Dear friends,
As summer arrives, we are celebrating new land connections and the growth of the commons.
The land in the summer is always buzzing with activity – the Presente! Collective Farm is in its 5th season of growing free food for community, Wild Mountain Nursery is propagating hundreds of peach trees, Celebration Tree Farm is tending the gardens and hosting events in their new yurt, and community members are outside walking in the forests and holding gatherings in the schoolhouse and gardens.
Northern lights above the commons in Greene
In a world where so many things are privatized for profit-making, finding a public place to gather where you don’t have to buy something in order to be there is rare. The commons provides a place for people to just be, at no cost. Throughout the year, and especially in the warmer months, hundreds of people come to the land in Greene and Durham for all sorts of things – farming, hosting celebrations, organizing education events, harvesting wild foods, holding meetings, or finding a quiet place to sit and listen to the wind in the trees. The commons offers essential community and land connection that is so hard for many people to find.
Over the past year, our staff collective and leadership council have been hard at work growing the commons, working on several land projects simultaneously, each of which connects Black, brown, and Indigenous land stewards to land security. We’re working with Bomazeen Land Trust on a series of land returns, collaborating with Presente! Maine to purchase a community center in Portland (fundraising enough to buy a commercial building is a slow and ongoing process!), and partnering with several farm projects seeking land.
We’ve been humbled by the time, energy, and resources that go into making land projects happen. But with the arrival of spring, years of tilling and sowing seeds have led to amazing abundance, and we are excited to share four successful projects with you.
La Finca Cooperative
In late April, with support from many collaborators and friends, we completed the purchase of a 15.4 acre farm in Porter, ME. This land is now the long-term home of La Finca Cooperative, a Black and brown majority worker-owned farming coop “committed to healing the mind, body, and soul of the individual and the collective.”
They are already working to restore and revitalize the land, and plan to begin producing fresh vegetables and halal meat this season. They’re looking forward to hosting events that center BIPOC land connection and collective healing. We’re so excited to welcome La Finca into our community, and to be welcomed into theirs!
Protecting the Little River in Belfast
This project has been an incredible labor of solidarity from a community in Belfast called the Possibility Alliance, who organized to protect a 66 acre parcel of land along the Little River. The land is home to beautiful, mature pine forests, the clear, spring-fed waters of the Little River, and a building with gathering space, a craft studio, and a classroom.
The Possibility Alliance committed to fundraising the amount needed to purchase the land, if we would help protect the land and connect it to Black, brown, and Indigenous land stewards who would use and care for it. They successfully fundraised everything needed, and we’re planning to make the purchase in mid-July.
Staff collective member Autumn Jade Fitch is leading a community process to match the land to its future stewards. Her vision for the land is shared stewardship, multiracial community building, and Wabanaki land connection. We’re excited for the future of this land as it unfolds!
Full Circle Willow
We’re thrilled that Adinah Barnett and her Full Circle Willow project have found a place to sink roots – literally! – on our commons land in Greene. Adinah’s vision is to build a perennial agroforestry wonderland of diverse willow varieties, and to weave them into living willow structures, baskets, cradles, and especially caskets for natural burial – providing beautiful, sustainable alternatives to the extractive burial industry. Adinah is a 2023/24 Braiding Seeds Fellow and just spent the winter gaining weaving skills with a master weaver in rural Scotland.
This spring, Adinah began her first planting on the land with 34 varieties of willow. She is building an infrastructure-sharing collaboration with Wild Mountain Nursery, and plans to build a drying shed and workshop for Full Circle Willow over the next couple of years. We’re so excited to welcome Adinah as a land steward into the Land in Common community!
From Adinah: “Willow is a friend to all. Hundreds of species live and thrive on willow. The flowers of willow left to grow for more than one year are early season food for pollinators, so willow beds are a great crop to have growing near veggie and fruit production. Willow sequesters carbon, provides a wind break, prevents erosion, and is downright beautiful!”
Learning from Land Return
In the fall of 2023, Land in Common returned a significant portion of the land we held in what is colonially called “Greene” to Wabanaki care via Bomazeen Land Trust. We haven’t broadcast this story far and wide because it is primarily a story for Wabanaki land protectors to tell. But we did recently join together in a webinar with others working on land return in Wabanakik to share some thoughts and perspectives on this return and on the work of landback more broadly.
We hope this conversation can contribute toward sparking more return of settler-held lands to Wabanaki holdership and care, and we’re excited to support this work in any way we can. Please get in touch if you’d like to talk!
This work is only possible with the strength of a whole community, and we are so grateful to our supporters and our wider community for your care for this work. We send our thanks and love to you!
In solidarity,
Land in Common
Autumn, Camille, Crystal, Daphne, David, Ethan, Iggy, Jesse, Jonah, Kate, Katharine, Lokotah, Mali, Marco, MiMi, René, Sarah, and Sherie
