Sacred Indigenous Agriculture
God is Red, part three - with Taylor Keen
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Trigger warning—this conversation has the potential to make you mad. It also has the potential to wake you up. It carries great medicine, if you let it. If you are uninterested in such an affair, move on. If you are open and your heart is willing to see the many-selves dancing about, take a gander.
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This yarn with my friend Taylor Keen explores the intersection / divergence of indigenous wisdom and modern agriculture, emphasizing the sacredness of food and the importance of traditional practices. We discuss the historical context of agriculture, the impact of corporate practices on indigenous methods, and the need for a deeper understanding and spirituality of the relationship between humans and Earth.
Taylor highlights the significance of rituals in agriculture and the memory embedded in seeds, advocating for a return to indigenous practices to foster a more sustainable future and more…
Learn more about Taylor HERE.
Transcript
Taylor Keen: 2:20
Even though cows are an invasive species, they kill everything that might injure their cows wolves, coyotes, they hate bison. Whatever we can do to raise awareness and understanding, then I'll do it.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 2:38
But it's interesting you bring this up because something that I wanted to finish talking with you about on our yarn about agriculture and such, we ended with Bigfoot. Check out my shirt. Oh, you got Bigfoot riding a bison on your shirt. I can't thank you enough for wearing that. That is amazing. I can't remember.
Taylor Keen: 3:01
How did you get that? We're on social media? That's amazing. That that is amazing. I can't. Where did you get that? We're on social media. They've got a bunch of ridiculous ones riding an alligator, uh, golfing, I don't know. But just sorry to interrupt, you were just getting serious, brother, forgive me no, no forgiveness needed.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 3:19
I, I, um, agriculture to some degree is the like science of getting. We were talking about that a little bit last week. You know the necessity of harvests and uh, and to me, the american ranching system and american farming system, you know, with this cattle species and fence lines, and you know barbed wire, uh, bisecting the landscape, it seems to be the opposite of that, and so the idea of bison again roaming the plains, roaming their lands as their lands, I think it's petrifying, I think to a lot of Western farmers. So maybe there's something there that we can talk about. I think that's also the entrance in the Bigfoot conversation about I don't know the land sending spirits to protect itself from further colonization or further genocide or further abuse or over harvesting.
Taylor Keen: 4:12
It's a serious topic. I know it was probably in the late 90s, early 2000s. There was an effort known as the Buffalo Commons, I believe. I don't know a ton about it other than the fact that there was a number of preservation enthusiasts and bison ranchers who were trying to basically create a swath up to the Great Plains to bring back the bison ranchers, who were trying to basically create a swath up to the great plains to bring back the bison, and it was met with vitriol opposition from cattle owners and probably farmers too, and it got squashed down.
Taylor Keen: 4:56
I'm in contact with one of the scientists. I've flirted with writing a book about bison, or at least a chapter. Maybe I can work that into this book I'm working on. But it's such an amazing species it was engineered for the Great Plains, the relationship that bison have with the land and species that bison have with the land and species, even the difference between its hoofs and a cow's hoofs and what they eat.
Taylor Keen: 5:35
America was transformed to accommodate European cattle basically, and we hold nothing more romantic than the Wild West and cowboys and Indians and most of it's pretty much a misnomer. I've got a friend who does historical interpretation and one of Angel's characters is El Baquero is El Vaquero and you know, that's all of the cowboys of Western literature and cinema are all white and the reality is there were lots of Hispanic cowboys, some Indian cowboys and plenty of black cowboys, but the time period was really only fairly young, that you know. These huge cattle herds were moved vast distances. I'm trying to remember it was something like only 20 years and maybe 40 at tops, because that introduction of the railroad and that changed all of that. But yet it's lionized in American history and that changed all of that but yet it's lionized in American history.
