An End to Exclusivity: On the Fight For Equitable Land Distribution in Minnesota

By 2022, only 18 percent of white Americans supported reparations, compared with 77 percent of Black Americans. My friend’s prediction had come to pass. But the challenge wasn’t just an unwillingness to redistribute wealth.

That year, the great-grandchildren of the Bruces also decided to sell the old resort land back to LA County for $20 million; it was zoned for public use only, limiting what they could actually do with the property. “While I am disappointed the Bruces have chosen to sell the land, I understand their decision,” Kavon Ward told The New York Times.

The idea of reparations faces immense political resistance, on top of widespread debate over the form they should take. But given the profound racial disparities in farmland ownership—97 percent of farms, 94 percent of farm acreage, and 98 percent of net farm income belong to white farmers—it seems negligent not to consider direct measures to tackle it, redistributing some of that wealth. So whenever I noticed Black land activists mentioning the idea of reparations, I asked them about it.

The Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, a regional network of farmers, had started a reparations map, listing members who needed land, and several of them had already gotten donations. The effort could hardly undo centuries of injustice and discrimination, but “it’s something we can do right now,” Leah Penniman, one of its organizers, told me at the time. “A people-to-people solution.”

“Reparations means a cessation of the harm,” Dara Cooper said. At the time, she was the director of the National Black Food & Justice Alliance, which was working to retain and recover Black lands at a regional and national level. This partly involved protecting farmers from being displaced. “But the north star is community control of land,” she said. “And respecting the sovereignty of Indigenous folks.”

“When you do what I do, land is everything,” said Cameron Terry. “Land is power.” Terry was running a vegetable farm, Garden Variety Harvests, on borrowed backyards and small parcels he leases in Roanoke, Virginia. “Land as reparations makes a hell of a lot more sense than tax incentives or checks to people.”

It’s an uphill battle to implement the idea of reparations as policy, but even as Minneapolis cautiously backpedaled on defund, I could see that reparations was nevertheless gaining traction in some corners of American society. The Black Visions Collective, a nonprofit in Minneapolis-St. Paul, received millions of dollars in private donations following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Some of it helped to fund Black land projects in Minnesota. And that money helped to bring Zoe Hollomon’s vision to fruition.

The days of the uprising were a frenzy of mutual aid—bringing food to activists, organizers, and community members and organizing volunteer healers to provide free services and counseling. Hollomon was exhausted. Everyone was “traumatized and burned out.” She, her partner, and two other couples had been dreaming about starting a retreat for LGBTQ people and people of color, simply because those were their identities, and as it happened, they met a couple with a farm outside the city who wanted to retire.

The land included three cabins on a lake. The neighbors were already eyeing it—a cattle rancher on one side, a conservationist on the other. But the owners were thinking about reparations. “They asked us if we wanted to buy it,” she said, and they agreed to a deal. Over the next year and a half, Hollomon’s group got funding from the Black Visions fund and Resource Generation, a foundation of young justice-minded people with wealth, while white donors wanting to contribute to reparations also added to the pool. With $2 million in hand, they didn’t need a mortgage. They bought the land outright and called the retreat center Rootsprings.

“Land is one of those big resources that gives people all this power,” she told me. “At least in our current governance system and society.” That fact had become clear through her work as a food justice organizer—after all, farmers need land to grow food. Hollomon directs the organizing work of the Pesticide Action Network in Minnesota, and the coalition has helped White Earth farmers and the White Earth Land Recovery Project fight pesticide drift and chemical runoff from the industrial farms in their midst, especially R.D. Offutt. “The current food system that we have, and especially the one in Minnesota, is built for commodity farmers.” It was critical to “interrupt the agro-chemical farming industry,” she said. “But we also need to be building the solution.”

In 2018, she was talking to the Minneapolis Public Schools about sourcing their food from local, sustainable farmers and organized meetings between the two groups. Many of the farmers were Hmong, an ethnic minority in Southeast Asia; most were people of color. They were grateful to be introduced to big institutional buyers. “But we’re not there yet,” they told Hollomon. Most were still working to secure the basics: land access, credit, and technical assistance. But that meeting was a seed to a solution: small, marginalized farmers building a more resilient, sustainable food system.

The first time that these Hmong, Somali, African American, Indigenous, and Latino farmers came together from their isolated corners in the cities, counties, and suburbs of their state, they talked about feeling lonely. Most were also renters, and immigrant farmers shared stories about landlords taking advantage of them. “Could we build connections to the retiring white farmers of the region?” the group wondered. They decided to keep meeting and working together, adopting the moniker Midwest Farmers of Color. “Land is one of the top priorities that farmers named,” said Hollomon. “It continues to be.”

