We were 8 years old during the latter part of 1960’s, as three Navajo boys in governmental boarding school huddled in the back room known as the “end room.” With a line of Indian boys all waiting to purchase a boloney sandwich we had manufactured from stolen products from the BIA cafeteria. BIA represents the Bureau of Indian Affairs tucked away, hidden in the offices of Washington DC to distribute and appropriate federal funding and resources to Native American tribes across the US. Often, they were corrupted, misaligned and abhorrently out of context.
This night, we were reselling food products in sandwiches for 10 cents a piece with the “spirit of entrepreneurial fervor,” undamped by the western schooling system which was intent on acculturating us into the so called “white” system. This night we spoke in our native tongue without being reprimanded by the “dorm parents” and selling the biproducts of commodity foods distributed to the school to support the education of Indian children ripped from the bosom of their parents. On each labeled product we stole had the imprint or warning “not for resale”.
Commodity foods are kin to Native people throughout the US, introduced to supplement rations and sustain indigenous people with foods to fill stomachs but not provide the needed supplemental nutrients for optimal health. Laced and interwoven with indigenous foods creating a mixed smorgasbord of creative cuisine that have become a part of the cultural experiences. The line between a robust diet to a diet of ill health can certainly be realized from a historical perspective. The introduction of commodity foods to native people can be associated and point in relation to the cause and effect of increased diabetes, hypertension, and other related diseases vexing our Native communities. The Indian Health Services has become a booming business along with the commodity food program, grocery corporations and synthetic drugs intent on undergirding the vigorous traditions that kept Native people nourished and healthy for centuries.
We quickly sold out of our sandwiches and were able to meet a demand on the open black market in a dark and sterile environment in the back of the BIA dormitory. Who would have known the primal nature of children to be as open and swift to travel to the “spirit of entrepreneur?” In lunchrooms, children learn how to trade and exchange their food but are quickly restrained by a system that hinders this process of creativity and instinct to control what we eat and how we consume. The system of education is to control and quench young people into a system of colonization and industrial machinery in preparation for corporate jobs as adults.
In today’s food system we are confronted by a structure of subsidies and bail outs for famers to continue to monocrop and feed the poor. On the flip side, local farmer’s markets feed the rich consumers by keeping prices marginal to commodity prices. Even so, these local so called “organic” farmers are barely making ends meet. The American system and so-called large farmers are some of the richest corporate entities that receive large sums of subsides by the government to mono crop and continue to commoditize markets and control prices that make the small local farmers obsolete. Organic Farms and other small farms, you might say, are feeding the privileged consumers, while the government provides subsides to large farms continues to keep food prices low and commoditize. (Farm – and other F Words, Sarah K. Mock).
The food from the commodity programs that indigenous people have been receiving is substandard in nutrients and quality. We were raised on commodity foods because our indigenous access to our traditional foods was systemically cut off. Historically social scientist has predicted and correlated uprisings that can be traced back to people that are denied access to foods and will rise in resistance if hunger is in the equation. Therefore, the intent of the government is to provide just enough food for the ‘wild Indians’ so that they do not rise. Thus, set into motion the feeding of indigent natives unable to do for themselves and become wards of this nation. A policy to subdue Tribes on reservations and the slow eradication through ill health and to rid governmental commodity foods from the overflow is a result of set treaties driven by the federal government. In today’s world, we are headed into major unrest across the globe when the faucet of feeding the masses begins to shut down. Decentralized systems will become the next conversation the global powers will be asking themselves.
In this discussion we enter conversations about food sovereignty in a colonized system of extraction and currency-based economy; simply put, intent on capital gain for the few. Capitalism can work if it has the embodied ethics of community away from control and exploitive tendences of greed. Just as native people have entered ill health, we now have the dominate culture feeding on the same downgraded foods we crave but do not satiated or nourish our bodies in order to reach the nutrient threshold.
As my grandpa plowed the fields with his deep plow, he was setting into motion the beginning process of conventional farming and practices first introduced to the Navajos at Ft Sumner, Bosque Redondo. In the late 1800’s plowing and monocropping was introduced to our people which at the time was unsuccessful because of the cut worm that infested the crops on 3 thousand acres of corn (Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides). To our Dine’ people it was somewhat of a mystery because they had been farming with the diversity of the three sisters for hundreds of years with precision and robust results. Mono cropping by its very nature attracts pests due to the lack of diversity of microbes in the soil and on the roots and leaves of plants making them powerless to attract additional microbes for optimum health (Elain Ingham – Soil Scientist).
