Collard Atlas: Experiments with multispecies community archives

• In Event: Elemental Postcards from Beyond Empire: Excavation / Dust

Abstract

Seeds have become a locus in environmental justice movements as means of reproduction of food systems and socioecological relations with land. Encouraging seasonal and generational rhythms of care, seedkeeping has become a facet of building hope in the ruins of racial capitalism through geographies of flourishing (Margulies 2023; Smith 2024). Attention to the cooperative geographies of agrobiodiversity intersects seed work with methods for thinking through multiscalar politics of nonhuman care (Nazarea 2005; Pottinger 2020), cultivating anti-racist food politics through critical memory work (Rhodes & Keeve 2023), and understanding farmer decision making and its political-ecological ramifications (Graddy-Lovelace 2013; Veteto & Skarbo 2009).

This paper follows ongoing collaborative work with the Utopian Seed Project (USP) and Heirloom Collard Project (HCP), a collective of growers, advocates, and scholars working to preserve heirloom collard varieties, uplift their stories, and cultivate community-based stewardship in the face of archival silences and violences read through the Black GeoEcologies of the U.S. South. I focus on Collard Atlas, a project started in 2024 with USP, that seeks to deepen the work of HCP through creative mapping and regional grow outs of these varieties. As well as a project of cultural seed stewardship that seeks to re/connect people, plants, and place, Collard Atlas seeks to build a model for gathering and sharing place-based socioecological knowledges. Through observations, reflections, images, and stories, this project opens spaces of articulation for seed stewards to build living community archives through public storytelling. Through this project, I sit with the pasts and presents of colonial bioprospecting connecting global agrobiodiversity struggles to the U.S. South, the im/possibilities of geographic knowledge politics through seed story mapping, and the seasonal response-abilities between people, seeds, and stories for a plant that carries legacies of Black Southern place-making yet oozes out of that cultural-geographic framing in fugitive ways.

Author

• Christian Keeve, University of Kentucky