We had discussions about how, while growing things and connecting with nature should be a happy and positive experience, because of this country’s violence against people and the earth, those relationships can actually be very traumatic.
We looked at different groups of people’s historically traumatic relationships with land. We included US mainland indigenous people, native Hawaiians, descendants of enslaved Africans, Puerto Rican people, poor white mine/extraction workers, and Black Philadelphians. We explored how oppressive systems contorted and damaged these people’s relationships with land and the earth.
Then we looked at stories of reclamation and resistance around these relationships within these groups. Students chose a group to focus on, and learned more about what their group was doing in order to reclaim and rebuild their relationship with the earth. Students used this document to gather their thoughts as they learned.
Anonymous Student 1
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