Offerings

Here is where you can find the reports and teaching tools that Black/Land offers for public use.

Please share these materials. Use them in your classroom. Show them to your community groups. Re-post them in your blog. Talk about them with your co-workers. We just ask three things:

Give us credit. Always acknowledge that these materials were created by the hard-working people at The Black/Land Project. Don’t pass our work off as your own.
Share the whole thing. Don’t sample, modify or re-mix our work. Please don’t “borrow” our images, audio or video out of context: we often had to get special permission to use them.
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Works on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Black/Land: A Conversation with the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture

In September 2022, Mistinguette Smith talked with students at the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture about the narrow ways that Black relationships to land are narrowly framed in their field, and contrasts them to the manifold strengthening ways Black people define their relationships to urban land today.

MOVE Bombing day of remembrance: Why Philly can’t heal until America does.

On May 13th, 2021, the City of Philadelphia will hold its first annual remembrance of the 1985 bombing of a Black neighborhood to silence the Black decolonial naturist group MOVE. But Philadelphia cannot heal from the MOVE bombing until we remember the whole truth: the bombing of MOVE was part of a pattern of local government warfare against its own people, through the murder of Black people and the seizure, incineration, and erasure of Black land. This pattern still shapes Black relationships to land today.

The Black/Land Project connected the dots between Wilmington, Tulsa, Rosewood, and many other places, to bring you this story.

The scene at the corner of 62nd and Larchwood in Philadelphia, in the afternoon following the dropping of bomb on MOVE headquarters, May 13, 1985. TOM GRALISH / Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer — The scene at the corner of 62nd and Larchwood in Philadelphia, in the afternoon following the dropping of bomb on MOVE headquarters, May 13, 1985.
TOM GRALISH / Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer

WILDNESS: RELATIONS OF PEOPLE AND PLACES

What place does "wildness" hold in black life and imagination?

Mistinguette Smith talks with the Center for Humans and Nature about what gifts emerge from the wild, black margins.

THE DECK

THE DECK

The Deck is a helpful discussion tool that Black/Land uses in our workshops. It is comprised of over 100 different questions that we can ask ourselves about black relationships to land. You may find these questions helpful as a conversation starter, a writing prompt, or maybe even as a new perspective to consider. Click here to go to The Deck: refresh your page to shuffle The Deck and generate a new question.

a different american history: our newest resource

Not Nowhere: Collaborating on Selfsame Land

The Black/Land Project has conducted its work entirely outside the academy and, until recently, completely separate from the codes and discourses that preoccupy academic inquiry. Yet we operate in a series of contingent collaborations, principally with scholar Eve Tuck (Unangan). Together we construct work on decolonial futurity and theorizing land.

In a multiracial collaboration, the Black/Land team of Hannah Sultan and Allison Guess co-authored “Not Nowhere: Collaborating on Selfsame Land ” with Eve Tuck for the journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society. You can read it by clicking the image above, or you can download a PDF of the article here.

Click the image above to download the PDF

Race Food Justice Cleveland: Where Black/Land Matters

Did you attend the Black/Land Project and Place Matters workshop at the Cleveland Race Food Justice conference in April 2014?

If so, we invite you to download the attached summary report of how you want land to be used in your neighborhoods and communities.

Because so many of you have asked for it, we have also included a shortened version of the slide presentation with key dates about the history of land use and ownership in Cleveland, linked here.

Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations

The Black/Land Project is a catalyst for community action based on research. We recently collaborated with two social scientists, Eve Tuck PhD and Brian Jones of SUNY New Paltz, to analyze some of our interviews. Together, we explored two thresholds of belief: beliefs about stories as data, and beliefs about black people as being “ungeographic.”

The result is Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations, which appears in the March 2014 issue of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. (Click on the image at left to read a PDF of the article.)

The Deck of Black/Land questions in The Colors of Nature Teaching Guide

The Colors of Nature is a collection of essays that explore the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting value of cultural heritage, and revealing how this wealth of perspectives is essential to building a livable future.

The new online teaching guide includes the full set of questions from The Deck , 125 question cards designed to stimulate writing and conversation about black relationships to land. The Deck was created by The Black/Land Project, and can be found on pages 128-136 of the Teaching Guide, here.

Beyond Fields and Factories: Black Relationships to Land and Place in Flint

The Black/Land Project spent six months helping the people of Flint, Michigan tell themselves, and each other, about their relationship to land and place. As a post-industrial city with a majority black population, Flint shares a narrative with other northern cities that boomed during the Great Migration, but now face the economic and environmental consequences of heavy industry and its decline. Beyond Fields and Factories includes samples of interviews with local Flint residents, and recommendations for how they can use the strengths developed by living “Up South” to generate leadership for a self-determined future. Click on the image at left, or click here, to download a copy of this report.

Black/Land: Other People’s Stories

Other People’s Stories is an essay that describes how The Black/Land Project generates both data and questions related to self-definition and self-determination in black relationships to land and place. An abbreviated version of this paper was delivered on the panel “Staking A Claim: Self-Defining Black Relationships to Land” at the Black Environmental Thought II conference that was held at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. September, 2012. Click on the image at left, or click here, to download a copy of this essay.

Transcending Historical Trauma

Transcending Historical Trauma was a paper delivered by Tavia Benjamin and Alison Guess at the 2013 Allied Media Conference panel “Tierra Y Libertad.” Below is a link of the presentation.

AMC Tierra Y Libertad “Transcending Historical Trauma: Black/Land Project” from Black/Land Project