Fast forward my grandpa transitioning from the horse plow to the industrial tractor digging deep into the soil, was now on his way to conventional farming practices that would devastate the landscape in our delicate environment for the next fifty plus years. For 3 to 5 years, he produced good crops but soon abandoned his fields because the crops did not grow as tall and did not produce as well. With that process of conventional farming, he did not have the knowledge to amend his fields with synthetic fertilizers because it had not been introduced to the farming practices in our area. It was the 1950 and 1960’s that he migrated from small acreage to increase his conventional plowing and farming in vast acres for the last holdout of self-sufficiency to feed his community and employ them. He soon ran out of places to plow and grow because the land did not produce as well and had overextended himself by destroying the topsoil and the microbial life in the soil.
This brings us to the question of what exactly is Regenerative Agriculture? Regenerative means to start again and to start with something that has been damaged by conventional practices, in this case lands. Agriculture, sheltered in the context of linear thinking and a shallow perspective has devastated lands across the world and in 150 years set into motion a disruption of ecosystems, extinctions, and climate change.
In the “New World”, Indigenous peoples developed an estimated 4000-year agricultural perspective that has influenced, and help revolutionized Europe, India and Asian with Indigenous knowledge about farming that is unprecedent in human history. Russia would not be a political country if it were not for the potatoes from the New World. Asia would not have the spice peppers if it were not for the New World development of agriculture. Italy would not have the tomato in its cuisine if it were not for the Indigenous farmers of the North American continent (Indian Givers, Jake Weatherford).
Regeneration or Regenerative Agriculture can be a powerful development of regrowth and change to an extractive system or conventional practice of how we produce and acquire our food products. Indigenous Regenerative Intelligence is key because we use local natural ingredients or materials to implement development of amending our land. Establishing local economies to regenerate local communities with an entrepreneurial spirit is crucial for our own existence and progression. Our indigenous economy has suffered against a dependency economy of hand outs and governmental support just enough to survive, not to succeed. Regenerative Agricultural can easily be misunderstood by not separating the context on which it establishes it’s criteria by existentially defining regenerative along with conventional farming and without looking deeper into colonization and extractive economies. Decolonization is simply put “re-imagining ourselves in the context of our history” and bring the intelligence of our ancestral agricultural practices forward towards food sovereignty and food security. Reclamation and regeneration is key to our vision going forward as indigenous farmers.
A bio-cosmology awareness considers soil as the key component in the first layer to our success. Honoring and farming the soil microbes moves into the next layer of plant hypha or plant uptake of nutrients. The plant being the mouth of the earth and the connection with the sky from which a circular relationship enables the two legged and the four legged to benefit. Nature brings the network of fungal species and the bacteria all working in collaboration with plants and animals. It is the unseen mystery and the medicine to our healing. A life force we call the Great Mystery sets its world view apart from reductionist thinking of fragmenting all of nature’s complexity. The healing and the system of nature is strong and resilient, but science gives us a false sense of security and arrogance regarding deep and mysterious nature of Father Sky and Mother Earth. The scared hoop has been broken by the industrial revolution and has decimated the natural cycles, creating and fearing the nature of wild things.
Tribes in the southwest have always depended on land intelligence as a sophisticated and complex system of engagement with the environment that has yet to be understood and considered by outsiders. It is rich, complex, and colorful to the naked eye but to an indigenous person it is full of meaning, purpose, and identity. Celebrating nature and life with patterns of seasons and repeating the power of the circle creates a deeper understanding and sensitivity with the land. Together with land and the seasons comes a highly valued system of ceremonial affirmation that honors the balance between female and male. In this renewed regenerative movement, the aspect of a female’s marginalized perspective can easily be overlooked and not incorporated into how we look through our lenses and missing the very bases of regenerative intelligence as a nurturing and female perception. A patriarchal perspective can counterfeit and misinterpret regenerative agriculture to totally mean something that was not intended; consequently, counteract the good that it was intended to produce.
As humans we need to work in the context of nature and enter intelligence on all layers of living things embodied with humility and ethics to walk in a sacred manner. No longer are we abrasive and extractive but working and living in the context of deeply sacred systems layer upon layer. We can begin to communicate and reattach ourselves to an indigenous intelligence that I can so proudly say our elders and our elder culture understood. It is “a good day to be Indigenous.” We have to be regenerative to save our environment and reclaim our rich tradition.
