Enrique Salmón: Ancestral foodways that enrich local landscapes (ep391)
“I came up with the idea of ‘Eating the Landscape’ because I was thinking about our Indigenous ancestral foodways. It’s not just about food. It’s not just about nutrition. ‘Eating the Landscape’ is about this large, interconnected matrix of our relationship to place.”
In this episode, Enrique Salmón, Ph.D. guides us to see Indigenous foodways as parts of an interconnected matrix of our relationship to place. Introducing the concept of “kincentric ecology,” Enrique problematizes one-size-fits-all approaches to caring for the land. He also elaborates on why many Native peoples are opposed to memory banking as a way to preserve Indigenous knowledge.
Having completed his dissertation on how the bioregion of his Rarámuri people of the Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico influences their language and thought, Enrique invites us to understand the layered meanings behind the phrase “Eating the Landscape”—looking at food not just as sources of nourishment but as avenues of growing one’s kinship. Ultimately, as opposed to the doom and gloom perspectives prevalent in mainstream environmentalism in regards to the role of humankind, Enrique leaves us with a calling of recognizing humans as a keystone species—where creation is not only a matter of what came before but an act of relational responsibility.
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About our guest:
Enrique Salmón is the author of Iwígara: The Kinship of Plants and People and Eating The Landscape, a book focused on small-scale Native farmers of the Greater Southwest and their role in maintaining biocultural diversity. With a PhD. in anthropology from Arizona State University, he has been a Scholar in Residence at the Heard Museum and on the Board of Directors of the Society of Ethnobiology. Enrique has published several articles and chapters on Indigenous ethnobotany, agriculture, nutrition, and traditional ecological knowledge, and he teaches American Indian Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Cal State University East Bay. also serving as their Tribal Liaison.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Enrique Salmón
Episode-inspired artwork by Cherie Kwok
Dive deeper:
“Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship,” an article by Enrique Salmón
“I Want the Earth to Know Me as a Friend, ” an article by Enrique Salmón
The Man Made of Words and The Names, books by N. Scott Momaday
Gardening at the Margins: Convivial Labor, Community, and Resistance, a book by Gabriel R. Valle
“Moral Landscapes amidst Changing Landscapes,” an interview with Enrique Salmón on For the Wild
Expand your lenses:
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Enrique Salmón: I'm an Indigenous person. I'm Rarámuri. My people are about 70,000 strong, down in the Mexican state of Chihuahua in what's known as the Barrancas del Cobre, the Copper Canyon area. It's a canyon that's deeper than the Grand Canyon. You can fit three Grand Canyons in it. It's so big. But I spent most of my life, when I was growing up, in Southern California, down by the border, and also in the American Southwest, and back and forth into the Southwestern Mexico as well.
I was raised traditionally with a lot of the plant knowledge that I imagine we're going to be talking about. I didn't realize that it was anything special, when I was growing up. It was just always sort of there. It was kind of, ways of healing that people in my family would employ, because we couldn't afford to go to regular western doctors, and so on.
Kamea Chayne: I appreciate this introduction. To lay the grounds for this conversation, I would love for us to first explore what kincentric ecology means, as that is a foundational part of your, and many other Indigenous worldviews. And more specifically, I would love to hear how kincentric ecology has different, or shared, underlying roots, ways of validating knowledge, or ways of relating to the world, when compared to ecology stemming from western science and environmentalism.
Enrique Salmón: Kincentric ecology is a concept that a friend and I came up with years ago in the late nineties, I suppose, There is another Native friend of mine. His name is Dennis Martinez. And he and I have been going back and forth about trying to figure out how, as Indigenous people, we can more easily explain and reveal how Indigenous peoples look at our relationships to our local ecosystems and landscapes. Because up until that point, nothing that people were writing about and speaking about was really conveying how Native peoples truly relate to these landscapes—our sense of place.
