The Miseducation of the Colonized
It seems evermore impossible to sit down to read the news without bracing for an offensive onslaught of blatant propaganda and an unfortuantely understated display of utter injustice. This isn't an appropriate activity for the sensitive or rational mind. But occasionally, mercifully, a headline appears that fills my heart with hope. As was the case when I came across an article in The Guardian entitled: ‘‘Hey, I grew that’: the Native American school that’s decolonizing foodways’.
I am absolutely supportive of all people, indigenous or otherwise, rediscovering ancestral foodways, no matter how reductive the motivation may be. But I also want community leaders and social justice educators to get it right.
The very first sentence of this article mentions eggplant.
I should have stopped reading there.
To be fair, drawing attention to this particular vegetable could be a clever but gentle tell from writer Kate Nelson.
“She knows,” I thought.
Eggplant is in no way a culturally relevant food to any indigenous people of the Americas. The species Solanum melongena is native to Asia, probably more specifically the Indian subcontinent. It is thought to have been introduced to Europe by Muslim immigrants to the Iberian peninusla during the Middle Ages. It was introduced to the Americas by.. [checks notes].. colonists.
Further along in the article Ms. Nelson relates that this “decolonized” community garden aims to erect greenhouses to “extend the growing season”.
GREENHOUSES!
I can hardly think of anything more colonial than a greenhouse. With the exception of, perhaps, a school.
The Indigenous Gardens of North America
Native Americans are not a monolith. Even within the boundaries of what is now the contiguous United States there was tremendous diversity in culture. There was no single universal indigenous food system. It is difficult to accurately convey what qualifies as an “indigenous” food when many foods and their preparations were specific to certain regions and tribes at the time of conquest. Additionally, we must necessarily ignore the fact that in the centuries and millennia prior to the age of conquest there were established trading networks that traversed both land and water, dispersing people, plants and animals far from their presumed place of origin. The integration of foreign agricultural species was nothing out of the ordinary for many indigenous tribes of North America, and accounts for the prompt adoption of most “colonial” plants and animals so soon after conquest that many subequent European surveyors considered things like pigs and carrots to be native to these lands.
They are not.
One aspect of indigenous North American agriculture that was very nearly universal was the production or procurement of food for the winter months. There were no greenhouses. Even today these structures are a luxury. Rather, the crops most common to indigenous gardens are those that have been selected over many thousands of years to provide sustenance well beyond the growing season.
This is elementary agriculture.
Indigenous Americans had no need to “extend the growing season”.
Europeans on these shores were quick to recognize the value of indigenous crops like corn, squash and beans, which could be consumed both during the growing season and long after, and they were promptly exported. Today gardeners still celebrate these “three sisters”, which are incredible achievements of breeding and selection and which are easily grown by virtually anyone anywhere.
The Fleecing of the “Indians”
School and community gardens, colonial or otherwise, are an absolute good. Get kids access to healthy foods, and teach them to grow that food. Give them fair access to land on which grow it as adults. Subsidize the crap out of local food economies, whether they be indigenous, black, or white suburban. It does not matter. I have absolute faith in the value of hard work and hands in the dirt.
But I am also aware of the sad fact that Indian reservations and their inhabitants have historically been exploited in innumerable ways by diverse opportunistic individuals and organizations. You might think that a community garden is an innocuous investment until you read that the many hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to the garden featured in this article are not at all sufficient per their budget, in spite of the fact that they lease their land for a mere $1 per acre from the Omaha tribal council, sell their produce to the school at the standard market price, and pay the children working to maintain the garden $10 per hour. The article states that the school has made up the difference in the garden budget shortfall, and I cannot help but wonder what kind of racket is happening on this reservation and why they are drawing attention to it in The Guardian as if it could ever be some kind of model worth emulating.
Recolonizing Your Garden
History is old. Painting an accurate picture of which people and plants and animals belong where is almost impossible. This pointless ideological sorting can lead to genocide. For as much as we go on and on about the impending doom of rising oceans and climate change and displacement of people, we somehow forget that the oceans indeed rose abruptly by hundreds of feet just ten thousand years ago, and that the Sahara was green as recently as five thousand years ago. People and plants and animals migrate to survive. This is the standard condition of the Earth.
Which is not to diminish the significance of the genocide that took place in colonial North America, where there are massive geographical regions from which indigenous people and their culture, and even their histories, had been virtually extirpated. Manifest Destiny is an example of this silly ideological sorting.
Rather than “decolonize”, it may be well enough to ecologically “recolonize”. American gardeners wishing to quietly subvert the Empire can choose to grow more of those varieties that were once most plentiful in this part of the world, and use them as intended. Plant a flint corn rather than a sweet corn. Choose a dual purpose pole bean like Trail of Tears rather than a fancy “French” filet bean. Grow a squash that will mature into food you can use for soup in February. Your neighbors are going to grow zucchini anyway.
Other nutritious American natives that we grow include: tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, chilacayote, papalo, sunflower, nodding onion, camas, quamash, culantro, amaranth, chia, quinoa, dahlia, wapato and even jicama. Native flowers include most common species of cosmos, zinnias, and marigold, as well as petunias, tithonia and tobacco. This is but a small selection of species that are widely available and can be grown in a short season in northern gardens, and does not even include the dozens of native wildflowers that we can grow or wildcraft in New York. But at no time would I consider not growing lettuce or cabbage or cucumbers or any other plant from the Old World for little more than perceived political points.
Many thousands of species were and continue to be grown or foraged by indigenous people of the Americas. Several of them have become staples of commercial food production and popular cuisines throughout the world. Imagine Italians refusing to grow tomatoes in their gardens because they are not native to Italy. Or Thai food without peppers and papaya. It reminds of the time we were meant to stop eating French fries to punish the French for not wanting to invade Iraq. Potatoes are Andean, by the way. American. Our relationship with plants and food and their place in culture is complicated. Ignorance appears to be King. Lies have colonized our minds. I plant a garden in the shadow of every gardener before me, on every part of this planet. The whole of the Earth is the garden of my ancestors.