(By Christina Stucker-Gassi, Healthy Food & Farms Program Manager & Sidney Fellows, Program Specialist)
The purpose of this project is to support the rich and complex relationships between the native plant movement and Indigenous knowledge-ways.
Various tribal communities today are adapting and strengthening cultural practices that involve native flora. These practices have historically, and continue to be, impeded by colonial dispossession which has created an issue of tribal access to the native flora that is traditionally used for food, ceremony, and various other cultural practices. Often, traditional food/medicine harvesting areas are hard to access, due to practices such as land privatization and industrialization, in addition to being located off of Indigenous reservations. Environmental degradation through conventional agriculture, industrial contamination, and climate change are among the factors that tribal communities face as they adapt and strengthen their ancestral human-plant interactions.
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Photo: Magic Mana corn ready to be shelled, or removed from the cob
(By Christina Stucker-Gassi, NCAP, and IORC Agriculture & Food Team)
Food access is a cornerstone social justice issue of our lifetime. In 2020 organizers with the Idaho Organization of Resource Councils (IORC), Irene Ruiz and Samantha Guerrero, helped create the Idaho Immigrant Resource Alliance (IIRA) to bring emergency aid to the Idaho farm worker and immigrant community. These communities were left without access to resources like funds, social services, and information due to lack of translated materials when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Idaho. Many living in food apartheids couldn’t access nutritious food despite being a critical member of the food production system. Under IIRA, Project Milpa was created to source & grow non genetically modified, organic, and culturally relevant food to feed Idaho’s Latinx community, most of whom are of Mexican descent and have been significantly impacted by the pandemic.
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