Forging a Sustainable Future Together: Conversations in Black-Indigenous Ecological Solidarity

Introduction

Emergent conversations at the intersection of Black and Indigenous studies are reshaping histories of Western empire by gaining more nuanced knowledges about pre-colonial Afro-Indigenous and American Indian worlds, and how the violences of slavery and colonialism upended and transformed American Indian and Afro-Indigenous relationships to land, water, and the more-than-human world. Most importantly for the following discussion, these intersections are also concerned with the epistemic traditions that have been submerged or lost in the process of sedimenting the logics and praxes of empire, and what knowledges, interrelations, and intimacies have formed among now Black and American Indian peoples in the long afterlives of colonialism and slavery (see, e.g., King 2019; Maynard and Simpson 2022).

The assignation of the Americas as the “New World” presumed the beginning of time (and history) in this region with the arrival of European settlers. So, too, did the various eras of scientific discovery proclaimed from the fifteenth—twentieth centuries presume an absence of useful knowledge and technologies among both peoples for the so-called industrial and modern eras. And so, both groups often find themselves defined out of the future because their epistemic traditions are either devalued or erased (Rifkin 2017; Whyte 2021; Curley and Smith 2024; King 2024).

Simply put, the submerging and erasure of these knowledges and histories threaten not only the accuracies of collective memory, but also have devastating impacts on the scope of collective imaginaries across the globe, all in the service of reinforcing hegemonic Western epistemology and ontology. On the other hand, surfacing these epistemologies and committing them to public memory offers no less than the prospect of a different world.

Dr. Lydia Jennings, citizen of Pascua Yaqui (Yoeme) and Huichol (Wixáritari), and Dr. Tianna Bruno, both early career scholars with complicated relationships to Western environmental science and physical geography, contend in their research with the afterlives of colonialism and slavery, which can be understood as the spiraling and folding of temporalities which reproduce violences of colonial domination, emerging through “skewed life chances…premature death” and ongoing extractions from Earth and all of her relations (Hartman 2022 (1997); Sharpe 2016).

Dr. Jennings's research examines various strategies to heal soils damaged by copper mining, particularly in southern Arizona, the ancestral lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation and the contemporary lands of the Pascua Yaqui (Yoeme). Jennings learns the land (and thus the soil) through her running practice and through rigorous melding of Native and Western scientific methods. As she applies these methods, Jennings is adamant about establishing data sovereignty for Native communities over knowledge stewardship (Jennings et al. 2023), so that the communities may use the information to improve their own conditions rather than for “extractive personal gain” (Gazing Wolf et al. 2024).

Dr. Bruno's research explores the biophysical afterlife of slavery, or “how the precarity and devaluation of Black life has affected the natural environments in which these lives exist” (Bruno 2023). A Texas native with roots in Port Arthur, a largely Black town on the Gulf of Mexico that hosts numerous oil refineries and petrochemical plants, Bruno melds biophysical methods with theories from critical human geography and Black geographies to develop alternative ways of knowing the land that reject more rigid, taxonomic separations between human social relations and their ecosystems. By placing the plantation and its afterlives at the center of her scientific inquiry, Bruno is able to remap the lives and landscapes of her family and ancestors through the tissues of trees (Bruno 2024).

Dr. Danielle Purifoy, who moderated this conversation, is a scholar whose research considers the exterior/interior sociopolitical lives of Black communities forming towns and settlements in the U.S. South, with a specific focus on the geographic/ecological sites of experimentation with ideas of liberation, from the orchard to the cemetery.

In this conversation, held on October 3, 2023, hosted by Purifoy and Dr. Sara Smith at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bruno and Jennings discuss their relationships to and critiques of dominant scientific inquiry, their histories in their respective geographies, and their aspirations for how Black and Indigenous methods can shape future epistemic practices.

**Production of this conversation was done with co-equal authorship. Authors are listed in alphabetical order.

This conversation is part of the UNC Chapel Hill Landback Abolition Project, a student/faculty led initiative to interrogate the UNC's histories of enslavement and Native land appropriation to build the modern university. The program was co-sponsored by the following organizations at UNC Chapel Hill: The Alliance, the American Indian Center, the Institute for Arts and Humanities, the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies and the Department of Geography and Environment.

