Zappa Montag steps outside his home to a thicket of redwoods, Pacific madrones and oak trees. Dozens of fruit trees dot the 76 hectares (189 acres), along with a large garden replete with squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, corn and peppers. Nearby, a small stream runs through a valley surrounded by hills. At Black to the Land, the ecovillage in Boonville, California, Montag and five other Black people steward the land off the grid, relying on well water and powered solely by solar panels. The intentional community, as it’s called, is located in a rural area 115 miles (185km) north of San Francisco. Montag said it was an effort to “reverse-gentrify the country”.
Black Americans and Indigenous people have long gathered in intentional communities, defined as small groups of people who live in the same area based on shared values and a common vision. They come in many forms, including co-housing spaces in urban environments where people have their own units and share communal spaces.
In ecovillages in rural settings, residents of all ages live off of the land and strive for environmental sustainability. Intentional communities are often undergirded by communal governance and sharing resources. After the end of enslavement, tightknit groups of Black people relied on each other to find success in business and agriculture in the face of racial violence. In recent years, Black and brown people in Alabama, Massachusetts and California have increasingly looked to intentional communities as a way to reconnect with their ancestors’ agricultural and ecological knowledge.
In 2015, Montag, now 57, and his then 16-year-old daughter, Bibi Sarai, conceived of the idea of Black to the Land. Disheartened by the gentrification that they witnessed while living in Oakland, they envisioned creating a healing space surrounded by nature for Black people. During the first few years of the project, they hosted community gatherings, such as concerts.
In 2021, a friend introduced them to the Emerald Earth Sanctuary in Mendocino county as a possible site for a healing retreat with yoga and meditation for Black people. Founded by white activists in 1989, Emerald Earth Sanctuary was an intentional community that had begun to cease operations as people aged or moved away. They were in search of people from marginalized communities to assume ownership of the land, so Montag, his daughter and a few of their friends jumped at the opportunity.
Soon after, the non-profit gifted stewardship of the property to Black to the Land through a verbal and written agreement. “It’s been a reparations type of project,” Montag said. “Instead of paying money, we are spending the time to learn stewardship and the knowledge of how to take care of this particular place.”
For the first two years, Montag split his time between teaching high school in Oakland and making weekend trips to Mendocino county to become acquainted with the land. Tragedy struck in February 2023 when Bibi Sarai unexpectedly died, and Montag was uncertain if the project would continue. But when people reported that visiting the property that summer improved their mood and wellness, he realized the significance of continuing with his and his daughter’s dream. Montag moved there permanently the following summer.
Over the past two years, he’s recruited people to the community and sharpened his agriculture and building skills through mentorship from former members of the Emerald Earth Sanctuary. The stewards, who range in age from late 20s to mid-50s, raise money to maintain the land through fundraising and grants and by hosting workshops on building, gardening and foraging. Some of them work remotely to cover personal expenses.
African plant medicine practitioners in the group make herbal remedies for members who are feeling unwell. No one has required medical services yet, but there’s a nearby clinic and the non-profit has paid insurance for emergency medical transportation.
Sankofa Roots, an organization that trains marginalized communities on land-based skills, has taught them how to build fires and structures. Black to the Land also partners with an ecovillage leader from Ghana who teaches them how to create natural buildings. While stewarding the land, members stay in dwellings made out of clay and do yoga and cook their meals in a large community center on the property. When there’s a lot of rainfall, they work together to build trenches in the dirt driveway so that it doesn’t flood. In lieu of paying for housing costs, everyone participates in doing weekly chores around the property, such as gathering firewood for the stoves.
“We want to be able to be independent or self-reliant,” Montag said, “because it feels like things are precarious out there these days.”
Since its founding in 2020, the Bipoc Intentional Community Council has seen “a back-to-the-land movement, where a lot of people are moving to rural areas and exploring ways that they can create farming communities”, said board member Crystal Byrd Farmer. “They can kind of return to their roots.” The non-profit supports Black and brown people in creating intentional communities through providing funding, workshops on creating non-profits or land trusts, and connecting members to others who want to live in community.
While the media often portrays intentional communities as radical, said Farmer, the concept is similar to how humans lived for millennia. “We are used to gathering in small groups and being together and supporting each other,” she said. “So what we’re doing now is trying to get through the capitalism maze in order to re-create that feeling of being in a home and being in a community that values us.” Intentional communities vary in their structure and practices, but many members grow their own food, share household responsibilities, such as chores and cooking, and raise their children together.
Most intentional communities in the US are majority white because they have greater access to the capital needed to acquire land and build than historically marginalized groups. Black and brown people who enter majority-white communities, Farmer said, sometimes feel estranged from their cultural practices, food preferences or value systems: “There’s this disconnect in how white communities conduct themselves that makes it uncomfortable for Black and brown people to continue to live with them.”
In the current sociopolitical environment, people of color are being drawn to create their own spaces to heal from oppressive societal structures. “There’s so much going on, so much pressure and so many things that Black folks have to shoulder,” Montag said. “Creating an intentional community in a space that is natural and wild is delving into the possibility of a deeper level of healing so that we can carry on. There’s a movement of this happening all over the place.”
‘Increased security and safety’
Marginalized communities are relying on intentional communities as a way to protect their traditional practices and to pass them down to youth. Within some of these spaces, elders are also revered and their knowledge is documented for future generations.
At Ekvn-Yefolecv, in Alabama, Indigenous Maskoke people ranging from children to elders observe their ancestral practices on the land from which the US government forced their removal 180 years ago. A collective of Maskoke people established the ecovillage in 2018 after reacquiring the land, which is now structured by matriarchal governance. Residents speak their ancestral language daily and operate through a language-immersion program focused on Indigenous ecological and agricultural knowledge.