Taylor Keen: 6:51
We have an obsession with bringing European stuff into this country. I always get in trouble with cattlemen when I say this, but cows are an invasive species and we've done a lot to transform the landscape, and not not in great ways and now there's a handful of people, as we were discussing last time here, trying to bring all this back and they view themselves as saviors. But um, yet they still ignore the American Indian and indigenous peoples when we're right here and we can tell them how to do it, but they ignore us.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 7:27
I was reading this essay, um, uh, I forget the author's name, I apologize. She's a Dakota um, a friend of mine, lakota friend um, cherokee ancestry but citizen of the Lakotas today. He edited a book, an anthology of essays that's titled Unlearning the Language of Conquest I believe is the title, and I was flipping through it last night, dreaming about today's conversations with you, and I read this really interesting essay about the Laura Ingalls Wilder series book series, little House on the Prairie, and in it the Dakota author. She was writing about the anti-Indian and ideological hegemony. The anti-Indian and ideological hegemony. I think it's really true. You're getting to this, she's getting it to it via literature, but it's just so firmly established in the American mythology and in the American heavily white psyche that I mean we can go so many different directions, and I want to, but we have an open problem to solve. Right, we have a land that's open that could feed people. We have a land that's open that could be settled. We have a land that's open that we can pioneer our way through it. Right, we have a land that's open that we can drive cattle through it and obviously we're going to close that with the railroads and so that's our own self and destructive place limit. I see that too, but it's so hard to see it right, even before our very eyes. I can go to a regenerative conference, and maybe this is the way this conversation starts to play with, because, well, let me, I'll finish the sentence and I'll get to the reason I wanted to bring this up you to these conferences, read these regenerative ag books.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 9:28
You talk about regenerative ag, sustainable agriculture, better agriculture for the planet, for your plate, for the human body, etc. And there's lots of vested interest in this and the climate change and the climate chaos, movements and global distribution. Green energy movements also fit, I think, nestled within there. Or maybe the agriculture is nestled within the green energy movement. I don't care, I don't really care. Neither do I know which one is accurate, but they're both there together, they're twins in the same space and, like you're saying, it's preached as a better option, the best option. You know, saviors, climate saviors, grass farmers, all of these things.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 10:05
And it's so interesting to me is when you, when you take a step back and you actually open your eyes, like, like I talked about earlier, the Buffalo Hunter Hunter, stephen Graham Jones's book. It's a horror book, it's it's probably one of my favorite books, if not my favorite book I've ever read Um, but it does such a good job at opening your eyes. I think that's the power of story too. I think Stephen Graham Jones is an excellent storyteller, on top of just the potent truth of the book. But you begin to open your eyes and you start to see these anti-Indian educational opportunities into our culture, that we could look at a whole slew of invasive species that eradicate the quote-unquote native ones, and then we progress forward with those invasive species as fast as you possibly can and we call it good and we call it holistic, and we call it righteous and we call it saving the world. And I think there's a lot there, because one thing that I want to push you on and I want to push you on, and I want to push it because I'm curious about these things and I have to think about it in my own life, but around us, right?
Daniel Firth Griffith: 11:13
So we've so eradicated the predators of our region, especially here in the East. So we have no apex predators, so we have a bunch of scavenging predators trying to fill the role of the apex predator and they are not apex predators and they struggle with that, right. So we've eradicated bobcats and mountain lions and now we just have black bears and maggots and a few wandering coyotes that the local farmers didn't shoot, and so we have our trophic chain of predation. That's all askew. And then we have pesticides and herbicides and fungicides and genetically modified corn and soy and wheat and all of these horribly wonderful, you know, foods that are saving the world and feeding the world.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 11:51
But I've chemically toxic, toxified, if that's a word, the landscape to a point where our watersheds are polluted, our rivers are actually poisonous, the land can't grow a darn thing. But it's also the only food, because we've also cut down all the hardwood forests and replaced it with loblolly plantation pines. Right, just rotated monocrops of pine trees instead of this. It's not all the wild game, really only can eat soy, corn and herbicide, you know. And then what do you do? That? That's really what I want to get into is is now what? Like we have what we have? How do we move forward? Does that question make sense? It does um.
Taylor Keen: 12:34
But I'm wanting to go um back to the beginning of where this ideology comes from. I watched a? Um ideology comes from. I watched a? Um I'll be morbidly but fascinating um documentary on PBS about uh L Frank Baum, um writer of uh wonderful wizard of Oz. Do you know much about him, his life in the West? I don't. No, he erroneously felt that Aberdeen, south Dakota, was going to be the great center of the emerging West and was quite an interesting entrepreneur and tried several things, kind of a curiosity and oddity shop up there in aberdeen and um, as the economy ebbed and flowed, it destroyed his business. But he was also um, he had a newspaper and in this tumultuous period of right around 1890, 1891, america was dealing with the responses of the Fetterman massacre and then Custer's last stand and killing of Sitting Sitting Bull and the Massacre at Wounded Knee. And I'm quoting from what he wrote.
