Photograph by Layne Kennedy / Getty Images
WORDS BY YESSENIA FUNES
Kentucky’s Letcher County is defined by its mountains—and the coal buried deep within them. In the southeastern part of the state near Virginia, Letcher County became home to dozens of coal towns throughout the 20th century. In some cases, companies mutilated entire landscapes to reach coal in a process known as mountaintop removal. After blasting and extracting, these businesses left the land unrecognizable.
But the land always remembers. Its original caretakers do, too.
When Tiffany P. arrived one cold November morning last year to see a particular plot of land exploited by mining companies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, she immediately grabbed the tan buckskin tobacco pouch she wore around her neck. Tiffany, who is withholding her last name due to personal safety concerns, was in the process of purchasing the 63-acre parcel for the Indigenous environmental nonprofit she co-leads, the Appalachian Rekindling Project.
She had already studied the area’s topography through maps, but standing with the earth—meeting her—was a different experience entirely. Atop the mountain, nearly 2,000 feet above sea level, Tiffany’s heart raced with joy and grief. She was surrounded by relatives. There they were, all the mountains that hadn’t been detonated.
She felt a calling to offer tobacco to the land, and that was the moment she knew: “Oh, it recognizes me as much as I recognize it,” said Tiffany, a descendant of the Cherokee Nation, the region’s original custodians.
The land is now under the stewardship of ARP, and the organization has grand plans to nurse it back to health. However, Tiffany and her co-executive director, Taysha DeVaughan, had another inspiration behind their purchase: They wanted to rescue the land from federal plans to build a prison and labor camp atop it.
“Our involvement in that came about from knowing that another part of my ancestral territory is at risk, is at deep threat,” Tiffany said. “That land has already been strip-mined. It has been harmed. The addition of a prison on top of it would be cruel to the land, to the community, and to the people who would be imprisoned there. We knew we had to act.”
The group’s actions come at a powerful time. As the United States government arrests and detains innocents and guts environmental protections, Tiffany and DeVaughan are showcasing a different path forward. They offer an end to cycles of abuse and healing for the land and its people.
Instead of a prison, the two plan to use the land to raise bison and collaborate on eco-tourism opportunities with their neighbors. They want to supply existing local businesses with meat and yarn from the animals. This would benefit the economy and the environment. Bison are “ecosystem engineers” because their presence dramatically affects their surroundings. By grazing on tall grasses, bison make way for other species to grow, increasing biodiversity. Plus, these thousand-pound guys love to roll around on the ground (what is known as wallowing), which helps disperse the seeds that get stuck in their chocolate-brown fur.
In 1870, an estimated 8 million bison wallowed across the U.S. Indigenous peoples had long hunted the animals to make food and blankets—this is the culture the organization wants to revive after European settlers killed all but roughly 500 bison by 1890. Once driven nearly to extinction, about 20,500 now live in conservation herds.
“The buffalo were erased as a key aspect of killing our way of life so that they could then kill our people,” said DeVaughan, an enrolled citizen of the Comanche Nation. “What our ancestors would be most proud to see would be the return of this animal.”
The federal government, however, wants a $500 million prison instead.
The Bureau of Prisons has been trying to build a prison in Letcher County since 2006. The original plan was a maximum-security prison, but the opposition—which included local landowners, environmental organizers, and others aligned with the prison abolition movement—stopped the site in 2019. Organizers, including attorneys and incarcerated folks, established a campaign called #our444million, which named the previous cost of building the original facility. Their argument? Those public dollars could be put to better use elsewhere.
“That first iteration of the fight from 2015 to 2019 was really amazing,” said Judah Schept, a justice studies professor at Eastern Kentucky University who is a coalition member of the advocacy group Building Community Not Prisons. “#Our444Million was explicitly about disavowing and rejecting the prison but claiming the need for development. People utilized that hashtag as a way to stake a claim in needed higher education or drug treatment facilities, or cancer research, or hospitals, or community centers.”
In 2022, the bureau restarted its effort, supported by Rep. Hal Rogers, the Republican congressman representing the county. This time, the feds are settling for a medium-security (and more expensive) men’s facility that would house 1,408 people brought in from the Mid-Atlantic region, which covers eight states from Delaware to Tennessee. According to the project’s environmental impact statement, 256 individuals would serve in a labor camp, “carrying out routine maintenance activities necessary for the proper functioning of the overall institution.”
