Who We Are

Mistinguette Smith, Executive Director

When Mistinguette Smith began to notice that black people think and talk about their relationship to land and place quite differently from the ways mainstream institutions do, The Black/Land Project was born. As the Founder and Director of the Black/Land Project, she has travelled the country gathering black people’s stories about relationship to southern farmland, urban city-scapes, changing neighborhoods, and public green spaces since the fall of 2010.  Blending her literary ear as a poet and essayist with her professional knowledge of women’s health, food security, and leadership development for social equity, Smith turns the gift of individual stories into a body of information that engages and heals black communities. Smith is a skilled analyst, trainer and facilitator, and a masterful speaker who captivates both academic and community audiences.  A graduate of Smith College, she holds the MPA in Public and Nonprofit Management from New York University. She was the Twink Frey Visiting Social Activist at the University of Michigan Center for the Education of Women, and is a 2021 Encore Public Voices Fellow.

Diedre F. Houchen, Ph.D., Consultant/Collaborator

Diedre joins the Black/Land Project as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Florida Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations. She is an award-winning researcher, educator, writer, speaker, and mother whose work is grounded in emancipatory educational theory. Presently she focuses on historical and contemporary Black southern education and community life. Her analyses suggest that southern Black communities—through schools, professional associations, informal networks, and parent organizations were complex grounds of theoretical construction for organized resistance against oppression and emancipatory strategizing for achievement and liberation. Her most recent work is a three-site exhibition focusing on the activism,  role, and strategies of Black educators and segregated all-Black K-12 institutions in Florida from 1920-1960.  You may find her latest publication here.

Makshya Tolbert, consultant/ collaborator

Makshya Tolbert (she/they) is a black queer writer, grower, and cook guided by Black ancestral ecological practice. She recently completed a 2019-2020 U.S-Italy Fulbright fellowship, studying food, memory, and fugitivity through black feminist study and practice. Her writing has appeared in For The Culture, Gastronomica: The Journal For Food Studies, and the New Farmers Almanac. Makshya received her Certificate of Ecological Horticulture with the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems in 2018.

Makshya is currently based on unceded Huichin land as a collaborator on community food development projects with DAISA Enterprises and the Equitable Food Oriented Development Collaborative. She will join the University of Virginia’s MFA Program in Poetry as a first-year student this fall.

In her free time, she is waywardly elsewhere, where Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls 'that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.'

Eve Tuck, Ph.D., Consultant/Collaborator

Eve Tuck is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She is also Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities. She makes a podcast with graduate students at OISE, University of Toronto, called The Henceforward, on relationship between Indigenous and Black communities on Turtle Island, and advises Black/Land on the participatory action research aspects of our work. She has conducted participatory action research with New York City youth on the uses and abuses of the GED option, the impacts of mayoral control, and school non-completion.  Her current research is with migrant youth in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her publications are concerned with the ethics of social science research and educational research, Indigenous social and political thought, decolonizing research methodologies and theories of change, and the consequences of neoliberal accountability policies on school completion.  She is the author of Urban Youth and School Push-Out: Gateways, Get-aways, and the GED (2013)  and co-editor (with K. Wayne Yang) of Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change (2014).  Tuck’s writings have appeared in Harvard Educational Review, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society and several edited volumes.  She is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of Environmental Education Research on land education with Kate McCoy and Marcia McKenzie.   Tuck is an enrolled member of the Tribal Government of St. Paul Island, in Alaska.

Program Board

Lynn Harvey-Akan

Lynn is an independent communications professional who has worked in the private, government and nonprofit sectors. She offers Black/Land her knowledge of public affairs and resource development, and shares her many relationships in commercial and public media.  A skillful intercultural communicator, Harvey-Akan has lived and worked in the midwestern and southern United States as well as internationally, most recently in Jiaozuo City, Henan Province, Peoples Republic of China.  A native of Schenectady, NY,  she currently makes her home in Greensboro N.C. but believes “your place in the universe is as big or as small as you make it.”

The Black/Land Project is a sponsored program of Community Ventures.