The core of environmental practice is a resonance with the land at the register of the self and with concern for sustaining the productivity of the land for generations to come. Across the Black Belt South and Appalachia, Black women have been stewarding the cultural practice of memory and kinship to their daughters and children to come. The generations of learning have fortified Black approaches to land management and practice that require a deep reciprocity with giving to the land what is taken. Mavis Gragg’s great-great-grandmother, self-entitled “America,” laid claim to a nascent entrepreneurial spirit, owning land in her native western North Carolina. Reflections of childhood embody an inherency with nature, not by name but through experience, walking to school in the forest and spending time with family. Nature enshrouds these communities in a solace that emerged to provide rest and healing. Both of these “country girls” take heed from the caretaking methods of their foremothers to take care of all things with respect and love for their agency. Memory becomes a story of how to do things and how to keep things. 

At the center of Mavis’s practice is the affirmation of the act of humanity and resistance that is Black ownership. To combat the challenges around heirs’ property, Gragg has co-located resources for Black communities to govern their land through legal consultation, digitizing official documentation, and imagining new methods of buying and purchasing intra-Black communities. Euneika’s work brings light and joy to the heaviest of topics around race, justice, and our country’s deep history. As a designer and creative artist, her work defines the “social architectural practice” of how Black women hold and make space. This practice of translation combines community organizing and political education to produce a public history trail that makes visible the endless contributions of generations of Black women to shaping the productivity and cultural importance of the South. 

The agricultural sovereignty that Black communities transported to the Americas, through their forced enslavement, was an intelligence and manipulation of the landscape for the abundant capital surplus that has made the modern economic system. The landscape intelligentsia of Black labor and land practice manifests beyond high outputs of raw material, but also in the cultural stewardship of making meaning of a violent place through ethics of care, rest, leisure, and entertainment. Without the committed work of Black women through time, the longevity of Black life and Black culture would have been reduced to its intended decline and eradication. Through the preservation of Black land ownership and the maintenance of Black land sovereignty, Afro-ecofeminism becomes history’s ledger of the conservation of land and Black futurity. When we align our history to the care practices of respect, reflection, and reciprocity with the landscapes that sustain us, and even those that are constructed to oppress us, we become embodied knowledges of how to live beyond land as an object

This episode, Afro-Ecofeminism and Preserving Black Ecologies, is dedicated to exploring the intersection of design, land preservation, and land reclamation within a notion of the critical role of Black women and Black femmes in shepherding the cultural and ecological knowledge that sustains the generationality of Blackness. How can understanding the land as a domain of history and future reshape the way we design and preserve the potential of Black life? More importantly, in this moment where there is the Great Return, how does reorienting Black focus and investment to the South maintain, repair, and project a new trajectory? Where are designers in this fight? 

Full Transcript

Euneika Rogers-Sipp  (artist name: Ndgo Bunting) is a planning and design artist, a social entrepreneur, as well as the Founder of the Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates in Atlanta, Georgia. Most recently, she launched an ongoing exploration, “Digging DuBois,” a regional reparations ecology project on spatial solutions to decades of racial health inequities impacting descendants of enslaved Africans in the Southern United States Black Belt Region. Previously, Euneika was Executive Director of Regenerative Design at the Sustainable Rural Regenerative Enterprises for Families (SURREF), where she coordinated the Black Belt Community Based Tourism Wealth Creation Program and delivered design interventions such as the Family Water Access Project, Black Belt Agricultural Homestays Project, and a Community Regeneration Education curriculum.

Mavis Gragg is a self-described “death and dirt” attorney and conservation professional with nearly twenty years of experience. Mavis’ mission is to empower generational, family real estate owners, especially heirs’ property owners, with knowledge and tools and to raise the visibility of numerous ways in which heirs’ property is important to affordable housing, rural and urban planning, climate resiliency, and markets. She is the co-founder and CEO of HeirShares, which is building groundbreaking technology to facilitate affordable solutions for family real estate ownership. A 2024 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Mavis previously led the eight-state Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention Program and The Gragg Law Firm, PLLC.

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Developed by the African American Design Nexus at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, The Nexus is a podcast that explores the intersection of design, identity, and practice through conversations with Black designers, writers, and educators. The Nexus is produced in conjunction with a commitment by the Frances Loeb Library to acquire and create an open-access bibliography of various media suggested by the GSD community on the intersection between race and design.

The Nexus Season 4 is hosted by Tyler White, a dual candidate in  the Masters of Urban Planning and Master of Design Studies, Narratives program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The show is recorded and edited by Maggie Janik, and the theme music is produced by DJ Eway.

For all inquiries, please email aadn@gsd.harvard.edu.

The post Euneika (Ndgo) Rogers-Sipp and Mavis Gragg first appeared on The Design Nexus.