Reviving Native Food Sovereignty
These projects and many others like them are quite literally weaving traditional knowledge, culture, and Native values more deeply into these villages and communities across Southeast Alaska.
These projects and many others like them are quite literally weaving traditional knowledge, culture, and Native values more deeply into these villages and communities across Southeast Alaska.
This world is not a billiard ball table where we advance by banging into one another. It is a world of relationships, constantly changing, everything in some way feeding everything else. It is a world of mutuality and reciprocity.
Words can’t fully express our current predicament. We need other tools and other ways of making sense of the situation we now find ourselves in.
The third thing doesn’t require dreaming, but waking up. It’s more like a property of physics, the round Earth that triangulates everything. It’s also alive, meaning it responds to our efforts and brings its own powers, processes, pathways and beneficial relationships to the project.
We need to act where we can most effectively act now, in our communities and bioregions, cities and states. We’re only going to make it working together, building the future in place.
When it comes to building community resilience—or building community at all—we have our work cut out for us.
Farming is a science but it is also an art. There is no one book, one philosophy, one six-week course which can teach that.
We have the option to utterly divest, and build CARE based opportunities outside the current system. Which is what CARE-HOME-FARM is. It’s a model, which we hope to test and explore in real life, for an inter-sufficient community.
From a society-wide perspective, a new consciousness a involves major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly.
The Spinsters hope to both beautify the downtown core and bring wool manufacturing back to Bellingham. They’re not the only ones looking forward to the transformation. Downtown Bellingham Partnership’s Jenny Hagemann says Spincycle’s move is “an exciting chapter” in the neighbourhood’s “continued revitalization.”
We can farm like an ecosystem, we can hold onto the rainwater and disperse it when needed. And, with trees nearby, they do much of the work for us. Why aren’t we paying attention?
How do we try to compensate for our destruction of so much of Earth’s life? By curbing ourselves? By deep societal change? By bending heaven and Earth to protect what is left, before it is too late?