5/7/22 - Our Permaculture Community Comes Together - A Reflection on Weekend One of the PDC. Decolonizing Permaculture Workshop Series - YouTube She served as garden educator and camp director at the Truly Living Well Center for Urban Agriculture for eight years. Pomo people do different things than Navajo people. Decolonizing Permaculture - We got this! - Lenape Union Land Trust Nobody should feel like a slave. And because of this they have a stake in the continuity of the colonial project. Isnt nature our best teacher? Decolonizing Permaculture. In contemporary agriculture, there are individualized, commodified resources like land, you can buy water, at one point in our history you could even buy somebodys body and health. A-dae is a compelling voice against the injustices of colonization inflicted on Native People and for the acknowledgment of Indigenous Peoples land stewardship as a basis for regenerative agriculture. All participants are welcome. We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website. kcet.org/shows/tending-nature/the indigenous science of permaculture. We all have indigenous ancestors, and they were once colonized too. I help to facilitate and teach Permaculture Design Certification courses (PDCs) here in Maine and sometimes in Boston, partnering with the Resilience Hub. I do believe that most people wake up in the morning wanting to be good people and to do good work in the world, regardless of their race, class, gender, age, or what they eat for breakfast. I dont have any answers, but I do care deeply about being a good neighbor and a good ancestor to my descendants. I just didnt understand the concept of making the food supply so clean to prevent sickness. I googled it and found a powerful, provocative body of work centered around a 2012 essay by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. Producers That Are Decolonizing Agriculture. I tell you to make the point that not everybody has access to the jobs, schools, homes, families, land, and respect that is a given in many of your lives. Such a project is nothing more than another form of imposition upon the locals by another foreign interest. He said that Western culture views the natural world as an it that can be exploited and processed. Clearly were doing important work with permaculture, so I want to separate the baby from the bathwater. Indigenous People need room to tell those stories. Thats the only way were going to ensure that we are within the cycle of whatever natural systems were a part of. Decolonizing Permaculture The Eco-Institute at Pickards Mountain Permaculture and Indigenous Wisdom December 6, 2021 Decolonizing Permaculture: Steps Forward in Acknowledging the Past By: Meg Toben A few months ago, I posted a request to Facebook for an indigenous permaculture co-teacher for our Permaculture Foundations Certificate Program. But counting carbon and counting molecules is not going to help people understand. Marina Nobre: Reforestation is more than plantingtrees. ARTY: What needs to happen to make the regenerative agriculture community more inclusive? In this article we will seek to answer the following questions: What is decolonization? In another sense, a cultural sense, decolonization is about the process of removing colonizing thoughts from your own mind and colonizing behavior from your own lifeway. When you look at the whole of time, it becomes overwhelming. When we talk about decolonizing regenerative agriculture, we are looking at that initial definition. A-DAE: One of the things that comes to mind is food safety. Wikipedia; Wikipedias Plastic shaman entry; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_shaman, FreeFactFinder; FreeFactFinders Pretindian entry; http://freefactfinder.com/definition/Pretindian.html. Another proposal is that we should seek genuine and longstanding relationships with existing First Nations. 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. The reason for this relates to a concept in the article Decolonization is not a metaphor, which the authors call settler moves to innocence. A move to innocence is a diversionary attempt by a settler person to absolve themself of the guilt of living on stolen land using some form of catharsis, without actually addressing the difficult societal structures involved. What Is Permaculture? | Earth Activist Training Rather than being burdened with that task, the idea that we respect the unknown helps people deal with it. It is offered so that we may think critically and philosophically about sustainability and our role in our culture as designers of novel ecosystems. There is so much that we have to learn. If I hadnt been able to hustle up several thousand dollars trimming weed in California last winter (to hire an attorney) I would have lost the Food Not Lawns trademark forever. The Navajo people do different things than Kiowa people. Oct 25, 2021 -- Delaware Teachers Institute learn about Decolonizing Permaculture Share Watch on Since then, we've found this message from 10+ Indigenous leaders and organizations stating that regenerative agriculture and permaculture offer narrow solutions to the climate crisis, when compared with indigenous values. My dad, a working-class electrician whose parents emigrated from Mexico before he was born, wasnt around until I was a teenager, and wasnt able to help much through the haze of violence and alcoholism that dominated his life at that point. That was my choice and I dont regret it, but the burden of those loans is crippling. Decolonizing Permaculture: Bridging the gap between privilege and Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, Culture