Earthly Wilds, Land Reparations, Monacan Land

Posted By the Racial Equity Team (RET) on 12/8/25

Earthly Wilds is working to build a community to help repair the relationship between BIPOC and the land. It has a nominal labor budget of 400 hours. As of this writing, Earthly Wilds' members are RET members: Miles, Trout, Jeli, Seya, and Sebastian.

We all come to community with different ideas about what it means to be on the Land. Land Theft is the acknowledgment that hundreds of years of racist policies have disenfranchised many peoples from the land, farming, and the generational wealth therein. Loss of lands is a defining trauma in many these communities. Land Reparations are a tool to build bridges between communities that suffered these losses, primarily Indigenous and Black, and the White communities and individuals who continue to benefit from this generational wealth.

The purpose of Earthly Wilds is to set aside part of Twin Oaks' property as sovereign space for a new community built around the concept of Land Reparations. This act will provide an opportunity to heal from the generations of trauma, in a space that is BIPOC centered. It is not meant as a gift of generosity, but more of an accounting both for what was lost in past eras, and how that loss reflects the conditions of our own time.

Earthly Wilds honors that this is ancestral Monacan land, and we intend to be in respectful conversation with the Monacan Nation about ways we can materially support them. Our purpose is to create a BIPOC sovereign community here as a form of reparations for historic Black and Indigenous land dispossession. We are not claiming to represent or replace the Monacan Nation. We support their sovereignty while also claiming space for our own healing and reparative work.

For thousands of years, Native Americans lived on the land we now call Virginia, in ecological balance with it. From the early 1600s, white colonists systematically displaced Indigenous communities, attempted genocide, and deforested the landscape, while enslaving Africans to work the land. After the Civil War, Black people faced sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, and systemic barriers to land ownership. Over the last hundred years, 90 percent of Black owned land in the American South was lost due to violence, forced migration, and local, state, and federal programs designed to prevent generational wealth accumulation.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, mostly white, middle class college students embraced the back to the land movement, re-appropriating the imagery of homesteading and pioneering. At the same time, rural Black communities were under threat. Lynching by the KKK, being denied USDA loans, and other systemic barriers made it deadly and dangerous for Black people to participate in these spaces. It is not surprising that the "resurgence of homesteading" and the "back to the land movement" remained overwhelmingly white during that time. Twin Oaks was founded in this historical context, and so it has benefited from these stacked historical injustices.

Today, Twin Oaks still carries much of that history, yet it also holds the possibility of creating something new that addresses these injustices. That is the purpose of Land Reparations and the vision of Earthly Wilds Community. To restore connection, sovereignty, and justice to the land, while re-imagining what intentional community can mean.

The aptly named “Monacan Land” has become a focus of our intention to build a community that re-imagines the relationship between people and the land. It is close enough to Twin Oaks to build a relationship based in healing of historical traumas. It is far enough away from the center of Twin Oaks to claim BIPOC sovereignty over the land. And it is close enough to the Communities Conference Center to be relevant in the movement.

We envision Earthly Wilds as a force that brings people and entities together. We hope to build a relationship with Twin Oaks Forestry, and continue that historical stewardship of the Land as a collaborative effort. We want Twin Oakers to continue to enjoy the hiking trails of Monacan Land. Our vision is one which we share the Earth.

Understanding Land Reparation is key to expanding the concept of community that is truly egalitarian, and supports people and cultures historically marginalized by Land Theft. We strive to provide a place where BIPOC can heal from generational traumas in the safety of community, in sovereign space, upon the Land. So much generational wealth of Black and Indigenous communities has been handed over to Whites over the centuries, and it lives in our community. We hope to make a sincere gesture in reassigning sovereignty over a portion of that land, and build a future that strives for equity and balance in community.

-RET