On Indigenous People's Day and National Farmers Day: Building an Indigenous Future
Today remains a good day to be Indigenous, and it's a heavy weight too. Yesterday, on Indigenous Peoples' Day and National Farmers Day we covered our 96 x 30' high tunnel expanding our food production capacity, harvested heart medicine, and held a lot of grief for our Wabanaki communities' losses in the present day and historically too.
With our hearts carrying deep sorrow, we orient from it towards continuing to dream and create what our people need from the gifts that Niweskok's collective of Wabanaki folks carry-- restored food systems and nature-based economies based in mesitte-ketalanapemnawak (all of our relations).
Wabanaki peoples have actively nurtured these lands & waters towards their abundance for 15,000 years. We cultivated vast food forests and nourishing fisheries across our homelands. So called Maine was an ecologically interdependent system, teeming with dynamic life! Colonial settlers were unable to distinguish our intentional management of the lands from the "wilderness"; however, the abundance of the land through presence of grasslands underneath massive mature oaks, blueberry barrens, caribou "yards", ease of moving across the land were the result of what is now generalized as agroforestry practices. Cultural burns were a critical management tool, conducted from a place of humility, responsibility and nurturance. Plants and trees bearing medicines, fruits and nuts we selected for disease resistance and quality of the fruit--this was tree crop management. Wabanaki caretaking of our forests has been disrupted and invisibilized since colonization. Many of our woodlands held undermanaged, choked with dense immature trees or managed for timber, where natural cycles of regeneration are stifled.
We are grateful to our ancestors' legacy, which guides us in what comes next in Wabanaki lifeways. The health of the region might be measured by bird flocks again blackening the sky as they move through. May we open further into what is possible when we move in ways that nurture connection, belonging, and balance amongst us all.
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