Belonging to the Earth

It is said that in the Wabanakik region of what is today’s Maritime Canada and New England (known as “The Dawnland” for the Wabanki people) all human life was willed into existence by Tabaldak (owner/creator) from splinters of the ash tree. In other remembrances a boy was churned up from the sea, and a girl grew from a plant that bore her as its fruit. In any case, it was impressed upon our memories from generation that we belong to this earth. To honor the earth is a way to honor ancestors, and care for ourselves.

We, the Alnobak people, grew green, strong, and we shared our life’s breath with all living things. We humans evolved in nature as caretakers, not separate creatures. We are the daughters and sons of Mazipskwik ta Bitawbagok (the Missisquoi River and Lake Champlain) and their holy waters flow through our veins. If we are to dance among the leaves, then we are to ensure those leaves would be there for those generations yet unborn. If we fail in that Original Instruction then we are not fit for this responsibility.

Long before me, my grandmothers and their many great-grandmothers past cared for this land, now busy with people and progress. They were the original farming mothers. Those women did not spend their days toiling in a yet undiscovered wilderness. They were not wrestling life from the ground in a daily struggle for survival. In reality, we, the Alnobak, possessed an intimate knowledge and relationship with this land that allowed us to work in concert with the fields and forests to feed millions of pre-contact inhabitants of the Americas. 

Because our blood and bone dust have commingled with these lands for millennia, we have a special relationship with the sacred soil of the St. Lawrence Seaway — creating an unspoken kinship one can’t cultivate in a lifetime. This traditional ecological knowledge has been passed down from generation to generation, and this intergenerational transfer kept many newly arrived Europeans souls from starving on the shores of this continent several centuries ago. As I plant and save our traditional seeds year after year, I send up prayers of thanks that food was the love language of my grandmothers. Because of their resilience, my children delight in the spring soil. They plant the love of countless ancestors that has been preserved for us to know the gifts they bring. 

There is an inextricable intersectionality between our traditional belief system, agriculture, and ecology not typically seen in the western settler-colonial mindset. We do not dominate, extract, or use without giving.

There is an inextricable intersectionality between our traditional belief system, agriculture, and ecology not typically seen in the western settler-colonial mindset. We do not dominate, extract, or use without giving. We only take what we need and we must do so in a way that is reverent. Elders say that in spring we must walk lightly on the Earth for she is pregnant. In this season, we care for her gardens and forests as if they were children. Come autumn, she becomes a loving grandmother providing for us all the sustenance we need to survive. 

As I walked through a field of Maryland Meadow Beauty and basket flowers on the unceded Monacan lands of central Virginia searching for mushrooms on a recent morning, I reflected on how alien a concept the typical “rugged individualism” idolized in farming and ranching of bygone days would be to the sensibilities of the land’s original stewards. 

Much of our current ecological crisis was born out of this wistfully celebrated underdog — the hard-working and pioneering hero — creating abundance and excess by dominating the land in an anointed manifest destiny. Unfortunately, we are experiencing the harmful impact of this myth. Dammed rivers disrupt ecosystems, and fish lose their breeding grounds. Forests are leveled and replaced with uniform rows of high-input crops that struggle against nature instead of working with or mimicking it. Herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers kill off many of our plant and animal relatives. And all of this progress is done so that we — present-day Americans — can throw away nearly 108 billion pounds of food each year. That is, a staggering forty percent of all our land’s bounty is presently wasted while community members go hungry on a daily basis. This is sin.

Food was historically used as a weapon of war against my ancestors. Cornfields were burned. Caches of food carefully stored for hard times were stolen or destroyed. In nearly all cases, we were removed from our ancestral hunting and fishing grounds to unfamiliar landscapes which we didn’t know how to cultivate. Today, it is impossible for many to return to those cultural homelands. Those who settled in North America destroyed the environments which supported our game, legislated away our rights to hunt and fish as we once did, and sold off our traditional homelands as private property. It was a slow death by bureaucracy for our culture. 

In response to that past trauma, I’ve had the honor of co-creating several tribal food sovereignty projects such as the Rappahannock Tribe’s Food Sovereignty garden, Richmond Indigenous Society Community Roots Garden, and I provided the first plant and seed installation at the Upper Mattaponi Tribal gardens. These initiatives are gradually leading the way for preservation and perseverance of both our people, our heirloom crops, and possibly a better way forward for American farming culture. In recent years, I’ve seen a reawakening of passion for reviving our traditional foodways from local Indigenous groups.

Native foodways are as intimately tied to our traditional faiths (we are not a monolith) as the Judeo-Christian traditions are associated with celebrating the holidays with friends and family gathered around the dinner table. Like millions of households across the United States, we gather with loved ones for midwinter ceremonies, or stomp depending on your affiliation, and typically these times of celebration and ceremony revolve around the sharing of a meal. Food is the great cross-cultural unifier. Food tells the story of who we are. We celebrate the Green Corn Dance in the summer, because it signifies that our survival was ensured for another year in a bygone era. We must not forget. After all, the carefully cultivated, vast food forest of the New England shore of Wabanakik provided for the survival of the Pilgrims. These cultural customs of generosity were our way of showing wealth. We were measured by how much we gave away, not how much we had.

When you think of a Native American foodways can you think of anything besides corn? Probably not.

When you think of a Native American foodways can you think of anything besides corn? Probably not. The irony of  this nation’s amnesia for quintessential native foods is that they make up the majority of the American dinner plate. Without our agricultural contributions and methods, the world’s dinner plates would look very different and much emptier. From agriculture grows all cultures. When conjuring up images of another nation, many people think of its culinary culture.  It’s hard to imagine Italian food without tomatoes or an American holiday without mashed potatoes or pecan pie. Avocados, beans (kidney, green, and lima), black walnuts, blueberries, strawberries, cocoa/chocolate, chestnuts, corn, crab apples, cranberries, hickory nuts, onions, papayas, peanuts, pecans, peppers (bell peppers, chili peppers), pineapples, plums, potatoes, pumpkins, raspberries, squash, strawberries, sunflowers, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, turkey, and vanilla didn’t grace European cuisine until after the Columbian Exchange. And that’s just a short list. 

The United States is undergoing a great awakening to the climate crisis and the visioning surrounding agricultural solutions. This must include traditional Native practices and foodways. Virginia Free Farm — my farm — takes very seriously the practices of field burning both for pest management, soil improvement, and safety. We have been utilizing biomimicry, such as intercropping, for many years. These are all done with intention to respect and honor the land which provides for our community. In return, she gives the abundance to feed our community free of charge. 

After returning to our traditional practices of agroecology and generosity at Virginia Free Farm, we reassuringly see major state and federal players in our nation’s future implement our ways as well. Entities such as Cal Fire are actually harkening back to our western relatives’ sacred practices of prescribed burns to help mitigate forest fires. Non-profit organizations such as Future Harvest are dedicating serious efforts to promote the preservation of land and water through initiatives aimed at promoting regenerative agriculture in the fertile lands of the Lenape and Piscataway. 

We, as a society, are finally realizing that we can’t eat money. Grassroots leaders are stepping up and filling in empty public spaces with community fridges and gardens. Socially acceptable practices are changing, and networks of growers are preserving seeds from our people to save them from obscurity and for future generations to plant. Public pressure has the power to influence leaders, if we choose to resist as our ancestors once did. Our persistence is their legacy. We must all come together to save our planet and in doing so ourselves. As we look at the solutions for climate change and agricultural reform, the answers were here all along. They have been patiently practiced, and held in the hands and knowledge keepers of the original stewards of this land.