Cherish Indigenous wisdom and immigrant workers
Drought. I watch the soil blow away each morning, fine black particles that took centuries to build. Like watching ICE round up the farmworkers who’ve tended these fields for decades — each one representing years of built community, of taxes paid, of children raised, of roots grown deep.
Let them talk about “protecting borders.” I’ve spent enough years watching topsoil disappear to know the difference between protection and destruction. These workers are like my field’s deep-rooted grasses — holding the community together, doing the essential work others won’t touch, stabilizing something precious that took generations to build.
When you tear out native grasses, the soil structure collapses. When you rip out settled families, the community structure fails. Both leave wounds that can’t be quickly healed. I’ve watched worker housing empty out like my dying pastures — first one family, then ten, then whole blocks gone quiet.
Let’s talk about what we’re really losing. These families create invisible networks of support—like the complex web of soil organisms that make land fertile. They clean our hospitals, build our homes, care for our elderly, harvest our food. Twenty years waiting for papers is too long. They do the work that makes America possible.
The land doesn’t care about documentation. It knows who tends it. The indigenous peoples who first tended this soil understood something we’re forgetting — that the health of the land and the health of the community are inseparable.
The logic of destruction spreads like erosion cuts. First they come for the undocumented. Then they ban books that tell uncomfortable truths — including those about the peoples who knew how to tend this land sustainably for millennia. Then they tell LGBTQ youth their existence is inappropriate. Then they claim women’s bodies belong to the state. Each move strips away another layer of protection, leaving the bedrock of democracy exposed to the wind.
Each deportation cuts a channel through our community, like water carving through unprotected soil. These channels grow deeper with each raid, each family torn apart. Soon you have canyons where gardens used to be. Wounds too deep to heal in a single generation.
I’ve measured enough dry streambeds to know how systems fail. First the surface water disappears. Like watching local businesses close when their workers are deported. Then the deeper aquifers drain. Like watching schools empty, churches quiet, community bonds dissolve. The tariffs they celebrate are like drought that kills slowly. Raising prices, strangling trade, making survival harder for those who actually work the land.
They don’t understand how long it takes to build fertile ground. How each undocumented worker who pays taxes, each family who joins the PTA, each teenager who dreams in two languages—they’re like the patient work of earthworms, creating channels for growth. Making space for future harvests. Like the indigenous peoples before them, they understand that tending the land means tending the community.
Every culture that has survived on this soil has known this truth — from ancient tribal wisdom to immigrant farmers’ knowledge. You can’t replace decades of community building with slogans and walls.
Let them praise their sterile vision of America. I’ve spent too many years watching living soil turn to dust to believe that uniformity breeds strength. Real fertility, like real community, needs diversity. It needs people willing to do the hard work. It needs protection for the vulnerable.
The cruelest joke is hearing them claim they’re ‘protecting American jobs’ while they deport the very people who make our farms, factories, and businesses run. Like claiming you’re protecting the land while stripping away its living skin. The fields know better. The empty farm worker housing knows better. The shuttered businesses know better.
Every morning I check new erosion gullies. Every morning another family disappears. Every morning another teenager feels unwelcome in their own country. Every morning another woman loses control of her future. The necessary work continues, even as right-wing fanatics try to make it impossible.
The soil teaches us this: When you destroy the organisms that bind earth together, you don’t get better soil. You get dust. When you attack the people who bind communities together, you don’t get a stronger nation. You get emptiness.
So let them praise deportation. We’ll build sanctuary.
Let them ban books. We’ll share stories.
Let them spread hate. We’ll cultivate belonging.
Let them control bodies. We’ll defend choice.
The rains will return. And they’ll find two kinds of Americans — those who helped destroy their own community’s fertility, and those who protected it. Those who let their humanity blow away in the wind, and those who held onto it, like precious topsoil, knowing what it cost to build.
History will record how we acted when they came to tear our communities’ roots out. Whether we stood watching as the soil blew away, or whether we did the patient, necessary work of holding our ground together. The land remembers — it remembers its first stewards, remembers every hand that tended it with respect, every culture that understood its worth.
The indigenous peoples who first worked this soil knew it. The immigrant families who tend it now know it. The deepest truths survive in many languages, many traditions, many ways of knowing: when we guard the earth, we guard each other. When we protect the vulnerable, we protect ourselves.
Custodes terrae, custodes veritatis.
Guardians of the earth, guardians of truth.
What we preserve, preserves us.
Their dust will blow away. Our roots will hold.
*In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare in the US.
Images by Gael MacLean ©2024
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