notwiselybuttoowell:

Blue corn and melons: meet the seed keepers reviving ancient, resilient crops

According to the United Nations, 75% of crop diversity has been lost over the past century as farmers abandoned numerous local varieties of crops for high yield monocultures that are often shoehorned into environments they are poorly adapted to.

The Hopi, a sovereign nation in north-eastern Arizona, have been practicing resilient methods of farming for years. “Hopi’s one of the only places I know that corn is made to fit the environment, and not the environment manipulated to fit the corn,” said Dr Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi dryland farmer and academic from Arizona who relies on passive rain harvesting and drought-resistant seeds to sustain crops. “In agriculture across the world, you could argue that the fundamental problem is remaking the environment to fit products.”

“The industrialized food system has failed us,” added Lowden. “We need to restore our food system and that ecological knowledge that has supported us since the beginning.”

That ecological knowledge stretches back millennia in the southwest, where farming began as early as 2000 BC.

For Lowden, Acoma – the oldest continually inhabited community in North America – is a model of resilience. A community with a holistic, reciprocal and self-sustaining food system, superbly adapted to the high desert and capable of weathering extreme drought, climate change, and violent intrusions by outsiders.

In Acoma, “farming is not a hobby”, Lowden said. “It is the basis of our culture and our survival.”

attropin:

Haz de luz, 2013 by Marcela Taboada

“President-elect Joe Biden chose Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) Thursday to serve as the first Native American Cabinet secretary and head the Interior Department, a historic pick that marks a turning point for the U.S. government’s relationship with the nation’s Indigenous peoples.

“With that selection and others this week, Biden sent a clear message that top officials charged with confronting the nation’s environmental problems will have a shared experience with the Americans who have disproportionately been affected by toxic air and polluted land.

‘A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,’ Haaland tweeted Thursday night. ‘ … I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.’

“In addition to Haaland, Biden has turned to North Carolina environmental regulator Michael S. Regan to become the first Black man to head the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as Obama administration veteran Brenda Mallory to serve as the first Black chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/12/17/deb-haaland-interior-secretary-biden/?fbclid=IwAR3PBTzj0-FJOLbOznR1HPPIUAW69PmOrLp4ex82KBKj1EbXENagd1CSmTY

fandomshatethedisabledcommunity:

nbytea:

t4t4t:

Native burial sites blown up for US border wall

Colonialism is not a concept of a bygone era.

It is a time to listen to native folx rn, partly as this isn’t being widely broadcast, because their voices are being shut down and shouted out, but also because the very laws that were agreed in term of what post colonial America decided was reasonable to place, is being violated. For capitalism and racism. Listen and support southern natives right now, and don’t think the American gov won’t trample on human rights and sacred places the minute it’s inconvenient for them not to.

mybasementstudentworld:

First Nation Artists

Beddy Rays - Week On Repeat

King Stingray - Milkumana

Alice Skye - Everything is Great

Barkaa - King Brown

Jessica Mauboy -Glow

Xavier Rudd - Messages

Yothu Yindi - Treaty

Thelma Plum - Better in Blak

Archie Roach - Took The Children Away

(With Respect) Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu - Wiyathul

Nooky - Bars of Steel

The Kid Laroi - Always Do

Baker Boy (ft. G Flip) - My Mind

Budjerah - Wash My Sorrows Away

Aodan - Butterflies

Operation Amazonia

The French band Gojira is creating a movement to help the Amazonand the indigenous peoples it houses, who have also been victims of the fires and deforestation that have occurred more frequently in recent times (thanks to our ecologically irresponsible and unfriendly government with indigenous peoples).

You can help donating. If you can, please help. This isveryimportant.

Gojira

a-strange-sorcerer:

scorpionmotordemon:

This is so empowering to see proving that despite how hard the churches and Canadian government tried. They failed to “kill the Indian in the child” and that we will continue to flourish in our beautiful culture ✊✊✊ and we will never give up

I don’t like the comments, I am a catholic, I live in the most religious country. No matter what they believe, the Christians have always been not good. Yes there are good people I know but please know the history and what this people have been through. My country is “successfully” rid of our culture and everything, don’t go “don’t blame the ()” because they did, they did all of that and we should not ignore it.

