TW: Violence against Native peoples
For my last week, I read “AN URBAN FARMER’S ALMANAC: A Twenty-First-Century Reflection on Benjamin Banneker’s Almanacs and Other Astronomical Phenomena” by Erin Sharkey and selected chapters from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I also completed the writing I have been working on and I am really excited about how it turned out.
“The Council of Pecans” – Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
In “The Council of Pecans” Kimmer weaves together stories about her grandfather and the forced relocation of his family with the rise of Indian relocation policies, and the teachings and historical wisdom of pecans. The chapter begins with Krimmer describing how finding pecans came as a saving grace to her grandfather and his brothers mid-summer when fish were scarce. Later in the chapter she discusses how nuts are a high-calorie source of protein highly sought after by many communities preparing for the winter, and how Pecans themselves, in their hard protective casings, are perfect to store for both human and animal survival.
“The boys may have come home fishless, but they brought back nearly as much protein as if they’d had a stringer of catfish. Nuts are like the pan fish of the forest, full of protein and especially fat—“poor man’s meat,” and they were poor. Today we eat them daintily, shelled and toasted, but in the old times they’d boil them up in a porridge. The fat floated to the top like a chicken soup and they skimmed it and stored it as nut butter: good winter food. High in calories and vitamins— everything you needed to sustain life. After all, that’s the whole point of nuts: to provide the embryo with all that is needed to start a new life.”
Kimmer reveals how in just one generation her family was forcibly removed from their homes three times to open up land to white settlers, with their last stop being in Oklahoma. Native tribes were all but forced into accepting citizenship in exchange for a parcel of land further west, with anything the government considered leftover being sold off to colonizers. While this was not covered in the chapter, it’s important to remember that Native tribes did not practice individual ownership of land, believing that one person could not own the earth, and the forced breakup of land from tribal ownership to family by family ownership was a move by the United States Government to reduce land ownership amongst Native tribes. (Suzan Shown Harjo, 2014)
“Butternuts, black walnuts, hickories, and pecans are all closely related members of the same family (Juglandaceae). Our people carried them wherever they migrated, more often in baskets than in pants, though. Pecans today trace the rivers through the prairies, populating fertile bottomlands where people settled.”
I am really hoping to do an ILC on food, life histories, and creating your personal menu. The politics and social atmosphere of the geographical area you live in will hold cultural influence on the food you eat, but what about the histories of the land? What are the ignored signs that land has a deep personal history, how do we preserve and restore what is left? How does the method by which food reached your area affect its literal and metaphorical taste? How does food with a legacy impact the ways in which communities face food insecurity?
“My Haudenosaunee neighbors say that their ancestors were so fond of butternut that they are a good marker of old village sites today. Sure enough, there is a grove of butternuts, uncommon in “wild” forests, on the hill above the spring at my house. I clear the weeds around the young ones every year and slosh a bucket of water on them when the rains are late. Remembering.”
I very much enjoyed Kimmer’s explanation of the Pecan tree and how it sustains itself. The hard shell around a pecan that makes them best for keeping for scarcer seasons also protects some nuts from potential predators, therefore allowing the seed to reproduce. While the trees do not produce fruit every year, if one tree produces, they all do, they are a pack plant. Kimmer highlights how this act of self-preservation benefits both the tree and the living things around it, and how despite extensive study no field of eco-biology has yet determined how exactly these trees are able to evaluate and manage their production. And despite the debate around if plants can “talk”, they are at least capable of acts of self-preservation that act to preserve other species for their own benefit. The trees even seem to be able to determine if there are enough or too many predators to produce fruit!
I don’t want to conclude writing about this chapter without acknowledging the atrocities mentioned in this chapter as they apply to the forced relocation and subsequent genocide of thousands of Native people as well as the kidnapping and inhumane treatment of Native children, all of which was backed by the United States Government. While my annotations mainly pertained to the food and ecological mentions in the chapter, the history of our lands does not extend only to agriculture but to our social histories.