We were bantering back and forth, and I can't remember who said it first, but we mentioned this concept about how we look at the land as a relative. Everything on the land, the animals, the plants, the rocks, the air, the water, everything is a direct relative to us. And not in this metaphorical, metaphysical, sort of way, but truly, we are related to all these things around us, the same way as our human relatives are related to us. It's like they are actually our kin. And that's where this notion of a kincentric ecology, this kincentric relationship to place for Native peoples emerged. Then I published it in an Ecological Society of America article. And Dennis and I also spoke about it at an Ecological Society of America conference about the same time.
At the same time, we also brought up this notion that was pretty much new, still, that for ecosystems, humans are keystone species, or actually used to be, in a lot of ecosystems, keystone species, meaning that we have, for the longest time, played a direct role in the maintenance of our ecosystems through different kinds of management, of using the plants, of pruning the plants, with another word known as coppicing, where you cut the plants down to right at ground level, and then, of course, a lot of people lately, especially where I'm at here in California, have been talking a lot about ancestral California Indian fire management.
And so all these things we did in a sustainable way, for the most part, played a direct role in maintaining the ecosystem.
We are just as important as saguaro cacti are to the Sonoran Desert. We are just as important as redwood trees are to Northern California, and so on.
Dennis and I pursued these ideas. I kept writing about it and publishing about it, and it's taken on more of a life of its own, this notion of kincentricity and kincentric ecology.
At some point, I'd like to expand the article and put together a book about it and try to bring together, around kincentric ecology, examples from different Indigenous communities from North America, where, in the act of their trying to either maintain their ancestral land management practices or revitalize them, they are maintaining and revitalizing their own cultures. They're revitalizing their relationships through their landscapes. They're bringing back their languages as a result through these practices.
When a culture's language is revitalized, then that worldview that influences the land management practice also comes back. As a result, Native peoples can play a direct role in healing and mending some of these things that we have been doing to our landscapes here in North America, especially for the last couple of hundred years. I would love to see that happen, at least see the beginnings of it.
An example of this is when I was speaking with some young folks up on Puget Sound, Skokomish people. And they were talking about bringing back their seagoing canoe traditions. In the process of relearning how to build these canoes, they had to relearn how to collect the proper kind of cedar for the canoes. They had to relearn the ceremony around collecting the cedar. They had to relearn the language that goes with the ritual and ceremony of collecting the different plants required for building these canoes. In the process, over several years, these young people led a sort of revitalization of this entire culture. And so that's what can happen, when we start with something small, like I want to relearn how to build a traditional canoe, and in the process bring back the whole land management practice.
Kamea Chayne: I love the recognition of people as keystone species because it speaks to the importance of our role in supporting and maintaining the health of our biocultural systems. And that stands out to me as really differing from mainstream environmentalism's narratives and views—that humans are, by default, bad, and cause negative impacts for the environment, and therefore we need less human contributions and anthropogenic change, and maybe need to fence off particular areas so they are off limits for people.
The state of keystone species is often seen as indicators of the health of their ecosystems. So maybe this is a broad question and can't be generalized, but I wonder if you think people still are and can be recognized as keystone species today? Is it just that people have fallen out of this role, or are people no longer keystone species, because of the different ways that people relate to the land?
Enrique Salmón: We can be, if a couple of things are changed. I contributed a chapter to this edited book. And what happened is the editors got a bunch of us writers together, for three days, in Crested Butte, in Colorado, to mull over together, our concepts of wilderness and wild. And during the dialogue, at one point I said, in my people's language and also in pretty much every Indigenous language I've ever come across, there's no word for wild or wilderness. So therefore, our worldviews don't perceive ourselves as separate from the natural world. Like with a kincentric approach, we see ourselves as a part of it. We're directly related to it. And so I wrote that chapter focused on that concept.
This notion of wilderness, from the western perspective, implies pieces of the land that, like you said, we are not a part of. It implies areas where we perceive ourselves as not belonging there, as alien to this landscape, and as a result, we stay away from it, or we backpack into wilderness areas here in North America, and as they suggest, we leave only footprints.
