Our 2021 Collective Positionality
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The Garden Project is located on the unceded land of the Western Abenaki peoples, at the confluence of the Winooski and her North Branch, currently known as East Montpelier, VT. As members of the Garden Project, we hold ancestry of Slavic/Czech, German, Irish, Polish/Russian, Irish/Greek, Italian/Sicilian, Puerto Rican & Mexican (Taíno, African, Spanish, English, French, Indigenous Nation(s) of Turtle Island), Polish Jew, English, Canadian, Tennesee slaveholders, Nebraska corn farmers, French Canadian, Acadian French, Portuguese, Italian, Scottish, and Belgian peoples; and the pieces of us that remain in the knowing of Mystery. We are all settlers. All but one of us hold unearned white privilege. We acknowledge both the privilege and the responsibility that entwine in the journey of coming to know our ancestral origins, and hold these as growing practices themselves.
The majority of us are Queer and were AFAB; many of us identify as cis or cis-passing, and some of us identify across the Trans spectrums. Our collective body currently consists of folks primarily aged between 20 and 40, all of whom have completed Bachelors’ level education, two of whom hold advanced degrees. The majority of us are abled, working class, and who grew up in places where the religions in our communities and/or homes were those of our most recent ancestors. All of us grew up with English as a first language, one of us also grew up with Spanish spoken in her home. Some of our ancestors came to this land as later beneficiaries of the harms of the colonizers who were actively settling, and some of our ancestors are the direct settler colonizers of this land and her rightful peoples. |
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As settlers growing food on stolen land, we acknowledge the legacy of harm, exploitation and injustice that our bodies carry in our presence here; and upon which we are working at the literal ground level of necessary reckoning and repair.
Our project is structured in three concentric circles of involvement and responsibility, called Scopes: Outer, Inner and Core. Our core leadership is composed of individuals who hold both generational and current working class identity, and who have agency of choice in our current class status as self-employed workers. We recognize that the ways that we choose to disengage in capitalism are elective, and therefore inherently privileged. We seek to leverage this privilege by using it to support a project that increases equitable access to land, community and healing. Collectively, our project exists at the intersection of lack of resource to generate land security, and the privileges we carry individually and collectively which facilitate our access to unceded land.
Within our collective body are experiences of generational wealth, chronic pain and illness, and a spectrum of neurodivergent identities, all of which inform how we touch the land and move with one another. We are in the practice of unlearning the “pushes” generated by capitalism and white supremacy of extraction, exploitation, productivity, hierarchies, binaries and perfectionism, and of embodying emergent rhythms of relating, repairing, and co-creating that are authentic to the bodies of land, wind, rain, sun, plant, insect, bird, animal and human animal that we are weaving them with.
Collectively we tend a biodiverse half-acre garden where we strive to be in embodied practices of connection, learning, healing and repair. With the language of somatics at the foundation of our project, we understand healing trauma - collectively and individually - to be direct and essential work in mending the violences of racism, colonialism, and capitalism. As a group of predominantly white-bodied people with settler colonial privilege, we are in embodied reckoning and active practice with ourselves and with each other around unsettling, anti-racism and decolonial work. Our practices move us towards centering relationship, ancestral reconnection, right relationships with all of life, and re-membering equity.
Within our collective body are experiences of generational wealth, chronic pain and illness, and a spectrum of neurodivergent identities, all of which inform how we touch the land and move with one another. We are in the practice of unlearning the “pushes” generated by capitalism and white supremacy of extraction, exploitation, productivity, hierarchies, binaries and perfectionism, and of embodying emergent rhythms of relating, repairing, and co-creating that are authentic to the bodies of land, wind, rain, sun, plant, insect, bird, animal and human animal that we are weaving them with.
Collectively we tend a biodiverse half-acre garden where we strive to be in embodied practices of connection, learning, healing and repair. With the language of somatics at the foundation of our project, we understand healing trauma - collectively and individually - to be direct and essential work in mending the violences of racism, colonialism, and capitalism. As a group of predominantly white-bodied people with settler colonial privilege, we are in embodied reckoning and active practice with ourselves and with each other around unsettling, anti-racism and decolonial work. Our practices move us towards centering relationship, ancestral reconnection, right relationships with all of life, and re-membering equity.
Collectively and individually, we move our positionality through a shared set of Values which inform how we move and grow.
Want to join us?
Learn more about our Scopes of Involvement or fill out our Membership Application for either
Core, Inner, Shift Meals & Storage Scopes or Outer Scope & Community Work Days
Want to join us?
Learn more about our Scopes of Involvement or fill out our Membership Application for either
Core, Inner, Shift Meals & Storage Scopes or Outer Scope & Community Work Days
