METHODS OF LAND-BASED OPPRESSION: FIGURE 10. Historic
DRAFT
RESPONSE:
Timeline of Urban Agriculture in Philadelphia
DISPLACEMENT
COLLECTIVE ACTION
1681–82
COMMODIFICATION OF LAND EXPLOITATION & ERASURE EXCLUSIONARY INSTITUTIONS
1630s
European colonists (first Dutch and Swedes, then Finns, English, Welsh, German, and Scotch-Irish) arrive, bringing food, farming practices, and disease.
PRE-1600s
The Lenni Lenape or “original people” of the Delaware River valley, sustain themselves by hunting, fishing, gathering foods from the land, and subsistence farming. They practice companion planting by growing the “Three Sisters”—squash, beans, and corn—together.
The Lenape suffer devastating epidemics at the hands of colonists. Violent conflicts over land and trade further threaten their survival.
William Penn arrives, claiming lands unlawfully granted by King Charles II of England for what would become the Pennsylvania colony. Penn establishes “a large Towne or City” that we know today as Philadelphia. Although the colonists and Lenape negotiate a peace treaty beneath an Elm Tree at Shackamaxon along the Delaware River, increased colonist population and violence eventually displace the Lenape people.
People lived in harmony with the land, migrated to avoid depleting natural resources, and understood the land as a living entity, to be protected, and not owned by any one individual.
1684
Enslaved Africans stolen from their homes and families are shipped across the Middle Passage, and disembark in Philadelphia to be sold into slavery by and for Quaker settlers and then forced into debilitating unpaid physical labor and unlivable conditions.
Among those stolen are African agriculturists who bring with them ancestral knowledge of farming methods and seeds for crops that become mainstays in American agriculture and cuisine, such as yams, black eyed peas, rice, okra, collard greens, millet, and melons.