Unfortunately, this concept has influenced how the western modern society perceives our relationship to the natural, to the wild, as something that is alien and separate from us. And so it causes modern human beings, for the most part, to ignore our role in maintaining natural systems, so we can just forget about it and let other people take care of it, let those people from the Sierra Club take care of it, or those "environmentalists" take care of it. "It's not my job," a lot of modern people think, to take care of the landscape, of ecosystems.
And so when I said earlier, we can change, we can maybe start to change our language around talking about ecosystems, talking about the land, talking about our own selves as human beings. When we give a name to something, as N. Scott Momaday suggested in his book, The Names, we give it beingness. We give it life. We bring it into the real. Maybe we can change the definition of wild, or stop even using the notion of wilderness, or change the notion of wilderness, where it's a place where humans are actually a part of.
When we are keystone species in a place, that implies that we have a responsibility to maintain that place, that ecosystem, that landscape.
This goes counter to so much of western thinking, because our society is predominantly a rights-based society, where we have a right to do whatever we want to, as long as we're not breaking a law or hurting somebody. So I have a right to buy a big gas-guzzling SUV, as long as I can afford it and not hurting anybody, as opposed to, from an Indigenous perspective, can we change this notion of our relationship to ecosystems, to one of responsibility where my actions, my choices impact things around me, impacts generations 20, 30 years from now? It's my responsibility, therefore, to make sure that my actions and choices don't negatively impact those everything around me and those systems down the road. That's a very Indigenous cultural perspective of responsibility, as opposed to a right to do something.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, definitely. It seems like there are very critical worldview and relational shifts that many of us need to make, in order to support our collective healing. We also need to unpack what it means when people predominantly see "anthropogenic" change as inherently bad, because from my view, every being co-contributes to change around us, so it's more so what types of impact that we're going to have.
From your book, Eating The Landscape, you write, "Most Native people aren’t comfortable with the idea of memory banking or preserving indigenous knowledge. It is perceived as something akin to pickling it." I have never thought of this analogy of how preserving knowledge is like bottling it up and pickling it. But that really resonates. And I would love it if you could expand on the resistance against pickling and preserving Indigenous knowledge, as in, how can people better understand what Indigenous knowledges are and the forms that they take and how they are stewarded and co-created and co-transformed, through this sentiment that knowledge, as seen through the lens of kincentric ecology, has a sort of liveliness that refuses to be contained or calcified?
Enrique Salmón: This is directly connected to how Indigenous peoples largely transfer and reproduce and share our knowledge. It's largely based on what is known as the oral tradition, where knowledge is passed down through the generations, shared with each other, by talking with each other through in ritual, in ceremony, in our origin stories, and sometimes our stories about plants, our knowledge about plants. That's why in the book Iwígara, I tried to include as many stories about the plants as possible, because these stories themselves are examples of things that are alive.
Stories shared through voice are a reflection of a medium that is itself energy and has life. When we speak, we are moving breath. Breath is everything that permeates the realm, the universe. Breath is partly how the concept of Iwígara is defined. Part of the definition of Iwígara is breath, is energy. People who like Star Wars can think of it as the force, it's mana from Eastern traditions, Qi, perhaps. But it's all this shared energy that permeates through everything and everybody. And when we speak, we are moving that energy.
When we speak our traditions, our origin stories, our coyote stories, our knowledge about plants, we are moving and sharing that energy. This is why when this kind of knowledge is written or even just recorded, like in a film or a digital recording, it stops that particular knowledge at that moment in place.
And its life stops at that time. Indigenous oral traditions are constantly in flux. When anthropologists and other people talk about how Native peoples used to do this, how we used to know this stuff—that drives people like me crazy. When I'm teaching my American Indian studies classes, I'm constantly reminding my students, don't talk about us in the past tense. We're still here, we're still transferring our knowledge. We're still constantly updating it.
