Enantiomorphs no more: Indigenous agroecology and the future of food sovereignty

Abstract

First paragraph: I was part of a plenary panel on “Bridge Build­ers” at the 2023 Colorado Food Summit in Denver in December 2023. Echoing a statement I first made at the U.S. Agroecology Summit 2023, I explained how the first “bridge” we are building at The Acequia Institute (TAI) is between Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and so-called Western Science (WS). TAI does this work not to verify and legiti­mize IK by invoking the presumably more rigorous and mathematical methods and materials of WS. TAI enunciates and practices IK through autono­mous place-based food sovereignty initiatives. In this work we have determined how best to inte­grate the methods and materials of selected domains of Western knowledge systems in forms useful for us and the locality. These issues were discussed at the U.S. Agroecology Summit, but in the end they were left largely unresolved. The entire Summit was, as Carmen Cortez and others have rightly observed, plagued by being “Devoid of this spirit of place and people…” (Agroecology Summit ‘Outside Empire’ Subgroup, 2024, p. 2). In my view, it was a gathering fractured by pre-existing and possibly inadvertent and unconscious acts of epistemic violence reminding me of the difference Michael Redclift (1987) observed between top-down environmental managerialism and bottom-up collaborative environmental management. . . .

Keywords

• agroecology
• Indigenous knowledge
• traditional environmental knowledge (TEK)
• food sovereignty
• community-based organizing