Taylor Keen: 14:14
Baum argued that the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation of the few remaining Indians? Why not annihilation? He described the remaining Native Americans as a pack of whining cures who lick the hand that smites them and claimed that, given the inevitability of white supremacy and the conquest of the continent.
Taylor Keen: 14:48
Extermination was preferable to allowing Native peoples to live in subjugation. Here's the big one Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth and this future safely and this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. I mean that pretty much dominates and he he found a lot of um, power and fervor from the, basically the populist sentiments which everyone can understand today in America, and he was seen to channel into that. It's just a vitriol for indigenous peoples and somehow that sentiment is still with us. And that's why I bring this up, because we have to face the monster in the room, which is that sentiment is still here.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 16:09
I've never received so many communications around a podcast, let alone a podcast series, as I have with this one. I have so many people reaching out to me in a positive way and I have a few reaching out to me in a negative way, and it's interesting because the only negative comments that are being made about your words, about these thoughts, about these conversations and dialogues is all around what you're, what you're discussing here, that, uh, either, you know, indigenous peoples had their chance. What are we supposed to do now? Um, there's better options moving forward.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 16:47
I know a bunch of indigenous peoples, you know, or res indians, as this one person called it, and, uh, I don't want them telling me what to do or something like this. And and I it's so interesting to me because what I hear from your quote I hear many things being talked about for the next two hours, if you like, but one of the fundamental assertions of that quote is the lack of humanity, in my opinion, both of the speaker but also of those that are being spoken about, right, these untamable savages. They're not human beings.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 17:22
Right, there's no nuance, there's no complexity, there's no humanity there, there's no nuance, there's no complexity, there's no humanity there, there's no life, there's no creative spirit. It's linear. You know, and you see that same linear problem, I think, in the agricultural community. You see it in this, you see it in American history, in this ancient beauty writ right over in American mythology, beautiful beauty right over in american mythology. Um, there's this, have you, have you watched? Uh, there's a, there's a new. Uh, I believe it was done by bbc, I think it's just called american buffalo. It's a documentary ken burns directed.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 17:57
It, yeah, came out two years ago maybe. Um, there's a quote in there, um, I forget. I forget who I mean it was. It's like a primary source quote. You know, some Western pioneer, if you will writing, I think it was in the 1880s, so right at the end of the Buffalo Hunter era, if I got my timeline right, and he was looking over a vast plain. I don't know in which area great plains, he's looking over a vast plain, I don't know in which area, great plains, he's looking over a vast plain. And he said how much more beautiful if all of the Indians and all the buffalo were gone and there was a little white church on top of that bluff and a little white schoolhouse on that bluff and they just pictured these little white buildings all over the place and the plain was gone. You know he talked about pleasure and peace and religion and everything else that went along with the little white school houses. And I just, I just keep getting drawn to the quote the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the in the little little house in the Prairie.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 19:06
I think it's in book one and the first book, ma um, you know, every time an Indian comes around, the dog growls. You know so. You have all this subconscious retraining and training, you know into the reader that, uh, that there's an indigenous problem, the Indian problem. And then Ma says that the only good Indian is a dead Indian. And we see this as American literature. This is the Western American literature, Little House on the Prairie. And then right in there, from the beginning, is the only good Indian is a dead Indian. And I think the same thing is true in the American psyche and the American story in terms of agriculture and ecology. The only good agriculture is European agriculture, the only good ecology is the settler ecology, if you will, our own views of the thing.