You bring up the Eating the Landscape book. There's a section in there, where I talk about my mother and my aunts, and so on, getting together to cook a ceremonial meal. And they were constantly debating and arguing over how to best make this certain salsa, this certain kind of food, and so on. That is a part of this living process that I'm talking about. If that were written down in a recipe book that none of my family members ever had access to, there was no recipe books, it would just be this static dead energy, this static dead knowledge. But when the knowledge is passed on and transferred and argued about a few times a year, then that's part of the living knowledge, that's part of its beingness, that's part of its energy being shared.
Part of that also came from when a bunch of my students were meeting with a Hopi Elder, and they were asking him, why don't you just record your knowledge? Because he was telling them that he was the last member of his clan, and when he passed, all of his knowledge would go with him. Because like mine, the Hopi are a matrilineal society. Knowledge can only be passed down through the mother's lineage, and they never had a daughter, and so his knowledge would not be passed down.
My students were asking him, why don't you just record this knowledge somehow? And he said, “Because it would kill it. It needs to be transferred verbally, and it needs to be alive when it's spoken and when it's heard.”
That's where that idea came from, about how for Native peoples, we just really are opposed to storing this knowledge, like a form of pickling.
Kamea Chayne: I've shared several conversations with incredible people in the past including this one now as well which have helped me to see knowledge as alive, as a relation, knowledge as being something that is co-produced with the coming together of the people who steward it, and knowledge as something that—especially when passed through the form of orature—is given more room to enliven and shapeshift with time and place and community, even though western culture might see orature as less credible and less formal and valued.
And so, in conjunction with your remark that Indigenous knowledge is necessarily local, meaning they are collectively diverse, relational, and ever-changing, all of this leads me to question the western values of objectivity, universality, and generalizability across time and place as the indicators of credibility. So I'm curious what you think in regards to what makes it so difficult for western cultures and institutionalized education to be able to grasp and value and honor the complexity of knowledges that cannot be framed or affixed as some timeless truths? I think about the possibilities of deeper desires of domination and mastery maybe playing some roles, but what does this spark for you?
Enrique Salmón: It reminds me of one of my favorite quips or phrases, whatever the word is in English, which isn't my first language, by the way... But when I'm teaching about this very concept to my students, I remind them it's really difficult to be a traditional Apache in Vermont, because the landscape is totally different. I'll never forget the first time I went to New England, because I'm a Southwesterner, if you can imagine the landscape of the Southwest. And I remember going to New England [for] the first time, and feeling this deep unease, because there were too many damn trees. I felt like someone was always sneaking up on me. You can't see anywhere. All you see is just trees.
Native knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, is unique to the culture and that culture's relationship to their landscape.
That relationship includes having observed the plants, the animals, the movements of the stars, the varying seasonal changes over time, for thousands of years, and over that time, developing a kind of practical knowledge which has become sacred, because it works over deep sets of time associated only with that landscape. So imagine being an Ohlone, from where I'm at here in the Bay Area, everything of what it means to be Ohlone, everything connected to that particular identity and set of knowledge only works with the landscape and the seasons and even the star alignments and the tides, in this case, here in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can't transfer that knowledge to Texas.
You can't change or transfer even to another coastal system, say, the Chesapeake Bay, because it's whole different ecosystems. When western scholars try to overgeneralize about "Native knowledge," in general, they're really doing a disservice to the complexity and sophistication of what is required for a particular culture in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas to have adapt[ed] to that place over centuries, thousands of years.
Consider how long Indigenous peoples have been observing and mapping this landscape in North America. If we take a conservative view, Native peoples have been in North America for 40,000 years. Some of us, including myself, push those numbers even further back to sometimes 100,000 years—but that's another debate, another conversation.
