Lee is a sustainability professional with twenty five years of experience envisioning, designing, and living innovative solutions to organic food systems, intentional community, and sustainability education. As I reflected on how I could be relevant to communities of color close to where I am located in rural Maine (which is mostly white), I started thinking about making bridges with Native American communities to the north. I think one of the most important lessons in indigenous epistemology is that natural systems have unknowns, and that man cannot know everything. The Caldera in the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico is surrounded by a fence; its in a National Preserve. The shorthand is that Takers are people of industrialized growth-based societies and Leavers are people of tribal, small-scale, village-based or nomadic societies. Its much more nuanced than these terms that are in vogue or not in vogue depending on the time and audience. Permaculture is a fantastic curriculum and a beautiful pedagogy a wonderful system of knowledge that has been distilled down from a much larger traditional ecological body of knowledge originating all around the world and I think many of us within the movement acknowledge that. During events like the regional Convergence, we might make an offering at the beginning to acknowledge who the indigenous peoples are who live/d on the land we are now occupying. Pomo people do different things than Navajo people. And a true friend gives all of this back to you, and so much more. And because of this they have a stake in the continuity of the colonial project. In collective resources management, a variety of skills are needed because youre not only dealing with people, but youre also dealing with relationships and how to balance those relationships. A-DAE: Yes. A-DAE: Absolutely. And when I see nasty, divisive behaviors like interrupting, shaming, slandering, disregarding, plagiarizing, avoiding, condescending, taking advantage of, jacking up the rent and calling oneself King, Duke, or Benevolent Dictator, they are coupled with rationalizations about how doing the work is more important than how others feel about the way that work gets done. ARTY: The late Joseph Campbell, professor and author of books on mythology, said that Indigenous Peoples refer to the natural world and all in it as thou, as sacred. We should listen with humility when we are challenged over our privilege or unexamined racism. Exploring the Intersection of Permaculture and Decolonization. It is about learning what it means to be an ally, how to listen (especially when what I hear is emotionally challenging), and learning to give thanks always.We have to decolonize our minds before we can decolonize Native North America. This idea of exploitation puts us in the position that we have to manage everything with the right to commodify things that should never be commodified. We have to remove the empire from our heads before we can remove the empire from any land base. First Nations provides grants and technical assistance to strengthen native communities and economies. A-dae Romero-Briones (Cochiti/Kiowa) is the Director of Programs: Agriculture and Food Systems for the First Nations Development Institute. Document access and instructions can be found here. For instance, my grandpa would take me to the field and tell a story about the last time he saw conditions like this and what his grandparents did. Opening a heartfelt dialogue with life-A film review of Into The Soil, Start Where You are: Discovery at Zone 00, Explaining regeneration and its expansion beyond the limits ofculture. I most often hear the term decolonization used in discussions about race, class, and privilege. Full disclosure: I did not buy this one, or a photograph thereof, from an indigenous person. Full Profile Page. So instead of making a statement like Permaculture allows us to remember how to be indigenous to place, we should choose other language. Decolonizing Permaculture Whitewashed Hope: A Message from Indigenous Leaders and Organizations on Regenerative Agriculture and Permaculture "Whitewashed Hope" is an open-source document intended for sharing. When I see basket-weavers who are weaving from roots that have been affected by pesticides, I worry about them. Faculty Nobody should feel like a slave. While its a challenge, its also a tremendous opportunity. Shes been living in rural, land-based community since 1995 and at Earthaven Ecovillage since 2000. Rather than trying to disprove or prove the functionality of these systems, science needs to take their cues and use scientific methods to explain the importance and the positives of these stewarded lands. ARTY: In your writings and talks, you seem to challenge the idea of mimicking nature, which many people in the regenerative agriculture movement use as a guiding principle. That was my choice and I dont regret it, but the burden of those loans is crippling. Thats the only way were going to ensure that we are within the cycle of whatever natural systems were a part of. Friendships require vulnerability, compassion, patience, and most of all, effort. : Episode 96 Kritee Kanko, What Could Possibly Go Right? The biggest difference in contemporary agriculture versus indigenous agriculture is the idea of money. But counting carbon and counting molecules is not going to help people understand. He operates Midcoast Permaculture Design (midcoastpermaculture.com), serving residential and farm clients. How does indigenous farming develop relationships and nurture life? Such a project is nothing more than another form of imposition upon the locals by another foreign interest. Jesse Watson is a permaculture designer, teacher and builder living and working in Midcoast Maine, occupied Penobscot territory. They identify any person who owns land in a place to which they are not native as a settler (a.k.a. On a deeper level, permaculture is about the conscious design of ecological cultures. Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences! We take the cues from the natural systems, whether that be deer, whether that be insects, whether it be water shortages. It seems the observation of the tension in considering these questions of land ownership/stewardship in light of this historical and contemporary inheritance is important. People with more privilege have more control over their own lives and, as such, have better opportunities to manifest what they see as their true purpose, without the burdens (and time consumption) associated with struggling to survive on a daily basis. It is an ethically bounded framework of ecological design that can be used to design everything from landscapes and farms to business enterprises and other cultural projects, on nearly any scale. In an indigenous community, food shortages mean something within that society is awry and has to be fixed. My response to that? Questions of what happens to present settler peoples is secondary to the act of returning Native land to Native peoples. If resource extraction or industrial infrastructure needs to happen, none of us are immune to being displaced. Id like to think we can err on the side of survival, however temporary it may be in the big picture. Lee Warren I know that sounds trite and cliche, but thats because its a truism. I think nature is our best teacher. I consider this principle when recognizing how I passively benefit from the actions that my ancestors probably took to help construct this oppressive and exploitative system. As a community steeped in the ecological design model known as Permaculture, Earthaven is taking a good long look at the ways in which the "Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share" movement has fallen short on the inclusion of black and brown voices, on addressing systemic injustices, on acknowledging where most land-based wisdom has originated. Another view, Front Yard Gardens: Rules for Growing Food Out Front, Gaining Ground: 8 places to grow food if you dont have access to land, Regenerating Our Reality through Circular Economy. I highly recommend watching and/or reading this for anyone orienting towards regeneration in their work --> thank you Sarah Queblatin for so generously sharing I thought it was fascinating, the idea that you pretty much kill everything so that nothing living goes inside your body as a preventative to making you sick. Watch keynote addresses, panel discussions, performances and more from visionary innovators. Why didnt I just market my seeds, produce, and skills as a professional, and make ends meet that way? The indigenous universal connection is the idea that you absolutely need to be part of the natural cycles around you, whether theyre negative or positive. When we farm, were thinking about natural cycles, and how do we become more embedded into those natural systems. As a bridge to the challenge of bringing a decolonization framework into permaculture practice and pedagogy, I would like to start by mapping those same questions onto permaculture itself. It requires different skill sets when youre managing collective resources versus individualized land plots. We need small, steady change built upon strong, healthy connections. When people ask what do some young people need as an ally.this is one of the people I think of. Podcast: Decolonization & Sudden Oak Life By Melissa Ott Fant February 15, 2021 Education broadacre permaculture, decolonization, permaculture design course, Sudden Oak Life, traditional ecological knowledge Current PDC student Danielle created two podcast episodes from audio recordings at our Broadscale Permaculture weekend in February 2021. Im asking people to stop and say, Look at how we think about agriculture in America and think about whether it included Indigenous People. The answer is it doesnt. Im not tooting my own horn here, only illuminating my own body of work as an example of how effective a person can be, even if they didnt start out with much. Self-righteousness is certainly not a principle of permaculture, and yet we divide ourselves so easily, bickering over the details and competing for resources. Those stories are the guideposts that need to be laid out before we even start digging into the soil. If permaculture has as its ethical foundation Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share or Future Care, what do those words mean in this light, given the fact that people like me passively benefit from systematic forms of oppression and genocide that continue today? Special thanks also to gkisedtanamoogk (Wampanoag nation), Canupa Gluha Mani (Lakota nation), and Ana Oian Amets (Aquitainian proto-Basque ancestral recovery) for the same. On the surface, permaculture is often about designing eco-groovy, perennially edible landscapes, gardens and farms. She is now focusing on her writing and on EarthShine, a business that exposes children and teens to the wonders of the natural world. A-DAE: Agriculture, as were told in the American narrative, is the delineating line between civilization and the wild Indians. Decoloniziation For Beginners: Inner And Outer Vision Decoloniziation for Beginners: Inner and Outer Vision Using the land and our tangible environments as the palette of living changes everything.