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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Native Garden
  • Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 13:18:56 -0600


paul tradingpost@lobo.net
listowner
----------------

"The modern permaculture system of gardening is based on ancient practices
of indigenous cultures as permaculture founder Bill Mollison of Tasmania
will readily admit."


Notes from the Native Garden
by Dennis Martinez, Terrain Magazine, Spring 2000
http://www.ecologycenter.org/terrain/article.php?id=13270

A People's Ecology, edited by Tewa Indian educator Gregory Cajete, offers a
potpourri of perspectives on sustainable living, with chapters by Native
American, Hispanic, and Anglo authors who are personally committed to
health, environment, agriculture, and Native traditions including
traditional food practices.

I have worked closely with Cajete and his contributors, some of whom are
good friends. Cajete, an assistant professor of education at the University
of New Mexico, has become a leader in defining indigenous traditional
knowledge for a wider community. A People's Ecology has its roots in his
three previous books: Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous
Education; Ignite the Sparkle: An Indigenous Science Education Model; and
Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. In the trilogy, Cajete
develops an educational theory of context, a way of perception and creative
thought where education is an art of process, participation, and making
connection, as he puts it in Look to the Mountain. Learning is a growth and
life process; and Life and Nature are always relationships in process!

Cajete's theory, cultivated here in his fine selection of contributors, can
be applied to any educational program. A People's Ecology extends holistic
Native concepts to the non-Indian world, linking the ancient ways of all
human beings to the revival of traditional knowledge we now call
alternative in the modern industrial context.

Columbus & Commodities

At the time of Columbus' voyages, when Indians were using 2,000 different
foods derived from plants and more from a wide variety of animals, they
enjoyed exceptional overall health. In fact, researchers have found that
meat-eating herdsman-hunter-gatherer-fisher peoples have been typically
healthier and better off nutritionally than agriculturists [see Ecologist
Jan/Feb 1999]. Growing up on a San Joaquin Valley ranch, I remember
relatives still doing hard physical work all day long well into their 70s
and 80s. Subsistence hunting and fishing supplemented our home-grown
produce, which I suppose could be called organic except for the crop
dusters over our neighbors' fields because we couldn't afford pesticides
and chemical fertilizers.

Cajete starts with an observation about the changing health status of
indigenous populations: Adoption of the modern diet especially USDA
commodities like processed cheese, lard, white flour, and sugar is usually
followed by increases in heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and alcoholism.

Among the Tohono O'odham (Papago) of Arizona, the incidence of adult-onset
diabetes has reached 50 percent by age 35. Biologically, Cajete explains,
desert and semi-desert peoples have adapted to feast and famine cycles
characteristic of desert ecologies. Researchers have found a thrifty gene
that allowed the first inhabitants of North America to adapt to feast or
famine' conditions by storing calories as fat. . . resulting in increased
insulin secretion. The current Tohono O'odham diet of commodities, coupled
with lack of exercise and that thrifty gene, has led to the highest rate of
diabetes in the world.

When we eat other people's food, we begin to become like them, observes
Lawrence Shorty in the chapter A Navajo's Meditation on Food & Culture.
Shorty discusses the changes in Navajo diet (fewer traditional foods), and
impact on health (more degenerative diseases), but he also examines the
spiritual and cultural impact of modern ways. Prayers and songs were
traditionally offered at planting, at harvest time, and while gathering
wild foods or hunting game. But that was before the change to a
market-dependent wage economy. In the 30s and 40s, the Soil Conservation
Service ordered the destruction of up to 90 percent of Navajo domestic
animals and the poisoning of prairie dogs, an important winter supplemental
food. This was done under pressure from Southern California real estate
developers who feared that grazers and drought would erode Navajo lands,
silting up Lake Mead behind the recently constructed Hoover Dam, and
shutting off Los Angeles' main water supply. Since the 40s, there has been
less dependence on the land and Native foods, which means less personal
involvement with plants and animals (though Navajo herbal knowledge is
still alive and well). Traditional sheep herding is slowly being replaced
by cattle ranching because few family members have enough time away from a
wage job to herd sheep, which require more daily attention than cattle.

Fewer Navajo now offer prayers and songs to their plant and animal
relatives. Shorty sums up: Planting songs encourage the seeds to grow. The
positive feelings that emanate from the songs construct a reality for the
plants, as well as for the water, sun, and soil that nurture them. The
construction of reality through song reinforces the notion that all things,
including the plants, animals, humans, and the Holy People are
interdependent and important.

Today, an understanding of that vital link is rare, but it exists. Enrique
Salmâ€&n of the Baca Institute of Ethnobotany writes about the
symbiotic relationship among the Rar‡muri (Tarahumara of
northwestern Mexico); their traditional foods of corn, beans, squash, and
batari-ki (tesguino in Spanish, a beer brewed from corn); and the wild
foods that supplement the cultivated ones. They include acorns, chilis,
saguaro fruit, mesquite pods, prickly pear, and greens such as wild
amaranth (pigweed) and lamb's quarters.

