Black Environmental Memory: Remembering Black Land Relationships to Reimagine an Otherwise

Abstract

Many Black people use our own enslavement history as a rationale for removing ways we might be implicated in the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples. Decolonization means resituating our beliefs about the so-called American Dream that has been such an embedded aspiration to freedom on what some call Turtle Island; and this dream is bound to ownership of Indigenous lands. This is a point I contend with in my multigenre memoir about land and family history. Eve Tuck and K.W. Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”, Nick Este’s Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition and Tiffany Lethabo King’s Otherwise Worlds provide foundation for imagining an otherwise. Through my mutligenre memoir, I explore Black environmental memory using the vehicles of Blues music, Black poetics, Black feminist and queer thought, call and response, oral tradition, the Black church, and Gospel hymns. I revisit my own land relationships and familial connections to push against the dominant wilderness model and to reimagine an otherwise.