Soil-based creative activities build embodied understanding of our roles within interdependent systems through play, information, and experimentation. Working with local, responsibly foraged materials to create biodegradable constructions encourages learners at any stage to think in alignment with natural cycles: digestion, breathing, life and death, decay and regeneration. In The DIRT Project, artist Emilie Houssart uses the charged word dirt as a jumping-off point to examine inherited colonizer language and its impact on our attitudes toward land. Through its etymology, the word dirt is equivalent to filth, operating as a mainstream North American cultural idea connected to Earth. With three studio art curricular models, Houssart raises awareness about local land use histories, by exploring the Hudson Valley landscape of New York as a complex, living system. Learners are prompted to make experimental, hanging habitats for imaginary hybrid creatures; woven campus engagement structures from indigenous vines; and a playful Zoom “Dirt Dinner Party” where students collect materials from their respective living environments and offer them to Earth as a feast. Houssart’s projects address myths of human-ecological separation so that learners may restore relationships with the living land, a right eroded by a Eurocentric colonial legacy of extractive practices.