Growing intergenerational resilience for Indigenous food sovereignty through home gardening.

Rachael Budowle,Melvin Arthur,Christine Porter

doi:10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.018

Abstract

As a community-based participatory research project designed to promote health and wellbeing, Growing Resilience supports home gardens for 96 primarily Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho families in the Wind River Reservation, located in Wyoming. Through analysis of data from two years of qualitative fieldwork, including stories told by 53 gardeners and members of the project’s community advisory board in talking circles and through our novel sovereign storytelling method, we investigated if and how these participants employ relationships, knowledge, and practices across generations through home gardening. We find that participants describe home gardening within present, past, future, and cross-generational frames, rooted in family relationships and knowledge shared across generations. Our analysis of these themes suggests that gardening provides families a means to transmit resilience across generations or, as we call it here, intergenerational resilience. We conclude by discussing intergenerational resilience as a culturally specific mechanism of social-ecological community resilience that may be particularly relevant in Indigenous movements for food sovereignty.

Highlights

The international peasant movement Via Campesina defines food sovereignty as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Via Campesina, 2007, para. 3)
The generational transmission of resilience extends beyond the immediate historical trauma response and is applicable to Indigenous food sovereignty
Intergenerational resilience is a strength that Indigenous people and communities may draw and build upon, including in the face of historical trauma

Summary

Introduction

The international peasant movement Via Campesina defines food sovereignty as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Via Campesina, 2007, para. 3). This vision of food sovereignty includes gender, labor, and Indigenous rights (McMichael & Porter, 2018). Indigenous food sovereignty requires moving beyond rights to focus on the “cultural responsibilities and relationships that Indigenous peoples have with their environment It requires examining the efforts being made by Indigenous communities to restore these relationships through the revitalization of their Indigenous foods and ecological knowledge systems as they assert control over their own wellbeing” Growing Resilience aims to reduce those disparities, support local food sovereignty leadership, and evaluate health impacts of home gardens using a randomized controlled trial design (Growing Resilience, n.d.; Porter, Wechsler, Naschold, Hime, & Fox, 2019)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion