Collective Liberation & Colonial Legacies, 2 of 3

A conversation between guest collaborator sarah sao mai habib and Minnow’s Director of Land & Financial Redistribution, Neil Thapar

 

sarah habib – Could you start by introducing yourself, Minnow, and your role with Minnow?

Neil Thapar – Minnow is a kind of container we created because Mai Nguyen and I, who co-founded the organization, wanted to give space to our shared purpose, and it’s why we wanted to work together. Organizationally, it’s a nonprofit, and technically, we’re a fiscally sponsored project of another organization. I see it as a means to an end. What happens at Minnow and how we work together is important. And, ideally I see it as a temporary space for trying to support, advance, and catalyze the change that will live well beyond the organization's lifetime. 

And the purpose we come together around is to address the dominance of private property as the system of relations between people and land in the US. One of the outcomes of this is speculation for profit that wreaks havoc in society. It is also the system that props up a capitalist approach to food and land. The reason why Minnow is focused on addressing this property ownership model is because that is what sets up the foundations for what wiggle room we have or how we can organize our relationship to how we sustain ourselves and how we engage and relate to the earth. So I came to it from working in support of food justice work, broadly speaking. And I still see it in that frame. But I also like to think about it without being pigeonholed into a food-related project. It's connected to the larger vision of how we organize our society and, of course, how we organize our society depends on how we feed ourselves. 

So that's how we organized ourselves. We're a small team. The scale of the problem I just shared that we're addressing is way bigger than we are, and we don't see ourselves needing to grow to try to match the scale of the problem or the forces that are keeping that up. In fact, it's why we call ourselves Minnow; minnow are small fish, and so are we. But minnows roll deep. Our purpose is to find community with other people who are building the collective capacity to try to address these really big problems. Minnows are fish that tend to live in really large communities, which is what makes them resilient in the different locations where they live. So that's a little tie in to how the name reflects what we gather together to do. And we're all co-directors of the organization.

My specific job title is Director of Land and Financial Redistribution, which sounds big. But what that means is that I focus on supporting groups of Black and Brown people who are organizing their communities to develop the entities or structures they need for acquiring land so that they can steward it together. And sometimes, oftentimes, that includes connecting them with resources outside our small team’s capacity and skill set. So that's the land part. The finance part is related because one of the big challenges in the food and land systems that gave rise to Minnow was the cost of land and how we have a diminishing number of people in agriculture and huge consolidation of land ownership. In part, this is fueled by the high cost of land. It's a barrier to entry for people who want to get onto land or get into agriculture. 

And so, the purpose of helping people acquire land begs the question of where the money will come from to pay for it. The financial redistribution effort is related to working to shift philanthropic resources toward these Black and Brown-led land projects, particularly to support land acquisition. There's a shift towards more support generally for BIPOC communities, even as it remains a small fraction of philanthropic giving compared to white-led efforts. A lot of the focus is on existing grantmaking strategies that foundations use. But there's not as much awareness of the need to move larger amounts of money beyond the sustaining of the operations of a nonprofit organization like, for example, the actual acquisition of land. 

The reason why we see philanthropy as a place to draw on these resources is because all of that wealth ultimately was derived from the use and exploitation of Indigenous land and primarily Black and Brown labor. There's a direct connection for us in how land has supported the immense generation of financial wealth and how that's been consolidated into the hands of a relatively small number of people, allowing them to create an entire sector focused just on charitable giving. But the existing rules that govern that charitable sector don't require the redistribution of all of that money. Oftentimes, it just means the perpetuation of control over that wealth. While rules governing philanthropy can mean that wealth is no longer enriching private individuals financially, the rules freely allow the wealthy to continue controlling how that wealth is distributed, or not. So, all of that is to say that land and financial redistribution go hand in hand. The job title I gave myself was to try and communicate how these things are connected to people with resources who want to see themselves as allies and support this work.

SH – Thank you for sharing those details. I wonder about your personal background with law and how you view working within these historically oppressive legal systems. Moving beyond that, it's like bridging between many worlds, right? I've heard people talk about it in terms of dealing with colonial systems. But then there's this sort of natural or original law. I’ve also been encouraged to understand the difference between de facto versus de jure law, for example. I'm curious how you're navigating that.