I’m happy the natives still hold on, don’t ignore them, don’t blame it on others, don’t let them become my people who have been rid of our culture and that all what we had is taught as our past and history

Hell, many times we’re told that christianity was a gift in god’s way, and that we should be thankful for it

Gottfried Lindauer (1839-1926), Portrait of Terewai Horomona, 1886, oil on canvas; Royal Collection of the United Kingdom.

Gottfried Lindauer (1839-1926),Tamati Waka Nene, 1890, oil on canvas, 1019 × 842 mm; Auckland Art Gallery.

sipqlq:

by Janna Bryson |The McGill Daily

Demonstrators demand government action, increased awareness during annual march for missing and murdered indigenous women – Image by Ralph Haddad of McGill Daily

MONTREAL – On February 14, over 500 people gathered in the snow at Place Émilie-Gamelin for the annual March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, organized by the Missing Justice Collective. According to organizers’ estimates, it was the biggest march since the collective began organizing it in Montreal in 2010.

The first March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women took place in Vancouver in 1991 after the murder of a First Nations woman. In an interview with The Daily, Bianca Mugyenyi, the Programming and Campaigns Coordinator at the Centre for Gender Advocacy, explained the continuing legacy of the event.

“These marches are meant to symbolize a spirit of women’s resistance, [of] women standing up for themselves – specifically with the goal of being free of violence regardless of race or gender,” said Mugyenyi. “We are trying to generate a public presence, we are trying to generate solidarity, and we want to see less violence in the future.”

According to a 2010 report from the Native Women’s Association’s Sisters in Spirit (SIS) initiative, 582 Indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered, with roughly 75 per cent of those cases estimated to have occurred from the 1990s onward.

Later in 2010, SIS lost its federal funding and was unable to continue its research; however, a similar project was conducted by Maryanne Pearce at the University of Ottawa in 2013. Pearce’s research led to a database that has recorded 3,329 missing and murdered Canadian women, 824 of whom are Indigenous.

This year’s march began with an opening prayer, music from the Buffalo Hat Singers, and motivational words from a few speakers. Maya Rolbin-Ghanie, a member of the Collective, shared with the crowd some of the reasons why she participates in the march.

I march because we lose track of what is urgent and what is not. Our sense of collective urgency is skewed and stunted. Some would have us believe that violence against women is no longer urgent in these parts, or that it is never urgent when measured against more pressing ‘life and death’ issues like war or climate change. I wish that they understood that dealing with any issue in a vacuum makes no sense at all, and will only create more work for all of us.

From 6:45 to 8 p.m., the hundreds of protesters took to the streets of downtown Montreal with chants, banners, and flyers. Attendees participated in the march for a variety of reasons. Stephanie Guico of the Montreal organization Head & Hands felt both personal and professional connections to the event.

“[At Head & Hands] we work partly with First Nations populations and First Nations women offering social legal and medical services,” Guico told The Daily. “Also on a personal level, my experience as a racialized minority in Montreal, and to a certain extent having known people who have been marginalized […] I feel a particular affinity with this cause.”
Some demonstrators, like Hannah Harris-Sutro, sought to show solidarity with the cause from other communities.

“I’m here this year, and especially tonight, because there was a demonstration scheduled in the Village by another collective [tonight],” Harris-Sutro told The Daily. “It felt really important to be here as a queer presence […] because I thought that it was just completely inappropriate [for the other demonstration] to be competing with this march.”

The demonstration ended at Place des Arts with more music from the Buffalo Hat Singers, some closing words, and hot chocolate for the frozen protesters.

Addressing the demonstrators prior to the march, Rolbin-Ghanie encouraged people to think critically and empathetically in the face of social issues. “We need to ask ourselves continually and repeatedly, ‘Am I motivated by love or by fear?’ and then make adjustments accordingly.”