“The Three Sisters” – Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
This chapter highlights the plants known as the three sisters, corn, beans, and squash. Kimmer describes the sound that could be heard over time should you study the collaborative growth of these plants, providing indulgent and calming descriptions of what is repeatedly described as the noise but not the voice, concluding her description with, “These are sounds, but not the story. Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do.”
Kimmer highlights how plants have the ability to teach universally speaking a language understood by all. Plants teach of food, food that every human being from the beginning to the end of time will require for sustenance. The story of the three sisters reminds me of the Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon, in which Zeus and Hermes provide comfort to the only couple willing to show them kindness. The three sisters are personified in a way in which you can see both them in yourself and yourself in them, and allow for much interesting theoretical work on the relationships between plants and the relationships within people, both amongst our peers and the other life on earth. Each performs a function that benefits both themselves and their sister, much like the cycle of the pecan tree, and the dynamic between them is much like that of a family as Kimmer describes.
“The firstborn girl knows that she is clearly in charge; tall and direct, upright and efficient, she creates the template for everyone else to follow. That’s the corn sister. There’s not room for more than one corn woman in the same house, so the middle sister is likely to adapt in different ways. This bean girl learns to be flexible, adaptable, to find a way around the dominant structure to get the light that she needs. The sweet baby sister is free to choose a different path, as expectations have already been fulfilled.”
Kimmer goes on to talk about how to learned to engage her students in lessons about the three sisters by starting every fall program in the garden to students could see for themselves the collaboration of the three sisters. Here she further personifies the plants, telling the story of a student who grew disgusted upon hearing her favorite squash described as “the ripened ovary of that first flower.”. Kimmer explores the sexual nature of plants and gardens, offering a beautiful yet jarringly sensual description of how she has them open ears of corn that utilizes multiple of her senses. She likens parts of the corn to sperm and ovaries, describing the movement she sees within and referencing its name “the corn mother”.
Kimmer closes the chapter by reflecting on her yearly three sisters’ potluck, giving an idea of the community connection and parallels that relate to these plants. A potluck itself reflects the idea of the three sisters, with each person making something not only for their benefit but for everyone else’s benefit, and the mutual success is based on the trust that everyone will do the same. Kimmer also talks of how the introduction of pesticides and monoculture is counterintuitive to the land and to her communities, acknowledging that while crop-eating pests have always existed, the three sisters’ model of agriculture has far outlived chemical pesticides and survives better without, and instead we should utilize diversified growing practices. She also acknowledges each creature’s need to survive and take from the earth for sustenance, including the bugs.
“The Three Sisters offer us a new metaphor for an emerging relationship between indigenous knowledge and Western science, both of which are rooted in the earth. I think of the corn as traditional ecological knowledge, the physical and spiritual framework that can guide the curious bean of science, which twines like a double helix. The squash creates the ethical habitat for coexistence and mutual flourishing. I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledge. And so all may be fed.”
“AN URBAN FARMER’S ALMANAC: A Twenty-First-Century Reflection on Benjamin Banneker’s Almanacs and Other Astronomical Phenomena” by Erin Sharkey
I very much enjoyed this chapter from A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars. Sharkey writing emulates a diary or journal, incorporating her present experiences, memories, and generally reflecting on her beliefs and lines of thought. Each entry is dated and included an italicized line informing the reader of the most fruitful activities for the day, from January 12th’s “Best day to do nothing, to rest. The snow is an unbroken shell. There is quiet industry below. It does not need to be tended. Sleep is its own labor.” to June 10th’s “Best day to string extension cords to your neighbor’s house, to tag your name on the vacant park building, to graft, to pollinate.” These at first seem like simple fun or self-reflection, but as Sharkey begins to explore her religious history and its ties to her present exposure to astrology, you begin to realize each one is connected to the astrological cycles she’s referencing.
