Re-seeding Hope in Life Sustainers
Rematriation of Colonial-Patriarchal Food Ways
Re-storying myself/the human, as an apprentice to life cycles, a scholar of bio-intelligence, practitioner of land-body recalibration will begin and end with seeds.
When we feel what is around, what surrounds the modern madness of wicked realities tackled by technological desperation and political hegemony, we feel land.
A resilient body, experiencing harm – chemical mistreatment, surgical dismembering, attacking attempts of profiting – yet, still providing. Does our collective ontology acknowledge this described sensibility? Sensibility of both sides of the pea: the violence and misjudgment of which we omnivorously comply, and the receptivity of insistent care-filled mothering of nature. Or has the dis-ease of separability obscured our ecological enmeshment and ceased the regenerative turning of time. Have the walls building binary logics divided our sensibility, unable to format relational existence?
…
Examining the interface of un-sustainability and ongoing systemic violence, colonization is defined as the imposition of a sense of separation between man and nature.1. Patriarchal orders instated from the colonial mindset of superiority disseminate through most all social and ecological spheres touched by Western teaching. A clear intersection of these ongoing legacies is embedded in the experiences of native cultures and seeds originating across Turtle Island. A female lead mission of Rematriation safeguards the stories of seeds from which we relearn the centrality of cyclical conduct. Seeds co-inside with the feminine, the powerful creatrix creature, systems of female reproduction of both human and botanical life.
Rematriation “describes an instance where land, air, water, animals, plants, ideas and ways of doing things and living are purposefully returned to their original natural context.”2 Refining meaning to socio-political context, Rematriation restores the “sacred relationships” that honor “matrilineal societies, in opposition of patriarchal violence and dynamics.” 3
As a Vietnamese-Polish-Welsh womb-bearer born in Manhattan, New York to an era of normalized and valourized industrial globalization, in these words of Rematriation, I am speaking as an outsider of lineage. Yet my experiences of fear of systemic violence and un-sustainability motivate alternative ways of being and knowing through which I may meet ontological safety, a space to seed hope.4 In my privilege to prompt and promote academic virtue, I respond to the cries of Earth and make the attempt to ground.
Ground; through the abstract layer of modern methods of management,
Ground; past the fabricated systems of classification and fragmentation that formulate power relations,
Ground; into the actual ground.
A story reviewing the impact of epistemicide, the teachings from seed keepers in matrilineal place-based cultures circumnavigate the legacies of material (geographical, horticultural) and ontological (cultural, spiritual) colonization. The false divide between human selves and land has since permitted grave exploitation, domination, and subjugation. Yet this removal from the natural world is no longer tenable, (nor was it eva!).
Rematriation makes meaning for “cultural sanity and healing”5 through re-connecting to food ways, in practice and integrative conception of land.
The ways of being outside of western modernity explored in this story water life sustenance. Sustained through the generations. Sustained by the way of the women – cooperative life-giving caretakers. Seeds too lead the way on the observable trail craved by the impacts colonization of indigenous food ways and land pedagogies of Turtle Island as guides us now to a rebirthing of relational practices of Rematriation.
Let us move along a (non-linear) timeline from the past, present, and future to feel the cyclical ceremony between relatives, women and seed.
~ THE PAST ~
Women in many traditional societies bear the responsibility of caring for seeds. In the creation story shared by Native peoples of the Great Lake region of North America, the original ancestor, Sky Women, descended onto the back of a turtle carrying with her wild plants from the other world. Singing the world awake, Sky Women birthed a daughter. This Haudenosaunee story centers the process of birth, the life-giving power of female creation. Sky Women’s daughter followed this legacy of reproduction but was sacrificed during labour. From her body sprouted the original foods. Corn, from her breasts, her hands held bean, squash from her bellybutton, potato and sunflower from her legs, tobacco seeded her mind and strawberry in the heart. With these seeds, materialized from the body parts of the original ancestor, the people came into agreement to take care of the seeds, who in turn care for all other living relatives.