Taylor Keen: 19:56
I'm going to try to answer that in somewhat of a roundabout way. In our first podcast I touched on as I'm pooling my thoughts together, trying to extend my philosophical writings about living red, thinking red. The part I've written is growing reds, the story of Sacred Seed and all the projects there. The story of Sacred Seed and all the projects there. But it all centered around my frustration with the settler colonial paradigm and it, just like the self-congratulatory regenerative ag movement, bothers you in a way that it's hard to explain. The settler-colonizer paradigm bothers me in the same way as well, because it doesn't have an answer other than, um, some cataclysmic. Somehow the Indians are going to get the land back magically, um, or just um, pointing the finger at the white man. And what good does that do? That doesn't do any of us any good, and so it just. It creates an us and them, and that's part of the problem. Um, when I'm mulling over the sentiments of your listener, who knows some res indians and doesn't want to be bossed around by them, or whatever, I assume it's a he, um, it's, it's that mentality of us versus them that gets us into this mess and we have to get beyond that somehow. And um, because my first reaction is I don't want some white redneck telling me what to do either. That's not the answer. The answer is inward, it's spiritual and it's trying to see what the truth is, and I think both you and I try to do that in our own ways. Sometimes it may feel feeble, maybe it is sometimes, but part of the work that I I know that I'm supposed to be doing is doing good research and telling the truth. I just was writing about how big ag came to be the way that it is today and it took a very long time was helping people share seeds to patenting plants in the 1930s and successive Supreme Court rulings Over a lot of those interpretations. Most of the big changes happened in 1980 and just locked down the ability of big companies to control all the germoplasm. And that's the world that we're in. At some point it's going to take individuals like yourself and your family and trying to live with the land and trying to live with the land, teaching our children how to forage for as much of their diet as possible, understanding what it means to harvest animals. I think that's part of the answer. No-transcript find our relationship to the world that surround us. I think I mentioned this before, but John Trudell was one of my mentors. I wish I would have got to have met him. I got to meet a lot of my other indigenous heroes and thinkers, but you know, for him being indigenous was just that understanding one's relationship to their surroundings. And that can be in an urban environment, that can be out in nature, it can be anywhere in between. And I think that's the beginning of this, of the spiritual journey going inward is to be at peace.
Taylor Keen: 24:51
I often bristle at the mentality of people who live on either coast because they think it's superior or they'll dismiss the Midwest as a flyover state. And why? Because they can't see the beauty of the mother. I tell everyone you know everywhere is beautiful. You just have to be able to see it. And I look at the lands here in Nebraska and some of my students at the university from other places. Well, they lament the hard winters and the hot summers. There's nowhere pretty here to hike and that kind of stuff. And I tell them if you want to come out with me, I'll show you beautiful places and we'll work for it.
Taylor Keen: 25:49
But this is the land of my ancestors and there's something very powerful about that. Like we said before, it's not a mere two or 300 years, which is the vast majority of American heritage on this continent. It goes back thousands of years, and there's something to be learned from 15,000 years plus of indigenous environmentalism. And if you can't see that, then that's, that's a problem with you. It's science to embrace that, just that notion, but it takes humility to do that, and there's something about our human ego that wants to be superior, to be right, and I don't want to fall into that trap as an indigenous thinker either.
Taylor Keen: 26:44
All I'm saying is that, yes, we did live in a harmony that's different than the harmony of today, and at some point I'm going to look painfully into how much climate evolution has happened, happen, and I say that in the nice way, meaning how many species of birds were here at the point of contact.
Taylor Keen: 27:17
How many trees were here that are not here anymore, how many millions of acres of prairie are now gone. People would just take that in to think about that, the world in which we used to live. If you just internalize that and to see the beauty that could have a world where your job was to survive and thrive, I'd have to chase after the dollar and your paycheck and everything else which we all have to do. I don't claim to have any real answers, but I know just for myself that we have to survive whatever calamity comes at us and the only true way to do that is going inward and finding a peace a peace with real, with our own mistakes as a people and trying to somehow figure out how to not have those happen again. It's like little questions to me. What did we learn from the lessons of the tough teacher of the Dust Bowl? Did we?
