Garfield Community Farm’s Land Acknowledgment
Pittsburgh’s hills and river basins have always been the land of ecological and cultural convergence. Here we find ecological systems meeting from the mountains in the east, the grasslands to our west and northern forests and lakes in the north and the broad leaf forest to our south. It has also been a land where people converge.
Garfield Community Farm exists on three city blocks where thirty homes once stood. A neighborhood of working class Irish, English and Italian immigrants gardened these spaces, tended a community orchard and lived in homes on this land. Later African immigrants from the Southern states made the Garfield hill their new home bringing new foods and culture on their journey north. But this land, these hills and river basins that we call Western Pennsylvania were a land of converging cultures far earlier than the 1900’s.
Pittsburgh’s rolling hills, hundreds of streams and rivers running toward the convergence of the great three rivers, seems to have always been a land of cultural convergence. For thousands of years our land was a shared area of converging indigenous people. Few tribes or nations call these hills their ancestral home, but many cultures met on these hills because of these three rivers.
About 12,000 B.C. at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village in Washington County some of the earliest known people in our part of the country lived and called the hills of western PA home. The Osage people call the Ohio River basin their origin as a people, later migrating west and south through the Mississippi River Basin. Later the Adena people arrived, then the Hopewell and Monongahela. During colonial invasion in the east nations again converged with the rivers finding a land of plenty. The Susquehannock and The Delaware peoples came from eastern Pennsylvania, Shawnees arrived from the south and Iroquoian people migrated from New York state. Because the area wasn’t the ancestral homeland for many of these nations, their cultures often mixed like the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers.
For a few decades the three acres that are now Garfield Community Farm, sat vacant, houses gone and foundations of homes filled in with rubble. Today Garfield Community Farm is a place where people meet, mix with one another and natural systems and leave these acres of land better for it. Our land was the shared land of many peoples before it became what it is today. We can only strive to honor the indigenous people and all those who lived here before us by caring for our land well, using it to care for one another well, and to leave this land for future generations to tend and reap its bounty. Today, we at Garfield Community Farm strive to continue to honor indigenous first nations by hearing their stories, learning how they live today and by understanding the continued quest for land and food sovereignty in 21st century. We seek to honor our current neighbors who have rich family histories, connections to land, and much to teach us in our quest to care for the earth, care for one another and do it with equity and justice.
