Free the land
a revolutionary prayer toward reparatory justice
Free the Land: A Prayer toward Reparatory Justice
Directed by steve núñez and echoing the motto of the Republic of New Afrika, Free the Land looks to educate viewers on the historical roots and contemporary legacies of white supremacy, settler colonialism, imperialism, indigenous genocide, and african enslavement in the United States. The film seeks to amplify narratives of contemporary Black and Indigenous landback movements, to generate understanding of and support for ancestral land claims, and to establish landback movements as politically viable and ethically necessary for reparatory justice frameworks reckoning with the violence(s) at the foundation of modernity.
“Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”
-Malcolm x, “message to the grassroots”
Context
Acadia National Park - Land of the rising dawn
In a way, this journey started last summer with a visit to Acadia National Park. My first visit to Acadia National Park was life changing. I’ll never forget the experience of the brisk August sunrise from atop Cadillac Mountain — the first place the light kisses in the western hemisphere — and contemplating the meaning of the name Wabanaki, the local indigenous peoples’ translating in English to “People of the Dawn.” I realized that a story about the sanctity of land was embedded within the conceptual language of the culture of the peoples who have lived amongst it. I planned the trip around the August new moon to create some milky way photography. As I laid on Sand Beach staring at the sky while mourning the unexpected death of my uncle and the long summer organizing and protesting around the murder of George Floyd, I remember the clouds rolling away over the horizon to reveal a breathtaking vista of the Milky Way tearing apart the sky. I had never seen the stars in that light. I felt connected to ancestors I never knew from places I’ve never visited, and for the first time in months I was able to take a deep breath. I am honored to have had such an experience. In addition to grounding my own mental health, I hope that I can extend the soul-shaping experiences fostered by the incredible land, sea, and skyscapes of the national parks with those who are unable, for physical or economic reasons, to visit national parks.
“gravity.” milky way over sand beach, acadia national park
sunrise from cadillac mountain
I also look forward to highlighting the stories that have been passed down through oral traditions for generations, narratives that emphasize the sacred spiritual relationship between the land and the steward. it was the first national park that i’ve visited, but it ultimately prompted my interest in exploring land as a sacred subject rather than a lifeless object subjected to human domination, an overlap shared by many Africana and indigenous spiritualities. this led me to pen a photo essay entitled “Free the land: landscape photography as decolonial praxis,” for cornell university’s dark laboratory with the mission of reckoning,”with the entangled dispossession of Native sovereignty with African enslavement across the americas.” in the essay i gave a brief contextualization of the Republic of new afrika and their slogan “Free the land,” from which the documentary draws its name as well as a history and present of indigenous landback movements. The essay inspired dreams to facilitate a broader conversation about ancestral claims and reparatory justice.
As I work toward the completion of my PhD, I am deeply interested in pursuing a career in outdoor photography and filmmaking because I think that it offers me the ability to synthesize my political, intellectual, and artistic interests and allows me to utilize Divinity school training, philosophical thought, and artistic gifts of astro-, landscape-, macro, and portrait photography to tell a story about spirituality, existence, and hope.
Ideally, as a performative documentary, I envision the documentary to be self-shot and document my journey and growth, and ideally, I would shoot the documentary with a Sony A1 and FX3 as my A and B cameras. I want the documentary to intimately capture my relationship to the land communities, and to develop this throughout the film, especially in order to capture the unique astro-photography opportunities offered by the parks’ dark skies, I look to film the broader project in multi-week camping excursions.
Free the land: 40 acres
Wilmington, nC
The “Port City,” Wilmington, NC has a profoundly violent history of white supremacy. In 1898, while 2/3 Black and controlled by a Black-led political coalition comprised of Black Republicans and white populists called the Fusion Party, Wilmington was overthrown in a bloody white supremacist massacre & coup murdering somewhere between 65 and 350 Black residents and exiled thousands. Later, in 1971, following the closure of Williston Industrial High School, Black residents protested forced busing and assimilation into nearby white high schools resulting in the political imprisonment of those known as the Wilmington 10.
