Indigenous Knowledge
Soil to Soil Podcast Ep. 10: Why Regenerative Fiber Systems Are Rooted in Relationships with Place, with A-Dae Romero-Briones
Host Jess Daniels speaks with Rebecca Burges, founder of the Fibreshed non-profit, and A-Dae Romero-Briones, the Director of Programs for the First Nations Institute and an expert in Indigenous foodways, agriculture, and fibre history. Romero-Briones situates the project of healing our landscapes in ideas of connectedness and place, arguing a need to understand our relationships with place and ecology. She states that fulfilling our obligations to the Land is complicated by the impacts of dispossession. The pair discuss regenerative agriculture, traditional ecological knowledge, and “kincentric ecology.” She explains that in the United States, people have been separated from the natural world, and even the natural world has been divided up and separated; animals are seen as pests to agriculture, which must now be fenced off and protected, instead of part of a larger system. Regenerative agriculture is an attempt to create new systems that contribute to soil health. Burges and Romero-Jones also discuss economic design and its emphasis on competition; Romero-Briones argues that natural systems create balance and reciprocal relationships, and this can show us how to live with one another in more sustainable ways.
Daniels, Jess, host. 2020. “Why Regenerative Fiber Systems Are Rooted in Relationships with Place, with A-Dae Romero-Briones.” Soil to Soil, Ep. 10 (podcast), November 30, 2020. Accessed June 22, 2024. https://fibershed.org/podcast/soil-to-soil-podcast-ep-10-why-regenerative-fiber-systems-are-rooted-in-relationships-with-place-with-a-dae-romero-briones/.
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Place-Based Learning and Knowing: Critical Pedagogies Grounded in Indigeneity
U.S.-based geographer and researcher Jay T. Johnson is engaged in exploring and supporting the cultural survival of Indigenous peoples in New Zealand, the Pacific, and North America. In this paper, he draws on his experience and the work of anthropologists, philosophers, geographers, and critical educators to argue for a better understanding of “place.” He offers John Agnew’s (1987) three main understandings of place: as location, as representing a sense (feelings about a place), and as a setting where everyday life happens. He then suggests two more ways we might conceptualize place: “as a way of understanding, knowing and learning about the world,” and “as the embodied location of everyday struggle for meaning” (830). He advocates for a move away from dualistic and reductionist thinking and encourages meaningful place-making questions: “What happened here? Who was involved? What was it like? Why should it matter?” (831). In the process of erasing Indigenous histories, Johnson argues, Western culture has weakened the meaning of a place and has created instead an abstract empty space. He proposes that education grounded in Indigeneity requires that research initiatives “understand the importance of place within Indigenous” worldviews and ways of knowing (835). Ultimately, he argues that such engagement with place has the potential to repair academia’s tendency to overlook, or simplify, the history, and therefore, the significance of a place or how we might understand “place.”
Johnson, Jay T. 2012. “Place-Based Learning and Knowing: Critical Pedagogies Grounded in Indigeneity.” GeoJournal 77 (6): 829–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-010-9379-1.
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Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship
Salmón explains the concept of kincentric ecology by drawing on examples from the Raramuri culture, to which he belongs. He explains that the term, ‘kincentric ecology’ would be “meaningless” to many Indigenous peoples, even if they live and express its values. He offers that kincentric ecology is “an awareness that life in any environment is viable only when humans view the life surrounding them as kin.” He argues that humans are part of nature and it is the kindred relationships between us and the rest of the natural world that can preserve the ecosystem, and thus human life as well. He illustrates the meaning of kincentric ecology through examples of the Raramuri forest management, harvesting, and otherwise caring for the land. For example, by harvesting plants only from places where they are offered in abundance. Salmón understands history not as a linear, or even as something relegated to the past, but as continuous, cultural, and connected to a land base, which in turn, is connected to the life forms that existed and continue to exist on it. The “cultural practices of living with a place” embody kincentric ecology (1332).
Salmón, Enrique. “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship.” Ecological Applications 10, no. 5 (2000): 1327–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/2641288.
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