NT – I appreciate this question. It is implicated in the very nature of my role as a navigator of legal systems. The challenge is often about balancing operating within the system that exists to the best of our ability and using its tools to advance our vision while recognizing that, ultimately, the system is not created to support that vision coming to its total fruition. 

I went to law school. There's no lawyer in my family or anything like that, so I didn’t have much of a preconceived notion or any special understanding of the legal system other than being someone who grew up in the US and was exposed to it through popular media and culture. And so, at first, there were a lot of things about law school that made sense to me, and I appreciated learning about some of the legal history. At the same time, throughout even the first-year curriculum, you read old cases that clearly don't make any sense in the 21st century. And at the time, I could justify it sort of like, “Oh, that was the 1800s or the late 1700s. You know, it's not like that now.” But with the notion of precedent and fundamental legal doctrines like stare decisis, decisions in our legal system that are made at any point in time are meant to inform and guide future decisions. What we end up with is that, in many cases, we actually are applying 18th-century law today, even if it has evolved or has been written into new decisions. And it’s not just what the law says that can be severely outdated; it can also be how the law is supposed to be interpreted–the principles of how to interpret or how to construct the law come from a lot of those original cases. I'm not an expert in constitutional law at all, but I mention it to express how antiquity is built into the system. In so many ways, our legal system mandates that we be governed by ghosts. 

There can be, and have been, moments where things shift, but the system is not really meant to support sea changes. It's meant to be pretty stable. And to believe in the system is to believe that no more than certain small changes are needed on an ongoing basis to meet the needs of the present. I think that's flawed thinking. I think reform is inadequate to the task of achieving justice, and that the present demands a revolution. So, I constantly have to grapple with feeling like the system's not capable of the transformations that are necessary. I also recognize that in my lifetime, the work that I have ahead of me is to figure out how to deal with what we have while continuing to pry open this window into a different paradigm. And the different paradigm isn't necessarily all new. It includes bringing concepts and practices forward that have been lost, suppressed, or marginalized. My goal is to lend more and more effort to opening that window further. 

I can give you a concrete example. We’re currently working on a project to return land back from the State of California to Indigenous people in Northern California. The system, in this case, is the State of California. Due to its own interpretation of the laws that govern what the state can do, “the system” decided that they could, in fact, agree to transfer this land to another government agency or a nonprofit, but not directly to the Tribes, notwithstanding the fact that Tribes are sovereign governments themselves. Instead, the state told the tribal governments they needed to create a nonprofit organization in order to receive the land.

And there’s the challenge. The State, in this case, would not treat Tribal governments on par with other city or county government entities. So now, there is a new Tribally-incorporated nonprofit because the state of California determined their authority was limited to only being able to transfer the land to a nonprofit or to another government agency, excluding sovereign Tribal governments.

So what is Minnow’s role in all this? Our role has been to help the Tribes create this nonprofit. And it's not ideal. Nobody from the Tribes wants this to be the structure that the tribes have to use in order to steward this land. But there isn't an immediate opportunity to make the necessary changes in law or policy such that the state feels comfortable exercising its own authority to return land directly to Tribes. So a constant sort of settling for what is available happens. That's one way of looking at it. And it's an accurate way of looking at it. From another view, it is still an opportunity to return land and people to each other. And, as long as we receive direction from the Tribes to continue pursuing that goal, even in less-than-perfect circumstances, it's an important task to take on because it can inform change that's needed at the policy level to improve future land returns. This is one example of an active project where we're putting a lot of effort into setting up this nonprofit, that nobody really wanted, because we’re bridging between colonial control and land rematriation.

I feel that, in your words, you're sharing a lot of reality of the messiness of what this work requires. And at the same time, based on what I've heard and seen from other "environmental” organizations, very few are returning land back. They're trying very hard but not necessarily doing much. That sounds harsh, but that's what I see in a lot of these efforts, even post-2020 racial uprisings, that raising of consciousness after the intense start of COVID.

I really appreciate you sharing the paradox and the messiness that's required to push us forward. It almost makes me want to ask questions about treaties and how different people describe ownership or understand ownership and wealth. I will table that for now because that's a whole other discussion, but feel free to bring that in if it relates to this other question that I really want to ask you.