Compare even then, 40,000 years to just maybe, a little over 200 years that Western biologists and botanists and so on have been studying the North American landscape. It's quite the difference, with regards to the set of knowledge required to operate and understand fully what happens in a particular landscape. And western scientists are just starting to recognize the complexity and sophistication of American Indian knowledge with regards to ecosystems, land management, even in our some of our stories. They're finding references to past geologic events, references to volcanic eruptions, references to full movements of rivers where they've actually changed course, as a result of a geologic event.
Part of this disparity is that western science has been too arrogant to recognize that their approach to understanding and explaining natural systems is just another kind of philosophy.
People like Newton and people of his era, didn't refer to themselves as scientists. They referred to themselves as natural philosophers. So the point here is that Western science is just a kind of philosophy. And when it abuts against an Indigenous way of explaining how natural systems operate, their arrogance doesn't allow them to see the different ways that Indigenous peoples have classified and categorized over thousands of years these natural systems and also the differences in how we've transferred and shared that knowledge.
Kamea Chayne: This really puts into question what people value as knowledge altogether or see as "formal education."
What I've been drawn to sit with is how the dominant western culture seems to more so validate things after they’ve become compartmentalized and formalized. For instance, how food and agriculture is seen as separate from medicine, is separate from the private family life, is separate from public governance which is outside and on top of, is separate from embedded community learnings, separate from structured education, separate from spirituality and mythology, separate from scientific knowledge and truths, separate from human societies and cultures, separated from nature and “the wild”—which are concepts perpetuated by some of the most established environmental organizations seen as the leaders of the field.
I have a hard time articulating this, to be honest, but I hope you can sense what I'm trying to get at. It almost feels like what has been considered advancement or civilizing of society has just been a sort of rearrangement and siloing and simplification of the entanglements and complexities of a community, in conjunction with the reduction of what wealth means—into more monolithic and symbolic currencies.
This could go in so many directions but what do you feel called to share as you think about these dominant structures of compartmentalization, when you apply your lens of kincentric ecology?
Enrique Salmón: This western approach, it's about reductionism.
Constantly, the western scientific approach to studying the natural world has been to reduce it to its smallest molecular level.
And as a result, it's led to dangerous developments, where we have genetically modified organisms that we're calling food, where we're growing corn that has genetic manipulation from fish. Where in the world did they come up with this idea that we can somehow genetically mix fish genes with corn genes, so that those corn genes can better fight against parasitic and fungal attacks on it. That's a result of this reductionist approach to studying the natural world.
And this studying is always directly connected to commodification, which is another part of the problem, where western science is diverted away from the pure study of natural systems so that we can better understand it, to now where it's always constantly directly connected to profit. And when that happens, everything becomes a commodity, resulting in genetically modified organisms, because we can make a profit off of it, meaning Monsanto and Archer-Daniels-Midland, and so on. But it's dangerous, because if we, right now, in the United States, want to buy some corn at the grocery store, we're really just given a choice of one or two varieties of genetically modified corn.
What happens and is going to happen sooner or later, and I'll give you an example in a second about how this sort of thing has happened, is that because our systems are constantly changing and climate change is increasing this change, at some point there's going to be some kind of parasite or fungus or something else is going to attack those two varieties of genetically modified corn and western food systems are not going to have any kind of way to deal with this. People are going to go hungry. Just look what's already happening with the war in Ukraine and the cut in the movement of grains out of Ukraine. It's causing even more hunger around the world.
So by way of an example, there's an old friend of mine, some of your listeners may have heard of him, Gary Nabhan, who has written a lot about these same subjects as well. And in his younger days, he had collected a bunch of heirloom sunflower seeds from down of the bottom of the Grand Canyon with the Havasupai people, not knowing that a couple of years later there was going to be this fungus attacking sunflower seeds across the United States. Fortunately, Gary had this variety of sunflower seeds that he had collected [from] the bottom of the Grand Canyon and different labs were able to cross the Havasupai sunflower seeds with the dominant sunflower seeds that are grown across the country and saved the crops.
