Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture and spirituality. Black Creole farmer and activist Leah Penanman co-founded Soulfire Farm in upstate New York

with the mission to end racism and injustice in the food system.

With Afro-Indigenous farming technologies used to plant and harvest heirloom crops,

the farm has become a space for people of color to heal and reconnect to the land.

In this profile, Emergence Magazine staff writer Chelsea Steiner-Skutter

explores how Leah's work at Soulfire Farm is guided

by both her decades of learning on the land and her Afro-Indigenous spiritual lineages.

For 13 years, Leah Penamon has planted and harvested food on a section of land

located on the forested slopes of the Taconic Range in upstate New York, 40 minutes east of Albany.

She calls this place Soul Fire Farm.

We have the blessing to be stewarding 80 acres of Stockbridge, Muncie, Mohican territory in the rocky hills of Grafton, she says.

The Mohican people were the original stewards of this land, forcibly relocated to Wisconsin in the 1800s.

By nine o'clock on a morning in late July, the sun is already high in the day hot.

Visitors are arriving at the farm and congregating in the shade of a large tent. They carry water bottles and sunscreen

and wear eager tentative expressions

that say they are here for the first time.

Today is a community farm day

called a conbeat

after the traditional Haitian practice

...