Jamming and Meme-based Communication. https://depts.washington.edu/ccce/polcommcampaigns/CultureJamming.htm, [ii] Rafter Sass Ferguson, Critical Questions, Early Answers, Permaculture Activist 93 (Autumn 2014): http://liberationecology.org/critical-questions-early-answers/, Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility, The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. Indigenous Land Acknowledgement | Earth Activist Training I am Cree Indian on my mothers side and Chihuahua on my fathers. Cochiti people do things differently than Pomo people. But I realized that saying that sentence, especially to a room full of (mostly) white people, has the effect of erasing the lived experience of contemporary indigenous North American people. If its under your house and the machine needs it, it cares not who you are. Permaculture is ecological design aimed at creating systems that meet human needs while regenerating and healing the environment around us. Decolonization is about correcting past crimes committed by (mostly) European settlers by returning stolen land. Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences! Join us on-land or online by livestream, this Introduction to Permaculture will give you all the basics of design, ethics, and principles in the first 2.5 days. 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. I wrote about sovereignty in my work on the Heroines Journey, in relation to the age-old question, what do women want? I discussed the possibility that a womans heroic journey might have less to do with slaying the proverbial beast, and more to do with understanding, befriending, and co-existing with it. And I am asking you to check that luggage at the door, to open your heart and mind to the possibility that these actions will benefit not just you as an individual, but also the global community, in ways that avoiding change and hoarding your privilege wont. [vi] And while settlers of color may experience systematic oppression at the hands of the currently designed economic-political system, they are also settler people and not members of the First Nations. We now approach a closely related topic that, while important, is big enough that it warrants a separate article. I could go off on politics and science, but Im just going to end there. On the surface, permaculture is often about designing eco-groovy, perennially edible landscapes, gardens and farms. My response to that? In 200 pages she presents a cogent critique not only of anthropology, but of the cultural evolution of the entire Western concept of research. To find out more. The same goes for traditional ecological knowledge. Ancestral Organics in Colombia is committed to the magic of nature, consciously-grown food, and regenerative farming. It informs how I think about what part I can play to heal historical traumas. He helps facilitate PDCs with Lisa Fernandes of The Resilience Hub. resilience.org/stories/2016-02-19/decolonizing permaculture. How does indigenous farming develop relationships and nurture life? We should listen with humility when we are challenged over our privilege or unexamined racism. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. This website uses Google Analytics and Meta (Facebook) Pixel to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. 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 was a topic whose initial catalyst came from Rafter Sass Fergusons article, Critical Questions, Early Answers, which is an overview of the permaculture movement. In the latest instalment of PP I introduce the topic of decolonizing permaculture. Ive studied it to death, and Im still learning. Its a very broad term. What is Permaculture Design? The conversation usually goes something like this: Settler/landowner: What can I do to help the poor?, Me: Gift me a piece of land, and I will turn it into a seed sanctuary, food forest, and permaculture paradise that will feed and benefit the community for generations.. By choosing a higher price point, you are helping make the program more accessible to others for whom the low-end may be cost-prohibitive. A friendship asks you to go out of your way to see someone, to help them, and to support their work and their emotions. 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 American or contemporary agricultural system, the way to access those things is through money or some form of money. EarthShine also includes her Eco-Hood Design-and-Build Project along with Soulstice, which introduces young folks to careers theyve never heard of. They need that whole spectrum, the full body, the full room and the time to tell those stories along with their practices, which currently is hard to find in any of these multiple disciplines, whether it be agroecology, permaculture, or traditional ecological knowledge. A-dae was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Director of the Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Program. How do we incorporate righting this egregious, unresolved, and ongoing historical crime into our culture jamming work? Lee Warren Think about what it means to be a true friend to somebody. What is my experience with this topic? Think about the friends you currently cherish. Join us on this exploration of both the celebrations and the challenges of permaculture as seen through the lens of three marginalized voices. Decolonization doesnt have a synonym.. [ii] In this article he interprets the racial homogeneity of the permaculture movement as a vulnerability. In that sense, I think there is some awareness that there needs to be more inclusion of non-white people in the organic community.