Nadia Barhoum is the founder of a seed-saving and land stewardship initiative called Thurayya. She began farming in 2019, following a desire to be closer to the land in the way her family had been for generations in their small village of Al Malha, Palestine. They were forcibly expelled in 1948 by Israeli armed militias. Through Thurayya, she wants to uphold and restore relationships to the land that have been severed by ongoing occupation and dispossession in the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa region). She is growing out and saving seeds from a variety of vegetables, herbs and other perennials from Palestine and the SWANA region to share with her community in the Bay Area. She hopes these special plants can bring a part of her home and their stories back to her community.

This talk is about the depth and richness of the Palestinian relationship to their lands. The Palestinian struggle for liberation has and continues to be about a return to and liberation of their land.  From the farmers in Gaza continuing to grow seeds amidst a genocide, to the Palestinian elders who pass their knowledge about the land and their villages to the next generations, their resistance lives in their ways of knowing and being in the world.

This Spring 2025 environmental justice guest speaker series is in collaboration with the Amado Khaya Initiative. The project, titled “We are Not Immigrants: Unsettling Asians in ‘America’” examines the life histories and activism of mixed race Native and Asian community members at the forefront of indigenous struggles as well as the work of Asian American land stewards, working in the spaces of environmental justice and ecologically-informed, food production. It aims to lift up all the ways Asian Americans are resisting settler colonialism in California. 

Learn more here: https://amadokhaya.org/unsettling-asian-america