Since choosing to migrate to rural America with a sort-of "back-to-
the-land" ethos, my community has decreased in ethnic diversity. The suburban neighborhood I grew up in had people of all different races, backgrounds, and religions but most everyone I've met in the "sustainable agriculture movement" in rural Illinois, Washington, Texas, Massachusetts and Wisconsin have been white with American, Christian heritage. I've encountered many organic farms owned by white folk who employ Mexican immigrants but few owned by Mexicans, exacerbating my fear that environmentalist leadership suffers from cultural homogeny.In her journalistic foray into "the gardens of ethnic Americans," Patricia Klindienst proves that the conscientious land managers of America are in fact quite diverse. In "The Earth Knows My Name," Klindienst describes her interviews with immigrant, Native American and African American growers across the country, all of whom have deep connections to land and food. In so doing, she gave me hope that the movement I'm a part of as an American organic farmer is wider than the ethnically limited sample I've met so far.
Klindienst devotes each of her eight chapters to a community of growers, titling them with one word descriptive nouns.
"Freedom" is the story of two Gullah elders, Ralph Middleton and Otis Daise, and their gardens on St. Helena Island. Gullahs are a community of African Americans who have preserved their unique cultural and linguistic heritage throughout slavery, emancipation, and the modern pressures of tourism-based development on the islands off the coast of South Carolina. Klindienst describes some of the dynamic history of St. Helena where African slaves, as the property of European land owners, grew non-European crops (mainly rice, indigo and cotton), in a distinctly non-European climate with predominantly African growing methods. She speaks of today's Gullah community as people who know the empowering significance of growing food because they remember and pass down the story of their ancestors who transitioned from working the land as slaves to owning the land and providing for themselves as self-sufficient free people. She says of freed low-country slaves, "…in their gardens they had kept alive a love for the land that even the dehumanizing experience of slavery could not expunge."
Klindienst also laments, along with her interviewees Middleton and Daise, the onslaught of developers and tourists who have been buying up land on the historic sea islands. She says, "… real estate ads for land in Beaufort County, including the discretely worded advertisements for some of the old slave master's houses… make it clear that the marketing of St. Helena to wealthy white outsiders depends on the willed oblivion to history… It's as if the Gullahs were already gone, and with them the awkward and inconvenient history of slavery." Throughout the book Klindienst brings this kind of scrutiny to the present and puts out a powerful call to be thoughtful about where we all come from and about what land really is.
In "Refuge," Klindienst describes a group of gardeners known locally in Amherst, MA as the Khmer Growers, saying, "five minutes drive from the Emily Dickinson homestead and the Lord Jeffery Inn, a group of rice farmers from… central Cambodia, refugees from a decade of civil war, genocide, and invasion, have translated a three-thousand-year-old farming tradition into the local idiom of a New England farm field."
Klindienst tells the story of Sokhen Mao's family; about the violence and exile they experienced as a result of U.S. bombings, torture and genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, and a harrowing escape to Thailand. The story is set in contrast to the acres of Asian vegetables and herbs the family now grows on public conservation land in Amherst. Speaking of Sokhen's aunts and their immigration to the U.S. as refugees she says, "For years the sisters thought the others were dead. Now they work side by side in the garden…"
Again, Klindienst does not simply introduce us to "ethnic gardeners" with profound connections to the land; she meditates on how the past relates to the present, "I find myself face-to-face with the survivors of the television war of my coming of age, the war that split apart the generations and racked our nation." Klindienst paints a picture of her interviewees and then asks readers to grasp a meaning in the tableaus she presents.
The Earth Knows My Name also contains descriptions of Kleindienst's visits with Native American gardeners in New Mexico in "Renewal"; a Polish-American vintner and a Japanese American berry farmer in the Puget Sound in "Place"; two immigrant gardeners from Mussolini's Italy in "Memory"; Puerto Rican urban farmers in Holyoke, MA in "Community"; a Yankee descendent of Puritan New England settlers who grows Indian corn on his families' original homestead in "Justice"; and a Punjabi woman's garden in California in "Peace".
Numerous potential dangers lurk when white ivy-league professors set out to record stories of "ethnic" peoples; pitfalls of misrepresentation and the vagaries of whose voice is really whose are undoubtedly present as Klindienst speaks for her subjects. I do think however, that "The Earth Knows My Name" accomplishes a net positive.
After reading the book, I am more convinced that the overwhelming whiteness I've encountered so far in the self-titled sustainable agriculture movement is not due to a lack of diversity in conscientious American growers, but rather a lack of connection between communities. Khmer refugees who have brought their deep history of conservationist agriculture simply aren't enough in contact with the graduates of American liberal arts colleges looking for more practical ways to accomplish food security in modern America. The diversity I experienced in my suburban upbringing exists in rural America too. Perhaps in the country, people are just spaced further apart, without the kind of forced contact that exists in urban areas.
The examples in this book, sentimental as they may sometimes be, of ethnic Americans connecting to America through its soil are a comforting wake up call that environmentalism is indeed a diverse movement.