When we reduce to the smallest molecular level, we, as a result, ignore the large diversity around us. When we ignore the diversity around us, it becomes stagnant, it shrivels up, it disappears, and we further reduce our own web of life that we are so dependent on.
Modern technology is rapidly causing this to happen, even within societies, where we have so many people right now thinking that when they look at their little phones, thinking they're engaging in digital communities. They're actually disengaging from the real world, from the real natural. And as a result, we're killing all the natural systems around us because we're ignoring it.
We need to engage in natural systems. We need to not reduce, but to expand our awareness of everything going on around us, because then we are better and more connected to it. We build and expand relationships and our own sense of self, when we can do this. I think I might have diverted from your original question, but that's where my mind took me.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. I always appreciate these tangents that my guests take me, so I appreciate this. And yeah, we understand diversity lends itself to resilience, so it's really important to note how the process of commodification for mass markets directly drives processes of homogenization in all forms. These realizations are really important as we consider how we might heal our communities and planetary bodies beyond simple practices and simple fixes.
And to weave Eating the Landscape back in here, you've noted that for your peoples, eating is not just about nourishment but it means so much more. Can you elaborate more on what Eating the Landscape really signifies and refers to, and how all of these layered meanings of eating and food show how deeply embedded and entangled your identities are with your values, relationalities, spiritualities, stories, and the land?
Enrique Salmón: I came up with the idea of Eating the Landscape because I was thinking about our Indigenous ancestral foodways. It's not just about food. It's not just about nutrition. Eating the Landscape is about this large, interconnected matrix of our relationship to place.
Before that, the idea had come about when I was a program officer for an international foundation. Part of my role as a Native person was to make contact with Indigenous communities in different parts of the world and find ways to get funding to them so that they can actually continue their ancestral land management practices. But the funding was limited. So the executive director asked the four of us program officers, indigenous to different parts of the world, to focus our funding. And for me, I was thinking and realized, we all have to eat. So I'm going to focus my funding on ancestral foodways that enhanced the diversity of local landscapes, and that's where this notion of Eating the Landscape came from.
Because as Indigenous peoples, getting our ancestral foods through either hunting, gathering or agriculture, or fishing, it only works and it's only sustainable when we do this in a way that actually enhances the diversity of the places where we're hunting and growing foods and fishing, and so on. If you look at my people's agricultural fields, they would not look anything like you would see in Iowa or Indiana or something, with straight rows of only corn. There are actually several species of useful plants growing in and around the corn field, or the bean fields, or the squashes or the chilies and that sort of thing.
We look at an agricultural field as a place that is full of diverse life, that reflects our relationship to that particular landscape, that actually returns nutrients to the soils, so that we don't have to, after the harvest, fill the soils with petroleum-based chemicals and that sort of thing and fertilizers.
But the idea expands upon that. It's not just about the practical. When we grow these particular foods, we are also our growing our relatives. We're growing plants and so on that are our aunts and uncles. When we eat these foods, we are also ingesting our own identities. Because our stories are directly connected to the landscapes where we are growing these foods, where we are harvesting, wild-crafting, catching fish, going out hunting. These are these larger, multi-level understanding of our identity connected to this particular place and our responsibility towards maintaining it, which connects to ritual and ceremony.
Our ceremonies, our rituals are not only about honoring our relationship to place and recognizing it. Our ceremonies are also about re-creating the places.
For most Indigenous origins, we do not believe that the creation happened once. We believe that we played a direct role in the creation sometimes, or we came afterward, and part of our responsibility is to make sure the creation continues.
It's a never-ending process. And so it's part of our responsibility, through the growing of food, through the connection of these foods and these plants and animals to our own identities, reflected in our ceremonies, in our regalia, in our language, to make sure that the creation continues. It's our responsibility to continue this, because if we don't, then the creation will stop, and then everything will stop.