1. So, I want to ask you both to elaborate about your various and perhaps complicated relationships to science.

LJ: My “science creation story” stems from an inherent feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be a scientist, and it definitely wasn't something that I felt like I was encouraged to do in school. I was encouraged to do social sciences because I like people. Today, I find this love of people vs. this love of science really interesting. In the western traditions of physical sciences, we tend to think the environment and people are separate. And that's just not the reality. Indigenous science practices demonstrate how we are always influencing and part of our ecosystems, in a process known today as environmental stewardship. My interest in science was piqued through running—learning from the ecosystems themselves. I’d run across a landform and wonder what this is that I'm seeing? Why is there a gulch here? Why do these plants grow here, and not over there? An under-appreciated, but vital, part of the scientific process is observation, and running helped me develop that skill. My high school and undergrad classes helped me refine the language I use to describe those observations I saw while out running with the land and taught me quantitative tools to measure those observations. As I grew my scientific language and engaged more deeply with the scientific community through conferences, I still struggled to feel that there was a place for me.

It wasn’t till I grew older that I realized as a Huichol and Yaqui person, I come from a long lineage of knowledge experts, data creators, and environmental stewards, as Indigenous Peoples have always been these experts. Though we didn’t use the same kind of terminology, I was constantly learning from my grandpa and his earth knowledge (“abuelito knowledge”), through practices like gardening and composting. I was learning from my mom's medical ethnobotany that my grandma taught her and stories my great aunties taught her; from my father's gardening, I learned about water physics and ecology and his home-made water catchment systems. But neither of them had ever gotten a degree or had formal training. By necessity, they were always thinking in scientific ways and acting as backyard engineers, and they taught me that it's not about the degree that you have. It's about the solution and the processes that you go through that demonstrate problem-solving skills, but also that community are part of those problem-solving skills.

As I started going through my own education journey, I reflected on the lessons that I learned from the ecosystem, through running and through family lore, all of which helped formalize my curiosity to continue the educational ladder, and respect that there are multiple ways of knowing in the environment (Gazing Wolf et al. 2024). Today I like to think that I contribute to a long lineage of Indigenous science and that Indigenous knowledge has gone through the ultimate peer review process—review by generations and generations of experts. In some of those cases, you actually see today's contemporary scientific tools reinforcing Indigenous knowledge expertise (Dickie 2021; Hunt 2024; June Johnston, 2025). Today, I strive to do work that includes all the parts of me; some that include what I would refer to as “settler colonial methodologies” but through an Indigenous mindset—and not allowing these practices to exist in silo, but rather aspects that are constantly reinforcing and informing one another (Anderson et al. 2025). Ecosystems don't exist in silos; nor should our ways of thinking or our practices. I’m exploring how I can interweave or braid these knowledge areas, while also being reflective of how I can create science communities that are much different from the ones I was trained in, that center Black, Brown, and Indigenous expertise and ensure rights to data and how it's used.

TB: I am not sure when I started being interested in the environment and science. I went to undergrad wanting to be a conservation biologist and an exotics vet, dreaming of being a veterinarian that specialized in big cats or something. However, as I started taking wildlife sciences classes and joining organizations with other budding conservationists, I grew to feel like I did not belong in this space. In particular, I began to notice that often within these spaces I was recurrently told stories that positioned Black and Brown communities in the Global South as the culprits whose devastating actions our conservation efforts had to remedy. These oversimplifications seemed to leave a lot out about the world and ecological degradation. In particular, these narratives left out the colonial political economic processes churning the gears of resource extraction that actually was harming the habitats of the animals our young hearts were so passionate about. Let alone the complicated intermingling of conservation and land theft, colonialism, capitalism, etc (Sène 2024). So, I left that major for International studies and Geography. I went away from the science world, but eventually I made my way back.

Science and I have a complicated relationship. My ancestors were tools of science. Our beings, our bodies, our lives have been tools of science, especially Black women's bodies (Adelman et al. 2003; Benjamin 2019). That, of course, leads to the complicated nature of my relationship. It is certainly a relationship with many inhibitions. I don’t freely and gleefully shout “I’m a scientist now.” We can understand and respect that scientists or science can be one thing to rally behind in the? needed solidarity of today, but there still remains the fact of what happened in the broader relationship between western science and colonized peoples (McKittrick 2021). All of that sort of bleeds into where I am now with science.

