be revealed and which parts need to be concealed, especially when safety is a concern. I did experience a pronounced politicization of my identities as an Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim overnight after 9/11–which was not just my own unique experience. I navigated a paradoxical hyper-visibility as an Arab and Muslim post 9/11 with the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the same time, experienced a persistent erasure of Palestinian existence. In my world history class, I remember learning about World War II, the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel with no mention of Palestine or Palestinians.

LEFT: Her maternal grandfather telling stories to siblings and cousins. ABOVE: Lorain and her mother at her 5th birthday party.

BELOW RIGHT: Lorain’s maternal grandfather in front of an orange grove c. 1975.

That same year, a teammate’s father admonished me to look at a map and see that there is no Palestine, after asking me “where” I was from. Later, I learned that settler colonial projects require erasure as a strategy to be successful, which was why Palestine could be excluded from my history class and why my teammate’s dad could deny my existence. I also began to understand why some Palestinians chose to say they were from Jordan or Lebanon, because naming Palestine caused tension and could potentially be unsafe. At this moment, we are bearing witness to Palestinians in the diaspora being doxxed, harassed, threatened, physically harmed and murdered, so I think many people will continue to negotiate what can and can’t be shared based on their own positionalities. The majority of the spaces that I am in now don’t require me to negotiate in the same way, but I am very aware that is not the reality for everyone.

In the logic of settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land, there is always a push to sever relationships with people’s food and to police or control its enjoyment. I often think of Thanksgiving that way–why should we feast, share, and be thankful for just one day of the year and on this particular day with its dark history? Could you share any thoughts or views on how land and food–its production, distribution, and consumption–are wrapped up in the struggle for liberation and how these interact with settler colonialism?

It is impossible to talk about the liberation of Palestine from Zionist settler colonialism without centering land and the fragmentation of Palestinian peoples’ relationship to their land. The weaponization of food and land against Palestinians for the past century has been practiced differently across historic Palestine. We are witnessing the active genocide in Gaza that is now four months deep. Gaza is intentionally being starved as inadequate quantities of food, water, and fuel have been permitted to enter. Aid trucks have been stuck at the Rafah crossing for several days. Palestinians have been filmed getting shot at by Israeli occupation soldiers while receiving aid. Aid is not reaching all of Gaza, and we have learned that Palestinians in northern Gaza are grinding up animal feed to use as flour. The UN distributed food like toys to starving Palestinian children rather than actually providing food. Three weeks into the genocide, the United Nations Relief Works Agency told Palestinians in Gaza that they ran out of aid, but Palestinians found aid stored

in a warehouse.

And before this current genocide, Gaza has been under a land, air, and sea “blockade” for 17 years. The Israeli government mandated the Red Lines Policy restricting the amount of food permitted into Gaza through a caloric minimum calculation. An ever-changing list of food items has been frequently banned, and to name some–chocolate, coriander, sage, pasta, meat, and dried fruit. Settler colonialism created the conditions for aid to be necessary in the first place.

Palestinians in the West Bank are divided up into Areas “A,” “B,” and “C,” causing further isolation while more Palestinian land is colonized through what is euphemistically referred to as “settlements.” Palestinians in historic Palestine are prohibited and criminalized for foraging herbs like sage, ‘akkoub and za’atar under the Israeli pretext of nature protection laws, even though Palestinians have always foraged these herbs while protecting their land. These laws further sever Palestinians of their ancestral land and food-based traditions. Palestinian water wells have been filled with concrete, and aquifers have been damaged. After all of that, Palestinian food is appropriated, rebranded, and commodified as Israeli cuisine. The egregiousness of Zionist settler colonial violence is endless. So practicing our food-based traditions is an act of resistance, even though these traditions predate resistance to settler colonialism.

Postscript on framing

In providing context for the guiding questions of this conversation, two topics stood out that merit highlighting and further consideration from ourselves and our readers. One was the bias by which men are differentiated from women and children killed. While we think of this as a function of both an appeal to empathy and an assumption that only men can be combatants–hence, their deaths more acceptable–this divide can also be very reductionist. Lorain noted that Palestinians don’t grieve their women and children differently than their men, so this bias elicits sympathy for one group while condemning another. Under an Orientalist framework, Palestinian men thus remain vilified along with Arabs and Muslims.

In Lorain’s understanding, a more helpful approach would be to talk about how different groups are affected differently by the US-backed genocide in

Gaza. Pregnant and menstruating people would be one example. Births are being forced to happen under the worst possible conditions. There are no sanitary products for menstruation available. Access to bathrooms is scarce and requires travel and hours of waiting in line, if available at all. Then there is the current forced starvation to which the whole population of Gaza is being subjected by Israel’s withholding of desperately needed humanitarian aid. These are just some examples of how we might go beyond the implicit or explicit biases that restrict our fullest expression of love and care for all people.

The other topic, often discussed in social media but not usually seen in corporate media, is how far to turn back the clock in terms of the occupation of Palestine when framing Zionist violence. One repeated offender is the simplistic view that everything started in October of 2023, which necessitates an obvious explanation of the history of Israel and its illegal settlements. Lorain remarked that, for a lot of people, the occupation of Palestine began with the 1967 Naksa, when in reality, it goes back nearly a century to the 1920 British Mandate that enabled the Zionist project. To her, it’s been over 75 years of occupation, which is when the majority of Palestinians were dispossessed of their ancestral lands, including her own family.

We invite our readers to think about these nuances not only in the context of the present genocide in occupied Palestinian territory but also when the histories and actualities of settler colonialism are framed closer to home, wherever that may be. ◆

BELOW: Lorain with siblings at her 5th birthday party.

MARIPOSAS Y SERPIENTES

By Noah M Schlager

NEXT SPREAD, RIGHT: The Tiburon Mariposa Llily

(Calochortus tiburonensis)

A Mvskoke-Jewish naturalist reflects on Indigeneity, invasion, and occupation.

Serpentine is a metamorphic rock formed through churning and pressure deep within the crust of the earth. Nutrient-poor, acidic, significant heavy metals—it erodes into an inhospitable soil for plant life.1 It was chosen in 1965 as the state rock of California for its economic importance to the booming asbestos industry2 of the time, a distinction Union Carbide might like Californians to forget. These hostile qualities make Serpentine a refuge for hundreds of endemic California plants.

Serpentine is a soil for specialists; only native plants who’ve built a relationship and resilience with serpentine can thrive where non-native flora cannot. Native wildflowers and grasslands hold out in these harsh soils against the Mediterranean grasses that have replaced them over most of their historical range. Several species, like Marin Dwarf Flax, have become so specialized they can only grow in serpentine soil. Another such species, the Tiburon Mariposa Lily, lives on a single serpentine outcrop within Marin County’s Ring Mountain Preserve.

surrounded by a canopy of Monterey Cypress trees planted a century prior when the land was still owned by the Reeds, the Irish-Spanish family who purchased the unceded Miwok land from the Spanish Presidio. Tasmanian Blue Gum, English ivy, African wood-sorrel, Meyer Lemon, Loquat, Harding Grass— these were the species I most intimately lived amongst. The California quail who passed through our yard each morning nested in an empty lot of Armenian blackberry. Feral cats ate them all when the brambles were converted by new owners into a native plant garden.

Known to the Linneans in our midst as Calchortus tiburonenses, its tripartite flowers have a kaleidoscopic interior thick with hairlike trichomes. Muted reds scatter over petals whose shade of green seems an homage to the serpentine that gives birth to them. Their center bears a resemblance to the Celtic triquetra knot. With the early spring rains, slender leaves emerge from subterranean bulbs, whose flowers bloom for a few weeks in June. Releasing their seed pods, the plants wither away, bulbs sleeping amongst the asbestos and heavy metals till rain comes again.

