who am i
Lathram; a name given to me after my maternal grandmother. I am an owning-class, settler-descendant, culturally-connected woman, who believes deeply in our collective capacities to heal, to question, to tell the truth, to surrender, to remember, to build new worlds seeping with ancestral wisdom. I name these pieces as they shape how I have experienced the world; because they inform my responsibilities for seven generations forward.
I am a facilitator, educator, writer, organizer, and land steward, currently creating in Uetvmkv/Wetumpka, AL, what we also call the place of flying water. Surrounded by the best keepers of time – longleaf pine, goldenrod, beautyberry, passionflower – I take cue from my ancestors, and the beings of this land. This attention to place guides my work; from facilitating conversations miles away from here with an attunement to the land we are on, to developing curriculum for younger ones exploring our dependence on the ecosystems around us, to being in tender conversation with young people and their families around values, class, and inheritance.
As I am shaped by many, my offerings allow me to embody the full spectrum of the lessons I have learned over time. The teachings from my community, including elders and young ones, have informed me just as much as my academic training, or my political education. Below, you can read more about my journey of learning and creating.
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My connection to land woke up when I started growing food fifteen years ago, and woke up again when I witnessed children participating in the growing. I have been deeply moved by watching the same expression of awe on a child’s face, and on an adult’s face, from the task of pulling a carrot out of the fresh earth. Miracles! Since then, my work has spanned from tending to a Bahamian farm in Tuscaloosa, AL, to teaching PreK-6th graders representing over 50 tribal and global identities as a garden educator in Phoenix, AZ, to managing a community garden program connecting folks to land and the skills to grow in Nashville, TN. My academic journey has followed this work, with a B.A. in Community Development & Sustainability from The New College at The University of Alabama (2018), and a Masters of Education in Community Development and Action from Vanderbilt University (2022). These experiences, and the belief that we all carry the breadth to connect with place as our lives depend on it, inform the ways I offer facilitation and create educational materials for all peoples of all ages.
In more recent years, my connection to land has expanded from the miracle of growing food, to the greater ecosystem around us. I moved into a place of deep belief that we needed to know the stories of where we were growing, who had touched this land before, who had carried these seeds. These questions need central focus. This direction guided my work from 2021 to 2024, as a co-founder of Stories of the Land, a worker-owned cooperative focused on place-based decolonial storytelling. As an active land steward, that means stewarding the stories too. This awareness, and connection to the land beneath our feet wherever that may be, is the lens I bring my offerings to life through.
Like the layers of the earth, we keep going deeper. When settlers came to Turtle Island, so too came colonial property law splitting the earth – meant to be held as one being – into sections for ownership, i.e. air, surface, sub-surface, minerals. This concept of owning layers of land, and of people, has led to multi-generational wealth for many families, including mine. With this, I find myself at home with Resource Generation as we build transformative leaders with class privilege to show up authentically in the world, and the Mineral Rights Action Network, where we work with mineral rights owners to interrupt extraction of the earth. Both, organizing towards the liberation of all Land and Life.
I first joined Resource Generation in 2020, when I was receiving stimulus checks that I definitely did not need to survive. I redistributed it within my local community of Phoenix at the time, and found a larger network of young people doing the same. Upon returning to the south later that year, I found a small chapter of three people meeting in Nashville. Since then, I have had the great honor to support the building of a leadership team of eight member leaders, and a larger base of twenty. As a chapter, we have redistributed over $250,000 in the last two years. Through experience, mentorship, relationship, and political education, my understanding of the world has been greatly shaped through the lens of class, and how that informs our material conditions. And with that, what my responsibility is to change material conditions as an owning class person. As I have developed, this has grown to also include deeper curiosities around how we are in relationship with money materially, energetically, spiritually. The land continues to be my anchor in these questions – as with the commitment to being a part of a place-based economy that is good for all life, we must surrender attachment to constant accumulation and wealth hoarding.