“It was deeply troubling to me—and reminiscent of slavery—to think about folks being shipped in from D.C. to be incarcerated in a place where their relatives could not come visit them and they would be working strip-mined lands,” Tiffany said. “I don’t want people to meet my territory in that way.”
Although the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, it allowed the cruel practice to continue “as a punishment for crime” in U.S. prisons. Indigenous peoples are incarcerated at more than four times the rate of white people in the U.S. and double the national average, per the Prison Policy Initiative.
“That land has already been strip-mined. It has been harmed. The addition of a prison on top of it would be cruel to the land, to the community, and to the people who would be imprisoned there. We knew we had to act.”
The government formally approved the Letcher County prison’s construction in October, but it’s in for a challenge now that Tiffany and DeVaughan, who worked with Building Community Not Prisons to raise funds to buy the land for $160,000 in December 2024, are among the proposed site’s landowners. The Bureau of Prisons hasn’t publicly commented on their land purchase, but Rep. Rogers told the Kentucky Lantern in January that the prison will happen one way or another.
“Right now, we don’t know what path they’re going to take,” said Joan Steffen, an attorney with the Institute to End Mass Incarceration who has been partnering with ARP.
The government could potentially use eminent domain to seize the land. They may choose to move the proposed facility somewhere else; the EIS lists several alternative locations. Opponents are likely to respond with a lengthy legal battle to either decision. The National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of infrastructure plans, stopped the project last time. Maybe the law will protect the land from further disruption again.
Building a prison on the land would erode valuable soil and excavate and fill nearly two acres of wetlands. This area frequently floods: A deadly storm in February washed out one of two roads that lead to the site, Tiffany said. Adding more concrete and weight could make the land more vulnerable to rain damage and mudslides. Meanwhile, her non-human relatives—like the matted feather moss and the federally endangered gray bat—call these lands home, too. She thinks of how the wildlife could live in harmony with the bison rather than under the prison’s shadows.
The land deserves healing. Not just here, but across Appalachia. Letcher County is just the beginning.
To the east sits Wise County, Virginia, where DeVaughan lives and Tiffany was born. It’s also where their organization is preparing to build a cultural wellness center for Indigenous peoples. The land, which is healthy, was a gift. The two partners want to safeguard it by building a structure with multiple bedrooms, an event space, different cultural rooms (like a pottery studio), and pow wow grounds outside. The center is for Indigenous peoples “who have been displaced” and now “have a place to return,” DeVaughan said.
They’re taking their time to tend the land. They want the space to be perfect for Indigenous visitors, who will be able to access it free of charge.
“We really look forward to people being able to use those facilities and not have to pay exorbitant fees,” Tiffany said.
Voluntary land taxes have made much of this possible. It’s a sliding-scale model that asks settlers to pay a regular land tax to the Indigenous peoples who were forced off. Businesses, homeowners, and renters are invited to participate however they can. ARP was inspired by the success of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in the California Bay Area, which launched its program in 2015.
“It was an idea that resonated with people,” said Ariel Luckey, development director for Sogorea Te’. “Not only did they pay themselves, but they told their family and friends.”
Some people pay $5 to $10 a year in land taxes; others pay more than $10,000, Luckey explained. “Because it’s a sliding scale in nature, we ask people to really reflect on their circumstances and history, on their relationship to the land and the tribe.”
Since ARP launched last year, they’ve received donations through land taxes from all over Appalachia and beyond. It’s the majority of the group’s budget, Tiffany said, and this approach has insulated them from the federal funding cuts many of their peers now face.
DeVaughan and Tiffany have a long road ahead, but they know they want to bring in the community however they can. In Virginia, they envision Indigenous peoples, settlers, and immigrants coming together to work the land—while honoring the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples who urgently need to rekindle their connections to their cultures.
In Kentucky, the organization hosted its first event on April 5, where DeVaughan’s mother helped the team prepare bison chili and frybread as bluegrass musicians played. The duo served bison-shaped cookies, and Tiffany led a round dance. Appalachia deserves a thriving economy without sacrificing the land and people’s health.
“Yes, this is a very visionary and spiritual thing for us, but it’s also very economic,” DeVaughan said. “This is something that could essentially be an economic reviver for the area that does not include pollution. That does not include slave labor.”
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Indigenous Leaders Thwart Prison Plans with a Sacred Bison Revival
