Land Clinic Audio Archives Land.Clinic

My daughter recently made a new friend on our morning walks, a polypore mushroom. I hadn’t noticed her friend and couldn’t figure out why she was drawn to a corner of the woods off our path but she was insistent. When close enough, she sat down next to polypore and said hi then bye and we were on our way.
I know this story is banal and familiar to many caregivers of young children. The mundane magic of a developing mind; however, her recognition of sentient beings beyond human is more than poetic, it’s felt. Her worldview is animated. She constantly reminds me to feel (not think*) into all the ways I touch the sentient and the sentient touches me.
Animacy doesn’t have a single definition and is very much based on the culture composed in. In Latin, the root of the word (anima) translates to life, breath, spirit or soul. I think about animacy as the way everything expresses some form of inhalation and exhalation, how everything at all moments is living, dying or being reborn in loops. It often has found expression in earth-based traditions and folklore tied to place. It doesn’t have to be the same thing as anthropomorphizing because it recognizes and differentiates the experience of each being. In intact cultures of Original People, this is perhaps an understood lifeway; for those of us severed from our place-based traditions of origin, animacy is the universal hum we are trying to find again.
For the sake of this essay, I very much reduce the wonder-filled landscape of animacy by bringing in the legal fiction of personhood. Abridged, legal personhood essentially is a being “for the whom the law recognizes to have certain rights or duties.” It is the top-down acknowledgment that allows for active participation in society rather than the passive role of “objectified beings” like children, animals, plants, fungi, water and land.
For most of the United States’ recent history, personhood has meant the adult human (note for the greater half of that history that human is likely cis-male, property-holding and white). Throughout the decades, personhood has evolved with the most contemporary developments including more-than-human beings as persons, distilled in what is formally known as the Rights of Nature (“RoN”) movement.
I’ll be honest, rights frameworks in isolation taste hollow. I focused my legal education on international human rights and walked away feeling a little empty in the application of the various doctrines and treatises. This weariness extended to the RoN when first introduced to me a couple years ago. Since then I’ve kept a pleasant distance from it, unsure how to hold something as slippery as “moral guarantees.” To me, individuated rights (whether for forest or human being) can suck the relationality out of a situation.
“Eagles build their houses in trees; people call them eagle nests because in the eyes of human beings it is a nest. To the eagles it is a house and home.”
- John Jackson, Haa Atxaayi Haa Kusteeyix Sitee
Recent conversations have led me to investigate my hesitation to play with these legal tools. One of our current projects is with a member of Land Clinic’s advisory council, Wanda Culp. Wanda is many wonderful things. Her warmth and honesty bring me so much joy whenever we meet (just thinking about her actually makes me smile big). She is Tlingit, specifically from the Brown Bear (Chookeneidí) clan. We are working on a mapping project examining land claims in Southeast Alaska. During the process, Wanda has sent me many books and art as research guides, including a collection of oral histories. These interviews with Elders in Tlingit bring the practical aspects of what has been deemed “subsistence living” in union with the stories of the many beings that animate the landscapes of Southeast Alaska.
Wanda’s art of “Xooyenah” Hoonah waterfront clan houses before the Hoonah fire of 1944. The fire was caused by jet fuel from an overturned WWII ba

This piece is co-authored by the founders of The Farmers Land Trust, Kristina Villa and Ian McSweeney. Kristina narrates for us.
Kristina Villa is a farmer, communicator, and community coordinator who believes that our connection to the soil is directly related to the health of our bodies, economy, and society. With over a decade of farming, communication, and fundraising experience, Kristina enjoys using her skill sets to share photos, stories, and information in engaging ways which help to inspire change in human habits and mindsets, causing the food system, climate, and overall well-being of the world to improve. Kristina has spent the last several years of her professional career saving farmland from development and securing it in nonprofit land holding structures that give farmers, stewards and ranchers long-term and affordable access and tenure to it. Most of her work in the land access space has focused on equitable land security for BIPOC growers, addressing the inequities and disparities in how land is owned and accessed in this country.