Ring Mountain

Purchased in the 1980s by The Nature Conservancy to stave off development, the Ring Mountain Preserve today is a feature for those who want both isolation from neighbors and proximity to the economic engine of San Francisco. It was a ten-minute walk up from my house to the Ring Mountain trailhead. Winding up the asphalt roads, I passed houses whose listing prices increased with elevation. Still in my adolescence, I thought of the preserve in contrast with this gaudy real estate, but in truth, the open space is symbiotic with this bioregion of ultra-wealth.

ABOVE: Tiburon Mariposa Lily and Celtic triquetra or infinity knot used by Celtic nations and other cultures worldwide. Diagram: Wikimedia Commons.

The biodiversity of the mountain could have been completely buried beneath faux Mediterranean houses and luxury apartments, but instead it survives between the trails of weekend hikers and their golden doodles. Affordable housing would have never gone up on the mountain, but it is hard not to look at the mansions that surround the park as an indication of who has stood to benefit the most from this park. Earnestly many of them must see themselves as conservationists of a sort, stewarding their favorite trails and views with gold and silicon ripped out from mountains someplace else.

My life began as an invasive, growing along the suburban foothills of Ring Mountain, on the homelands of the Coast Miwok peoples. A Franciscan mélange cast from a Jewish, Creole, Mvskoke, and Anglo matrix. My home was

Mvskokvlke

In the 17th and 18th centuries, several autonomous townships in the southeastern woodlands united into the Mvskoke or Creek confedera-

cy—covering most of what is currently Alabama, Georgia, and Northern Florida. The Tvlwa, or towns, remain central identifying markers to this day—many Mvskoke can tell you their family’s ancestral Tvlwa. My mother’s Mvskoke ancestors lived in Atagi. The Hale and the Elliot families are enumerated there in the 1832 Creek Indian census.

That census was an inventory of empire. With the passing of the Indian Removal Act, Creek Indians were enumerated to remove them and annex the land for white settlement and plantations. Most Mvskoke were forced west to Indian Territory, but some mixed-blood families would move south into the piney lowlands of Southern Alabama. My own ancestors would follow this path, blending with Creole and Anglo families along the way.

I frequently feel the insecurity of my own removal. Has something been lost in the act of transplanting and cross-pollination? In a time of rampant pretendians and shifting boundaries of belonging, there are real questions to be asked about Indigenous authenticity. Would I be seen as Este Cate, or is my Indigeneity a fathom strand of DNA trapped with the flesh of colonizers? Does blood carry ripples of winds felt by the skin of great-grandparents?

I traveled to Atagi a few years ago, near the town of Autagua outside Montgomery, Alabama. There are no surviving structures or even a plaque acknowledging where Atagi historically resided. I had to stand in the stream that my ancestors once lived beside and consider if there was some continuity between myself and the flow of that creek. Might there be old fields hidden beneath pine trees and camper parks where the seeds of my ancestors once grew, the ones I grow in my garden today? It is certainly in the interest of colonizers to flatten Indigeneity to a static geography from a singular moment in history— to steal the movement of space and time from the people. Tvlako vines spiral up cornstalks and launch their seeds from dried pods in the summer, unconcerned with the edges of fields.

Neophyte Nations

Neophyte, a new convert to Christianity, literally comes from the Greek for ‘new plant.’ In botany, a neophyte can also describe a plant that

is new to an area, a non-native, or an invasive. Functionally, western conservation treats the year 1492 as the beginning of biological invasion, the Columbian exchange of plants. Plants brought by wind, birds, or Indigenous peoples are natural, but those transported by settlers, the enslaved, or migrants are alien—out of their proper place in the natural order.

Scholars Nick Rio and Laura Ogden consider the Anishinaabe relationship to invasive plant species.3 Anishinaabe and many other Indigenous nations consider plant species as nations with particular relationships with human and animal nations. Rio and Ogden share cultural leader Kathy Leblanc’s perspective that these ‘invasive’ plant nations may be amidst their own migration stories— finding their place amongst a new political landscape of living beings. The language used towards invasive plants shares a disturbing similarity to how state governments speak of migrants and the subaltern.

