Black Earth Farms
Organizational Principles & Manifesto
Principles of our Organization
We need clean land, clean water, clean air, and reparations for all colonized and oppressed peoples on the planet. Black and Indigenous Women, non-binary, trans, and queer folks are the leaders of the movement for food sovereignty and must be centered and uplifted in order to achieve true and absolute liberation. Anti-Black racial capitalism, Anti-Indigenous Imperialist Empires, and white supremacist hetero-patriarchal structures, practices, and ongoing projects are the root causes of our wretched conditions and are the obstacles in our ongoing struggles for liberation.
Settler colonial parasitic capitalism, militarized imperialist nation states, and eurocentric ideologies such as pseudo socialism and fascist neoliberalism must all be abolished and replaced with autonomous and sovereign communities centered around indigenous self-determination and Black liberation. Our communities should be able to exist in balance and respectful reciprocity at all levels, between individuals, families, and groups of people actively engaged in relations with plant and animal relatives.
We need autonomous and sovereign communities that steward and produce their own ethically harvested food without pesticides and other chemical inputs. We need active divestment from the colonial food system and the fossil fuel petrochemical industry. We need access to de-privatized clean water, and food landscapes with no tolerance for racialized and gendered domination or enslavement. We need justice and reparations for Black and Indigenous people globally.
All forms of colonial and imperial governments are illegitimate entities that were created by genocidal slave holding colonists. This includes the blood thirsty settler state of israel, which needs to be immediately dismantled to ensure the right of return for all Palestinians globally. These colonial governments massacred indigenous people, stole their land, and then destroyed and continued to destroy ecosystems to grow cash crops like sugar, tobacco, and cotton, on plantations for export and wealth building in the globalizing capitalist market. The wealth created on these plantations remains solely in the hands of land grabbing capitalists with no regard for Earth, truth, or justice. The theft of indigenous lands and genocide of indigenous peoples is ongoing.
Relationships with soil, plants, food, and medicine are direct lines of communication and connection with our ancestors. Denying people food sovereignty is an act of systemic genocide. We believe all people should have access to affordable and safe housing, and the ability to collect clean water, to produce their own food, and steward their own food systems.
The genetic modification of species to be resistant to chemicals and produce infertile seeds is an unsustainable violent project that is leading to the destruction of our planet. These genetically engineered bioweapons destroy peasant food webs and cause massive starvation, famine, malnutrition, droughts, ocean acidification, and genocide. Biotechnology corporations use these infertile seeds as tools to prevent peasants from producing their own food and saving seeds.
The privatization of land is the framework through which colonized and oppressed Indigenous people across the planet are denied access to their ancestral homelands which historically provided them with sustenance and wellness. The continual contemporary displacement of these peoples is mainly facilitated by the fossil fuel and mining corporations who frack and create pipelines across indigenous land for oil, as well as mine uranium, and other metals required to manufacture weapons, and modern technology, which causes irreparable damage to the ecosystem and Indigenous communities. Monoculture soybean and palm oil production, latifundio style cattle ranching, and construction have all desecrated sacred indigenous plains, rainforests and coast lines for the benefit of tourists and capitalist farmers. Fisher folks who have been harvesting from their ancestral coastal fisheries for centuries and millennia have been displaced from their harbors to make way for seafaring capitalists and massive hotel chains who pollute the ocean with plastic and other petrochemicals causing massive fish and coral reef die offs along with toxic algal blooms.
European imperial powers, settler colonial governments and all settler and imperial beneficiaries live on blood money, blood resources, and on the sick amassed power of stolen life with blood on their hands. Inheritors of genocidal capitalist wealth owe payment to all oppressed people on the planet in the form of land, money, labor, stolen resources, and their total effort in deconstructing these violent systems. Liberation of all colonized and historically oppressed peoples from wage enslavement, debt, prisons, jails, military service, is essential in maintaining the longevity of all living species on the planet.
The modern militarized neoliberal fascist government state system exists to exploit and oppress the people, police their movement and existence in space, and manage the social and material death of the colonized. Black and Indigenous representation in policing structure does nothing to alleviate oppression in a system that was created to catch, kill, and murder enslaved Africans that emancipated themselves from bondage. There are no good cops in a policing system designed to uphold enslavement--abolish the police.
