Providing ancestrally-rooted workshops, skillshares and conversations seeking to help redefine what it means to nourish ourselves and our people as folks of color in America. It is about the recipes, methods of harvest, the cycle of the seasons, and holidays. It is identity.”- Hartman Deetz
Cultural reclaiming is a nigh-impossible thing for so many of us. As we are continuously distanced from our peoples, our customs, our lands and our autonomy, it becomes increasingly harder for us to define ourselves outside of the hegemonic "melting pot" of oppression that exists in America. Our stories become children's books we can't buy, our food become fine dining we can't afford to eat, our ancestral, deeply important, hard-fought for knowledge becomes a how-to guide for every hipster who wants to "eat local". We have been "environmentally friendly" long before it was necessary to name the obvious. Our people, Black and Brown and Asian and Indigenous, have understood for centuries that the Earth is our most important resource in the revolution, and that she must be protected at all costs. Right now especially, with these oppressive, violent powers at a peak, our independence and survival is intrinsically connected to our relationship with the Earth. Make no mistake; without tapping into Her resources in a sustainable, respectful, symbiotic manner, we have no hope of breaking free of the systemic structures that seek to oppress us. Our forced dependence on the Food Industrial Complex and this exploitative capitalist system are part and parcel of what makes us vulnerable to white supremacy, and the strength of the Earth is vital to breaking free of these chains. Much of this strength is rooted in food independence. As we continue to dismantle these systems, we must grow stronger in the ways we nourish ourselves and our families (both chosen and otherwise). These workshops and skillshares look to the wisdom of our specific and collective ancestry, held up by thousands of years of deep relationships with the world around us. Ways that the land provides for us without exploitation. Look to the groundedness; the responsibility they feel to our planet and our people, and the ways in which that love is translated through hands in soil, toes in mud, concrete relationship building with each other and the forces that nourish our existence on this planet. This is the way we cultivate our relationship with the World; the way we have been passing down information since before we can remember; learning to love the Earth costs absolutely nothing. But this information (and our cultural ways of disseminating it) have been stripped from so many of us, over and over again. Time and time again, we fail to understand the ways in which our survival is forever contingent on that of the grass we stand on, the trees we eat from, the ocean that surrounds us on all sides. As we fight for our families and our freedom, we must also fight for our food. What are we if not the food we eat and the hands that taught us to make it? The hands that taught those hands? the earth that bore us and all we need? These workshops and skillshares hope to ensure our own continued self-reliance and independence from food hegemony by way of cultural food knowledge. Passing down ways to grow, forage, harvest, and make medicine from the abundance of regional flora and fauna that exists around us. I want to do all I can to remind and reteach the ways that we, even in the concrete jungles, can access our own physical, mental and cultural sustenance using our own regional and indigenous resources.
