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The Homecomers Episode Transcript: Brett Ramey on Repairing Connections Between Peoples and Lands 

Sarah Smarsh: So, the United States has two geographic parts: the places our economy and culture tell us to get out of and the places we’re told to seek in order to make it. But I think there’s a shift going on beneath the surface of our national story: It’s a return to, or a refusal to leave, the least glamorous corners of this country—I’m talking about the small towns, rural lands, working-class communities that national headlines say are “dying”—in order to fight for the place that feels like home. I’m Sarah Smarsh, and this is The Homecomers.

Brett Ramey: It is part of that reclamation of physical space to let people know that there are ways of being and relating to the land that have predated a lot of our current systems that we should probably all look towards sooner than later.

SS: Ok so, who gets to frame our national discussion about environmental conservation? Seems like it’s often the same people who, historically, have profited from our environment’s destruction. Brett Ramey is director of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Washington, which empowers emerging conservation leaders who connect ecology, identity, and environmental justice from diverse perspectives.

As a young man, Ramey reconnected with his family and community roots in the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. And he’s devoted his work as an educator and organizer to repairing severed ties between food and medicine, peoples and lands, ecology and well-being. He’s taught courses on food sovereignty, collaborative garden design, and Indigenous science for Tribal Universities and medical schools.

Ramey joined me during the spring of 2018 from Seattle, where he lives.

SS: How would you describe the class background of your life?

BR: Usually when I’m describing who I am, I have to start at least with my grandparents. Both of my grandparents are from northeast Kansas. My mom’s side were from the Ioway Reservation, or officially known as Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. We straddle the border of Kansas and Nebraska both, nearest the town of White Cloud, Kansas, and Rulo, Nebraska; or kind of equidistant from the center. My mother grew up there between there and then also the Sac and Fox Reservation, so she spent a lot of time in Reserve, Kansas, as well, also just south of the Nebraska line. So my grandpa, he helped sculpt a lot of the terraces and the cornfields in the region, and so today you can still see a lot of his handiwork if you’re looking in northeast Kansas where we’re pretty close to the Missouri River, so we do have pretty significant bluffs and more rolling hills. And so, a result, in order to maximize water tension, all that, you need to have a little bit of support in terracing the land—if your aim is to grow large monocrops anyway. And so that’s how my mom grew up was around that. And then similarly, on my dad’s side, they were from a smaller community in Brown County, Kansas, called Robinson. Also growing up on a farm, one of four boys, no girls in his family. And so that’s what he and his brother did all day, every day, was raise mostly cattle, corn, and then on occasion, they also had hogs. And so, I think mostly what my dad ended up doing was working in the fields though, more so than with the cattle, from recollections I’ve heard. And then soon after high school ended for both of them, they ended up moving so my dad could attend school at Highland Junior College, also up in that general area. Eventually moved to attend physical therapy school at KU. And then, it just worked out that the first job he had moved him and my mom both, and my sister, to Springfield, Missouri, which is where I then grew up. So, I ended up being the first generation in many to not grow up in northeast Kansas; to not grow up either on the reservation of my mom’s people or in the other, small farming community where my dad grew up.

SS: I find that my having grown up on a farm makes the earth and geography just an immediate touchstone for me to explain, “how I came up,” where I come from. I find that, increasingly, a 21st century psyche in America, earth and place doesn’t even figure into their go-to story, you know, of who they are. So that’s really beautiful, and I think there are so many kinds of themes of your work I can hear arise just in sort of your own creation story. Talk a little bit more about that part of the country for people who have never been there. You already dispelled one stereotype that every inch of the Great Plains is flat as a pancake. So, this is near the Missouri River; you’ve got bluffs. What else does it look like? What are the seasons? What does it smell like?