I quickly identified with some of Sharkleys background, while my parents weren’t ever particularly religious (an atheist father and an agnostic mother), I grew up in and around church activities. The Bible had a hand in most extra-curriculars and clubs in my English hometown, and so my parents sent us so we wouldn’t be isolated from other kids. As Sharkey says, for much of my young life church activities were something to look forward to with my friends, although I always went home to be reminded they were only stories. The church was the first place that told me my queerness was bad, and my socially progressive parents do their best to support their two queer kids despite not always understanding. As an adult I have always identified as an atheist, though recently I was tasked with identifying spirituality within myself for my Spring 23 class with Kendra. I settled on my houseplants as my spiritual energy, and that feels the closest I have ever gotten to believing in god or any form of extraordinary.
While I do not agree with all of Sharkey’s assessments of the effectiveness and reliability of astrology, I very much enjoyed reading her thoughts and applications of it. Her interview with her parents was particularly interesting to me, and reading about the inclusion and potentially opposite references to stars in the bible made me wonder how many original religious writings could have centered around the existence of stars, the cosmos, or other naturally occurring wonders. While I do agree that there is absolutely an argument to be made that astrology uses patterns to identify useful information that can be timelines, when it reaches a metaphysical level of being able to determine the best day of the month to cut your hair I cannot support that conclusion. Astronomy however is an excellent tool of agricultural work that I feel is often underutalized in its ability to maximize overall global food production.
Sharkey also weaved in stories of the teenagers working the urban farm project, not just their agricultural endeavors but the stories of their lives and how the farm work is connected to or separate from the rest of their world.
“Arica’s parents were like that wild weed. Her mother, holding many responsibilities; her father, wheezing and tired; both ever-present. Wrapped around her as she tried to get off this block with its crumbling sidewalk and slumped houses boarded with plywood, their paint peeling itself away. She carried the molded-pulp berry basket home to share her bounty with them, to share the taste of her first harvest.”
“Antonio always volunteers for chicken coop duty. He likes the quiet. He used to be afraid, but now he pushes their stubborn bodies aside and away from the heat lamp. In a hushed whisper, he reassures the brightly colored hens and thanks them for the warm gift—Easter-hued eggs—their biological instinct. Clucking, though now forgetful and unworried, the birds wander out of the coop and toward the compost pile. The boy knows about duty. At home, he is responsible for getting his sister to the bus after picking out the pieces of her uniform, the khaki pants and navy polo with the charter school logo embroidered on the chest, and brushing her ratty hair, forcing an elastic band around it. He sometimes takes a couple of eggs home and cracks them in a big blue bowl and bathes slices in it to make her French toast, but she drips syrup down her front, so most days the menu is peanut butter toast or cereal.”
“They listen to reggaeton on an old boombox while harvesting green beans, touching the flesh gently and flicking their wrists so the skin won’t bruise. At sixteen, they know that we leave marks where we intersect, know how to carry a bounty of patience. The experience is not lost on them—the slow crawl from tiny seed in the cup of the palm to the painfully slow reach for heaven. Magda is tiny, too. Can get lost for hours with her head low in the beans, palm, snap, palm, snap. But when she is directed to move a pile of earth, she looks even smaller. The handle of the tool barely fits under her chin and her arms spaghetti. She moans and her huffs balloon around her.”
By weaving together all of these elements, this essay presents a series of events and ideas that leave open for questioning the role of religion and spirituality in agriculture, the crossover from the physical to the metaphysical in botany in agriculture, the impact of farming projects on young people living in urban areas, and the impact of religion on young people not idealized by said religion.
This week I also finished my paper “Hungry Greeners: Findings on College Hunger Through Digital Reading and Suggestions for Creation and Re-enforcement of Anti-hunger Infrastructure at the Evergreen State College”. I was incredibly nervous to write this as I find papers and such to be very intimidating, but as I am progressively getting more confident in my writing I want to explore creating useful and one day publishable writings.
This paper provides some background on student hunger in Washington, provides my developed definition of anti-hunger infrastructure, explores current food services on campus, student income statistics published by the college, and puts forwards my proposals for combatting food insecurity and strengthening anti-hunger infrastructure on campus. I am incredibly proud of it and it feels like a very successful final product.