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Tag: indigenous knowledge

Categories
Future Building Relationships Society

Read The Serviceberry

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Read The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”

A lot to admire and inspire here — definitely worth reading. I admit to cringing when Kimmerer writes things like suggesting a college be named “Earthly Gifts” instead of “Natural Resources”, but that probably means it’s good for me to hear so I can consider why that makes my eyes roll so hard when so many other things in her message resonate.

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Categories
Cool Culture Food History

The history and future of corn

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Liked Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System – Robin Wall Kimmerer by Robin Wall Kimmerer (emergencemagazine.org)

Following a nine-thousand-year journey, Robin Wall Kimmerer reflects on the ancient technology embedded in our relationship with corn.

Corn tastes better on the honor system by Robin Wall Kimmerer — with cool paper illustrations by Suus Hessling

The writings of some early colonists reveal that they thought corn a primitive crop, because it did not require machines or draft animals to cultivate and process, as did their familiar wheat. They mistook the apparent ease with which corn fed the people for a lack of agricultural sophistication, rather than recognizing the genius of the system.

Because of its unusual photosynthesis, corn leaves a signature in our tissues written in its particular ratio of carbon isotopes. Corn-eating peoples of the Americas carry a very different ratio of these isotopes in their flesh than the wheat eaters of Europe or the rice eaters of Asia. One biochemist concluded that Americans are basically “walking Fritos.”

The earliest known method of processing corn was to heat the seeds in a dry ceramic vessel over a hot fire. This caused the moisture inside the seed to rapidly expand and explode through the seed coat in a puff of white. Popcorn! Our modern snack is an ancient technology for converting an inedible seed to a staple food.

Agribusiness is quick to point out that we cannot feed a world of nearly eight billion people with gardens alone. This is true but omits the reality that most of the corn we grow is not going to hungry people: it is feeding cars. There is another kind of hunger in our affluent society, a hunger for justice and meaning and community, a hunger to remember what industrial agriculture has asked us to forget, but the seed remembers.

 

See also: Notes from Acquired Tastes

Tasting heritage

Equal systems mean better systems

Categories
Activism Nature Writing

Missing people: context and honesty in nature writing

Replied to https://antonia.substack.com/p/i-just-want-us-to-be-good-to-each by Antonia Malchik (On the Commons)

Maybe mothers can’t write about nature in a way that excludes other humans because they don’t have days that exclude other humans, Dungy said. And beyond that, far more than that, it’s a problem rather than an asset that so many people are able to write book after book about the wonders of nature and their love for it without including hints of what is going on in human society at the time. That they don’t have the imagination to think that you can write about struggles against prejudice and injustice and rivers.

“I have grown intolerant of that. I can’t be fully interested and engaged in writing that seems to erase me. Because all of those concerns about civil rights struggles and women’s rights struggles and those kinds of things—if those don’t move forward, if they don’t get paid attention to, if they don’t get talked about, that negatively affects my ability to move forward in the world.” — Camille Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

This is part of what I’m enjoying in Braiding Sweetgrass: her life is not separate from nature that she can ever set either aside, that her connection with nature and community are intertwined, that the way she relates to nature is dependent on her personal history and her family’s history and her people’s history. There’s no pretending nature is this pristine untouched place “untainted” by people (untouched nature is largely a myth anyway) because she recognizes how humans have played a part in the ecosystem — she even studies the indigenous practices for harvesting sweetgrass and sees indications that gathering sustainably actually keeps the population growing healthily — that human stewardship is part of the balanced ecosystem.

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Categories
Cool Learning Resources and Reference Society

UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage

Bookmarked UNESCO – Dive into intangible cultural heritage! (ich.unesco.org)

I like this map of connections, a fun way to explore all the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” — which is a very cool list to exist! This is essentially a digital garden focused on all the cultures of the world. Some of these items are extremely specific, which makes sense that cultural practices developed through a group of people in a particular geographic area, in close association with the way they needed to live in that climate and place.

Came across this via the list of “intangible cultural heritage of humanity in urgent need of safeguarding” via the “Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” via the duduk.

Categories
History

The Unimprovable Tool

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Liked Tumblr User Shares A Story How Craftsmen Helped Scientists Identify A Tool Created 50,000 Years Ago And Still by Rugile (Bored Panda)

If you paid any attention in history class, then you’ve definitely heard about a species called the Neanderthals. They lived in Eurasia about 40.000 years ago and despite being extinct for a long time, it turns out there is a certain tool that they left us as a heritage gift. One Tumblr user decided to share his discovery after learning about a tool called a lissoir, which is still used by leather-workers to this day. Turns out, it was actually a leather worker himself who helped the scientists to understand what this weird tool made out of bones was.  

40,000 years in use

Categories
Cool Future Building History

Persian Desert Ice Storage Structure

Liked Yakhchāl (en.m.wikipedia.org)
Yakhchal of Yazd province

“A yakhchāl is an ancient type of evaporative cooler. Above ground, the structure had a domed shape, but had a subterranean storage space. It was often used to store ice, but sometimes was used to store food as well. The subterranean space coupled with the thick heat-resistant construction material insulated the storage space year round.” Wikipedia

“In most yakhchāls, the ice is created by itself during the cold seasons of the year; the water is channeled from the qanat (Iranian aqueduct) to the yakhchāl and it freezes upon resting inside the structure.”

“Sometimes equipped with a system of bâdgirs (ancient design of windcatchers or wind towers) that could easily bring temperatures inside the space down to frigid levels even in summer days… Bâdgirs catch the slightest breeze by the vents at the top and funnel the cooling air down through internal, vertically-placed wooded slats to the water or structure below. Alternately, the bâdgir can function as a chimney, expelling warm air upward to pull cool air in from a base opening…”