BR: It’s been a pretty long winter relative to many in recent memory anyway, and we’re finally getting into spring. The redbuds are just now starting to pop; that is one of the few trees in the woodlands that has a really pronounced bloom. And so, for me, that’s always one of those early signs of spring where you can walk around in the woods again, you can see these pink flowers blooming in the woods, and also kind of indicates that it might also be time to start looking down to see if some morels might be popping. And so, it’s really that time of year where it’s like, you’ve come through the winter, it’s been pretty dreary, potentially, interspersed with sporadic sunny days. We do have very erratic weather in this part of the country, which is part of what I like about here. But generally, you know, winter can be pretty long. There is generally a pretty significant period of dormancy. And so right now, you know, we’re starting to get some of those early smells that are wafting in both from some of the flowers budding, but also we’re starting to get some of those other smells that come from rural northeast Kansas, which are agrochemicals. For somebody like me, this time is like marked by getting out, looking for nettles, you know, picking nettles in the woodlands, and looking for morels. And then for others, it’s also time to get the tractors out, and start, you know, getting the fields prepared, because that is the economic base for so many communities in this part of the country.

SS: What is your family, on both sides, what is their current relationship to both agriculture and I guess just rural living? What do their day-to-day lives look like?

BR: I don’t currently live here; I live in Seattle. And so, I’m just back for a full week, as I always try to do this time of year. And the other day, you know, left Lawrence and drove about 70 miles straight north to the town I referenced where my father’s from, Robinson, and had dinner with his brother. And his brother for the past 20 years had been the manager at the grain elevator in White Cloud, and so he had still been very largely connected to the community’s economic engine, right? The past 20, 25 years, he’d been all day every day at the elevator in White Cloud, which is right on the Missouri River. It’s a very small town, very small elevator, mostly giving way to a lot of farmers taking their grain further in. But nonetheless, he still got to manage that elevator in White Cloud, and be in the all day, every day rhythm of the few people who still use that as their primary point for distributing both their grain and also purchasing of agrochemicals and fertilizers and things.

SS: And what about other members of your family? Are there any more kind of direct connections to food production, agriculture, food systems, other than your own work, of course?

BR: So, on my dad’s side of the family, that brother is the only one. None of his kids are directly involved in food production in that way, though one had been kind of lead on a restaurant that they had in Hiawatha. So, in that way, he was still part of the food system and being the owner-operator of one of the few sit-down restaurants in Hiawatha. On my mother’s side, I do have some cousins who are younger than me, in their early 20s, who have gone to school for things like GIS that, you know, in the context of farming, and so still continue to be involved in farm production in that way. One of them also has his own home garden; he has goats, he has chickens, and really is kind of an anomaly that he’s chosen to do that.

SS: Well speaking of anomalies within a cultural context, and just kind of the forces that push us in different professional directions, it’s clear from your personal story and background that you have, you know, metaphorical roots in these concepts. But statistically, the majority of people who have similar roots, you know, were of course, taught to quote-unquote “get out” of a more agricultural or rural setting that is seen by capitalist America, basically, as economically dwindling or “bad bet.” You have focused your life on food sovereignty, the earth, people’s connection to the land. Is there a specific moment where you remember thinking like, “This is what my life is all about,” or was it just kind of a slow evolution of finding your way? Is it your personal sensibility? A particular mentor? How did you end up in this field?

BR: It did begin when I moved to Lawrence after high school, if I had to pick a point in time. I grew up in Springfield, Missouri, that’s where I went to high school. I would come up here occasionally, “here” meaning Kansas, broadly. You know, a few times a year was all. But then after high school, I moved to Lawrence, I went to Haskell Indian Nations University, also University of Kansas both, often simultaneously. I began to reconnect to parts of my family history on both sides, just, in part, due to proximity of both of those communities I mentioned.

But also just being Haskell had that opportunity to connect with a lot of other young native folks from, at that point, it was roughly 160, 170 different tribes from around the country who were all coming to Haskell to further their education—both in terms of western education, but also, in my case, and I believe many other people’s, like a re-education around those connections to lands that have been severed, in many cases deliberately, by institutes such as Haskell, when it was originally set up as an assimilation boarding school in the late 1800s. So, for me, to arrive at Haskell having not had a lot of teachings that I knew about, my native side like reinforced, just through day-to-day life growing up in Springfield, Missouri, come to see that that part of myself was much more pronounced within, within my way of thinking, within my way of doing than I had ever really had a chance to fully express and have reinforced in Springfield, right? And so, initially, that took form in a few different places. You know, it took form in a wetlands landscape, and then it took form in working at a natural food store, where I was learning more about the political as well as personal health impacts and effects of both eating organically, organic foods, as well as the dominant food system overall. And so, I was kind of getting that political and personal—if there’s a difference—exposure to the different facets of the food system.

For the wetlands itself, that was the first point where I had the opportunity to learn very deliberately and frequently about how to make foods and medicines from the plants that grew there; how to observe beaver ecology and understand the connections between their health and our health as well. And through all that, regained a lot of those life ways that the federal government had set out to deliberately eradicate, as part of their case to assimilate, or as a saying at the time went, “kill the Indian to save the man.” And so, we were able to go and breathe the air in the wetlands and experience what it was like to harvest nettle, or harvest echinacea, take them back to a lab. And so, kind of the integration of traditional indigenous knowledges with also more western science understandings as well. And through all that, realize that’s where I liked to be in general; having an opportunity to learn just very basic things of how to provide physical, and in turn, spiritual sustenance for myself, through these, like very basic connections to plants that had been lost.

SS: You might speak a little bit more on the wetlands. This is, you know, I think another kind of form of landscape that isn’t readily associated with Kansas. But it is a powerful place, and one that has been involved, of course, in controversies over the years, tensions between the native community and development forces. Of course, as a former Lawrence resident myself, I’ve been in that spot many times, and it’s incredibly powerful in so many ways. It’s not surprising to me that that was kind of a formative location for you when all of these kind of pieces of your life puzzle were coming together. If you’d talk a little bit more about those wetlands, and what is there, what it looks like, the history. And not that they mean the same thing to all members of the native community there, but if you could maybe speak to your own meanings.

BR: So, the wetlands sit on the south end of Lawrence, Kansas, and they’re up against the Wakarusa River. The wetlands that are along the river, on the south edge of Haskell campus, are the last remaining tract of wetlands along that valley. They’ve long ago been filled, been drained to allow for either development but more often for farming, or at least attempted farming. When Haskell was set up as a boarding school in the late 1800s, they were drained, and a lot of the young people were taught to try to farm in it. After a significant amount of time of trying that, it was realized that actually wasn’t the best place to try to farm. And so, they were then refilled, allowed to be wetlands again, with support from another university, Baker, about 20 miles south of Lawrence.

And so then, roughly in the 80s, as Lawrence continued to grow, there were ideas that we needed to have a bypass around town. And given that that area was considered to be a salvage area—because wetlands aren’t really valued; they’re seen as just swamps; they don’t any longer have the reverence applied to them that they should, given the functions that they provide, which is cleaning water as they then go to enter into the river. And so, because there’s not that appreciation for the necessity of that type of landscape, and because of the ease through which they can be filled and erased—vanished—it made them susceptible to being a very good option for this superhighway to go through. And so, for 30 years plus, there was ongoing conversation and battles, all ranges between those two around running a highway through there. And there were, of course you know, ecological reasons why we might not want to compromise one of these last few remaining areas where wetlands were able to do their job.

But then my interests also came through with kind of the spiritual significance of altering landscapes that have such a deep history, as these did—to not only to current students, like myself, but also it served as a place of refuge for young people during those early boarding school days where they could go and practice ceremony. Where they could go, you know, speak their language. Where their families could go to meet them if the children were able to escape off of campus.

That was as significant to me, knowing that we can’t, as a larger society, reconnect around the necessity of creating opportunities for healthier relationships if we are always in a state of erasing examples of those healthy relationships. And in the case of this highway, with many things, the choice was made to build and complete the road—thus once again erasing a lot of that history, or attempting to erase. The wetlands continue to be doing their purpose. I was out there yesterday. They’re still beautiful. The birds were still there. The beavers were still there. There were people there enjoying it, and so in spite of what is definitely a loss in that long-term battle, I think it still remains that these places are very special, they are very sacred. And while there is literally eight lanes of traffic severing these wetlands from Haskell, that wasn’t enough for me to feel like that connection of, you know, spiritual connection and cultural connection has been severed.

SS: Let’s talk about some of your specific work over the years. Correct me if I’m wrong, but would your work in Flagstaff be kind of an early career moment for you in terms of work related to food sovereignty?

BR: Really my work there was an outpouring of what I’d been learning at Haskell, what I’d been learning in Lawrence, what I’d been learning in the wetlands around that those needs to protect these places that we’ve come to revere and come to find our connections to. I had a pivotal moment, while going to Haskell, where I was going to get a job for the summer through the Forest Service. Ended up two weeks before it was set to go that there were no longer funds available. And so, the person who had been helping me with that instead invited me to go on a trip with just a handful of youth and elders to the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota. And so, we got to spend four days up there with four other youth and a spiritual leader from the Seminole nation, elder named Bobby Billie.

And so, at the end of the trip, you know, ended up being this really pivotal moment where I came home knowing that I needed to ground all of my work going forward in having a deeper understanding of my own language; but then also understanding the ways that we use languages from both western science and indigenous science, and the necessity of protection around these sacred places by utilizing both tools. And so, we started doing all these trips. About once a year, we would go out somewhere with this youth and elder council. And the fifth year, we ended up in Flagstaff, after a few days on Navajo Nation.

In that trip, we met with the Forest Service about a proposed skier expansion on what they call the San Francisco Peaks. It’s a mountain just on the north side of Flagstaff, Arizona. We met outside their headquarters, not inside. It was determined by the elders that we weren’t going to stand behind a podium and be limited to two to three minutes input, but instead that we were going to meet outside; we were going to sit in a circle amidst the landscape that was being threatened and talk about the impacts of what that would mean. Meanwhile there’s smoke billowing in the background from one of the largest fires at that time in recorded history, and we were there to share a message that what we do to these sacred places has impacts beyond what can be measured on environmental impact statements. So again, that kind of like spiritual perspective that thinks about interconnections between places and interconnections between not just the physical world but the spiritual world. And then also things like how smoke blows, and it has nothing to do with political borders.

SS: It doesn’t stop at the state line.

BR: And it doesn’t stop with the 12 tribes that were listed on the environmental impact statement. Right, and so you think that they’re having these, you know, very clear connections and examples while we’re talking could help illustrate that. You know, there’s an entrenched way of thinking and doing that we’re working with and against, simultaneously often.

And so that trip to Flagstaff, and specifically around that mountain, made me decide to go there for a little while and see what it was like to be in a place where you would see 40 high school kids showing up after school to organize demonstrations around the protection of the mountain. And that was an amazing energy to be around, where we had young—primarily native, not exclusively—folks who were not only working in resistance to the things we didn’t want, but it was also a lot of resurgence-based work. So, a lot of youth-focused, traditional food programs, public art programs that aim to tell stories that had long been suppressed or forgotten—or otherwise like had been erased. And so just part of that reclamation of physical space to let people know that there are ways of being and relating to the land that have predated a lot of our current systems that we should probably all look towards sooner than later if we want to reinstate some sort of balance between/of our human systems, and financial systems, and environmental systems. Like all the things that have been become compartmentalized in this modern world, but that all are very much interconnected and intertwined.

SS: You’ve used the word “spiritual” several times, and I would love to hear you talk about just how we could discuss environmental health in a way that accounts for spiritual health. You’ve said before, I think, that what you called “loss of land-based knowledge” is a global epidemic. How is that epidemic related to what you describe as spiritual well-being?

BR: I think that when we’re living in healthy relationships with a landscape, that we automatically understand that there aren’t separations between things like the health of frogs and the health of the economy. These natural systems are very good at letting us know that they’re all interdependent on each other. If you’re a farmer in northeast Kansas and if you’re in a drought, like we know that we’re not above and beyond what actually imposes itself from the clouds, or doesn’t impose itself, or offer itself, is probably a better word than “impose.” Depending on quantity, I guess.

SS: Right, yes.

BR: And so I think we end up having this situation where we get either so focused on the economics of growing corn, or the physical attributes of growing the corn, or whatever our particular individual focus might be, that it’s easy to lose sight of that larger system that they’re all part and parcel of. And so, for me, when I’m thinking about these land-based knowledges and knowledge systems that emerge from a place—that everybody has at some point in our family histories, regardless of where we’re from—then within that also comes this kind of spiritual dimension, and it’s not something that’s necessarily, again, separate, much in like in conversations around sacred sites protection. It’s sometimes hard to convey why a mountain or why a wetlands has that spiritual strength if there’s not a church on it or if there’s not like a literal physical building on it. Because that’s been another part of our world that’s been compartmentalized and said, “A school is where you learn; a church is where you pray.” But very much in many places, like, they’re intertwined.

SS: I want to focus a little bit more on this concept of compartmentalization. What do you see as kind of the root of that issue? You know, for some populations, like let’s say the Ioway Tribe, what we could now view as a compartmentalization was really a severing by white people who tore human beings away from or attempted to tear them away from their own land-based knowledge with various strategies. And then for some communities, it seems that these compartmentalizations just kind of have arisen organically within. So, if all of these separations are ultimately illusions, how do we restructure our lives in a more healthy way to reflect reality?

BR: Hmm. The one size fits all. Yeah, let’s go for a one size fits all. That’d be nice. Something that likely resonates for a lot of people is having a sense of community, and I think family is probably an easier place for some to start, even. And thinking of ourselves within like not just a lineage, in terms of being linear, but a lineage, more in terms of cyclical nature of things. Another thing that’s been put forward is this idea that time moves in a straight line. Whereas again, if we’re thinking about landscapes, we’re thinking about a farming season, like we know that everything operates in a cycle. There are seasons that start, and then they transition to the next one, and the next thing you know you’ve come back around to where you started. It’s not a straight line.

We’ve adopted this idea that doing anything from previous times is going backwards, when in fact, it’s actually, just like a farmer planting; like you’re going to do some things the next year the way that you did the previous, but some things are probably going to change, because they didn’t work so well. Like it’s perfectly fine to abandon things that don’t longer serve you, while retaining the things that do. And so if there’s a way to move that thinking forward, and like our family structures, as I’ve heard the term, like having one hand back and one hand forward, so pulling things forward, recognizing there are people behind you that you want to honor and have as part of our family, as part of our relationships moving forward. And then also always thinking about who comes after, knowing that eventually, it’s all going to cycle back around again. And we do want to have a way to honor the people who came before us, as much as knowing that we are going to be somebody’s ancestor, eventually.

SS: You know, you’re talking about some kind of universal ideas that people might meditate on in their own lives and their own families. What is the direct work that you’re engaged in right now in White Cloud where you yourself have such a family history?

BR: Yeah. So, I don’t have immediate work, tangible work that I’m doing there right now. You know, I’m living out in Seattle right now. But one thing that’s pretty exciting just a couple of weeks ago, our tribe got 160 acres of land back in the bluffs above the Missouri River that had been held by the Nature Conservancy for the past few decades.

SS: Wow.

BR: There’s not yet a specific plan of what the ideas will be to retain management over those landscapes. There’s no such thing as wilderness, by the way, just a side note, there’s always people managing lands. That aside, there is a general interest in seeing what it looks like to kind of reinstate some of these ways of relating to the land that do honor wildlife management and also honor that we want to think about how we can access some of these traditional foods that grow up in these bluffs. And recognize that those were our first community gardens, right? Like prior to the cultivated row crop gardens that we think of today, you know, like the entire landscape was a big garden and was often managed and maintained. I would love to see how any of the work I’ve been able to do in Seattle through the University of Washington and the young people that I support there, like might eventually transition into being of service back here in my home community.

SS: And what is the name of the program that you direct at the university?

BR: It’s called the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program. The mission is to, you know, just generally diversify the conservation field. What we take that to mean through our program is not only racial and ethnic diversity, socioeconomic class diversity, you know, gender diversity. Yes, we’re definitely working towards that, and we believe that that’s not sufficient. For many of the reasons we’ve talked today, if we just insert ourselves into the structures as they are currently, then likely, we’ll just be reinforcing and perpetuating them—and in a way, almost giving them a green light. Instead, we want to think about how we can support these young people to relearn or uphold their personal and familial connections to having healthy relationships to lands and waters. So that, if and when they do enter the field of conservation, or environmental fields more broadly, they’re going to be carrying with them these teachings from their family, land-based teachings that recognize that there is no separation between the health of the environment and the health of our human communities.

SS: So much of what you’re saying is kind of a recalibration of just kind of the usual measures that the more powerful factions of society use to frame these discussions. And I of course am a member of the media, so I’m always interested in, and concerned with, how I can help my industry improve its own use of language in kind. So, I’m wondering who you think gets it right in telling these stories for a broader audience to understand the kind of work and missions that you’re talking about, if anyone does. And what do you think is maybe the most dangerous misstep that is made by people who have the voice and platform to set these discussions?

