Healing Grounds 1

     The first couple parts of this book dive straight into some of the largest core problems this class covers within food justice, sovereignty, climate, and addressing past discrimination tactics in agriculture. Carlisle tells us that none of them alone are enough, and that specifically addressing past discriminations is a part of both sovereignty and even mitigating climate change. 

        Carlisle describes to us the saddening story between settlers and natives, and specifically gets into the bits related to agriculture. She says that indigenous peoples who lived along the prairies were not mere spectators, but maintainers, overseers. They were able to form a relationship with the nonhuman parts of the prairie that enabled them to know exactly when and where to do "x" or "y" like burning, rotating, harvesting, etc. all without the use of modern machines and excess inputs. Instead, they mostly used fire and buffalo. It's described that buffalo show traits that may prove them to be better for agriculture than cattle. They can resist harsh weather better, defend themselves against predators better, and are actually active in maintaining their own environment which in turn aids biodiversity.

    Unfortunately, along came the settlers who apparently saw sustainable well being as a threat and decimated their way of life. Whether or not they saw their way of life as a threat or not, I don't know, but what is true is that they did try to destroy their way of life by literally killing the backbone of it, Buffalo, as well as the people themselves sometimes. When the indigenous peoples were willing to negotiate or surrender, they were boxed into a plot of land and forced to abandoned their ways due to it being almost impossible now. 

    Carlisle mentions now that groups such as Blackfeet have attempted to reintroduce buffalo to restart their way of living. She mentions as well that settler farmers, beginning in the late 1900s, started to see that what they were doing was not sustainable, and that regenerative practices were better for the land. She notes this as good, but also insufficient as it does not address the deep relationship with the land that indigenous peoples had. 

    Nowadays, I do not foresee majority of American farmers and ranchers garnering as deep relationships with the land as indigenous peoples. Some definitely could, and should, but I would assume most farmers are doing it because they need money or the family has been farming for generations, not because they love the land and feeding others. I'm sure many do like the fact that they feed others and many likely love the land, but I would assume most would leave if they had enough of those dollars saved up, and I wouldn't blame them since modern agricultural practices tend to leave farmers with depression at rates wickedly higher than the national average for other working Americans. If we could actually adopt some hybrid agricultural system that involves connections to the land and animals, as well as is on a scale large enough to feed the world, and does not involve degrading inputs, I imagine the depression rate in farmers would not only go down, but it would go negative, leaving more farmers happier than the rest of us. I believe someone in a reading we read earlier this semester, indigenous to somewhere in Central or South America said that their relatives told the settlers that if the settlers did what their people did, they would all live long, happy lives.