You mentioned how it's really hard to talk about these issues separately–whether it's climate chaos, migrant issues, Indigenous sovereignty, the legalities of worker cooperatives, all of that, and we could go on. It's hard to talk about them separately, but we're constantly being conditioned to and told to. What are your views on how these different liberation movements within Turtle Island actually strengthen each other, and if you feel inspired to talk about that within the global context?

I feel like I need to take a moment and step out of my immediate response, which focuses on the challenges, and refocus to think about what is the opportunity or what feels inspiring about your question. I think that the last few years have made this interconnection more visible. They’ve helped people feel more of that sense of interconnectedness despite being isolated physically because of COVID and all of the sort of impacts that has had. I too feel that yearning for connectedness, which, from my perspective, is part of the human condition and human experience. I just feel it and see it more and more in the digital age we live in as well. And there’s a spark I feel in knowing that people have never wanted to put up with the bullshit of capitalism, and now, people are much more clear about that and are looking for ways to exercise some kind of agency around it, around how to live better. And so, I'm currently thinking about the strike waves that have been building for many years and coming to a head in 2023. The legacy of the Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter movements, and the 2020 uprisings and resurgence of Land Back. For me, 2014 had a big impact personally, in terms of my orientation to how I saw my role, what I thought about, and also my politicization. So, while I feel really clear about a lot of things, I'm still definitely learning. You know, trying to understand the historical context and learn from that and apply it in my life. I didn't grow up as an activist or with a strong orientation toward social justice. I grew up in a pretty conservative household, actually, so it's in my adulthood that all of this has really taken shape. 

Something I am paying more attention to is to think about how the food system connects to social movement organizing. How does all the work that people are doing around food and land justice connect to what feels like broader and more well-understood social movements that are around climate change or housing or economic justice? I think so much of mainstream food activism in the US, which is what I was first exposed to myself, has really been limited to individually-focused, consumption-based lifestyle changes. For me, it's only in the recent past where I’ve been able to center structural change, racial justice, and critical theory in my work. And it's mostly due to being connected to more Black and Brown leaders who are doing this work where that intersectional approach is more the norm. And I think we’re still a small slice of the overall pie, but that's where the inspiration from other places around the globe comes.

In other places, mostly in the Global South, social movements arising out of peasant movements and out of people being displaced from land are inherently intersectional. A lot of my inspiration for how to reimagine land relations in the US comes not only from teachings of Indigenous communities and learnings from pre-colonial contexts here, but also from more recent uprisings and social movements in Africa, in South America, in India. There are actual land reform policies that are implemented, actual changes to constitutions that give people an enforceable right to food. The US in particular, and the Global North more generally, is in some ways an outlier in terms of land policy, and it goes back to this notion of private property and the way our legal system was set up. And private property will be defended very strongly by the powers that be to prevent anything that resembles land reform here. That is why we have to link arms across the spectrum of movements fighting for human and social rights to win.

Yes. Thank you for sharing that perspective on the US being an outlier. I think I still haven't passed the threshold of living more in the US than I have elsewhere. I was born and grew up in Kuwait, so I feel like my US indoctrination is strong, but it isn't quite dominant, and I'm trying to hold on to that. But it's hard, and you definitely touched on those points of what makes it so hard. Even these systems that are so-called philanthropic or progressive, they're really distorted. It can be really hard to step out and view that clearly. And it's by design, right? It makes me want to ask the question of your own experiences and background. Were you able to live outside of the US? Do you identify with diasporic experiences? Because I'm always curious, what leads people to step out a bit and see how the US is an outlier while also living here and trying to survive and create change? What has influenced you and given you that clarity?

I was born here in the US, and my parents immigrated from India. I'm thankful that when I was younger, our family moved to India and lived there for three years. I was in elementary school, so most of my experience was simply living in my own and my parents' homelands, though in a different part than where they and their families were from. I don't think I saw it at the moment, but in hindsight, living there helped me develop an important perspective I carry with me today, which is that the US is not the center of the world. Growing up here and in different places around the world sort of powers that narrative for me. I was also fortunate to be able to travel to other countries throughout my childhood because my family could afford to do that. I got snippets of other cultures with enough frequency and in enough steady doses that I think it helped me keep that perspective. 

