There are no real ways to be a non-taxpayer, devoid of federal government. Many of us are still practicing marronage while being citizens of this country and demanding what our citizenship is supposed to include.

The Black Panther Party was an example of a very maroon-like entity providing the things the community lacked. They filled in critical voids, and that was a very powerful thing to do.

We can find marronage in something as simple as community gardens: We’re going to feed and depend on one another, right?

For example, my wife and I get way more eggs than we can use from our chickens. First, we give them to the family and to our neighbors, and then what’s left, we sell at a heavily discounted price to friends and co-workers.

Our neighbors know they can come to us if needed, and they’re looking out for us in return. This is how we grow interdependence, which is what maroon communities have been about.

In this book, you write that during the Reconstruction Era, land-owning Black people had to learn how to not just own the land but also how to commodify it quickly. How did that shift their relationship to land?

There was this immediate need to learn. Commodification is a form of capitalizing off of something, so we start to see the emergence of Black capitalism, of becoming part of this economy to survive.

When we went off of Indigenous wisdom, societies were much more communalist. Agriculture was very valued, but that was simply one’s job in the community, similar to being an educator, a healer, or a doula. [Our] ancestors had to go from that communalism to being the lowest rung of society as a slave, to then finding a way to make a living off [agriculture]. We had to learn how to put a price on one crop versus another, a price that would make sense to white people.

Trying to figure out a space to be a citizen, a business owner, and part of this agri-economy as a Black person was a delicate dance. But our expertise was often overlooked. I know this soil, I know these trees, I know the stars, I know what that wind means. I know when there’s too much water in the air and when there’s too little water in the air. There was so much innate wisdom, but now they [our ancestors] had to learn the psychology [and business] of making a profit while working with unsavory actors.

It required double consciousness, a concept that W.E.B. DuBois spoke to often.

Reparations for Black land theft is a subject you explore in the book, along with Indigenous land rematriation. How do those conversations make space for one another?

First, it starts with Black and Indigenous people being in community with one another more. We also need to look honestly at Black history and Indigenous history in this country and acknowledge that both cultures have always had an abundance mindset regarding land, that there was enough to go around, that it could be held communally and benefit all of us.

It is a white supremacist idea that only some of us can have land, and the other people should work it. It is a capitalist idea that the people who own the land would not be those who work it.

The pathways to landback and Black reparations can look very different. For example, in Indigenous communities, landback looks like reclaiming larger swaths of land that are still more rural—and that’s much of what is currently happening in the Pacific Northwest. For Black people, reparations can look like government accountability. States like California are leading the way with initiatives such as forming a reparations task force to address the state’s former participation in the slave economy.

We need to get into the nitty-gritty and be open to the tension. Reparations and landback should be multi-pronged approaches, where people can access resources and assets in the form that works for them. Even more importantly, there is a need for both groups to be in solidarity. I do believe we owe each other something—honesty.

How do we work together and make the case for justice simultaneously so that we are not pitted against each other? We could say, Yes, it’s all stolen land that our ancestors worked on. This country was built on Indigenous genocide, on stolen land, on land that our ancestors worked. All of that deserves repair.

The Pigford vs. Glickman case, which resulted in $1.15 billion in settlements for Black farmers in 1999 and 2010, is considered a hallmark case in addressing alleged discrimination by the USDA. What have been the lasting ripple effects of the settlement—good and bad?

I’ll start with the bad to end on a high note. The negative outcome of the case is that many white people believe that those settlements were reparations. Any new addressing of the issue feels like reverse racism.

We ran into that issue in 2021 when the Biden administration attempted to pass debt-relief legislation for marginalized farmers, which includes white women, women of color, and non-Black people of color. It was portrayed in the media to be only for Black farmers. White farmers saw it as a threat that Black farmers were going to be compensated again and reacted by suing for reverse racism, which kept that money tied up in the courts.

For the Pigford settlements, the message that traveled farthest was that Black farmers were getting money. But many Black farmers did not qualify anymore because they no longer owned their land. To qualify, you had to have existing acreage. If you were already bankrupted and had no money, you could not qualify either. And if you didn’t keep specific records of the debt from the decades that case specified, you did not qualify.

One of the good things about the settlements that did go through is that they kept many farms alive. It was the first time that the government acknowledged that they did not do right by Black farmers and attempted to address it. It was also the first time that the government held the USDA accountable.

I believe that about 20,000 Black farmers and families benefited from the settlements. While that is a large number, we still have less than 1 percent of rural land currently owned by Black people. The problem of the widening racial wealth gap and the lack of Black farming families in the South is still not solved.

What do you hope people take away from your book?

I hope that Black people feel seen and excited to talk to their elders, whether those people are biologically related to them or not. We have so many elders around us; before they become ancestors, talk to them. Ask them about their first experiences on land.

We need to hear those stories, understand the fear, and understand why people do what they do so that we know what we’re fighting against and for. We need to get to a place where most Americans finally believe that we need to address the legacy of slavery and start talking about what that would look like.

I would want everyone to leave the book filled with urgency to act. That starts with learning about your family history through projects like Where’s My Land, which helps Black families reclaim stolen land.

It also looks like working to preserve cultural traditions through food, worker-owned land projects, and resource sharing. It also starts with understanding the fact that we’re never going to get to a post-racial America without some form of reparations.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.