The science that I want to continue to get into, the science I want to encourage students to get into, the labs and the spaces I want to build are not shaped by a feeling of being beholden to this version of science, the science that prioritizes itself over relations. I don't always feel like I need to follow exactly what's expected. I'm here to get more information to bring texture to what we know about Black lives, Black livingness (McKittrick 2021), and Black ecological experiences. For example, in my dendrochemistry work, I could sample loads and loads of trees to produce some giant rigorous “n” number, but this approach was not completely necessary to seek out those stories of Black life and the mutual experiences of trees in this way. I am accountable to science in many ways, but more so I am accountable to projects of liberation, life, and placemaking. So, it's a very complicated relationship with science. I do think there's value in it. But ultimately, I got back to science through my Black geographies work. I think of physical geography, in general, as a tool in a broader liberation seeking project versus something that I want to enhance as a field in and of itself, to be plain about it.

2. Can each of you say in brief, what your research focus is right now, in light of what you've just said about your relationship to science?

TB: To position my work, my family is from Port Arthur, Texas, which is where the largest refinery in North America is, the Motiva refinery, a Saudi Aramco operation, which is the nationalized oil company of Saudi Arabia. That's the entry point into my research. I started out doing a lot of environmental justice policy research, then got into wanting to learn more about this historical trajectory of—how did this Black climate and environmental justice community in southeast Texas come into being? So, I look at the racial and colonial histories that have shaped the social, political, economic arena in the region. Then I think about those things in conversation with environmental history. I am interested in how these are all interconnected. All these relationships we have with each other seep into the ecologies that we walk through and live in every day. I ask questions like how does anti-blackness seep into the ground beneath our feet. Consider the contamination in a community like Port Arthur where anti-Black environmental injustice impacts the people as well as the surrounding ecology. The trees are a way to learn information about contamination history because trees pick up things from the surrounding environment (Muñoz et al. 2019). I sample trees to learn more about the histories of Black folks’ environmental experiences in that community.

LJ: I explore how to heal the land from extractive industries. To be clear, this is land that has been separated from the human, more-than-human, water, and land relations through land stealing and legal dispossession processes. Today, this extraction continues through mechanisms such as land leased for industries like mining and natural gas. These natural resources/relatives are then used to make tools, weapons, and technology that can further separate Indigenous Peoples intellectually and physically from our homelands. Many of the places where extraction industries occur on are ecosystem relations that Indigenous Peoples hold sacred.

In my PhD work, I investigated a site that a cousin tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, holds sacred, and another site that my tribe and 12 others hold sacred. The more-than-human relations on these sites are also sacred: the plants, animals, waters, and microbes. My scholarly process has been to explore how we can understand what the soil can tell us about the ecosystem's health as it recovers from mining, but also how Indigenous knowledge interventions are vital to helping heal the land and relationships to the land. Ultimately: What are the perspectives of the tribes who are healing from mining? How do they see the land in its present, and in the future?

As a postdoc, I expanded my work here by invitation with the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. In it, I thought deeply about how the Lumbee are navigating their extraction industry issues, specifically natural gas pipelines, and how they are building their own processes to assert their rights of engagement as a state-recognized tribal nation. ¹ My work explores soil health as a way Indigenous Peoples can assert ecological power amid environmental injustices. I implement a variety of toolsets in my work, including collecting data in the field and in the lab, community engaged meetings and how to apply Indigenous rights from physical ecosystems to digital ecosystems through Indigenous data governance. I work hard to ensure our work is communicated back and reviewed by the community, and to always center the voices of the communities I work with.

3. There's been a lot of scholarship in recent years intersecting Black and Indigenous studies. In the geography arena, there have been many conversations about how any real analysis of any place in the Western Hemisphere requires some intersection of thinking about both Blackness and Indigeneity. Could you both say a bit about how you’ve encountered those intersections in your own work and how it might be changing how you approach your work?

TB: I think, generally, in the literature, there's discussion about coalitions and solidarities throughout history where there are social movements and moments where those spike into events where we can see coalition-building between these two. Also, many instances where the groups we discuss and describe as distinct exist are one and the same, of course (Consider Afro-Indigenous peoples, Indigenous peoples from the continent of Africa, etc.) (Jolivétte 2007; Mays 2021; Prud'homme-Cranford, Barthé, and Jolivétte 2022).