That's what Eating the Landscape is about. When I eat, in my own garden here, where I live, when I grow different kinds of beans and chilies and corn from there, my people have been growing for who knows how many thousands of years, I am continuing all of that process, all of that creation.
Kamea Chayne: Especially in the recent years, regenerative agriculture has been portrayed as the solution to climate change, in large part I think because climate change has been framed first and foremost as a problem of an imbalance of atmospheric carbon levels, and so farming techniques focused on soil carbon sequestration might seem like just the fix that we need.
I personally have contentions with these practices being called regenerative, because I find them to be myopic especially when a lot of times, they are practiced in ways that perpetuate social injustices and power differentials even when they are marketed as fair-trade. But that aside, I respect that of course, a lot of these practices are vital for enriching agrobiodiversity, and many even attribute the roots of regenerative agriculture to Indigenous farming. Though keeping in mind an awareness of how entangled Indigenous food systems are with all other aspects of life, governance, and community, what concerns have you noted as the limitations of regenerative agriculture in being able to heal our planet?
Enrique Salmón: It's another form of this gentrified western appropriation of Indigenous ways of doing things, of Indigenous knowing.
When we call these things permaculture or regenerative agriculture, it's ignoring the origins of the Native, Indigenous practices that have been going on for thousands of years, and like we see a lot in these kinds of new-age appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, they pick and choose what they decide is going to work best for them. I'll never forget Caleen Sisk, she's a Wintu Elder from up here by Mount Shasta in Northern California, talking about how Westerners, Americans in particular, feel like it's so easy just to pick and choose whatever spirituality they want to appropriate, and it's like a kid walking down the cereal aisle of a grocery store, and there's only one box, of Wintu, she said.
My point here is that when I read these articles about regenerative agriculture, a lot of times when they do admit to their appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, they oftentimes will bring up this notion of the Three Sisters way of planting, where you will plant corn on a little hill surrounded with planting of beans, and then around that, plant some squash seeds, and they'll symbiotically support each other through the growing season. Well, that is an appropriation from Northeast Native peoples' ways of growing corn and beans and squash. And like we talked about earlier, it's unique to just that landscape. It only works in the Northeast or only works best in the Northeast.
You can kind of make it work in other parts of the world or other parts of the country, but you really have to work at it. Doesn't work in California, doesn't work in the Southwest, because the land, the ecosystem, the rain patterns and so on, and even the movement of the sun is so different.
And so, yes, I appreciate what regenerative agriculturalists are trying to do. I just wish that they would better understand how they've appropriated Indigenous knowledge and tailor what they're trying to do to their unique landscapes, whether it's in the Pacific Northwest or in Texas or in North Carolina, and fully and better understand the Indigenous practices in those specific places as opposed to trying to have this one sort of western frame of what they think is Indigenous agriculture.
Kamea Chayne: And this again, goes back to recognizing the limitations of universalizing knowledge and coming up with these sorts of one size fits all prescriptive practices for how to best caretake for every diverse landscape.
To bring in some lessons of inspiration for our closing, in Iwígara, you highlight and honor 80 plants revered by the Indigenous peoples of North America for their nourishing, healing, and symbolic qualities. Having engaged with so many different medicine peoples, farmers, ethnobotanists and so on from different cultures, what has been some of the most enriching and common-denominator learnings you've had, while honoring such a vast diversity of the communities and their land bases that they come from?
Enrique Salmón: Part of that is recognizing my own limitations. I'm a trained ethnobotanist and grew up with all sorts of plant knowledge, but there's only so many things I can learn. I never forget when I was communicating with Judy Dow, she's Abenaki, from up in Vermont and I was asking her to give me a list of her culture's, and her own personal favorite plants, and so on, that I can include in the book, and to expand on that, to tell me how she uses these plants and so on, and she included blueberries.