Johns island, sc
Gullah Geechee is a creole language and culture spoken and practiced panning along the southeast coast from Pender County North Carolina to St. John’s County Florida. Melded with traditional Southern grammar, syntax, and dialect, Gullah Geechee is the only distinclty African language spoken in the United States. In addition to Sherman’s later abandoned Field Order No. 15 mandating 40-acre plots of abandoned plantation lands along the Gullah Geechee corridor be redistributed to emancipated freedman, the protection of lands, language, and culture make Johns Island a necessary locale to conceptualize reparations. (photo credit: Hunter McRae / New York Times)
Tulsa, OK
2021 marks the centennial memorial of the massacre in Greenwood/Archer and Pine, Tulsa, Oklahoma murdering more than 300 Black residents and injuring another 800+ more. In a highly organized massacre including aerial bombardment, white supremacists used stereotypical pretexts of the “Black male rapist” allegedly defiling a white woman in an elevator to destroy the prosperous economic foundation known as Black Wallstreet. Additionally, Oklahoma also played an improtant role historically in respect to Black and Indigenous solidarity with a push in th eearly 20th century to make it a “Black and Red” state. (Credit: pbs / Tulsa Historical Society & museum
Jackson, MS
In many ways, Jackson, Mississippi represents the legacy of the RNA tradition echoing “Free the Land.” In 2017, Jackson elected avowed socialist, Chokwe Antar Lumumba as mayor with 93% of the vote. Lumumba’s election is the culmination of decades of RNA organizing beggining in 1971 when Lumumba’s father, Chokwe Lumumba, moved to Jackson with the Provisional Government of the RNA (PGRNA) aiming to establish a new community called El Hajj Malik. Lumumba (Sr.) was elected to mayor in Jackson in 2013 before dying an untimely death at 66 years young. “Free the Lands,”runs through Cooperation Jackson. (photo credit: The Fairview Inn)
Flint, Mi
Flint, Michigan is notoriously synonymous with environmental racism. In 2014, Michigan government agents switched the sourcing of water supplying Flint residents without applying corrosion inhibitors resulting in the lead contamination of the entire water supply serving the predominantly Black de-industrialized Detroit metro area. In 2016, the Obama Administration declared Flint a national emergency. Victims of the crisis were awarded $641 million in August 2020 and in January 2021, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and eight other government officials were charged with 34 felony counts and seven misdemeanors. (photo credit: nbc news / carlos barria / reuters)
Ferguson, mo
In 2014, the police murder of Mike Brown made international headlines. #BlackLivesMatter forged a marked emergence of a new discourse. But long after news cameras, neoliberal influencers, National Guard tanks left allowing the smoke to clear, Ferguson protesters resisted the police state for over 400 days. Since, over half a dozen organizers have been found death, with two being burned alive in vehicles. The murder of Mike Brown compounded broader community grievance including Black residents composing the 93% of arrests by the Ferguson Police from 2012-2014. Ferguson organizers can offer searing insights on how we might be able to think about how to think about landback in the metropoles.
(photo credit: toronto star / j.b forbes / AP)
“the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
- rosa luxemburg
LandBack: Indigenous ancestral land claims
Denali
despite being officially recognized in the anglophone world as “mt. mckinley, indigenous athabaskan peoples have resided in the Denali mountain range for more than 12,000 years. The territory has changed colonial changed from russian to us possession, and as the impacts of climate change ravages the globe, the landscapes of the alaskan northwest need to be documented and handed back over to its rightful stewards.
(photo: national park service)
Yosemite, CA
In 1851, on the back of the infamous ‘1849 Gold Rush’, roughly two hundred members of California’s state militia unit, the Mariposa Battalion, descended upon the Yosemite Valley and brutally dispossesed the lands from the Miwok peoples indigenous to the region. After razing villages, murdering at least tweny-three, and driving the majority of remaining inhabitants from their native homelands and forced them onto reservations. Centralizing northern California’s Sierra Navada mountains, Yosemite offers sublime, sequoia-studded ridgelines, granite cliffs, dazzling starscapes, and a magical display of Yosemite’s ‘Firefalls’. (photo: leo serrat / harvard)
Yellowstone, WY
Established under the Grant Administration through the passage of the Yellowstone Act of 1872, Yellowstone is the oldest national park in the United States. The act was enforced violently and the Shashone, Bannock and other occupying peoples were banished from their ancestral homes. The Yellowstone Act, like much of the legislation establishing national parks, violated traties between the US and recognized sovereign tribal nations. Home to the Grand Teton mountain range, ‘Old Faithful’, and an array megafauna like elk, moose, and bison, Yellowstone is one of the most coveted land and skyscapes in America’s heartland. (photo: national geographic)
Paha sapa (Black Hills)
Thought of as sacred by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache peoples, the Black Hills represent the oldest mountain range in the US and are home to a number of National Parks, including Mt. Rushmore and Badlands National Park. In recent years, both Lakota and Sioux tribes have contentiously rejected settlement offers by the State. In 1877, the US violently seized lands in direct violation to the 1868 Laramie Treaty reserving Black Hill lands for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians.”. In 1980, the federal government offered nine tribes $1.3 Billion in reparations, but they continue to rufuse they payment and demand landback as the only viable just resolution. (photo credit andreas eckert / us doi
Tacoma
The indigenous name of '“Mt. rainier” is tacoma, meaning, “the source of nourishment from the many streams coming from the slopes.” like many indigenous peoples continuing to survive western eradication, the population of pallyup peoples who have ancestrally occupied the pacific northwest are dwindling, and deserve unfettered access to their ancestral territories and granted the ability to honor and exercise the traditions, community, and culture as ancestors and living pollyup peoples have maintained generationally.
(photo: National park service / doi)
Grand Canyon & Arches
the southeastern US hosts some of the most picturesque natural wonders including the grand canyon in arches national parks. Home to the Havasupi tribe, meaning “People of the blue-green waters,” the havasupi reservation encompasses of 188,077 acres of canyon land. the area is also home to the navajo reservation, the largest in the us spanning over 27,000 square miles, as well as the ancestral home of the hopi tribe. Not far northeast from the grand canyon, spectacular rock spire structure have given meaning to tribes in the moab valley for centuries, and the nearby La Sal Mountains are stewarded as a dwelling place for spirits and sacred beings.
(photo: visit utah)
Make a donation.
unfortunately, making films is expensive. cameras, sound, and lighting are pricey, and despite relatively low production costs of being self-shot, traveling with all of that gear to film an outdoor documentary is also costly.
Although I hope that grant opportunities will fully fund the project, small contributions are welcome in getting the project off the ground and filming a trailer. Donate below: