In “Virginia Public Schools Serve Indigenous Cuisine,” Gravy producer Anya Groner takes listeners to the second annual Indigenous Peoples Feast at the College of William & Mary. The evening’s menu showcases indigenous food–foraged wild rice, duck confit, acorn grits, and a four-corn stew. But these dishes aren’t just for enjoying tonight. With the help of a USDA grant, they’ll eventually be served at public school cafeterias in Virginia’s coastal Tidewater Region.

In Vietnamese culture, water and home are so linked that they share a word. The Vietnamese word for water is nước. But nước also means homeland.

Today–how the Vietnamese community has to reimagine its relationship with water as Louisiana’s coastline changes. In this episode, we’ll travel to a shrimp dock, a tropical garden, and a neighborhood surrounded by canals to examine one question: What does it mean to live with water in a place where everything about water is changing?

This episode was supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. 

What plant has leaves that smell like green pepper, fruit that can taste like pineapple or turpentine, and bark that can be woven into baskets? Enter the poor man’s banana, also known as the pawpaw. Two decades ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find a nursery with a pawpaw tree for sale, but these days the mid-sized tree and its fruit has a near cult following. Though indigenous to the eastern United States, pawpaw trees fell out of popular consciousness for almost a century. The reason is at least in part economic. The fruit ripens and rots so quickly that it’s never been commercially viable. But, in recent years the northern-most variety of “custard apple,” a family of trees that includes the soursop and cherimoya, has had a remarkable comeback.

Have you ever seen billboards on the highway offering cash for houses? Has a stranger called you offering money for your home sight unseen? In Plot of Land’s second episode, we wade into the world of housing speculation, considering how private equity markets and real estate investment trusts have transformed the places we literally call home. How did housing become such a profitable market? And so volatile that it could lead to the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression?

Learn how Sedonia Dennis, a woman once enslaved in Louisiana, came to own a piece of land on a neighboring plantation. 150 years after emancipation, her family still lives there and the plantation economy gave way to the petrochemical industry. Sedonia Dennis’s great-great-grand-daughter, Jazzy Miller, is documenting her family’s fight to exist at the intersection of each of these forms of extraction. As stronger hurricanes and vanishing wetlands reconfigure Louisiana and new industries threaten to repeat old patterns, what will this mean for the future of Jonesland?

Once the largest and wealthiest Black town in Oklahoma, Boley was founded by Creek Freedmen and African Americans escaping Jim Crow violence and disenfranchisement. We meet the Bradford family, whose G-Line ranch is indicative of the broader struggle of Black farmers and ranchers in Oklahoma and across the country. At one point Oklahoma had 50 Black townships and 1.5 million acres of Black-owned farmland. Today only 13 Black towns survive and the majority of Black farmers have retired or lost their land, discouraged–and broke–from an industry plagued by racist lending practices. What can Boley’s rise and more recent decline teach us about how biased policies have shaped who gets to own what land?

Concluding the Plot of Land series, we look at the work being done across the United States to repair our relationship with the land, from the Tongva conservancy in Los Angeles to the Sea Islands of South Carolina. What will it take to imagine a radically different future? With the stakes rising along with the temperature, what is the scale of change we need to shift power and build a more just world?