Analyses of these instances of coalitions foreground how these groups have collectively resisted racial capitalism and oppression throughout history, certainly the history of the US, but also around the globe (Mays 2021). I think this intertwined experience and resistance to various arms of racial capitalism are certainly present in some ways in Southeast Texas, which is, of course, very connected to Louisiana. The living together, surviving together. I am gesturing toward the particular racialization of this region and the presence of Louisiana Creole peoples and culture. Prud'homme-Cranford, Barthé, and Jolivétte (2022) discuss the complex identity and land relations for Creole peoples in the region who often have mixed Black, Native, and European ancestry. Colonial categorization projects like racialization in the census erased a lot of complexity in archives and records around these identities, but, of course, our existence and relations remain regardless of those projects.

Race and racialization in this region are not quite as black and white as we would describe across the US more broadly. It has been somewhat of a challenge to study a place and be in/from a place where the dominant racialization schemata that we learn about in academia and dominant racial discourse do not necessarily align neatly with the entanglements and blurred existence on the ground. I am constantly being corrected and taught lessons from family and community on this front as I do this research. But yes, I think broadly there's intrigue in sort of scholarly thinking about how we can dream of land back and abolition together, like you all are doing here [at UNC]. I see a growing academic discourse on how to think across these imposed colonial boundaries on Black and Native peoples and struggles. I am learning that, of course, this blurred boundary, thinking and being across these spaces has literally always been, especially when you think about American history, in the U.S. South in particular.

One thing I’ll also add is that sometimes, if we are doing this work across Black and Indigenous studies, there feels like a tension or a fear that may make us feel like we should just back off. The complexity or complication feels insurmountable. But the reality is that, in my experience, there are plenty of groups and communities that welcome people who want to support them. Period. On both sides. Regardless of whatever your positionality or background is. For example, in Port Arthur, we're planning a ceremony for enslaved people that were brought through what is now the port of Port Arthur. The steering committee for this project has made it a priority to reach out to Indigenous communities in the region. The response when Native groups were invited was not, oh this is not about us or something like that. It was yes! They wanted to be invited to such programs. Any of the groups that I spoke with supported fostering solidarity and collaboration. So, I think the fear and anxiety get stoked by some of our academic talk on incommensurability, but the reality may be different when we actually start to do the work.

LJ: As an Indigenous soil scientist, I’ve come to see soil not just as a biophysical system, but as an archive of relationships shaped by colonialism, extraction, labor, and resistance. In my work, the relationships between Blackness and Indigeneity emerge in how land has been taken, worked, and transformed, and in whose knowledge systems have been erased or marginalized in the process. Indigenous Peoples were forcibly removed from our homelands so that land could be worked by Black Peoples who were also stolen from theirs, creating interconnected systems of dispossession. In that process, both communities lost relatives, knowledge systems, and our ways of relating to land were erased, fragmented, or appropriated (such as seeds, plant medicines, language, and agricultural practices) (Penniman 2018).

While these histories are often not discussed in soil science, they are deeply interconnected, producing layered forms of ethnocide embedded in the foundations of the soil science field and in institutions like land-grant universities that have materially benefited from them (Lee et al. 2020). Engaging in Black and Indigenous scholarship has pushed me to think more critically about how these legacies persist in terms of what we consider scientific data and whose expertise is represented in soil science, where Black and Indigenous peoples remain among the most underrepresented (Carter et al. 2020). These legacies also exist in the soil itself—through land management practices like plantation agriculture, environmental racism affecting Black and Indigenous communities, unequal access to healthy land, and the misappropriation of Traditional Ecological Knowledges. To speak of soil health, then, is also to ask whose health, whose land, and whose sovereignty—and to recognize the necessity of Black and Indigenous solidarity in imagining shared futures.

My own movement across geographies has deepened this awareness. As a desert kid from and trained in the Southwest, I wasn’t attuned to the extent of Black land histories there until I spent time in the Southeast. Being in North Carolina has made visible both the gaps in my own knowledge and the presence of communities that are simultaneously Black and Indigenous. It also clarified the complex history of how our communities have been positioned in relation to one another—through moments of division, but also through shared learning and solidarity, from organizing connections between the American Indian Movement and Black Panther Party, to contemporary alliances around environmental justice.

All of this has reshaped how I approach soil science. Studying soil health and environmental quality now requires centering Black and Indigenous struggles to reclaim land and water, recognizing these as intertwined histories rather than separate ones. From water crises like Flint to movements resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline (Mays 2016), there are shared conditions of environmental harm alongside shared practices of resistance, care, and survival. Soil, in this sense, is both an ecological system and a living archive of these histories (Cornes 2023). Approaching it demands relational, accountable work grounded in solidarity and attentive to erasure. Soil cannot be separated from people, and healthy soils cannot be understood apart from Black and Indigenous futures—making solidarity not optional, but essential to how we understand and practice soil science today.