It’s worth considering as well that many of the so-called worst invasive species are named as such not for their impact on ecology but for their impact on capitalist endeavors. Kudzu, zebra mussels, Asian carp, pigweed— these beings are despised more for their impacts on shipping, fishing, and farming than any particular ecological collapse. This isn’t to say there is no harm done by invasives, consider the Mediterranean grasses who’ve all but pushed out the native bunch grasses of California, but since these grasses feed cattle, they aren’t of much concern to state land managers. Is invasion a phenomenon of biological species or of the colonial capture of our relationships with other beings?

Chernozem & Shtetls

Chernozem, a black soil layer stretching across Eastern Europe, has made the region a breadbasket. Deep-rooted grasslands have spent millennia pulling the sun into the soil, the layers of their decomposed ancestors producing some of the most ideal humus for agriculture.4 There is evidence that anthropogenic fire has played a role in the soil’s creation as well.5 It is a history of life and death which feeds the sunflowers and wheat of the region.

My father’s family came from the shtetls and Jewish districts around the Eastern European

cities of Lviv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Iasi. Jews weren’t newcomers, they had been present there since the Middle Ages but were legally barred from accessing most agricultural land. In 1897, only 2.66 percent of Jews living in the Russian Empire made their living from agriculture.6 Jews could live along the edges of the Chernozem but not put down roots too deep.

In response to a rising climate of antisemitism, in particular violent pogroms in their home cities, my great-grandparents immigrated to the United States. Siblings and relatives of theirs moved to Mandatory Palestine. Those who stayed behind were later killed in the holocaust.

I never met my great-grandfather, Meyer, but I was told that it took him some time to come to terms with the fact that he was never going back home, that there wasn’t a home to go back to. In Ashkenazi culture, it is traditional to name a baby after a deceased relative, and my middle name Michael was chosen as a less Yiddish version of Meyer. Meyer was an old man’s name, a name of a time and a place that were best left behind.

When the war in Ukraine began, I saw for the first time in any real detail the cities my family had once called home. These were cities they’d fled a century prior that had rejected them as full citizens. Now those same cities were being torn apart by rocket fire and 21st-century warfare. Amidst the images of rubble were layers upon layers of absence. Jewish relationality to land in Europe has so often been defined by its absence, the inability to establish roots in any one place. Lands shape a people even after they leave, accreting soil upon the boots of wanderers.

Canaanite Thorns7

Like hundreds of thousands of young Jews, I took that free ticket to Israel. I was under no illusions about the political motive behind that program. I’d been to Hebrew school, where young volunteer teachers spent more time clumsily indoctrinating us with Israel factoids than the Aleph-Bet. I respect anyone who refuses the trip out of moral conviction, but for my part, I wanted to meet my cousins there, the other living branch of my father’s family. I was greeted at the airport by a cousin holding a bold letter sign, “Son of The Cockroach,” under a clip art image of a giant horsefly. An irreverent man with a

chaotic sense of humor, he famously abandoned my dad for an hour in the Negev desert as a joke. He was a prototypical Sabra—the name for native-born Israeli Jews, taken from the Arabic word for the prickly pear cactus.

Prickly pear are common in the Levant these days, symbolically significant to both Palestinian and Israeli conceptions of resilience in the desert. It also haunts the sites of occupation. The cactus gives its name to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp of Southern Beirut, the site of the 1982 massacre. In November of 2023, the Gazan neighborhood of Sabra and its mosque were destroyed by an Israeli bombardment as a part of the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza. Fences of prickly pear still outline the ruins of villages lost in the Nakba.