As a result of living in India as a child, I've always had my foot in both of those worlds and never felt fully comfortable in either, even though I was born here in the US. There's something that always reminds me that this isn't the only place that I'm connected to. My ancestors are actually from what is currently Pakistan, both my grandparents on both sides. After the partition in 1947, when the British left, their families moved from what's now Pakistan into India. So it's even strange to say that I'm Indian in some ways. I tend more towards the term South Asian because otherwise it's just a series of lines that got drawn at a certain time that decide what national name is used. Even though my parents heavily identify as Indian because of their experience and what they grew up around, including much antagonism towards people on the other side of that made-up border, I don't carry that with me because that was not my experience. 

Being pulled between two places that I feel connected to has created a distance which has both disconnected me from a lot of things and allowed me to see them in a different way. And the more I've learned about my own history, I’ve been grappling with this idea of being a descendant of colonization myself. While this looks different for lots of different communities, the more I learn the more I understand that it has also directly affected my family. Still, there are lots of gaps and broken links in understanding that for me, but even though I don't see the full picture yet, I recognize that a picture is still there. 

A lot of my childhood experiences have helped with why I feel I was predisposed to arrive at the place that I've come to in life. What I later learned to call neo-colonialism, I saw first hand as a child. During my years growing up in India was when the first Pizza Hut opened. I, along with so many others, was so excited! It represented progress. It represented that India was cool, there was excitement that there was this American brand that saw itself as wanting to be there. But now I look back on that with such a different perspective as the harbinger of a US-led industrialization of the Indian food system along with all the accompanying distortions to the existing culture. 

Later in life I learned about the Green Revolution and how corporations in the US and the federal government use other countries as a testing ground to perfect practices that are then adopted here, but at the expense of all of those places. A US-based corporation, Union Carbide (which is now Dow Chemical) had a chemical manufacturing plant that created one of the world's largest industrial disasters in Bhopal, India, in 1984. It poisoned hundreds of thousands of people. But it was manufacturing insecticides for export and for use in agriculture, both in India and other places. There are many examples of that in other countries, you know, and all of those learnings and experiences or observations connect. I'm exploring these connections and it is helping me better understand why I feel so connected and committed to, for example, movements for Indigenous sovereignty in the United States.

Hearing you helps me clarify my own links and ties to why I am drawn to being involved in Indigenous sovereignty here in the US, and it's not only that, but it's also both that intercultural and that interspecies solidarity that I hear is coming through in your stories. 

Talking about food is also talking about the seeds and the land, and your example of how the testing grounds for certain pesticides happened in your homelands. It's just another example of our deep interconnections both in the really difficult wounding aspects, but also the potential for healing and our mutual liberation. So thank you for bringing in those specific examples because it really helps ground us in these mycelial networks that we might not see but are definitely there.

Someone recently shared with me how, even in the most progressive spaces in the US, we're encouraged to follow these identity scripts of who our people are and how we should act and what we should care about. I think having more of these conversations is really breaking down those scripts and getting at something deeper. 

It still feels like we're scratching the surface in a lot of ways, but all this to say is one of the questions I prepared, and if this doesn't resonate, we could close off with something else. But do you feel any resonance with wisdom and healing traditions from your homelands and bringing that forth in this work? Whether it's something new or something you've already been doing?

I actually don't have a lot to say on this because it's something that I have felt really disconnected from. There's an innate curiosity and interest, and if I'm being truly honest, there's also social pressure. In doing work that connects me to other people who are focused on social justice, I find that so many folks are inspired by their ancestral connections, which in turn inspires me! So I internalize a sort of pressure that I feel to tap into that even though I don’t have that much ground in it yet. I'm just balancing and weighing that I don't want to do it out of obligation; I want to follow the actual interest, curiosity, and desire that I have to connect back with my ancestral lineages, histories, and lessons. I think it helps that I’m  able to be in the spaces where I’m talking to people about this, and  I'm also just letting it come to me so that I feel an authentic connection to that exploration. 

