OK: Food, Land Future

Rachel Mulder, Leanne Nagata, Sasha Zwiebel, 2021

https://rls.cargo.site/

Artist Statement

Oklahoma is a place of fields, faith, and football, built on a palimpsest of past and current failure, violence, and disaster. It is home to the forcibly removed, the end of the Trail of Tears, the Dust Bowl, and racial discrimination and terrorism, including the Tulsa Race Massacre. Here, there is continued systemic discrimination and racism in the agricultural sector, while big ag’s commodity monocrops are heavily subsidized at the cost of the environment, biodiversity, human health, and rural economies. 

Where there is failure and funding, there is opportunity. Opportunity to face the violence in our shared past and confront their new forms by working to end continued harm and to restore, repay, redistribute that which is owed: reparations, Land Back. Our first interplay aims to facilitate food sovereignty and small farming by shifting USDA resources to support community-based, diversified food farming and local market and food processing initiatives. Our second interplay utilizes the power of collective ownership and stewardship by changing the terms of the State trust lands, adapting USDA subsidies, and enforcing the power of tribal jurisdictions, to redress the stolen land, wealth, and sovereignty from Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks in Oklahoma.

We are not the experts — the experts are all the many organizations and folks on the ground already engaged in this work. They have deeply inspired us, and we wish that our project can extend out from the Yale School of Architecture to be useful to them. Thus, instead of seeing our interplays as two certain and unmoveable systems, we see them as two collections of ideas that can be atomized and adapted to changing contexts. For that reason, we have distilled our work into a deck of ideas that we hope can support those who are on the path toward justice.

We extend our thanks to Keller Easterling, Theodossios Issaias and the Yale School of Architecture for their support and guidance.