In an interview with Cultural Survival, a publication that advocates for Indigenous rights, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, the co-founder of Ekvn-Yefolecv, said: “Instead of changing our language to accommodate the environmentally abusive realities of settler-colonial industrial capitalist ideology, we needed to change the way we live by recreating a society in which our language once functioned best – one premised on ecologically regenerative lifeways.” (Briggs-Cloud said that members of the Ekvn-Yefolecv community are declining interviews at this time).
They tend 3,105 hectares (7,674 acres) of land by using traditional foraging knowledge, growing Native regional crops and reintroducing previously threatened animals, such as the buffalo and sturgeon. The community makes traditional clothes and harvest trees on site to frame all of their structures. Unlike a reservation, which is land held in trust by the federal government, the ecovillage’s residents share the land title. Ekvn-Yefolecv members abstain from artificially sweetened drinks and food, while government-issued meals on reservations often consist of canned vegetables or highly processed foods that stray from a traditional diet. Ultimately, the group hopes to serve as a model for other Indigenous communities wanting to practice ecological sustainability and retain their culture and language.
In central Massachusetts, members of the Solidarity Arts & Education Decolonial Initiatives (SAEDi) collective – an art collective for women of color – live together in a communal home. The home is managed by Julivic Marquez, an Afro-Latine film-maker in her early 30s, and is owned by the collective’s founder, K Melchor Quick Hall. A late-40s Black woman, Hall also serves as the group’s grant writer, while Keisha Marsh-Burke, a Jamaican hairdresser and nail technician, provides administrative support to the group and lives in the home with her two children. The three work together with a transnational group of women of color on multimedia art projects, research and education about food sovereignty, Black reparations, and prison abolition. Recently, the house added a 20-year-old mother and her daughter from Guatemala.
Each member of the household pays a rent that they can afford, and they provide food and childcare and do chores. In April, a household member cooked and did other tasks around the house when they couldn’t contribute to the mortgage due to the cost of medical services. “Ultimately, we don’t pretend as though things are equal,” said Hall, the homeowner. “I had some early and intergenerational advantages that allow me to put forth more material resources, so that a sick child or a missed paycheck doesn’t result in a homeless family.”
Monthly house meetings are conducted in Spanish and English, and in the spring, they plan to plant a garden, as well as a fruit and nut tree orchard. A vacant room in the house has been saved for up to weeklong residencies for community elders. “During these green residencies, the women of color elders would share their garden, farm, food and recipe stories, which would become part of a digital archive, to be shared online,” Hall said. “The goal is to create increased security and safety in a context where immigrant families and women of color are facing increased precarity as xenophobic and racist policies and practices proliferate under the current administration.”
‘It was so empowering to see people come together’
The origins of modern-day intentional living within Black communities can be traced back to Albany, Georgia, during the civil rights movement.
Founded in 1969 by several civil rights leaders, including Charles and Shirley Sherrod, New Communities was a farming community for Black sharecroppers who lost their jobs and homes because they registered to vote. Based on the model of the kibbutz, New Communities was located on more than 2,225 hectares (5,500 acres) of land in south-west Georgia. New Communities became the first community land trust in the US, in which a group of civil rights leaders bought the farmland, held it in a trust, and invited Black farmers and their families to live on the land. “Our goal, we had big ideas,” Shirley Sherrod said, “was to go about the country, buying land, holding it in trust and to turn it over to local community development corporations.”
About 100 people worked on the farm which had 10 buildings. They built a smokehouse on the property, and became known for their cured hams and bacon. However, the group was never able to sustain the community that they envisioned. Federal funding for the community to grow was blocked by Lester Maddox, then Georgia’s governor. “It was so empowering to see people come together to talk about what kind of educational system they wanted, where industry would be located, what kind of health system we had. We just planned every phase of the community,” Sherrod said. “I can remember feeling, ‘Wow, this is really going to be great.’”
They were forced to sell part of their land in the 1980s and lost the rest to foreclosure. But in 2009, New Communities Inc was awarded a $12m settlement from the US government for the discrimination that they faced by the US Department of Agriculture. A couple of years later, New Communities bought a 640-hectare (1600-acre) former plantation in Georgia. On the new property, the organization hosts workshops on tending land and raising livestock. Now, Sherrod is mentoring younger generations on how to create Black intentional communities and form land trusts.
She still hopes to build more structures on their land for families to farm and live in community. “Working together, there’s all kind of organizing going on in order to move forward,” Sherrod said. “We’ve just tried to do that over the number of years, trying to help our people see that we can do some things together to bring some of the change that we need.”
‘Enjoying ourselves has got to be part of it’
Gathering with like-minded people offers members a respite from systems of oppression. It gives them an opportunity to reflect, grieve and embrace joy.
In Boonville, California, Montag relies on the land to connect with his deceased daughter. Last year, Black to the Land members and others created a reading bench out of clay and rocks as a memorial for Bibi Sarai, who was a voracious reader and nature lover. When it’s not raining, Montag visits the memorial and promises his daughter that he will continue creating a haven where young Black women like her can feel empowered. “It was important to her to find a space of openness, acceptance and calmness,” Montag said.
As he sits on the bench under an oak tree, Montag often utters a prayer for his daughter. “I mostly just tell her I miss her and love her, and feel her pretty strong here,” Montag said. “It helps me feel more connected to humanity in general, which helps me keep her spirit.”
In the future, Black to the Land hopes to host grief rituals for people who have lost loved ones. Members are also working on a memorial garden for Bibi Sarai.
More than anything, the land helps Montag ground into the present moment. It reminds him of the community that he is building and the healing power of nature. When the weather warms, Montag said that he plans to bask in the sun by the river: “Just enjoying ourselves has got to be part of it.”