Daniel Firth Griffith: 28:53
I think this is a little bit crazy, to say a little bit divisive, and I don't mean it to be such, but the American ethos is very good there. When you study the history of the early American West, all the way through the late American West, so the early pioneers, all the way through the cowboys that you discuss, you see this ethos, this very singular understanding of the linear progress of time. Where you land, you farm, you abuse, you rape, you leave, you land, you farm, you abuse, you rape, you leave, and we keep leaving and leaving, and leaving and leaving, always going, of course, west. And to me, because there's a lot of ways we can look at that, because I think the idea of regenerative agriculture, the idea of the green movement, if we can generalize it to such, is the opposite of that right that we can actually be good stewards of the land, that we can not destroy a place, we can do all of these things so that we can improve the soil, health and improve the biodiversity, etc. And so on the one side you have mankind, a particular type of mankind, destroying inevitably, and then the other side, you have a type of mankind again only a type that is saying that we need to heal. But both of these come from the understanding and I want to get back to bigfoot with this come from the understanding that humankind I to get back to Bigfoot with this come from the understanding that humankind, I'm not going to let this go. We have to talk about Bigfoot.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 30:12
Both of these ideas either humankind destroying earth or humankind saving earth, unequivocally, and that's the important point, both of these two viewpoints, these philosophies, these waves of thinking, these mental mores come from, I think, the assumption that humankind has power over earth, whereas when I think, the assumption that humankind has power over earth, whereas when I think about living red, when I think about God is red, it's the opposite. It's not that man isn't important, right, because we've talked about that, the teaching that you showed with your hands. We have the plant kingdom, then the animal kingdom, and then you have man down here, and when man goes up top, it's topsy-turvy, and that's the problem of settler, colonialism and stewardship and everything else, this kingly dominion over earth. But mankind controlling earth for good or ill, seems to be the exact same narrative, just with different tools or different intentions, but the result is still the same. So when, when I'm thinking living red, god is red thinking red being red, growing red to me it's about more being and relationship than actual measurable results and those ancient teachings.
Taylor Keen: 31:30
Who knows how long ago the ancestors of the Odawas developed that paradigm? But it's not putting ourselves on the top and that's very, very difficult for humanity to subsume themselves. And I think it's out of a fear of not surviving, maybe, but it doesn't have to be that way. Um, but it doesn't have to be that way. There's certainly something around the ethos of, you know, kingship and dominion over the land that is rooted in fear, and we have to get beyond that fear, fear. Going back to the quote of the Lakota chief, luther Standing Bear, that you read no-transcript, and she said many things to me, including the line about green movement ignoring 15,000 years of indigenous environmentalism. Her answer to the debate about, you know, dominion versus stewardship, she, I can see her doing it. She would just dismiss the whole drama between that with the wave of her hand and her answer. Answer seems very simplistic, but the more that I think about it, the more powerful it is. Instead of trying to you know, you know, coddle our egos with terms of dominion or even stewardship, which is, I would put that in the camp of green and regenerative and sustainable. It's still got the savior mentality to it and therefore has a problem she talks about. I believe the language was citizen, participant of the earth, and so it takes a whole different mindset because the participant is just someone who's there, you're being with one's surroundings. And, jane, the way that I interpret it. Maybe now I'm adding my own onto her thoughts, but to me we have to become citizens of the mother. It needs to be that sort of nation state mentality, but all of this together, not against one another. But I would push beyond just this, the citizen aspect of it. It needs to be spiritual and, in my opinion, anything sort of anything short of religious devotion to Mother Earth. That's the main lesson that Indigenous peoples can share and try to get people to understand, but most people don't understand it. I'll say this over and over again Unless we love this planet like we love our own mother, it's not going to be enough. This planet like we love our own mother, it's not going to be enough. I'm starting to get my own mind around what my feelings are for it. But quit trying to control everything or worried about the apocalypse.
Taylor Keen: 35:38
I don't agree with either side. Um, I think we've talked a little bit about my friend charles Mann, and he's written a number of worthwhile books 1491, 1493. The Wizard and the Prophet discusses basically the ecological movement, the early 1900s and Borlaug and other scientists who ultimately, you know, took the scientific approach. And I went in thinking I was going to come out on the side of ecology and basically I came out not believing either side because we've had doomsday climatologists saying that we're going to destroy everything and yet we're still here. It's going back to what John Trudell says at our worst we'll burn the skin of the mother, but the mother will live on. The paradigm that humans are the saviors of. It is just as dangerous. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. But I don't think we're going to find the right answers unless we just learn how to be with where we're at, the fine beauty in all the places.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 37:07
