Raspberries

Mint

Yum yum, dandelion greens

Oregano

Melissa officinalis, lemon balm

just found this: https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/conservation-programs/conservation-reserve-program/

Floating gardens

E102: Lyla June on Returning to Native American Agricultural Traditions

12/15/20 by Hosted by Kelly Brownell

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/117084628
Episode: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/leading-voices-in-food/Lyla-June-Returning_to_Native_American_Agricultural_Foodways.mp3?dest-id=860036

https://leading-voices-in-food.libsyn.com/e102-lyla-june-on-returning-to-native-american-agricultural-traditions

What if we cultivated our environment instead of intensive crop planting and animal farming, and in turn created an abundance of food to meet our needs? Is this what First Nations people did here in the Americas? This concept is the focus of doctoral research of today's guest, Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer, Lyla June. June is an Indigenous woman of Dine (Navajo), Tsetsehestahese (Cheyenne) and European lineage. She's pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And she's fascinated by the intersection of Indigenous food systems and Indigenous land management. Interview Summary So can you begin by explaining how you came to be passionate about food as an Indigenous woman? And tell us some about your doctoral work. Sure, so as you may know, a lot of Native people are struggling with diabetes and other food-related illnesses and are having a hard time accessing foods. And a lot of us live in what they call food deserts.

A lot of our food systems were destroyed in the process of the creation of America. Everything from decimating buffalo populations to burning down orchards and cornfields to ruining the salmon runs by putting dams in all the rivers; and destroying the beavers for the fur trade, which destroyed all the ponds which supported a lot of food systems. So our ways of life, as you can imagine, have been deeply altered, and that has its ramifications on our health. I think you can't help but be very attuned to food systems as an Indigenous person. I think what sparked my doctoral research is how tribes have, before Columbus and still do today these genius practices of taking care of the land that actually enhance the natural food-bearing capacity of the land. And what really sparked my interest in that was an elder who said to me, "Native people control enough land "to change the way the world thinks about food and water." And that really inspired me because that made me feel like, you know, even though we've lost most of our land base, it doesn't take a very large model to start a revolution in the way people think about things. So I've been going around traveling as part of my doctoral research, recently reading a ton, but a lot of times just working face-to-face with Native people and seeing the ways in which they take care of the land. That's really how I got into it. This belief that Native people could not only create thriving life for their own communities through the revitalization of our food systems—but that we could actually become leaders once again to help not just our communities, but to help the rest of the world. Although industrial agriculture seems like it's working right now, it's only a matter of time until it collapses. We are on the precipice of a very, I don't think there's any way to sugarcoat it, a very tragic famine. I think there's a way around that with our current food system. And so I would like to work with a number, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of Indigenous peoples who are preparing for that, and ready to share our medicine and our knowledge with the world. If it's okay, I'd like to share just a few vignettes of how Indigenous peoples are exemplifying this way of working with the Earth. I'd very much like that. And what you're saying sounds very concerning and very hopeful at the same time. I feel that every day, a very strong mixture of urgency and hope all at once, and it's exciting work. And I very much feel guided by the ancestors 'cause the things I'm learning and the things I'm coming across are just way too big for coincidence. But for example, there's a group in British Columbia that I talk about very frequently called the Heiltsuk Nation. They live on a little island called Bella Bella, West Coast of Canada. And they actually have these hand-planted kelp forests that they plant along the shoreline of their islands. And at the right time of year, they go out and put this kelp, it's very fast-growing kelp. And this increases the surface area upon which the herring fish, which is a little silver fish, can lay their eggs. And so they just litter the whole place with eggs, millions and millions and millions of eggs. And that provides the basis for the salmon, the killer whales, the sea lions. The humans, of course eat it. It's a huge delicacy. You can sell it for tons of money, but they don't sell it.
https://leading-voices-in-food.libsyn.com/e102-lyla-june-on-returning-to-native-american-agricultural-traditions

They actually use it to feed their island ecosystem. So on up the food chain to the wolves, the eagles. And everyone in the system benefits from this anthropogenic base of calories. And I say anthropogenic, which means manmade. There are ways to touch the Earth that are very kind and very helpful, not just in the feeding of humans, but of other lifeforms as well. Another example I like to give is the Shawnee ancestors of what we now call Kentucky. What we see is in the fossilized pollen if you take soil cores out of the ponds, you can see pollen that is as old as 10,000 years. And you can see what the forest has looked like over the past 10,000 years. And what we find is for a long time, it was just cedar and hemlock dominating the pollen profile. And then about 3,000 years ago, this is before Christ, we see the Shawnee ancestors move in and we see a huge influx of hickory nut, black walnut, chestnut, acorns, sumpweed, goosefoot. All these edible plant species come into the pollen profile. Which means that somebody, presumably the Shawnee, radically transformed the whole cedar and hemlock forest into a dense food forest. What we also see is the influx of fossilized charcoal, which indicates that they managed this food forest with low intensity, gentle, prescribed burns, where you burn the forest floor, which eliminates competing vegetation. It injects nutrient dense ash into the soil, phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium. It creates the charcoal which creates little apartment buildings for microbes in the soil. So you make a living soil. And this food forest with the charcoal persisted for 3,000 years, up until about 1830, we see the whole system collapse. All the pollen disappears, all the chestnut disappears. This is an example I like to give to show people how longstanding and how sophisticated Indigenous food systems are. I have also been looking at the Tenochtitlan, which was the original city of Mexico City. They had these incredible waste sanitation systems where they say that human waste was so valuable on Lake Texcoco, way before Columbus was a twinkle in his daddy's eye, that you could actually bring it to the market and trade it. You could trade your own waste for goods and services because they had this waste sanitation system that reinvested all of this so-called waste into their food systems, which were floating gardens they created out of reeds and very special soil systems. Gardens that floated all over Lake Texcoco. So if that's not sophisticated, I don't know what it is. I'm really very impressed by those stories. And one of the things that you made me think of as you were describing the kelp forest in Canada, was that the food sounds like it's part of the spiritual life of the individuals who were raising it, consuming it, protecting it, et cetera. Is that correct? Oh, absolutely. In fact, there's one elder I interviewed from the Amah Mutsun Nation who are the Indigenous peoples of what we now call Santa Cruz, California. And they did a similar forestry management strategy where they used prescribed burns. But he said that it was a ceremony. He said the smoke would go up into the oak trees because they're oak people and those acorns form a very important caloric base for the pre-Columbian peoples of California. They were acorn people through and through. The smoke would go up through the trees and would smudge off the trees. It would bless the trees, he said. They had fire-resistant bark because they had co-evolved with human fire for so many millennia. And this smoke would kill all the weevils and bugs and pests. And so you had a really healthy acorn harvest in the fall. And so it was absolutely not just land management, but it was a prayer and a gift. Sort of like Vandana Shiva from India says. She says, "Nitrogen and potassium and phosphorus...
https://leading-voices-in-food.libsyn.com/e102-lyla-june-on-returning-to-native-american-agricultural-traditions