The Old Powers Family Farm

        In a small valley above the Allegheny River sits the remnants of the old Powers Family farm. Every morning, I wake up to light peering through the same shagbark hickory that watched over my mother as a child. My house is held up by eighty-year-old logs, offspring of the ancient red oaks that have framed my family's land since 1780. I walk to school along Powers Run Road, named after my ancestors, and pass O’Hara elementary school, which resides over the old Powers' strawberry fields.
        Growing up in an environment so full of my mother's Protestant history has separated me from my Jewish heritage, so I do not know what grew around my father's family. I can only assume that wheat and soybeans were among their staple crops like other Eastern European Jews. My backyard instantly connects me to the Powers family, but I had to go to a screening of Woman in Gold in order for the Holocaust to resonate with me after seventeen years. That same night I returned home in an attempt to further process my peoples' suffering, but I could not ignore the irony of gaining such awareness while standing on land colonized by my mother's family.
        Before that night I thought that the Powers farm had only been covered with strawberries, lettuce, yams, and other produce that sustained the region. Today, I notice more of the broomrape that came over with my European ancestors. This foreign, parasitic plant lacks any chlorophyll, so it latches onto the roots of its host, sucking away nutrients. Today, I reflect on the Shawnee Native Americans who once thrived across Western Pennsylvania in a small valley above the Allegheny River before colonialism was brought from overseas.
The roots of colonialism extend from my yard out, constricting indigenous people around the globe. I first witnessed this expanse while teaching visual art and music with my parents in Nicaragua. In the rural coffee cooperative of El Porvenir, we worked to foster creative and critical thinking in response to the poverty caused by foreign intervention from 16th Century Spanish imperialism to late 20th century U.S. political presence in the Nicaraguan Revolution. During our two visits to El Porvenir, our goal was to create not artists and musicians, but observers and questioners who can see their environment and their reality differently and can thus self-determine their futures against the pressures of oppressive foreign endeavors.
        I returned home from Nicaragua awakened to my role as a descendant of both the oppressors and the oppressed. As a white male raised and nurtured off of stolen land, I must actively decolonize my mind from thoughts of white supremacy, misogyny, and all other systems of inequality that benefit me. As I remove the broomrape from my yard, I see how the Powers farm is a model for the world - one that I can help to decolonize by making policies which challenge the advantages of my ancestry and create equal opportunity for all people.