Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Dawn Sherman and her colleagues are committed to growing the Tanka brand against all odds, as part of their community service, she noted. “We’re more than a brand. It’s who we are,” she said. “We’re like the buffalo. We face the storm. Eventually the storm’s going to end.”
Collectively, there is an opportunity to better track phenological shifts and manage, adapt, and prepare for changes that lie ahead…and it might just start with a small, delicious berry.
We need all the support we can get to build this movement locally. In the spirit of “a high tide raises all ships”, racial justice in the progressive farming movement will benefit everyone.
A cohort of actors including philanthrocapitalists, aid agencies, governments, academic institutions, and embassies are all working to make this narrative a reality. They talk about transforming African agriculture but what they are doing is creating a market for themselves cleverly couched in a nice sounding language.
We are in desperate need of more integrated approaches that recognize our interdependent place in the natural world. Strengthening interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration will encourage a paradigm-shift towards integration, as will the sharing of knowledge between people with different worldviews.
Today, danger confronts all of us on this Earth. “We were already facing climate change, and now there is the pandemic,” Skye says. The seeds will always be there, to provide both food and a spiritual connection to the Earth, he says. “They are how we will survive.”
In our work to build the Agrarian Commons, Agrarian Trust participates in this work: to confront systems and structures that have resulted in inequitable access to land, and thus impeded the most vulnerable and historically disadvantaged among us from having true control over their food supply.
“Not only do Indigenous diets provide us with nutritionally balanced, seasonal local food, but they help us recognize the connection to our physical place in the world, as well as the wisdom of those who have come before,” says Mariah Gladstone (Blackfeet, Cherokee), founder of Indigikitchen. “This helps us care for ourselves, the land, and each other.”
Nutrition education is one way that the Kañari people can put their children into a better world than the one they inherited. Not only will the world be moving toward better balance, the children will be prepared to continue and further that movement.
It’s not as hard as you might think. If you have the right action for a couple of seasons — the Earth actually wants to be full of life. That’s it’s nature. We actually have to work to get it to not do that. So if we just get behind her and breathe life into what she’s already doing, it can change pretty fast. But we need the tools and we need the skills and we need the knowledge and most of all the wisdom that supports all of these things.
But Lino did foresee the resilience, the determination, and the imagination of the Kañari people. He knew that, given the opportunity, they could solve the problems. That is what they are doing through TUCAYTA, the bilingual/bicultural education, the Savings and Loan Cooperative, the community cooperatives, and through Mushuk Yuyay, the association of seed and nutritious food producers.
The enduring success of these ancient methods remind us that we could reimagine our entire food system to feed ten billion people while rejuvenating wildlife and locking carbon away. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we should look to what worked in the past and adapt it for the future.