The cacti won’t show up in any botanical accounts of Judea written by Philo or Josephus, and certainly not amongst the plants mentioned in any religious text. Prickly pear are neophytes cultivated for millennia by Indigenous peoples in the Americas before arriving on the shores of Ottoman Palestine. Their large protruding thorns are intimidating, but far more painful are the fiberglass-like barbed spines that harpoon themselves into the skin and itch for days.

Like spines, Indigeneity is barbed into the discourse surrounding the occupation. The Southern Levant sits at the isthmus of Africa and Asia; its peoples and cities have always been points in constellations stretching across continents. Exclusive notions of Indigeneity deny the plurality of that land. How many waves of people have written their own letters into its clay? Here in the Americas, are mountains not capable of holding dozens of names from overlapping and mobile peoples? Do Mvskoke rivers not flow into Choctaw or Miccosukee ones? Does the Indigeneity of a people only come at the expense of another?

I often scratch at the way Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora, have positioned ourselves to colonialism. We’ve stood at both ends of empire throughout most of our history. Early Zionism was unapologetic in describing its project as colonial, appealing to those European powers that wanted to support their endeavors.

Today, we see Zionists speak of Jewish indigeneity in its lowercase, stripped of its political posi-

tionality to colonialism in favor of static ethnic geography. Such claims of Jewish indigeneity are more concerned with justifying a Jewish nation-state than sincerely considering the relationality between people and land. The diaspora is positioned as wayward cuttings, wandering Jews; we are made into the people without a land. Why must we remake ourselves into an endemic species whose roots can only grow in Levantine soil–a soil now soaked in lead and white phosphorus? Here in the Americas, many young Native folks look at Palestinians and see themselves—recognizing the surveillance, political annexation, environmental devastation, religious desecration, and expendability.

At a Kibbutz in the Negev, I would sit with a group extolling the need for a Jewish presence in the desert, “our religion was born of the desert; we were a desert people and must become stewards of this desert once again.” I looked outside and saw an irrigated lawn, street trees, and a row of suburban-style houses. A form of desert stewardship more akin to Palm Springs than Bedouin. The Essenes would not have recognized the landscape outside the window, though perhaps the zealotry. I don’t know what they’d make of the cacti.

Serpentine (reprise)

Serpentine can be a text, a matrix for humanity to inscribe its place on the land. In the metamorphic boulders of Ring Mountain, the ancestors of the Coast Miwok people created a series of circle petroglyphs. What they represent isn’t known to Western archeologists and probably isn’t supposed to be. The meaning, the message, the relationship between those people and the rock—it’s a message outside observers can see but not understand.

When thinking about relationality, the lands and people who make us, there is a tension between conditionality and continuity. Each moment is unique, unrepeatable in its minutia, and still patterns form and string together. Meaning seems to be born from both the novelty and the rhyme. It’s tempting to try and classify and bind these patterns, to pull a solid object out from the noise, and sometimes it can feel like it’s possible.

As for me, I’ll never be able to live on Ring Mountain again, and I would never want to; my

niche there is gone. My parents divorced and sold the house. The cypress trees were cut down, the ivy was pulled up, and certified native plants now decorate the driveway. I still go and visit the Mariposas when they bloom. I imagine myself a slide on a zoetrope, iterations of myself staring into the blooms each summer. Like turning a kaleidoscope, the patterns inside those petals must shift slightly each year. On the way back down the hill, I sometimes spot blackberry vines and quail. ◆

Noah (he/him) is a writer and environmental geographer who draws upon the lens of his Mvskoke-Creek, Jewish, and Creole backgrounds. He has a Master of Environmental Science from the Yale School of the Environment. He has written for Sierra Magazine and High Country News and stewards two dozen endangered Indigenous corn, bean, and squash varieties.

LEFT: Harvest Brodiaea (Brodiaea elegans), native only to California and Oregon. PREVIOUS SPREAD, RIGHT: The author’s fingers pointing at the flowers of the Marin Dwarf Flax (Hesperolinon congestum), a species native only to San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin County.

