Today on KPFA Radio’s Women’s Magazine Lisa Dettmer talks to three Queer farmers of color, Oriana Bolden, Loa Niumeitolu and Kellee Matsushita-Tseng about how we can create alternative spaces to sustain us during this newest round of fascism.
While Trump is orchestrating a neoliberal collapse and we weather the constant barrage of attacks on our lives we need to create alternative communities rooted in the land.
But our capitalist industrial model of growing and consuming food is contributing to both climate change and social inequity and unfortunately large agro industrial farming is not that different than plantation farming. industrial capitalism is undermining our ability to build sustainable food systems for all. 98% of Farm Land is controlled by white people and many argue that alternative economies—including alternative food networks—continue to benefit middle class white folks, while further marginalizing communities of color and low-income folks. So today I am going to talk to 3 Queer farmers who are creating farms and gardens farming for BIPOC and low income and Queer people which is so important to creating a truly just movement for food sovereignty and is so important right now to help create alternative communities that can sustain us when we can not count on government grants or financial support reminding us that we will need to create independent grassroots movements rooted in the land where we can be sustained with food and well being and where we can create our own systems for mutual aid and an alternative non extractive non exploitive economic and eco system. Today we talk to 3 farmers who are doing that.
Oriana Bolden is a Black, queer, filmmaking farmer located in Grass Valley, CA, where Oriana stewards medicinal herbs, edible flowers and long-celebrated, but “forgotten” herbs, spices and indigenous foods that are local and ecologically and culturally important.
And we talk to Loa Niumeitolu, who is a Tongan poet, community organizer, educator and urban farmer. She is the director of Planting Oceania, a Pacific Islander collective that plants their ancestral foods and medicine for self determination and to heal from the destructions of colonization.. planting Oceania plants on the unceded territories of Lisjan and Raymatush tribes.”
And lastly we talk to Kellee Matsushita-Tseng who is a yonsei, 4th generation queer japanese-chinese american, living and farming on unceded territory of the Uypi-tribe in Santa Cruz. Kellee joined the Food, What?! team in 2023 with over a decade of both farming and education experience, with special love for connecting people to seed stewardship. In addition to their work with youth at Food What?!, Kellee works to build seed sovereignty movements as a means of cultivating community power and organizes with a collective of AAPI farmers and organizers across the country, called Second Generation Seeds, which preserves, improves, and breeds crops significant to communities of the Asian diaspora. Kellee is also a founding member of Bitter Cotyledons, a collective of queer and trans asian Americans that cultivates creative resilience through ancestral foodways and community.
The post Queers of Color Farmers appeared first on KPFA.