Today. It's interesting. Today is the first. I did it today. It's interesting. Today is the the first. The first berries popped up today and my daughter is so mad that I have this podcast with you, um, because she just, she just wants to go and run, to run to the land picking berries, blackberries and uh, blackberries, blackberries, yeah and uh, she's been watching them.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 37:31
Oh my gosh, she's been watching these berries slowly go from you know nothing to flowers, to little green buds, to big red berries. Now they're finally black. And uh, we were. We started harvesting them this morning after we did our little thing, and I overheard her. She was uh, uh. I don't know if I should share this or not, but I'll. I'll start and see how it feels. But she started picking them and underneath her breath I heard her. Every time she picked she was saying thank you, thank you Bush, thank you, thank you Bush. And she just kept talking to herself. You know, very, it wasn't, it wasn't anything public, it was just.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 38:06
And then we're in the middle of tanning a bunch of hides, leathers, and we sometimes use brain, but right now we're playing with cambium. So bark, certain barks, carries of certain trees, certain leaves, certain nuts, certain flowers, they all carry different tannic acids, which is what tanning is from. And I was harvesting some bark from a tree today and she was the same daughter was with us, with me, and I turned around and I was carrying this bucket of bark, shavings away like the inner cambial, the vascular layer of the bark and I was carrying a bucket of it away and I turned around. She took a piece of bark and she put it in her mouth from the tree and chewed on it. And it's so interesting, she has such a palate, she has such a palate, she has such a familiarity with the thing that she then turned around. She didn't talk about what she did with the tree, but she turned around and she took the bark out of her mouth and she said this is good, this is, this is good. And I was like what are you talking about? And she goes this, this is really bitter and it dried my mouth out. It's going to be good. And she, she understands that when a tree is really flowing and has good tannic acid you know good for tanning hides that you can taste it. You can taste the medicine in your mouth and it makes you feel in a certain way. And she had language for it.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 39:16
And I see such a contradiction between our modes of agriculture and there's an inevitability there to plant and to reap. You know a good farmer plants and reaps what he sows. But it seems always the opposite to me when we're harvesting berries or wild foraging for foods, or harvesting bark for tanning hides or something. There's always a particular limit that your soul, that your spirit reaches, long before the thing is gone, long before it's eradicated, or long before you've harvested too much or something, I don't know. There's always a limit.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 39:47
In agriculture, in American forestry, in the stewardship mindset, to some degree it's the eradication of limits, right. So, right now, in the carbon space, we're trying to see how much carbon we can sequester in the soil, and we're really petrified of there being a limit to the amount that we can sequester in the soil. Right now, in the soil building space, in the soil organic matter aquia solution of soil organic matter space we're trying to see how much soil organic matter we can build in as little amount of time as possible so that we can sequester carbon, so that we can be more drought tolerant, so we can have deeper and more nourishing root systems that our plants, plants that we eat, or plants that cows eat, that we then eat the cows of. And so again it's this how fast can we move, how much can we build in this short amount of time? The essence of limit growth. How much limitless growth can we accrue? Can we surge past?
Taylor Keen: 40:33
Yeah, just like we've been discussing. I think that's also part of the problem. It even goes outside of stewardship towards panic and thinking that capturing carbon is is the only answer. That just it's way too linear. A couple of a couple of thoughts.
Taylor Keen: 40:57
And Carl Barnes lived out in the panhandle of Oklahoma and I came across his legacy through a group called Braiding the Sacred. It's an indigenous federation of seed keepers and I had the opportunity to catch up with a friend from several years ago now. His name is Alt Toops and he's an agronomist and he had met Carl Barnes I should probably have been in the mid to late 1990s. He was a fairly new agronomist back then and Carl had studied agriculture at Oklahoma State. He became aware of this massive collection because I got to see it with my own eyes. I think we may have talked about this, but he'd kept over 1,000 to 1,500 different seed varieties and experimented with hybrids and corn. But I was really glad I got to catch up with Al because he was given the collection from Carl Barnes as he was getting near the end of his life. But I'd forgotten about one aspect of it, as Carl was getting near the end of his life after his wife passed away and he was going to be soon to follow and suffered from dementia as well. Eventually there was some sort of new age woman who came and began to take some of his seed bank away. And I hear that kind of stuff and I'm like why, why, why would you do that? And she saw some sort of spiritual power from it. Fortunately, eventually she returned it to indigenous peoples, but after quite a while and a lot of kicking and screaming, I think. But the legacy of keeping all those seeds is a part of the answer. We live in such a monocrop economy now that there's almost no way out of it. We've discussed subsidies for corn and sugar. It's an absolute waste of money and props up an industry that subsidizes gasoline and feeds cows things they're not supposed to be eating Fast cycle. So the seed preservation and multiplicity of seeds is one of the answers.