1 Whittaker, R. H. (1954). The Ecology of Serpentine Soils. Ecology, 35(2), 258-288. https://doi.org/10.2307/1931126

2 The California State Capitol Museum. State Rock: Serpentine. https://capitolmuseum.ca.gov/state-symbols/rock-serpentine/ 3 Reo, N.J., Ogden, L.A. (2018). Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species. Sustain Sci 13, 1443–1452. https://doi.org/10.1007

4 Pozniak, S. (2019). Chernozems of Ukraine: past, present, and future perspectives. Soil Science Annual, Vol 70 No. 3, 193-197. http://ssa.ptg.sggw.pl/files/artykuly/2019_70/2019-3/ssa32019-s193-197.pdf

5 Kaiser, K., Shao, D., Minkina T.M., Miltner A. Chernozem. (19772023). Science Direct. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/ earth-and-planetary-sciences/chernozem

6 Abramson, H. (2010). Ukraine. YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Ukraine.

7 “I will not drive them (Canaanites) out before you; but they shall be thorns in your side, and their gods shall be a snare unto you.” Judges 2;3. King James Version. (KJV 1769). Qbible. http://www.qbible.com/comments/judges/2-3.html

Background photo: Johannes Schenk on Unsplash

CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION

The first in a series of articles on uprooting philanthropy

By Neil Thapar

The word “philanthropy” derives from Greek and roughly means “for the love of humankind.” Unfortunately, this couldn’t be a more unsuitable misnomer for philanthropy as an industry. We’re calling this series Cracks in the Foundation because we are going to explore how the structure of philanthropy, beyond any good intentions by individuals, ensures that its actions will contradict its namesake meaning. In fact, despite the dominant worldview that tells us that philanthropy is good for society, philanthropy has, from its inception in the early 20th century, served as a trillion-dollar Trojan Horse for our movements.

Philanthropy, as we know it today, is less an expression of love for humanity than a scant balm to soften the sting of capitalism. Scratch just below the surface, and you’ll find that it is also an incredibly generous welfare system for the rich, providing tax breaks with little to no accountability for results. And if you dig a little deeper with us, you’ll find that, even worse, it is a strategic effort by the ultra-wealthy to pacify and distract from grassroots efforts to challenge and dismantle existing racial, gender, political, and class hierarchies within society.

We have three goals with this series: (1) to break down common misconceptions about philanthropy that protect the industry from appropriate and necessary scrutiny, (2) provide evidence for our argument that the philanthropic sector, as constructed, will always do more to protect capital interests than to promote social change, and (3) point towards structural changes we (and many

others) believe are necessary for philanthropic actors to break free from these limitations so they can actually contribute to the movement for land justice. You might ask yourself why an organization like Minnow, whose purpose is to secure land tenure for farmers of color and Indigenous communities, might dedicate itself to challenging the philanthropic industry. As an organization funded primarily by foundations, we see it as our obligation to transparently and directly speak to the contradictions within philanthropy. We operate in a philanthropy-driven sector that simultaneously makes our work possible by paying our salaries while severely undermining that work by investing in and profiting massively more from the very economy we are working to replace. And more importantly from a historical perspective, there is also a completion of a cycle that needs to happen.

Philanthropy exists because of excess wealth. This wealth was extracted originally by White settlers who enslaved Africans and colonized the lands and Peoples of what we call the United States of America. Many others since then have continued to extract surplus value from the land or people within the capitalist economy that we operate under today. Philanthropy must dedicate itself to fully realizing and reckoning with this truth to restore balance to our ecosystems and repair generational harms within our communities.

Currently, philanthropy is not only falling far short of completing this cycle, it is perpetuating a system of control driven by the same forces that extracted the excess wealth it now manages:

white supremacy, paternalism, and capitalism. For example, 91 percent of foundation board members, 86 percent of foundation CEOs, and 70 percent of program officers are white. The high level of homogeneity in the sector means that the vast majority of people who control the sector’s $1,000,000,000 (that’s 1 trillion dollars) operate in a racial echo chamber – a difficult place from which to root out white supremacy and paternalism, even for those who are well equipped.

