Origin stories after the end(s) of the world

Abstract Extractivism is more than an economic system that brokers the sequestration of matter qua resources from existence. Extractivism is a cosmology. Weaponizing the force of segregation, extractivism's agents and acolytes reorganize and revalorize existence into entrenched hierarchies. Those formations of existence relegated to the bottom—Black and Indigenous people and the Black Earth—are further segregated from their own selves, divided into alienable and cumulable parcels of private property. Extractivism did not end with the abolition of slavery; it was retrofitted to a new era organized along new commodity flows. We can trace the evolution of extractive logics and landscapes along a continuum from colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production and climate change. And yet, as the cosmology of extractivism and technologies of exploitation were trafficked across the globe, so were African indigenous cosmologies and technologies seeded in the forested mountains and cypress swamps located beyond the borders of the plantation grid. In Louisiana, the Black antebellum burial ground, which manifests as a grove of trees surrounded by miles of monocrop fields, is the key to understanding how ecological resistance to extractivism became entrenched in these liminal lifeworlds. This article suggests that Louisiana's burial groves be considered through the lens of African sacred groves: at once a sacred site, a cultural heritage site, a biodiverse microecology, and a remnant of and monument to the forest that was cleared to make way for the dominion of slave plantations.