Bending Possession: How Detroiters Care for Land by Remediating Settler Property

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how people reconfigure the social, legal, and material claims that settler property relations make to place. It does so through ethnographic and historical attention to small‐scale gardens in Detroit, Michigan. When present‐day Detroiters transform grassy lots into gardens and places of shared enjoyment, they frequently encounter how antiblack environmental conditions are grafted with property claims created through settler‐colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands. Gardeners document encounters with the simultaneity of settler plotlines and contaminated soils as part of efforts to secure gardens from encroachment by real estate developers. As gardeners leverage legal conventions of settler property regimes like adverse possession manoeuvres, they also refuse the sociomaterial status quo of colonial land relations. In conversation with Detroiters and their gardens, this article offers bending possession as a handle for methods people develop that begin to provisionally redirect the violence of private property that sustains colonial racial capitalism.