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  • From: Kelda Lorax <kelda@riseup.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@mailman1.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] How To Decolonize The Permaculture Movement | The Huffington Post
  • Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2017 11:34:13 -0500

I'm not sure I can address everything, and also had the unfortunate experience of almost finishing this email before my finger slipped and it all deleted, but:

Lawrence and Darrel, there could possibly be a non-racist white person who grows up in a diverse community in the woods and never encounters books, images, magazines, movies, or walks through any kind of public place. I see racism dripping from all of those things. As a white mother I desperately don't want my child to be racist, but she is, as I am. Knowing that we're swallowing culture with all its training is the only way to pick out and address how that training is deficient.

I also think you're confusing 'racist' with 'bigot'. Racism is also indifference, omission, assumptions about the frame of 'we' we're seeing in the moment, etc.

Cris, it sounds like you're doing a lot to address equity. Can you be doing more? Yes. The video for example, yeah, you did the best you could at the time, but do we have a need in the permaculture movement to address the gaping hole of cultural appropriation? Yes. What if your email wasn't about resistance, but about how we make it more possible to do less appropriation?

Jason, I believe in a prior email you talked about ollas and stated the impossibility of acknowledging all our permaculture techniques. Why? People want to research aspects of permaculture all the time. Could we garner the energy to have an addendum to each permaculture module that acknowledges and empowers the source communities to the best of our ability? Yes.

I'm just not impressed that Tobias article was so poorly received on this list, after all it was a second article with solutions! What if our response as a movement was eager for critique about our social justice lens? Instead what I see here is an example of white fragility. THAT is what we need to get over.

We have a lot of things to take heat over. And true, Tobias' article might be lacking in some info that it would make it more well informed. But,I think we need to welcome more critiques, not shun them. Self-regulate and accept feedback, right? Maybe Tobias' comments weren't taken well because he doesn't know as much about permaculture. Then take it from me. I also don't like permaculture as a means of colonizing the two-thirds world, or cultural appropriation, or inherent bias towards white males. And I know from personal experience droves of people of color who only see those things about us and can't see any good we might have.

Critique me anytime.
Too bad this link didn't work for you but it works fine for me http://www.divinearthgp.com/positionality (it's a fairly new website update, that might be the problem)

Kelda Lorax
(living in Oklahoma, though most of my work and trainings have been in the PNW)



On 2017-04-29 11:15, Jason Gerhardt wrote:
I wish to say this also. It's a very confusing and difficult world.
Considering the state of it, it should be, as I think Kelda was saying,
otherwise we'd be complacent and therefore complicit. I think most
permaculturists want to respect each other and want all our sisters and
brothers to be free, as well as be free ourselves, whoever we are. We're
just not so sure how to get there all the time. I don't feel like I have
all the answers to that, but I do feel capable of recognizing what the
answers aren't sometimes. This was a big part of my objection to Tobias'
article. The other parts of my objection were that I didn't find the
accusations fit the work I do under the permaculture moniker or the great
majority of my permaculture friends work, so I felt the need to stand firm.
The last part of my objection is his choosing to go after permaculture
itself. Most of my work these days is in worlds that are not familiar with
permaculture. I don't think it's fair to have someone so uninformed about
permaculture putting a cast on the term on a popular website without
research or even specific examples that pass any kind of muster. I think
permaculturists have done better than this article paints them, put simply.

I wish to have some compassion in my response as I know where this author
is at. It's hard to know what to do, and he's just choosing a particularly
popular response and I can't blame him for that as I've found myself there
at times too. There are better tools and lenses than he is using though and
we have to be willing to dig deeper to find them, not just flip to an
opposite polarity out of angst.

Jason









On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 6:23 PM, Kelda Lorax <kelda@riseup.net> wrote:

I love that he wrote this article, and the last one. I put a link to it
on my (permaculture design) website along with the positionality
perspectives I wish other permaculture practitioners can articulate.
http://divinearthgp.com/positionality.