And like most people, I think of blueberries as those great little dark blue fruits that are so tasty when they're ripe, and that's their most important use. But she just really opened my eyes to the possibilities of blueberries, that they're more than just a sweet, sort of dessert-like fruit. They're a medicine, they can be used for basket weaving, they play an important role for vascular health. And, she just laid out this long list of how her and her people relate to and understand blueberries.
In the process of compiling just those 80 plants, my knowledge of plants just multiplied many, many times. I would love to do another book and just see how much more my knowledge of plants can multiply. There is this is never-ending set of knowledge that is held in the libraries of cultures around the world that we can have access to if we just allow ourselves, and ask more questions and expand our community of plant knowledge.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Enrique Salmón: There's a book that I recently reviewed for the Western Historical Quarterly a few months ago. It's called Gardening at the Margins by Gabriel R. Valle, and it's really just a rewriting of his Ph.D. dissertation, but it was just incredible because he spent years with mostly Latinx gardeners, in this one predominantly Latinx neighborhood in San Jose, California, and following their building of this really unique community of gardeners in San Jose. And in the process of speaking with these folks and gardening with them and sharing food from their gardens and so on and watching them interact, they have created this amazing community form of resilience and resistance to the established agricultural and food system. And it's just an incredible, enlightening, and inspiring book to read.
For the longest time, when I find myself stuck with how to explain something, I find myself always going back to one of my favorite writers, N. Scott Momaday, he's Kiowa, and Pueblo writer. And particularly, there's two books: The Man Made of Words, and The Names.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or a practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Enrique Salmón: As I've gotten older, I've gotten better at saying no. It's so easy to just be saying yes to every kind of invitation to do get involved in a project or who knows what. And you find yourself getting pulled in all these different directions and you get to the point where you could just say no. Because the more you can say no, and focus on just the things that are most important to you, then you remember your own needs and your own self.
At the same time, I practice Qi Gong every day, I'm always in my garden, even at this time of year, messing around in my garden. Just earlier, before doing this interview, because I wanted to center my own thoughts, I pulled out my classical guitar. I've been playing classical guitar since I was six years old and just played for about 45 minutes. And also, I've been playing cello for quite a while. Those two things, I just can turn off everything around me and focus on just the sound of the instruments.
Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Enrique Salmón: It's my students. I teach at California State University, East Bay. Our campus resides on traditional ancestral Chochenyo Ohlone land. It's the most diverse campus in the country. My students represent, who knows how many different cultures. At the same time, because it's part of the California State University system, so many of our students are low-income, many of them are first-generation college students. Almost all of them work either full-time or part-time and have responsibilities that can easily pull them away from their studies. Yet they are determined to get their degrees. And I am determined to help them do that. And do I see myself in them. I see the struggle. I see the determination.
And I am there with them when they achieve their goals, and we can celebrate together when they finish their degree, even when they finish a class, when they finish a semester successfully. I just draw so much inspiration from them. And, as a teacher, I'm not just passing on knowledge to them, we're sharing knowledge together, and that just keeps me going. I'm in my sixties and not ready to retire yet. As long as my students can keep up helping me engage with them, and we do this as a team.
The other thing that inspires me are Native communities. I'm the Tribal Liaison and NAGPRA coordinator for our campus, and so I am in constant contact with Native communities here in California who are increasing their efforts to revitalize their ancestral practices, and I get to be in the middle of helping them do that. So those two things, just keep me going, and give me a reason to wake up every morning.
Kamea Chayne: Enrique, it's been a huge honor to speak with you here. And we're so grateful that you said yes to this interview. So thank you so much for this nourishing conversation and all you've inspired in us. What final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?
Enrique Salmón: Find as many ways to engage in actual human-nature-based community. Expand your definition of community beyond people to include all the natural workings around you. And in that process, during that process, take time to stop, to pause. And be aware of that large community around you. Because we're killing it, we are ignoring it.
// This conversation was recorded at the start of 2023. This episode’s supporting researcher and transcript editor is Tammy Gan; the audio editor is Scott Donnell; and the host and producer is Kamea Chayne. //
