All related

To me, indigenous agroecology is embedded in their cosmology – it is learning from plants;  it is orchestrating the earthly and the celestials.  

 Indigenous worldview respects all life as “for all life forms as literally conscious and intrinsically interdependent and valuable” (Stewart 2009). Therefore it is only natural for agriculture to be energy exchange instead of extraction. 

Food is existential. It is what grounds us to this earthly realm. The cultivation of food is the alchemy of elements, the channeling of spirits and the manifestation into the physicals. The separation of form and spirit, of nature and culture, of male and female fractures our knowing, and the cultivation of food is a deep remembrance of who we are.

This deep reverence gives birth to this way of being, that we are one; that we are the same life-force manifesting in different forms. When yoked with the wind, it takes the form of the wind. When yoked with the thunder, it takes the form of thunder. It is only natural to learn from this universal life-force, through the temporary annihilation of this body.  As As Brazilian shaman Davi Kopenawa described in his book “The Falling Sky Words of a Yanomami Shaman”, 

“We study by drinking yãkoana with our shaman elders. When they become spirit, they carry our images far away to battle the evil beings or repair the sky’s chest. They teach us to know the xapiri and they open their paths to us. They send them to build our spirit houses. They teach us the words of their songs, then make them grow in our thoughts. Without their support, we would get lost in the void or sink into the mõruxi wakë blaze. We learn to think right with the xapiri. This is our way of studying, and so we have no need for paper skins.”

Tuck, Eve, and Yang also used the analogy of New York subway system vs. being in a cab during rush hours to illustrate the relationship of indigenous ways of knowings vs. Western knowing. In this analogy, the perceived “problem” of stuckness in traffic only exists in the framework of road traffic, not the framework of the subway system. This makes me question the problems and complications that are imposed in the framework of western ways of knowing, such as issues surrounding the unsustainability of agriculture — does the legitimization of these problems lie in the severity of the problems, or simply the confine of our ways of knowing?

Reference

Kopenawa, D. (2013). The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.

Stewart, S.L. (2009). One Indigenous Academic’s Evolution: A Personal Narrative of Native Health Research and Competing Ways of Knowing. First Peoples Child & Family Review 4(1): 57-65