Posts

Equitable Access to Land

Image
In Albuquerque and surrounding communities, residents can elect to redistribute a portion of their wealth to Indigenous communities on Tiwa land through the grassroots  Honor Native Land Tax . These recurring contributions acknowledge the legacies of settler colonialism and support the Pueblo Action Alliance and The Red Nation in their movements for land, water, and Native liberation. This powerful project underscores the injustices of land (dis)possession in New Mexico and offers one approach to chip away at it. But it also raises questions about underlying structures and systems. At a governmental level, what kinds of policies could address inequitable land access? How might local, state, and federal policymakers support community-led efforts? In what some advocates have termed an “emerging solidarity economy,” community coalitions have devised many creative solutions to the challenge of inequitable land access. [1] For example, the first community land trust developed in Georgia du

Reparations for Black Americans

In early 1865, a group of Black ministers met with Union leadership in Savannah, Georgia, to voice the most pressing needs of formerly enslaved people in post-Civil War America. Their priorities? Freedom from white domination, education, and land ownership. [ 1 ] This meeting led to the plan known as “40 Acres and a Mule,” which set aside 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land for freed Black families. So began the first program of reparations to Black Americans in the United States. This Union-sanctioned redistribution of land was fleeting. President Johnson overturned the plan just a few months later, dispossessing Black people of land they had forcibly worked for generations. Most plots returned to the hands of earlier white landowners, and Black families had little choice but to work as sharecroppers. For more than 150 years, the federal government has failed to fulfill the promise of reparations and address the brutal harms of slavery and its legacy. As a res