ATTTNT maps a tangle of scars, trails, watersheds, and infrastructural corridors that deliberately revisit the violence of modern programs and the wounds of white supremacy. Since 1776, the US has stolen 1.5 billion acres from Indigenous people. And since the late 19th century, Black farmers have lost 90 percent of the 16 million acres they owned because of discriminatory lending practices and white aggression. Linking the Appalachian Trail with the Trail of Tears and the Natchez Trace, the formation only begins to coalesce as it aggregates along its 6000 mile surface federal land designated as a new national resource for reparations. As ATTTNT passes through Alabama and Mississippi, New Deal public lands, scripted with supremacist narratives, receive another reckoning with the under-told histories of Black and Indigenous resistance and survival—persistent elegant activist experiments including mutual aid societies, cooperatives, agricultural wheels, labor unions, and land trusts. ATTTNT gathers Indigenous reserves, state and federal parks, wetlands, freedmen towns, historic and contemporary Black cooperatives, the Kush, and Bolton, the capital of the New Republic of Afrika. Finding resources in the failures of capital and governance, it also develops protocols for converting to trust land adjacent private parcels that are exhausted, bankrupt, over-subsidized, or stagnant because of retiring farmers, debt, or heirs property conundrums. ATTTNT creates a planetary infrastructure as worthy of funding as those of concrete and conduit. Not smoothing over its ugliness, it becomes more robust through its patchiness, lumpiness, and difference.

Mapping team: Keller Easterling, Nicholas Arvanitis, Andrew Clum, Zach Felder