It’s time for us to re-Indigenize agriculture
Native ecologist Melissa K. Nelson believes we are, collectively, at a critical spiritual crossroads spoken about in an ancient Anishinaabe prophecy. The teachings tell of prophets who came to the Anishinaabe people with seven chronological predictions, referred to as “fires.” The first six prophecies have come true, and many Anishinaabe people say that humanity is now in the “time of the Seventh Fire,” a pivotal era that determines the future of our world. We now have a decision to make: will we continue down the scorched path of destruction and greed, or find our way back to the green, fertile path that honors the sacredness of life?
If we want to choose the path of healing and abundance, then we need to transform many of our systems — including the incredibly harmful and unjust industrial agriculture system that dominates the globe.
“Agriculture is such an important global issue because we all need to eat,” said Nelson, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, and longtime director of The Cultural Conservancy. “We all love food, and we need to honor regenerative agriculture that is giving back to the Earth, not just always taking from the Earth.”
Regenerative agriculture is typically understood to be farming and ranching in ways that build soil health, increase biodiversity, recycle carbon dioxide, improve water quality, and more. It’s a growing movement that many Native Americans are saying is a positive step — as long as it’s not steeped in colonialism.
When we talk about regenerative agriculture, “we really need to appreciate the fact that it’s just exploring Indigenous agriculture again,” said Kelsey Ducheneaux, Natural Resource Director of the Intertribal Agriculture Council.
Native Americans have worked in partnership with the land for thousands of years — even after colonizers ripped them from their ancestral lands, murdered millions of life-sustaining bison, stole their carefully stewarded seeds, and violently forced them to assimilate into Western culture. Yet even though Native Americans and Indigenous peoples from around the world are foundational to regenerative agriculture, their knowledge and contributions are often neglected or blatantly ignored in academia, decision-making and media.
Indigenous knowledge and people “should have been guiding the conversation from day one, but we’re in a country where history likes to repeat itself, and that typically means that we’re going to leave behind the minorities that deserve the respect for having already known the solution,” said Ducheneaux, who is a fourth-generation rancher on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation and owner of DX Beef.
Nelson said she values all farmers, but “it’s frustrating that we see our Indigenous knowledge of agriculture erased and marginalized and invisible. … This whole overemphasis on regenerative, sustainable agriculture without mentioning Indigenous peoples is just wrong.”
It’s time to recenter regenerative agriculture around Indigenous peoples, values and solutions. Otherwise, it’ll just end up being another colonial system that isn’t as environmentally damaging as the one before it, but likely just as oppressive to the communities that are its backbone. We can’t just replace certain farming and ranching practices with more sustainable practices and pat ourselves on the back; real change will require a complete reset of the colonial, extractive mindset plaguing this country and the economic system rewarding it.
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Shaking off this colonial mindset requires us to understand the role of humans within Earth’s systems.
“When we think about the Indigenous food systems that truly stewarded and evolved alongside of this landscape, we have to value the fact that we knew humans were a part of that system. We referred to components of nature with kinship, which teaches us we are just as much a part of nature as the sky,” Ducheneaux said.
In a time when we are facing climate change, a pandemic and other complex global issues, it’s vital that we humans renew our relationship with the land, water and other beings. This is a relationship that colonialism, with its tenets of ownership and separateness, has damaged or severed altogether. For instance, seeds are commonly viewed in colonial cultures as commodities, devoid of any connection to the people caring for them. But, as Nelson said, “seeds are not just dead, objective pieces of nature that we can exploit. They’re actually living beings and relatives that give us life.”
Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes beautifully in her book “Braiding Sweetgrass” about how humans are important members of Earth’s ecological systems. We are not outside of nature; we are an active part of it.
Within this interconnected mindset, it’s easier to recognize how corrupt our dominant agriculture practices are. Year after year, the industrial system incentivizes farmers and ranchers to plant the same few genetically modified commodity crops, till the soil to oblivion, douse fields with fertilizers and pesticides, and raise animals in disturbing conditions.
Industrial agriculture is beleaguered with human rights issues and negative health outcomes. It’s also a leading cause of climate change, which will claim many more lives in the near future.
On top of all that, industrial farming is not profitable. Since the mid-1990s, farm debt in the U.S. has been steadily rising year after year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As of 2020, U.S. farmers are collectively more than 435 billion dollars in debt.
Industrial agriculture doesn’t make sense on any level — unless you are one of the few entities reaping short-term profits from it.
As the Executive Director of the Intertribal Agriculture Council, Zach Ducheneaux (Kelsey Ducheneaux’s dad) is dedicated to pushing for systemic change, particularly in financing. He said that agricultural transformation “[isn’t] possible under the current commodified system” in which finance entities “extract capital at a ridiculously fast rate.”
“If we don’t address the broken [agriculture] finance system in this country, we’re going to continue to have the same results and regenerative agriculture is going to go nowhere,” he said.
To fundamentally change this relationship between farmers and financiers, the Intertribal Agriculture Council established a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) called Akiptan, a Lakota word meaning “together, in a joint effort, cooperatively.” As a financial partner for Native farmers and ranchers looking for a long-term investment into their regenerative operations, Akiptan allows producers to step outside of the industrial agriculture system. (Learn more about how Akiptan works in a separate interview Zach Ducheneaux did with LIFT.)
Akiptan is one of countless Indigenous-led solutions that are guiding us down that prophesied green path. Indigenous peoples are stewarding and rematriating sacred seeds; kickstarting community-focused kitchens; tending the wild; leading regenerative farms and ranches; working toward food sovereignty; and advocating for radical change to heal the violence inflicted by colonial, capitalist systems.
To transform our food system into something survivable, we must “recognize and honor the legacy of Indigenous farming and the sophisticated science of Indigenous agriculture, as well as elevate Native farmers as heroes and sheroes,” Nelson said. We must understand what’s going on in our food system. We must work together on intergenerational solutions that truly get to the root of our problems — or, to go even deeper, the “soil of our problems,” as “Farmer Rishi” Kumar said on the Green Dreamer podcast.
It’s going to be a long journey, and we have to do it together.