Ian McSweeney’s life’s work is centered on the human connection to land and each other, framed through the understanding that food is a universal point of connection and agriculture is one of the greatest polluters of land and water, and a primary activity that separates people from the land. Ian has been a social worker focused on developing and operationalizing outdoor experience-based education, a real estate broker and consultant focused on prioritizing conservation, agriculture, and community within land development, and a director of a private foundation focused on assisting landowners and farmers through customized approaches to farmland ownership, conservation, management, and stewardship.

Our relationship to land is based on our cultural context. Land can represent seemingly opposite concepts simultaneously: unchecked power and community justice, reparative equity and wealth hoarding to name a few. Many experience and witness our disconnection from the land and from each other through the global and local impacts of colonization and privatization. These realities are magnified by historic and present day land injustice and are even more felt by those who grow food and cultivate land through experiences of significant financial, market, climate, and stress factors. 
Our cultures and societal structures are built upon belief systems that are created by the stories we are told. Land ownership, access and tenure, equity, and connection are unjust, and the truth of this is beginning to be understood by a greater percent of the population. The narrative of pioneering homesteaders acquiring land as the fabric of our national manifest destiny necessarily crumbles as we acknowledge that many of us live on stolen land. We need stories and models that strive toward land justice and reconciling our relationship with land. 
As it relates to our farmlands, new and beginning farmers identify land access as a primary barrier to farm viability, while existing and retiring farmers must destroy what they have built over a lifetime or more by selling their farms for development and speculation, simply to afford to retire. On average, 37 mid-size farms close permanently every single day in this country given these barriers and others. The successful transition of agrarian land and businesses is what will sustain agriculture, culture, and community resilience. 
Farms are on the decline while farm sizes are on the rise. This is indicative of things like Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and large scale monocultures. The landowners see farming operations solely as a financial investment rather than community one. 
Land trust and nonprofit land ownership structures have had a profound impact on defining and structuring ownership, access and tenure, and connection; however, by and large, they have not addressed land justice and equity on the scale needed. At The Farmers Land Trust,

Heather Bruegl (she/her) is a public historian, activist, and decolonial education consultant who works with institutions and organizations for Indigenous sovereignty and collective liberation. She is a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and a first-line descendant Stockbridge Munsee. She is a graduate of Madonna University in Michigan and holds a Master of Arts in U.S. History. Heather is the former Director of Education at Forge Project and travels frequently to present on Native American history, including policy and activism. Heather respectfully acknowledges that she works and resides on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral lands of the Three Fires Council- the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi- along with the Peoria, Miami, and Wyandot. Through forced removal, these nations are now located throughout the United States including parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kansas, and part of Canada.
When beginning to think about how to write this essay about land surveying, one concept kept coming to my mind: boundaries.  As someone who travels a lot, primarily by car (I mean, who doesn’t love a good road trip?), you always seem to know when you enter a new state.  There is a sign that lets you know you have entered New York or Michigan, or wherever you may be traveling to, but the sign indicates that you have entered a new space.  The same is true when you are entering different countries.  Currently living in Detroit, I always see the signs for Canada.  And when I travel to a friend's home, there are usually fences or something that indicates where their property ends and the neighbor begins.
But we often don’t think about how boundaries were made to facilitate European colonization of Indigenous lands in what has become the United States. As we know them today, borders can be dated back to the first settlers arriving on the shores.  The British, French, Spanish, and Dutch had colonial settlements in the “New World” and had drawn up these boundaries to ensure each territory was separated.  What they were doing was dividing up land that had been stewarded for centuries by Indigenous peoples. Prior to the colonization, Indigenous territories were communally held by Native Nations with quite a bit of overlap between different communities.  There were and continue to be shared hunting and fishing grounds, but no defined borders or fences to keep each other out.  In contrast, colonists created boundaries that would fit the societies that they were working towards, one based on private property and individualism. These were foreign concepts to many Native Nations.  As a result, this would lead to shady land deals between federal and state governments, colonists and Native Nations; the latter signing treaties written in a language and conceptual framework they didn’t understand with the result usually being forcible removal.