Taylor Keen: 43:41
I know the other thing that I think we were talking about offline, about the American Grange system. I learned about that through my dear friend, sister, fellow author, janet Wolter, and I called her up a couple of days ago after our conversation and asked her about the Grange system and how much of it is still there for your listeners, the, the grain system goes back to the early 1800s and it was sort of a fraternal sorority organization that was around a lot of rural farmers, a collective cooperative of sorts, where they would build these big buildings where they would store their grains and involve the veneration and adoration of goddesses, the ultimate one being Demeter, and it seems to be somewhat masonic in its origins because they had degrees and they were put on by these communities and there was a lot of fanfare around the threshing of the corn, which made harvest a ceremony and divided up the sacred masculine and feminine. And I was asking Janet how much of the system is still left and she said some of the buildings are still there. And some of the buildings are still there. And there was a group up in Minnesota that were trying to get back to the roots of the Grange system because Christianity had crept into the mythos and sort of taken over all the degrees. And there was a group of them who were trying to find all the older degrees, including the final one which was about Demeter, and she said that they found out where it was and went to the group that had it and some people had gone through that degree and it used to be about Demeter and now it was all about Jesus and Christianity and they asked to get back the original copy and the sentiment was if you ever ask about it again, we're going to destroy it.
Taylor Keen: 46:04
But I still think something like that is what we need to bring back in American farming. I would love to participate in trying to explore what that was. I'd love to go visit some of the grain systems, because they are still there. We really found a near religious understanding of between ourselves and agriculture and the roots of it. Yeah, I mean it all corn, rice and wheat um or altered by the human hand Some say by the hand of God, uh, somewhere around 10,000 years ago all around the world and transformed everything. There's interpretations about, uh, you know what was the um output of the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, and that they had to toil with the soil, and some say that part of that had to do with wheat. But we need to develop some type of spiritual and religious connection to that, to the land again, and we need to grow our own stuff and bring back all these different hybrids and find out what's most nutritious and eat what the mother provides at the time that she provides it. There's a lot to be learned from that.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 47:17
You know, I think about so much work being done in the green agriculture space, trying to take these modern systems and make them a little bit less painful, just with better ingredients, but not actually diminishing the, the problematic foundation for how they've been built, or maybe why they've been built. I'll let this train stop yelling at me. It's funny. This train is the only thing out here that makes noise, comes like twice a day. I always joke with people. It's the only thing that tells me that the world is spitting, or at least other people are spinning on it.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 47:59
Yeah, it's homely for me now. It's unfortunate it just transports coal and wood chips for energy.
Taylor Keen: 48:07
But oh, one thing I was going to mention that I gleaned from my conversations with my friend Al Toopes as an agronomist. I think he was so taken by the work of Carl Barnes and he took Carl's legacy very seriously and made sure that those seeds were transferred to the right hands with this group Braiding the Sacred, and their purpose is to rematriate a lot of those seeds back to the tribes from where they originally came, and we were sending pictures back and forth. I was telling him about in my search for trying to return indigenous seeds to the Omaha and to the land we call Nebraska. Out of Carl's collection came half an era of Omaha rainbow flint which I had discovered in my research from anthropological writings and was very excited to find it and began to grow it again here. And who knows how old that seed was, the fact that it had germinated so well, I was shocked because they were just kept in glass jars in Carl's house for a long time and they need cold storage to typically last long. They need cold storage to typically last long. But out of that came to what alan formed me of what carl called mother corn, original eight rows. And if you keep on breeding good, robust, old seeds, then corn's DNA will yield older varieties and I've seen that the Pawnees up here in Nebraska, deb Echo Hawk, she, has been working to preserve a lot of their seeds and I know that they had some, some of the old stock and got it to grow again up in Nebraska.
Taylor Keen: 50:06
It wouldn't grow in Oklahoma after they were removed down to a reservation there. So they kept them for over 100 years and then when they had the chance to get a little bit of land back in Nebraska and began to come back up here and plant their stuff and they had not been able to retain a lot of their varieties. They had not been able to retain a lot of their varieties but the ones that they did have. They have a spotted eagle corn variety and some other ones. But my point is I don't remember how many years later, 10 years later they noticed that some individual kernels began to pop back up in some of the other varieties, some of the other varieties, and they were able to isolate those seeds and they were the seeds of the type of corn they used to have but had lost. To quote Carl Barnes, the seed remembers. So the there were varieties of sweet corn within there. They had some really pretty. I would call them Robin egg. I don't know what they call them, but they're just a beautiful type of colored corn that came out of there too, and so we have a lot to learn from that wisdom of old seeds.