Philanthropy, at its core, also inherently strengthens and profits from capitalism. The laws governing foundations require them to distribute at least five percent of their asset value each year. In reality, this floor has become a ceiling, with most foundations only distributing the bare minimum required each year. Why five percent? We’ll get to this later in the series, but the short answer is because most foundations want to live forever. If they invest all their money in Wall Street, which most do, they can make, on average, a 5% return on that money, so by the end of the year, they end up in the same position as they were before they gave out any money that year to nonprofits. The bottom line is this: philanthropy advances capitalism because it profits more from investing in the capitalist economy responsible for the housing crisis, racial wealth inequality, war profiteering, mass incarceration, water and land pollution, and so much more–than it does from investing in the organizations that are working to repair the harms caused by this economic system.

Unfortunately, these are key

features of the structure of philanthropy, and they guide how the vast majority of foundations operate. The 11th Hour Project, which is Minnow’s largest single foundation contributor, offers an illustration of the deep contradictions inherent to philanthropy and how they connect to our work.

The 11th Hour Project is one of many philanthropic projects of the Schmidt Family Foundation, which was created and is governed by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, who are billionaires primarily from the stock options Eric received through his role as Executive Chairman of Google. As of 2022, the Schmidt Family Foundation held $1.5B in assets. That year, the foundation distributed about $112M in grants (of which Minnow received $220,000), which is about 7 percent of the foundation’s total assets. At the same time, the foundation’s investments for the year netted them $140M.

The 11th Hour Project’s Food and Agriculture program, from which our donation comes, has a mission to “support efforts to build resilient agricultural systems that improve soil, air, water, and animal and human health.” And many of the organizations that receive grants within this program, like us, are hard at work doing just that.

Yet when we look at a sampling of just a few of the 1,778 foundation’s stock investments, we are immediately reminded that despite the millions given in grants to build a resilient food system, the foundation profits even more from investments in the very companies that anchor and perpetuate the industrial agricultural system: Amazon,

Coca Cola, John Deere, Eli Lilly, McDonald’s, Nestle, PepsiCo, Tyson Foods, Walmart. The contradiction is as clear as it is frustrating to us–what is the real impact of distributing $112M in grants to support changing the food system when the foundation is making more than that in profit from thwarting change?

The 11th Hour Project isn’t alone in embodying these irreconcilable contradictions in the relationship between philanthropy and social change. Foundation tax returns, publicly available documents from where we pulled this data, simply tell a different story than their websites. And if we want philanthropists, including Eric and Wendy Schmidt, to really live up to the visions that populate their foundation’s websites, we all should start paying more attention to the structural and cultural deficiencies that are getting in the way.

That’s what we plan to offer in this series. We know there’s a lot of numbers and details to unpack from this introduction, and we promise we’ll do that in future posts. And if you’ve read this far, then we also know you might be curious to learn about some ideas for how all of this might shift. We’ll get to that too. For now, we just want to invite you to notice these cracks in the foundation of philanthropy and join us in imagining all the possibilities of what else might grow between them to anchor a more just future. ◆

Neil (he/him) serves as Director of Land and Financial Redistribution at Minnow. Visit our website for staff bios.

RIGHT: Detail of ancient petroglyphs next to a crevice at Ring Mountain Open Space Preserve. NEXT SPREAD: View of the boulder with downtown San Francisco in the background.

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Minnow shapes a world where all beings can experience joy and belonging with reverence for the land. Such conditions repair the harms of settler colonialism that persist under capitalism and white supremacy. By securing land tenure for California’s farmers of color and Indigenous communities, Minnow supports the heritage and foodways of those most affected by state-sponsored dispossession. Through democratic ownership of land and food systems, colonized peoples can thrive in their cultural practices while contributing proven solutions to climate change.

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