On the East Coast, many modern boundaries began after the American Revolution.  After the war, the newly created United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783, establishing the new country's boundaries.  What the two countries did not adequately take into consideration was the existing Native Nations whose land they were dividing up.  The Indigenous people had no meaningful say on how this new country would take into account the people and cultures that had been living and stewarding the lands since time immemorial.  
The United States continued to grow, eventually expanding to the Pacific Ocean taking land as settlements spread.  In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was passed. This led to the forcible removal of Indigenous Peoples from the Southeast onto lands west of the Mississippi River, like in present-day Oklahoma.  At that time, these lands had not been settled by the United States but were occupied by other Native Nations. Oklahoma remained Indian territory until statehood, while settlements and homesteads continued to move westward and the reserva

Quick Note: this conversation contains jagged edges, pregnant pauses and tattered ends. While the transcript is here for those that want to read it, we invite you to listen to the recording (if possible). If you don’t have the substack app, you can listen here.
Nkem Ndefo (she/they), MSN, CNM, RN, is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit. She is known for her unique ability to connect with people of all types by holding powerful healing spaces, weaving complex concepts into accessible narratives, and creating synergistic and collaborative learning communities that nourish people’s innate capacity for healing, wellness, and connection. Nkem serves on the founding advisory council of Land Clinic and is a dear friend.
Anastasia:
Well would it be okay to ask you to do just a quick introduction?  There's a lot I can share about you but maybe just anything you'd like to share for the substack?
Nkem:
I've been calling myself lately, a liberatory change alchemist but sometimes alchemy gives the feeling of like metal, right? A metal cold metal feeling, maybe it smells like sulfur but this is an alchemy that has blood and soil in it. So I play in the areas of trauma and resilience, and stress and wounding, and healing at different scales from the very intimate and intrapersonal and the relational to big systems and structures, across geography, across identities to develop and test out different approaches. Yeah. As my friend Farzana says that Healing Justice London, rehearsing freedoms.
Anastasia:
What I just want to note that when I think about the word alchemical, I have like, I have a body reaction of tasting metal tasting blood. So when you said soil and blood that tracks for me too. I think it would be helpful to begin is to just have you describe what you think a healthy boundary is?
Nkem:
Oh, I'm going to question the word healthy.
Anastasia:
Good question.
Nkem:
And maybe reframe that as a supportive boundary, a nurturing boundary, a protective boundary appropriately. So, I think of boundaries as responsive,  limits of what we will or will not tolerate. I think of them as semi permeable membranes. Like, it's not a wall per se, right? It's semi permeable. You can respond to the environment like a contact lens, lets in oxygen, and moisture to the eye but you cut onions and you don't quite get the onion in your eye, you know. And boundaries are not demands on other people. They're not rules for other people to follow. They are not even expectations, it's just, I will. If this happens, I will do X Y or Z or if this doesn't happen, I will do X Y or Z and so they are personal. I think of boundaries as qite upersonal Yeah. And that's it. Personal sense, right? That's an interpersonal sense of boundaries but the even intrapersonal right? Like how I care for myself, right? Like what are the boundaries I have abound? Commitments, often they are commitments. You can be commited. So that's in that sense of the word ("boundary"), but I do think of like a semi permeable responsive membrane the where there is a choice about what you let in or out.
Anastasia:
I love that image and it it's really in contrast to how property law works, right? And how property line boundaries are these very rigid boxes or hexagons or whatever shape it ends up taking. It feels like the boundaries of the land and how we have relationship to those boundaries very much shows up in different areas of life, right? Like that shows up in how we build community. And so, I don't know if there's anything coming up for you as you think about the semipermeable, the porous membrane you just mentioned and just contrasting that to property law or are at least conventional systems of "owning" land.
