The violence of lynching not only took life—it severed relationship.

Earth itself was turned against us.

What must the trees have felt? Their branches bent by the weight of human bodies, leaves trembling with the final gasps of lives extinguished. And what of the soil, which swallowed blood as though coerced into complicity? The earth became a silent witness to atrocity, drawn into the enactment of human terror.

Colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism fractured our relationship with the land. The very soil that could nurture life became the site of terror. Through colonial conquest, intimate bonds between people and place were severed. Indigenous communities were displaced, stripped of the lands that had nurtured them, and denied access to the abundance that sustained not only life, but memory, culture, and identity.

This legacy continues. We are concentrated in neighbourhoods where trees are scarce, green space is limited, and the air is heavy with toxins. Urban planning, discriminatory housing policies, and environmental neglect reproduce the patterns first imposed through colonial conquest.

The colonial wound persists not only in memory but in the very environment itself: in soil stripped of fertility, in waterways rerouted or poisoned, in neighbourhoods that resemble ecological deserts. The violence is ongoing, lived daily through deprivation and environmental injustice. The earth continues to bear the unending weight of human cruelty.