Three Stories
From Cofounder, Jesse Dow
The First Story
In 1918, my great grandfather on my mom's side, Henry McVey bought farm land east of Denver, Colorado, within spitting distance of what is now the airport. My grandfather, Vic, was raised on that farm.
When my grandfather was old enough to leave home, going to College on a football scholarship, his dad, Henry, fell ill with a fatal kidney disease. Henry tried to continue to work the farm. He hired a farmhand to help, but with Vic gone to college, and the Great Depression in full swing, he couldn't produce enough to keep up with the farm's loan payments, and soon the government was knocking on his door to foreclose.
Henry was in bed, too ill to work, and his wife, my great-grandmother, Emma, was in the kitchen when the government car came. Emma ran out to intercept the man before he could go inside. 'Please,' she begged him, 'Henry is dying from kidney disease, and losing the farm would destroy him. Can you please wait until after he has died to foreclose on the farm,' and the man from the government relented. He would wait until after Henry had died.
That summer, Henry, made one final bid to keep the farm. He planted his farm with wheat and barley, and planted neighboring farms as well. My grandpa took a semester off from college, and they worked the fields 24 hours a day, Vic and the farmhand, in 12 hour shifts.
Because of their focus on those crops, the rest of the farm was left neglected. The fence for the hog pen broke, and the hogs escaped. The family had a sow that was renowned for large litters, and soon the prairies surrounding the farms were filled with feral pigs.
When the wheat harvest came in, my grandpa went out with a full feeding trough. Each day he brought the trough out, but each day he set it a hundred yards closer than the day before. He repaired the hog fence, and one day set the full trough in the repaired pen, and, when the pigs all went in to feed, he closed the gate.
That season, wheat prices crashed, but pork prices skyrocketed. They were able to pay off the government loans and buy some of the surrounding farms as well.
I grew up hearing this story, and hearing the love and care in the voices of my elders who spoke of the land. I have so much respect and gratitude to my great grandparents who struggled for most of their adult lives to create a life for themselves there. Even when they resented the lives that they had, I believe they always truly loved the land. When I connect to land spirit, I feel that the land very much loved them back. Those early generations passed that land to the younger generations with reverence. My great grandmother Emma once told my grandpa, ‘Save the farm for the children.’
And yet, the history is not so simple. There is ample evidence that the treaty that gave the entire Metro Denver area to the white people was never signed. The truth is that my family created a life for themselves on stolen land. Since this is essentially the case for very nearly all white people in this country, we are due for a reconning. We have not received the abundance that we have in a good way.
In 2013, under a mineral rights lease, Exon Mobile scheduled to break ground for horizontal drilling, or hydraulic fracturing, a process that is commonly known as fracking, in which an obscene amount of water, laced with countless chemicals, including arsenic, is pumped deep into the ground, and then shocked with such intense pressure that the shale oil formation below shatters, and releases trapped natural gas and oil.
When I heard that our farm was to be fracked, I was devastated. I went to the farm with the intention of listening to the land spirit there, to find out what she wanted. My mom and I went on the land. We walked and we meditated, and, somehow, as my heart and mind grew silent, I met the land spirit of our family farm. I had expected something disembodied-- a spirit somehow tied to the earth, but that wasn't what I found at all. Wind was blowing across the wheat, the sky was blue with a few clouds passed by. Meadowlarks sang and flew around me, and red tailed hawks flew far overhead. Land spirit was not something connected to the land, land spirit was the land. Everything there was a part of land spirit. I was a part of land spirit. When I asked her what she wanted me to do, she didn't answer with words, she just answered with the quality of her being, and the message was clear. 'Be at peace. Everything is okay'.
I've gone back several times a year since then. The land has not yet been fracked, and the spirit of that land has become my greatest teacher. I find that land to be wiser, more ancient, more intelligent, more at peace, and more loving than anything I could ever be or even imagine. Every time I ask her, 'what do I do?' she replies with deep peace. 'Everything is okay,' she says.
And yet it is clear that land spirit has a prayer that we attune to her. Land spirit has a prayer that we sing her song in our hearts.
Last year, our family sold the mineral rights to that land. I went back there, again and again, asking what she wanted. The message I received was that land spirit wanted to give of herself to create something truly beautiful, so I took the money from the mineral rights sale, and started Campesino Commons.
Campesino Commons is not my project. This project belongs to the spirit of the land of my family farm. This project is blessed by a heartbreaking, beautiful sacrifice. May we open our hearts and do this work in a way deserving of that sacrifice.
The second story is the time I have spent in Latin America
I lived for part of my childhood in Chiapas, Mexico, connecting with and learning from the Chamula Maya women that my mom worked with. I also lived for a time as an adult in Nicaragua, starting in 1992, developing deep roots and connections with the people of Teotecacinte, in the northernmost part of the country.
In the summer 2019, my friend from Teotecacinte, Jorge, called me to tell me that their bean crops had been completely destroyed by unseasonable tropical storms. In a period of three months, I raised nearly $20 thousand dollars to help them replant, just in time for the village to get hit by two successive hurricanes, two weeks apart, destroying the newly planted crops. Climate change had created a new normal.
It became profoundly clear to me that our efforts to do good in the world had to change. We would have to start doing things in a completely different way in response to a completely changing world.
The third story is my family circle
My cousin Meade got married in Chicago during the summer of 2018. Before the wedding ceremony began, I was introduced to a cousin of mine, my grandfather's sister's daughter. Her name was Susan.
There were two things about her that stood out to me. The first was that I had never known that she existed. The second was that she was a mixed race black woman. It turned out that those two things were intimately connected, as her mom and my grandfather had broken all ties around the time that Susan was born. We have come to understand that racism in our family lead to a shattering of connections, so complete, that Susan and her brother, Evan, were erased from our family history.
At brunch, the morning after the wedding, my dad told Susan the story of how his dad, my granddad, committed suicide decades before, when I was a child.
After hearing the story, Susan looked at us and said, 'Our family needs circle.'
Our family circle, going on for over five years now, has healed us in miraculous ways. We have had to dig in to the wounds together, created by our ancestors, and we have had to learn how to give everyone a voice-- to give everyone a seat at the table.
When I told Susan that I was starting Campesino Commons, she agreed to join the Board of Directors, and suggested that we use circle process to help the wealthy and privileged come to terms with and heal our history of colonial harm, and to give the poor and oppressed communities of indigenous descent in the Americas a seat at the table.
Campesino Commons is designed to invert the power structure. We are not only working to heal the harm and to facilitate reparations, but to centralize indigenous wisdom, and to highlight a growing understanding that everyone must relearn how to be indigenous if we are to survive. The colonizers must learn to be humble-- become the students.