The story of Sky Women’s daughter encodes the matrilineal and ecological beginnings of a people, continually met and maintained by seed keeper’s devotion to “safeguarding the cosmological garden.”6 With a sense that “we are linear decedents from seeds”7 the thought that human and nature are separate in a competitive brawl of gain is non-sensical, or patriarchal you could say. This is a story, not to be forced as total physical or metaphysical truth, yet encodes values to engage in reciprocity and care. Rowen White (Mohawk/Kanienkeha:ka) senses the embodiment of this re-membering: “we are bound in reciprocal relationship with seeds that extends past beyond living memory… these agreements between us and the plant kin-dom are imprinted into our cellular memory.”8
Looking to a different historical point, we approach a radical departure from the co-dependent conception of seed and human revealed firstly in the logics that divided domains. Colonial explorers and traders arrived in the Americas in the sixteenth century, caring with them the Book of Genesis, projecting a rigorousness to dominate the natural world, made for man’s taking.9 Dispossession of Indigeneity occurred on the ontological level; the invisible, underlying forces of separatist positioning. This paradigm, foreign to the lands so transformed by its mental inoculation, made tracks onto Turtle Island through Judo-Christian worldviews preached in residential schools. Colonial activity across Turtle Island displaced Native people from their inheritance; land, culture, familial structures, and knowledge systems dismantled by forced removal and enculturation.
The new imperative of dominion, arising from a patriarchal-merchant lineage of thought, skewed human needs from the life needs of the land. Reduction and commodification of nature was cemented circa seventeenth century during the Enlightenment era, taking place oceans away in patriarchal societies, that over time floated and condensed into dense, dense clouds of detached reason. In this trajectory, the human betrayed their “agreements with plants that they would take care of each other.”10 Agri-culture digressed into agri-buisness, then agri-technology.
With food and connection to land as the provisional and cultural sustenance of Native people; the intentional colonization of indigenous food ways took place through violent uprooting. Through the dynamic of colonial-patriarchy, the loss of traditional seeds, and therefore sovereignty, was furthered by industrialization. The use of chemical fertilizers, mechanical technologies, and manufactured patented seeds have insulated a FOOD EMPIRE…
Roots infiltrate shallow,
in monocultural rows of depleted soils.
The land,
under compartmentalized, exploitative management,
has been experiencing death.
From the rejection of cosmological perspectives of foods, the kinship status of seeds is forgotten. Modern-industrial-agriculture establish across North America has somehow normalized a cultural withdrawal from food ways.
In this historical analysis of a past, we are reminded to feel the proximity:
“It has only been a few short generations that we have seen these connections slip away; in the big wheel of time, only a few fleeting moments where we saw ourselves become distracted from the great mysteries by some of the false promises of technology and convenience.”11
“Creation stories they never ended; they continue to unfurl into this moment.”
~ THE PRESENT ~
Today, the dominant narrative is challenged, paradigms are sprouting.
(continue in next publication) x
The dis-ease of separability is a description of colonial separatist logics steered by insatiable desires of authority, control through systems of certainty and entitlement to consume nature at the expense of its life and the life of other human and non-human species. (Facing Human Wrongs. (2021, March). Unlearning Bundle (Unit) 4: Denial of Entanglement. Retrieved from Navigating Paradoxes and Complexities of Social and Global Change: blogs.ubc.ca)
Prechtel, M. (2012). The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive. Berkeley: North Atlatnic Books.
Sororea Te' Land Turst (2019). Rematriation Resource Guide. Oakland. Retrieved from Sogorea Te'Land Trust: https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/what-is-rematriation/
Disclaimer: I do not attempt to decolonize the Western canon and epistemology, as Grosfoguel clarifies that without a lineage of non-western epistemologies assumptions of the meanings of epistemes limit the research (Grosfoguel, 2011). But I do identify an otherwise and experiment with its potential placement.
(Prechtel, 2012)
(White R. , Seed Rematriation, 2018)
(White, A Landscape of Relations, 2022)
(White R. , Seed Rematriation, 2018)
The Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis:
“God created man in his own image…
and God said unto them,
Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,
and subdue it:
and have dominion over the fish of the sea,
and over the fowl of the air
and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Zwicky, 2018)
White, R. (2023). Decoloinzing seeds and the feminine side of things. (G. Rokicka, Interviewer)
White, R. (2013, May 31). New Beginings. Retrieved from Sierra Seeds: sierraseeds.org
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