4. Both of your answers just now speak to a kind of intimacy and relationship of survival that are not just about the survival of people, but also about the survival of landscapes that sustained Indigenous and Black peoples through colonialism, slavery and their afterlives. To relate this to the earlier question about science, Western science is supposed to be objective, and almost devoid of context. Anything but intimate. I’d love to hear you both talk about this question of intimacy in your work.

TB: The way I got to thinking about trees was through soil. I was reading Christina Sharpe's In the wake: On Blackness and Being and sitting with the way Sharpe draws on Dionne Brand (2001). Quoting Brand, Sharpe discusses the ions on the bottom of the ocean of enslaved Africans that were thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in the Atlantic or those in holding cells. She's discussing this idea of what lingers with us in residence time. This really made me think of what's in the sediment everywhere, and certainly in Port Arthur. Because of the way clay structures lie so closely together, clay soils can be seen as a form of storage, containing things that you don't want spreading freely throughout the environment. There's so much memory of contamination and memory of all the other parts of life that happen. So, when it came to this intimate ecological relationship where I was reaching out to the environment to learn more about my community, ancestors, and self, it started with soil. It was a soil science class that I had begun with, and that same soil scientist became a mentor and encouraged my version of integrating Black studies and environmental science. However, I soon learned that soils are not so easily analyzed, especially with this temporal aspect to my work. One can, of course, date soils. It is just more expensive and complex than say a tree that provides rather obvious (although sometimes tricky) temporal markers: tree rings. I started reading this book Ecology, Soils, and the Left (Engel-Di Mauro 2014). The book opens with a story about this orchard and how some of the pesticides applied to the orchard were in the trees. Reading that was a shift for me. I was struck “Oh, my God! What do these trees remember? Especially in the South and all the southern tree iconography calls to mind.”

In this work, I was interested in learning more about how Port Arthur came into being as a place where we experience and witness profound intimacy between Black life and ecology. How has this intimacy been sustained and continually made possible, even as there is immense industrial presence, or perhaps because of it? Black coastal communities have been dispossessed for generations across the country (Kahrl 2012). Port Arthur is in many ways one of those communities, yet it is also a major industrial site. Is that why it has not been completely dispossessed in the same way? How can we understand this place and its becoming? How do we still have access to much of the land, waterways, and way of life that is possible in this coastal community? How do I go see dolphins, go bird watching, go fishing with my family, and all the stuff we do? How do we explain the many contradictions of a place like this? I wanted to know more about the actual quality of this environment around us. How does this all coexist that the refinery and the beautiful nature preserves and beaches? Immense capitalist wealth produced across the street from generational poverty and acute unemployment? Generational connection to land, ecologies, and place in a “sacrifice zone.” So, it wasn't like I needed to learn tree science necessarily. I just wanted to know how this could come into being, and ecological science was a part of understanding this interwoven story about Black place, ecological, and land relations.

LJ: Globally, Indigenous Peoples have always practiced science through relational, place-based ways of knowing that center environmental intimacy. Many traditions resemble natural philosophy, interpreting the world through stories, relationships, and seasonal cycles, where knowledge emerges from close, reciprocal engagement with land and more-than-human relatives. Storytelling, as Bagele Chilisa (2012) reminds us, is itself an Indigenous research methodology. I think about a conversation with an Alaska Native friend who described their region's frightening winter stories, suggesting that the presence of terrifying beings serves to keep young people from venturing out into dangerous winter conditions (see Hawk and Van Alst Jr. 2023). This reflection deepened my understanding that storytelling is not only a method, but a form of environmental intimacy—one that encodes ecological knowledge and survival strategies within culture, memory, imagination, and that sustains relationships between people and place. I love visiting different Indigenous communities and learning their stories, and what cultural survival knowledge is embedded in those stories.

For me, this underscores that intimacy with science is fundamentally about relationships—to place, to more-than-human relatives, and to each other. My work on mining sites often brings grief as I witness my beloved homelands harmed through extraction, so I’ve developed personal protocols of care and grounding to continue while honoring the land, that include running and prayer. Now living in North Carolina, far from my ancestral homelands, and with a lot of trees and water, I feel the absence of my own cultural ecological memory, prompting questions about how to introduce myself to new ecosystems, build relationships, and become a good relative to these lands that I am visiting. Through conversations with friends who have also lived away from their homelands, I’ve reflected on the protocols needed to enter new lands in a good way and have been thinking a lot about how to teach this cultural understanding to future students. This is the intimacy I bring to my science: a commitment to building respectful relationships with land, ecosystems, and their human stewards wherever I work.