I haven't been back to India since 2009. I do feel like sometime in my future there will be, if possible, time to go and actually do a trip that helps me learn and rekindle some of these threads. And I don't know what that is yet exactly, but for now, I'm just in a sort of exploration phase. It gets tricky in multiracial, multi-ethnic spaces. For me personally, there's sort of a nervousness and a self-consciousness of not feeling as connected. I don't know, feeling some kind of lack or sort of distance from the amount of passion that I want to express about something, and a distance from being able to do that when I see so much of it so authentically inspired in other people by their lineage that they have and what drew them in. So it feeds a little bit of impostor feeling in those spaces. I don't want to feel that because I don't think that I bear the full responsibility of how I ended up here. I do think it's important, though, and I do feel inspired to delve into it more because I think there's something there for all of us to feel more connected to our past. I have a child, so I am also motivated by a desire to be able to pass something on to them that they can carry forward in their life.

That's so important to name. I think a lot of us in the diaspora and, for any reason that we were disconnected, even adopt stories and things like that. It's a lot to feel that pressure. And I think you're right about the responsibility of that and not holding it all on our two shoulders is something that is required to actually be on that journey in a compassionate way. So, I thank you for naming the reality of that because it definitely resonates with me as well. And also for bringing in your child. It's sweet to think about the continuation of this work and that it maybe doesn't look a particular way. But who knows, maybe this engaged action is a sort of lineage continuation in its own way, and it doesn't look like a particular idealized past version of whatever we think we should be doing. I wanted to give you a chance to close in any way that feels appropriate. Any last thoughts you want to share?

I guess one thing that came up looking at the questions that you shared is the one that we skipped about ownership, wealth and re-imagining these things. What I want to share is that your question helped me realize a framework for how to think about the distinction between what that is and how I think about it, or rather, of how it's framed and how I think about it. Ultimately, what came up for me was feeling like the current popular conception of ownership and wealth is defined by a quantity of something. For me, reimagining that is to shift our focus to the quality of it instead. So ownership of land, for example, is sort of defined by how many things you can do to the exclusion of others on that property, what people  often refer to as the “bundle of sticks” of property ownership. Is that all that property ownership is–how many sticks you have? Instead, what if ownership was defined by thinking about the nature of your commitment to that place? What does it bring to you, and what is your responsibility to that land? That’s a qualitative way to think about that, and you know, similarly with wealth, it’s very clearly about the quantity. So yes, there is a baseline of enough that everybody needs to have, and beyond that, maybe it should be about the quality of relationships as a different conception of what wealth is. Beyond what it is to have enough, and enough includes sustaining ourselves physically, but also spiritually, and culturally. Then beyond that, and inherent in it, is the quality of how we are sustained, which would be a different way of thinking about wealth than how we currently think about it. I just wanted to share that because I appreciated your question allowing me to think about it in a way that I haven't really beforehand. I'm going to continue to play with that idea to see if it has more depth to it than what I've been able to think about so far. Thank you.

Yes, I love thinking about wealth as a relationship and the quality of the process that I hear you describe.

 

Guest collaborator sarah sao mai habib (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker with diasporic Vietnamese, Iraqi, and Kuwaiti roots. She holds a Master of Architecture with a focus on infrastructures of care from Columbia University. sarah created Home Sovereignty Studio, a twofold practice centered on narrative and material change while returning to lineages of collective liberation. We are sharing our conversations with sarah in full in this series of three blog posts, under the same outcry and prayer for action, solidarity, and love for the land with which our zine-letter number 2 was printed.


 

The introduction to this blog post series can be read here. It is also featured as an article in Minnow's Season 2 issue of The Dive, our printed zine-letter. Subscribe anytime to our digital newsletter to stay in the know, or better yet, make a one-time or recurrent donation to Minnow and get a printed copy of our zine-letter delivered directly to you!

You can browse a digital version of our first issue of The Dive here and our second issue here.


sarah sao mai habib

sarah sao mai habib (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker with diasporic Vietnamese, Iraqi, and Kuwaiti roots. She holds a Master of Architecture with a focus on infrastructures of care from Columbia University. sarah created Home Sovereignty Studio, a twofold practice centered on narrative and material change while returning to lineages of collective liberation.

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