Nkem:
Those aren't boundaries. Those are walls.
Anastasia:
Mmm.
Nkem:
They actually are because a natural boundary, like, is an ecotone, right? I was thinking about ecotones as like crepuscular or liminal spaces, they are in betweens, right? W

This month we’re featuring one of our clinic client-collaborators, KHIMSTONIK, and the work they are doing in Southeast Washington, specifically lands on the Snake River around the Ice Harbor Dam. If you would like to support the work of the Palouse and KHIMSTONIK, please consider donating directly to the organization.
The Lady Who Does Tasks Quickly
My name is ILL-LAH-WAH-LITZ-TUN-MYE (Lady who does tasks quickly). My English name is Ione IronHorse Martel Jones. I am an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of Yakama Nation and a lineal descendant of the WOW-YICK-MA NAH-KHEE-UM NU-SHWA, the People from Lower Snake River Palouse.
I am also the Executive Director and President of KHIMSTONIK, a tax-exempt Section 501(C)(3) nonprofit organization. Named after my Kuthla (grandmother), KHIMSTONIK seeks to understand the systems affecting Indian Country and to identify the ongoing disparities arising out of centuries of cultural appropriation and land thefts. 
My current focus is to continue my family's mission of land return for the hundreds of acres taken by the US Army Corp via eminent domain in 1959.
Keepers of the Past
My family descends from WOW-YICK-MA NAH-KHEE-UM NU-SHWA, the People from Lower Snake River Palouse. The Palouse are a distinct band of Ichishkin speaking people located in the confluence of the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. My ancestors resisted signing onto the Yakama Treaty of 1855, so our family’s land claims are a bit different from others in the area. My relatives CHO-WAWA-TYET (Indian Jim), XILCH-KO-WAKS WACH-OM-KYE (Wolf Necklace) and AL-LI-LUYA (Thomas Jim) received land patents under the Homestead Act of 1862 that guaranteed title (rather than a trust relationship) to our ancestral lands. Our family remained in the area until 1959 when the US Army Corp instituted a “condemnation” proceeding (eminent domain) and forced us to move off the land.
I am not the first in my family to advocate for our land return. I follow in the footsteps of all my relatives that have held the U.S. government accountable since April 19, 1880. This includes my grandmother, KHIMSTONIK (Mary Jim Chapman). She was there the day that her relatives were taken from their final resting place on Fishhook Island (now under water due to the dam) in preparation for the Ice Harbor Dam. 
We have received so many false starts to the return. KHIMSTONIK and my Aunt AYATOOTONMI (Carrie) went so far as to testify  in the 1988 U.S. Senate Hearing Before the Select Committee on Indian Affairs before the late Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii and Senator Daniel J. Evans of Washington. During the meeting, promises regarding our relatives were actually addressed on the record. Though these promises did not lead anywhere, the family never stopped remembering our relatives and the fight for our land.
To read more about my family’s story, including first hand accounts from KHIMSTONIK and AYATOOTONMI, check out this article written in 1993.
What is Eminent Domain?
Eminent domain is the power of a governmental entity to take land for public use without the owner's consent. This power comes from the common law concepts of “necessity and sovereignty” but has been codified (made into a law) by the legislative branch. 
Common law is judge-created law. This means that a judge made an objective decision that turned into the precedent that other judges follow.
A judge looks at the following criteria when determining whether a taking is appropriate:
* The taking of the land (also known as condemnation) of the property is reasonably necessary.
* The land will be used for a public purpose.
* Just compensation is paid to the land owner for the condemned property.
In the case of my family, the judge found that the creation of the dam outweighed our (and others in the surrounding area) claims to our land. For the estimated 18 descendants, the US Army Corp collectively paid out just $3,500 (percentages received at varying