5. That deeply resonates. I want to ask you about the future. How are you thinking about generations to come and how you will teach them given your own journeys through and beyond these disciplinary boundaries and more rigid approaches to science?

TB: Being in a space like Geography, a field comprising social and physical science, I can and will continue to intentionally work with students that are deeply in what we would call science and those that are more social or humanities inclined. Coming up as someone interested in critical human geography and ecological processes, I used to feel a lot of intimidation. Becoming cross-disciplined in this way was complex. I am trying to build spaces for future scholars or scientists interested in understanding the ways ecological knowledge and processes matter for broader social projects like decolonization, abolition, liberation, and freedom-seeking. And I am finding that there is a lot of interest. There's a lot of interest in the people coming up who are wondering, “How do I utilize this scientific or ecological knowledge to help the community?”

That sort of integration is a lot of work, especially because of the silos and disciplinary boundaries. It is a lot to fully learn Black studies and fully learn soil science, especially in institutions where not only are they two different departments, but probably buildings on opposite ends of campus. Also, because of disciplinary traditions, committee members from disparate fields may have a harder time agreeing with each other on how to advise you. Other barriers include getting funding for work that's perhaps not fully legible to siloed funding sources (Lave et al. 2014). There are real-life complications of actually doing this work, even though this integrated form of social and environmental is how the world exists. We exist in this intertwined socio-ecological reality every day, but this work in disciplines remains complicated. I'm actively in the complication. But it's possible. I'm really excited to see the students that LJ will produce and cultivate, and not just students, but also colleagues, peers, and comrades, collectively shifting disciplines, undoing the disciplinary bounds. This blending of human and physical geographies is not distinct from leaning into the blurred boundaries of Black and Indigenous struggles and studies. For me, blending critical geographies of race and Indigeneity and environmental science means intentionally integrating questions of land relations, community accountability, and racialized histories into both our environmental science and social science research. As Max Liboiron (2021) teaches us, we are most often not “decolonizing” when we do Western science, but we can be intentionally and methodically anticolonial in our practice of science. We can constantly ask where is our work and the outcomes of our work in relation to decolonization, abolition, and liberation. My hopes are that as we continue to grow our “interdisciplinary” thinking, it does not end with reaching across boundaries of the academy but also reaching across struggles for freedom and more just worlds.

LJ: I try to be honest with the students I mentor—I’m still figuring it out myself and building the airplane as we fly it! For many scholars of color, there isn’t a long lineage of mentors far ahead of us, especially in interdisciplinary spaces. I recently asked an Indigenous mentor how they navigated this tension, since many positions I encounter prioritize my soil science research while treating my identity as an added bonus, rather than seeing value in work that centers Indigenous science and community partnerships. Their advice was to focus on strong disciplinary science first and pivot toward community-centered work after tenure. I appreciated the honesty, but I also don’t believe that path is the only option. I hold onto the hope that science is shifting, so we don’t have to contort ourselves to fit into a single discipline. As I move toward a faculty career, I am transparent—sharing what I’m learning and working alongside other Black and Indigenous scholars to make this path less rigid for those coming next. Peer mentorship has been really key in navigating this unknown.

At the same time, I feel hopeful listening to students. They have a deep desire to weave Indigenous studies, data science, environmental justice and soil science together, and they want to understand avenues for communities to assert power. In my classes, we’ve been tracing links between metal mining in my home community and the technologies students are encouraged to use in their courses, while also considering where Indigenous-led interventions can and should take shape. They consistently challenge silos and imagine new ways forward, which I find deeply energizing and the pathway of the future.

I like to think that TB and I are now part of a mycorrhizal network of shifting what soil science is—along the way sharing knowledge, redistributing resources, and strengthening the ground beneath us. There is also something worth sitting with in the fact that we—Black and Indigenous women—can remake the epistemological ground of soil science—this field that has been so extractive to our ancestors. Just as importantly, we’re helping extend our mycorrhizal networks to the next generation, supporting the youngest and most vulnerable growth. I’m excited to see what this will make possible for Black and Indigenous solidarity in soil science, and the future scholars we can nurture from our own process of synthesis, struggle, and success.