Every community deserves a holistic healing clinic equipped with nutritional counseling, physical fitness and training provisions, free mental health services, free housing for houseless folks, and drug abuse rehabilitation centers. All Prisons must be abolished and replaced with these healing centers.
All oppressed and enslaved non-human animals and plant beings must be liberated in tandem to oppressed and enslaved peoples. Animals confined in concentrated animal feeding operations must be instantly liberated and set free.
Healing from trauma and ancestral wounds is an essential part of liberation. The colonial nation state systems have denied us access to healing and wellness. It is time to move forward in healing our minds, bodies, and spirits from this trauma. Since the western medical system has continually exploited and experimented on Black and Indigenous people, the usage of herbal and traditional medicines to ease the pain and suffering caused by capitalism are important to remember and actively put to use.
Self Determination, creativity and imagination are guaranteed human rights. Psychopathic Genocidal Racial Capitalist Hetero Patriarchy must be destroyed. It oppresses and kills women, men, non binary, LGBTQI+ folks, and children.
Black Earth Manifesto
We are a Black and Indigenous led agroecology collective composed of skilled land stewards, spiritual leaders, healers, gardeners, farmers, builders, writers, educators, artists, musicians, and organizers. We study and spread ancestral knowledge and contemporary agroecological practices to train community members to build collectivized, autonomous, and chemical free food systems in urban and peri-urban environments throughout the Occupied Karkin Ohlone & Chochenyo Territory.
Our work regenerates our community’s connection to and reverence for land and agriculture, which was partially severed from our ancestors through colonial violence, and from our elders through multinational corporate exploitation, food system consolidation, and racist actions of the usda, and u.s. government at large, perpetrated against Black farmers to evict them from their farm lands. One of our main priorities is to nullify the industrial food system and further food justice and food sovereignty for low-income, Black, and Indigenous communities, families, and individuals in Huichin (Oakland), Berkeley, San Leandro, San Francisco, and Emeryville.
Right now we are focused on establishing food sovereignty amongst our community. We grow, harvest, and deliver nutrient dense and chemical free food to low-income communities experiencing food apartheid. We also recover otherwise wasted food from organic community gardens, markets, and private residences. We make our produce accessible to all people by providing sliding scale or free produce boxes, but we prioritize the distribution of food to radical organizers, other revolutionary organizations, Black folks participating in insurrections against police terrorism and the murder of Black people, houseless folx, elderly folx, indigenous, afro, trans, and gender non conforming folx.
We consider ourselves a lighthouse organization in the Bay Area dedicated to food sovereignty. We are inspired by movements such as Cooperation Jackson, La Vía Campesina, The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, The Palestinian Liberation Oganization, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, The Young Lords, The Zapatistas, Movimento Dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), Plan Pueblo a Pueblo, and many more. Our resource page contains information about the above and other organizations that have pushed toward self determination and food sovereignty for oppressed colonized peoples globally.
Donations help sustain and grow this vision. These proceeds help us transform our connection to the land into regenerative, healthy, and intentional nutrition for our communities. We are not a nonprofit charity organization. We are a revolutionary youth coalition of militant peasants in the struggle for liberation.
We encourage all non-natives inhabiting this occupied territory to regularly pay the Shuumi Land Tax to support the Sogrea Te’ Land Trust, indigenous urban-women working towards the return of Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands in the San Francisco Bay Area to Indigenous stewardship. We also encourage folks to view the short film “Beyond Recogntion”to learn more about their work.
Native-Land.ca is a map of native nations occupied under settler colonial governments. We urge all non-natives in the Western Hemisphere (currently referred to as the Americas), Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) if you have not already, to acknowledge your presence on violently occupied territory and divest from willful ignorance, complicit acceptance or active perpetuation of settler colonialism. We demand that white settlers abandon the resources afforded them through colonial violence, return lands to indigenous peoples, pay ongoing reparations to black people, divest from and deconstruct white supremacy, accept and further settler social death, and support black and indigenous leadership in the ongoing struggle for liberation.
