In New York’s Hudson Valley, contemporary development agendas focused on rural tourism and organized around an agrarian and artisanal sense of place have created conditions for rapid gentrification and racialized displacement. This dissertation examines the logics of place and belonging that underly these development agendas, situating them within a history of racial capitalist and settler colonial development. I show how particular forms of “settler moves to innocence” (Tuck and Yang 2012) invoking agrarian and artisanal ideals are used justify and normalize viscerally uneven, tangibly contested geographies of food, land, housing, and incarceration in the region. I draw on Black, feminist, decolonial, and abolitionist theories of politics and place-making, as well as interviews, primary and secondary literatures, and 8 years of practice as a scholar organizer, to explore what motivates moves to “agrarian innocence” and what methods and practices might disable moves to innocence. Reflecting on grassroots organizing at the intersection of food justice and prison abolition, I offer three general methods to inform antidotes for innocence: learning to see “forgotten places” (Gilmore 2008), practicing toward “somatic abolition” (Menakeem 2017), and “reselecting our ancestors” (Gilmore 2022a, Williams 1998).