Five minutes outside the Leech Lake Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota, Vera Allen, a member of the Midwest Farmers of Color, owns a seventy-acre farm where natural medicines—sweetgrass, cedar and sage, tobacco—burst wild in the jumble of cedar beyond the cleared expanse. “What I desire most out of the work,” she told me, “is for growers to be able to grow.” Next to her house, a stately old tree lorded over the property. Nestled against its roots, a cloth pouch and bag of Lindt chocolates. Grandpa Ernie, a father figure who took her in when she moved to the Twin Cities, passed in 2020. “I don’t want him to leave,” she said. Tobacco filled the pouch, and the tree is an altar.

What about the Lindt?

“I wanted him to have something decadent.”

Allen’s partner grew up about ten miles away, and with their three children, they bought this parcel in 2019. It is close to family—her cousin is part Anishnaabe, part Navajo, part Winnebago, and from Leech Lake. But her own journey to this parcel has spanned many thousands of miles. Born on the Navajo Nation reservation in Gallup, New Mexico, she lived in Atlanta, Georgia, her biological father’s home, until the age of three. His grandparents were slaves on a plantation. “He never had the opportunity to dream of growing something.”

After her parents separated, her mother brought her home to the reservation, and her grandpa taught her to plant seeds and can the food. “I’ve been growing all of my life,” she said. “Besides fishing, it’s the only other thing that I don’t have any kind of struggle with. I don’t feel like I should be doing something else.” The reservation, however, didn’t feel like home. “It was family members who were the first people to ever call me [n-word],” she recalled. Her mother died when she was thirteen, and she followed her aunt up to Minnesota.

Allen wants her kids to develop a relationship to the land. That required looking toward the future and building something long-term. “Sometimes people separate growing things like flowers from growing things like potatoes,” she reflected. “I don’t feel that way.” The garden plot next to Grandpa Ernie’s tree has cucumbers, cantaloupe, tomatoes, yellow squash, broccoli, habanero peppers, and sweet corn, while inside a darkened shed, wine cap mushrooms that taste of asparagus were germinating. But her main business hasn’t sprouted yet. Christmas trees are a long crop, but organizations like the Boys & Girls Club or the YWCA reliably purchase them every year. Allen isn’t Christian, but Christmas always comes. Most likely, the trees will be ready to harvest in six or seven years.

Trees exist in the same natural world as cucumbers, only they inhabit a different span of time. “Our growing season is years long, and everyone else’s is just three-and-a-half weeks or three-and-a half-months,” she said. In three years, this land will host rows of bushy evergreens in different stages of life. “Brown people never get to think about ten years from now. They get to think about next month, they get to think about next week,” she reflected. “But you don’t get to have a relationship with a place and dream it, build it, and watch it come to life over your children’s lifetime.”

The surrounding forests have seen homesteaders arrive, Indigenous people clustering onto shrinking tracts, and men coming in with saws and machines to cull and sell the sturdiest stands amid them. One of Allen’s neighbors, an elderly man, logs the timber on his property, rotating through patches of his thousands of acres, and doesn’t do much else with the land. He is fond of reminding her that his property doesn’t just come up to the fence. It actually stretches slightly beyond it onto her side, he claims. Sometimes, he drives back and forth, back and forth past their driveway at five miles an hour, yelling in their direction, fueled by a bottomless well of gusto. Once, on foot, he swore so vigorously that he fell, and Allen’s partner had to help him back up.

Yet this attitude toward landownership can provoke conflict beyond just Allen and her neighbor. Allen has seen how property’s exclusivity—what’s mine is not yours—can make land, which is already “strictly limited in extent” (as Winston Churchill put it), scarce. And this can pit racial justice goals against one another, like the demands for land reparations and Land Back.

After the 2020 uprisings, Minnesota senator Tina Smith contacted the Midwest Farmers of Color. What did they think about the Justice for Black Farmers Bill? The proposed legislation vowed to end USDA discrimination, forgive Black farmer debts, and grant millions of acres of land to Black farmers. Some called it a land reparations bill, one that would elevate the idea of reparations from a single parcel donated by private landowners to the whole system governing the farm economy. Smith was on the agricultural committee. Would they support her in signing on?

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Hell yes.” “Hell no.”

With the extreme range of responses from their member farmers, “we ended up not making a statement for her,” Hollomon told me. “We’re exploring what different Black and Indigenous farmers feel about it.”

“When I hear, ‘Land Back,’ I’m like, absolutely, Land Back,” said Allen. Land Back is recognizing that the land will outlive us, she said. It is having soil to cultivate and a place to live. “The land is in agreement with me. It’s growing my things.”

But Allen chafes at the notion that “we should own all the things we used to own before the colonizers came.” Fortifying the line around your square, lording over it by excluding everyone else—that’s what the cussing falling neighbor does. “I’m not gonna tell Black women and Black men that land can’t be a part of your reparation. And I’m not going to say that in order for Native people to have liberation, Black people can’t have liberation,” she insisted.

She paused.

“Black women don’t have a reservation.”

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From Free the Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos by Audrea Lim. Copyright © 2024 by Audrea Lim. Published with the permission of St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of the St. Martin’s Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan, Inc.