Getting called out on our stuff sucks, but feels good, because we become
better people and it makes our movement better. Both Jason and Chris sound
like you're listing to us all the reasons you're not that kind of gringo.
Okay, but I'm happy to say I AM the kind of gringo that thought all of his
complaints were okay until I was called out for not having a better social
justice lens, and now I think they're not okay. (One of the first steps in
anti-racism trainings is to realize that all white people are racist
because we've been trained to be that way. To deny our training is just to
delay our inner work that could actually help to fix the problem).

About cultural appropriation specifically, I think PDCs (which do
admittedly work well for certain parts of the world and people) need very
much an acknowledgement of where our techniques come from. Additionally we
need a fundraising 'pass the hat' with each module (or as a percentage of
the course) to help those communities that developed awesome techniques
self-actualize with whatever negative impacts they're currently facing
under colonization. I want my students to be just as well-versed with the
struggles of those communities now as they are with how the technique can
work in their garden. And because I'm white, I go through every module
thinking of who in my community, that has experience of being a person of
color, could teach the module better than me, and I 'step back' as much as
possible.

We white permies need to be okay getting called out, and I daresay, like
it, if we want other white communities/regions/political parties to be able
to do it too. Otherwise it's just an irrelevant garden and another white
person causing trauma to brown people.

Kelda Lorax



On 2017-04-27 13:57, Jason Gerhardt wrote:

Christopher, thank you for responding to this. I thought of your work
immediately, though I was unaware of your history with the author. He has
done zero research, as you point out, other than surface scans of things.
He seems more trying to act out the popular social justice angst of the
times so he could get whatever little fee Huff Po paid him for this
article. His title is also extremely broad and his article extremely
limited, and the whole thing does damage to permaculture, which does an
incredible amount of good on the earth.

Things I question from this article:

On Cultural Appropriation. Where do we draw the line between cultural
appropriation and cultural exchange? I was once criticized by a white
woman
for using clay ollas in my university greenhouse as cultural
appropriation.
She said it was an indigenous technique and I shouldn't use them without
crediting the Hopi with a sign (why she settled on Hopi people I don't
know). When I asked her if I shouldn't also credit North African's and
the
Spanish, who brought the technique to the US Southwest, she had no
answer.
People live on the surface, especially nowadays with social media and
character limits/attention span limits. It's disappointing.
Permaculturists
probably haven't given enough credit to traditional peoples for some of
the
techniques we recommend, or for the paradigm, but even that credit seems
like a general form at best. This is a tricky subject when applied with a
deep look.

Permaculture Demographics. Are we sure it's predominately white male?
Permaculture authors, it seems that's true, and surely it's true for
youtube permaculture, but that's not the claim he made, nor
representative
of the global demographic of practitioners. Personally speaking, I've had
the same amount of female permaculture mentors, teachers, and co-teachers
in my nearly 15 years in the field as I've had male, and while that may
not
be representative, it's my experience nonetheless. I can also say I've
had
far more female students than men. The white part of this claim is
probably
true, but globally I'd be curious to see data before making that claim,
and
regardless, his article does absolutely nothing to address the real
injustices that exist.

On making a living as a teacher. Well, I'm glad I don't, but not for the
reasons he suggests. I don't see how I could be a teacher only without
also
being a designer and agriculturist, and for that matter a social
activist.
However, his claim is that courses cost too much, the PDC should be
abandoned (I'm not even gonna address this), and only white people take
them. The last claim is just rubbish, and demeaning to many of my
students
of color. That said, I took exception to the cost issue because judging
by
the date of the article a course I taught in Costa Rica was probably in
his
sample size. I think he should go to the campesino refugee camp of
Salvadorans and Nicaraguans this course was taught in, at their request,
and tell them that the nearly $15k we left in the community shouldn't
have
happened, and that the international students who brought in that money
should feel bad about their privilege.

On pedagogy. He claims traditional people can't learn from power point
and
lecture. LMFAO. He should keep telling people what they can and can't do,
it looks excellent.

In short, popular culture is lost. Don't trust everything you read and
hear. Dig deeper than the surface.

Two recommendations for decolonizing your mind (which is actually the
culprit here, not permaculture): Raoul Peck's film I Am Not Your Negro
based upon James Baldwin's work, and Wendell Berry's book The Art of the
Commonplace.

Please, please, please dig deep in this life,
Jason
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