BR: So, I think the people who get the stories right are the people who are actually experiencing them, experiencing whatever’s happening. Finding ways to have them tell the stories their own way through whatever medium possible as a journalist. The people who do it best are the people who are most directly connected to those stories.

SS: Yes.

BR: And so then for the second part of your question, we’ve often built these reputations by reinforcing and perpetuating the very things that people have come to respect, which is power. And so as much as we can be cognizant of the fact that the reasons we have access to the ears of people we do is largely because the systems that we’re operating within have sought to minimize other voices from the beginning and sought to diminish ways that the other communities and individuals within communities have always had agency revoked by not having the large name attached to them. And so, as much as we can just acknowledge that privilege when we’re going forward as journalists, as people who get to direct relatively well-funded entities that seek to elevate voices, just knowing that we have to kind of be fully cognizant and leverage that voice when we have, but also step back at any point possible and let the people who were working to support tell their own stories whenever possible.

I know we saw good examples finally during Standing Rock, where the media itself was picking up on this message of, you know, protectors, not protesters. And I think that was a pretty significant shift. It wasn’t, of course, in all media outlets, but some finally started catching that nuance between like “No, like we’re not talking about just always fighting against something and protesting something. Like no, like we have agency, and we have power, and we’re protecting this water.” And that’s not an insignificant shift in language to talk about protecting versus protesting.

SS: One last question: So, you just spent this week connecting with the Ioway Tribe, White Cloud, that kind of piece of the earth where you have deep family ties. What was the environment in terms of relationships in, I guess, healthy or unhealthy condition as you saw it?

BR: One interaction in particular was, was not quite in White Cloud, was on a road that kind of goes between like the hub of the Iowa Tribe and the hub of Sac and Fox Tribe, and that’s the road that my grandparents had always lived on when I would go visit them when I was younger. Last fall, I was at the annual Kansas Tribal Health Summit at Prairie Band Potawatomi, and I met a couple of young folks, you know, my age, young. Folks who had recently moved back here from California. One of them is a Sac and Fox tribal member, the other is their partner. Neither had ever been to Kansas before prior to moving here, even though she was part of the tribe. And so, I met them, you know, after a series of conversations, learned that they lived in this house across the street from my grandparents.

So, I was able to find them last week and go have dinner with them and see what they were doing on the land there. Like they were continuing the gardens that the man who had previously lived there had been building up over decades. Continuing to nurture the asparagus that had been growing for a long time. And continuing to build on, in a way, this legacy that the previous tenant—also an Iowa tribal member—had been building on that land. And then they were also adding things. He was from a tribe in northern California, and so there’s a pit-house as part of some of their traditional dwellings. So, he was adding one of those onto the landscape. And it was just really nice to be there walking around, seeing kind of a combination of that pulling forward from the past from previous people, as well as bringing in things that were of relevance to them in their other home. And having all that happen amongst, you know, the nettles popping up, and being able to look across the street and see the creek that ran behind the backside of my grandparents’ house. To me it was like a really good example of how we can honor the places where we live—whether we’re from there or not. But then also add our own sense of belonging and whatever it does to make us feel grounded, and whatever it is to make us feel whole. And do so in a way that’s respectful, and it doesn’t, you know, minimize or attempt to erase those who came before us.

SS: Brett Ramey is the director of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Washington and an organizer working at the intersections of ecological, cultural, and community health. He is a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, who works to create an inclusive movement for food justice, health equity, and environmental conservation.

The Homecomers production team is audio editor Jesse Brenneman in Montana; composer Daniel Hart in California by way of Texas; web designer Tameika Pittman in New York by way of Colorado; illustrator Angie Pickman in Kansas; and communications manager Kendra Bozarth in New York by way of Kansas. I’m your host and executive producer Sarah Smarsh in Kansas.

Hey, to hear more episodes, access Spanish translations, and get more information about the show, go to TheHomecomers.org. And to share your homecomers story, find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Thank you to Wes Jackson, co-founder of the Land Institute in rural Kansas, for his blessing to use a term he coined—“homecomers”—for the title of this show.

Special thanks this episode to KUOW public radio station in Seattle, Washington, and to research assistant Eda Herzog-Vitto at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The Homecomers is an independent production of Free State Media. It was created and produced with support from the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.