Salmâ€&n says, The Rar‡muri need corn, and the corn needs the
Rar‡muri. This reciprocity lies at the heart of traditional life
for most Native peoples including the nurturing of wild foods through
regular burning, weeding, pruning, and selective harvesting. He adds: The
degree of assimilation is directly correlated to the proportion of modern
foods found in indigenous diets in northwestern Mexico. The
Rar‡muri diet is still mostly traditional (unlike that of most
tribes north of the border). Diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are still
uncommon. Land, food, and culture are of a piece.



As Clayton Brascoupe of the Traditional Native American Farmers'
Association points out, the nature of reciprocity is more than physical. A
relationship with the land, plants, animals, rain, thunder, and lightning
makes one's religion more meaningful than simply going through the motions,
he writes. The Iroquois religion or spiritual beliefs are very similar to
the Pueblos in New Mexico; both are agriculturally based. If farming is not
an important part of what you are doing, the prayers and so forth also
become less and less meaningful again, interdependency and personal
participation with the land and its produce. This interdependency carries
over into family and community, with all ages pitching in to plant, care
for, and harvest, sharing the gifts of the Creator with others.

But many of those gifts are disappearing without traditional use. Brascoupe
observes that, of hundreds of varieties of corn known, only four are grown
on a large scale in the US. This kind of monocropping is not sustainable
even with herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. The lure of the wage
economy has led Indians to abandon more sustainable farming. That trend,
however, is reversing among some younger people like those at Tesuque
Pueblo where Brascoupe practices traditional farming.

But Indian youth are not the only ones interested in this renaissance.
Kenny Ausubel, founder of Seeds of Change and co-director of the annual
Bioneers conference, points out that the intellectual property rights of
Pueblo agriculture have become a hot issue with the recent popularity of
Indian blue corn. The Native origins of blue corn and names of tribes like
Hopi are being exploited in the marketplace without compensation.
Commercial marketing is also misrepresenting the cultural heritage of blue
corn.

Besides his work at Santa Clara Pueblo, Ausubel began an herb-growing
project with African American farmers in the southeastern US. Of the 10,000
such growers still left, only about 200 are under sixty-five years of age.
As Ausubel notes: Finding specialty crops and new markets is a matter of
survival.

On a hopeful note, John Mohawk (Seneca) and Yvonne Dion-Buffalo write about
the revival of Iroquois (Six Nations) corn farming and the marketing
potential of traditional Native American prepared foods (e.g. for
restaurants), including an organic certification program that would enable
Native-grown products to be introduced into national markets, and the
implementation of transnational indigenous communities' marketing networks
and programs. White corn is one of many gifts of aboriginal American
agriculture, the authors write. (It) has not only a glorious past but also
a wonderful future.



Three Sisters

Professionally immersed though I am in Native agriculture/agroecology,
permaculture, and ethno-restoration ecology, I learned a lot from A
People's Ecology. Many of us have been hearing for years about the
advantages of group planting of the traditional Indian three sisters: corn,
beans, and squash. But Brett Bakker, New Mexico field manager for
Tucson-based Native Seeds/SEARCH, tells us it is actually quite rare to
find these crops planted close together in repeating small groups. Why? The
beans are shaded out by the corn; the corn is almost impossible to get to
without stepping all over the squash not yet producing that spreads to
every row. Row cropping, with crop rotation or alternating rows of beans
and corn, is preferred in Indian Country.

Bakker also offers an interesting historical explanation for the
introduction of wheat to Pueblo Indians (used now instead of corn for
tortillas and oven bread): the Spanish wanted the Indians to have a
fall-planted, spring/winter-tended and early-summer-harvested crop which
would keep the Native people busy, thereby teaching them a lesson in
European industriousness. Of course, the Pueblos hunted and performed
ceremonies in fall and winter because corn was summer work. But they were
still forced to grow wheat for tribute to the Spanish in the encomienda
system.

In indigenous terms, Nature is viewed as a garden, distinct from cultivated
fields and yards but not a wilderness as in Western thinking. The Native
garden (known in anthropology as hunter-gatherer territory) requires
tending or caregiving with prescribed burns, tree and brush thinning,
weeding, outplanting in the wild of preferred cultural plants, and
management of culturally important animals. All indigenous peoples did (and
do) these things, including Europeans who once lived in beech and oak
forests of their own design. The modern permaculture system of gardening is
based on ancient practices of indigenous cultures as permaculture founder
Bill Mollison of Tasmania will readily admit.

If I have a criticism of A People's Ecology, it is that it lacks a piece
focusing specifically on Native wildland management or agroecology without
conventional cultivated row-cropping. Here I recommend Before the
Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians (eds. Kat
Anderson and Thomas Blackburn, Ballena Press, 1995). Western culture fails
to recognize traditional land management practices like fire and selective
wildland harvesting as agriculture because seeds are not carried home and
planted in cultivated fields. Yet cultivation with fire and digging stick
was practiced by so-called hunter-gatherers, and the structure and
composition of the landscape were modified considerably by Native peoples.
The 500-year-old papal doctrine of Terra nullis that these were empty
lands inhabited by savages doing nothing to bring the land up to its full
productive potential was a religious justification for genocide. It is
still alive and well, not only in academia but also in the environmental
movement, which idealizes the Noble Savage, who walks on the land, leaving
only photographs.





  • [Livingontheland] The Native Garden, Tradingpost, 08/04/2006

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