Taylor Keen: 51:16
We instead spent all of our time trying to genetically modify them to yield more or faster, or again back to the urgency. But after I, I texted al some pictures of the, the omaha red variety that I was able to reintroduce to our people, my clan or keepers of the sacred red corn, and I made a promise to my elders and the clan that I would try to return the omaha red corn, which we now have again. It's a beautiful, translucent. Whenever it's still wet, they look like rubies.
Taylor Keen: 51:57
And Al and I got talking about soil health as an agronomist and he's trained to think about such things. But he looks at the system and he says you know we're going about this all incorrectly. You know we're putting all of our energy into what's above the ground fertilizers, genetic enhancers when if we really just tried to grow the soil, it would all turn out much better, and I've never seen anything like this. He texted me a picture of a singular corn plant that was reported back to him. I can't remember who he works for, but it's, you know, soil education, trying to convince farmers that there's better ways to do things. And he would not call himself a regenerative ag person, he's just a soil scientist.
Taylor Keen: 52:53
But as some of these farmers began to work on soil health, he sent me a picture of a singular corn plant that had 13 ears on it. That came from good soil. You're lucky to get two or three on most plants, and I counted them. I saw the picture. There's 13 ears of corn on it and he said this is what happens when farmers work on soil health, rather than what comes out of the top. And it makes me wonder what's possible if we can do that. Get back to this. It's not just about sequestering carbon, it's about the deep systems that live within there. And how do we grow that without urgency and without haste? Go back to natural systems. Just plant lots of different plants.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 53:40
It's that simple in my opinion, we're out there in this field, so much of what we do is I don't mean to keep saying the word linear, but when a calf is born, it's linear, right, if it's a bull calf, it's born, you rip its nuts off, you separate it from its mom, you raise it up for about 18 months maybe 24 if you're really a good regenerative farmer and you send it off to process and you know it gets separated from the herd and it's transported on the road and trailers that go clank and boom and boom and clank at 80 miles an hour and then it sits in a concrete, windowless stall for 12, 18 hours so that its bladder is empty and its gut is empty, and then it gets put into a guillotine and slammed on the head with a hammer or maybe some sort of other structure, and that's the story. And you're like this is a good story and it's it's not. There's no crying, you know. There's no rejoicing, there's no anticipation, there's no consent. I think that's a whole other conversation.
Taylor Keen: 54:31
Thinking about your comments on the harvest, and I think that's terribly important. My thoughts were we've got a lot of things turned around the wrong way. We've lost the true meaning of the indigenous celebration of harvest that we call Thanksgiving. It's an appropriated story to make somebody feel better about taking of land and life away from tribes in New England part of the American myth to somehow make it honorable. But Thanksgiving should be every day, as you were talking about being outside with your family and harvesting blackberries, I mean, maybe that is the answer.
Taylor Keen: 55:11
I've done a lot of thinking about the rise of agriculture and many cultures and how the rise in agriculture changed how we thought about myth and gods and goddesses, because it wasn't until the rise of agriculture, whether that's Europe or Asia or America, it's only when you needed the seed to be sacred that we come up with the sacred feminine and venerate her, whether that's Mother Corn in the Americas or Demeter. And it's only when you need water that you develop the power of thunder through thunderbirds or underwater serpents, and we're lacking all of that again, and that's what I want to bring back is we have to have stories that are important about the life-giving powers of the mother, whether those are put together in forms of myth. I know that's what we're going to talk about next time. I'm very excited about that. Maybe this conversation, this is the segue towards some of that next week I'm just thinking out loud.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 56:21
Yeah.
Taylor Keen: 56:22
But anything short of that is not enough. It needs to be sacred, it needs to be a part of every day. I mean, your children are the seventh generation For indigenous peoples. That are the ones that are going to lead our tribal nations to stand tall again. The non-indigenous populations, they're the ones who are going to be ready to hear it. I'm sure every generation says this, but I've given up on the adults. I put all the hope into them for the seventh generation, because if you teach them, which you all are, then they're getting it. She's telling the plant, the blackberry bush. Thank you, tasting the flesh of the tree to know what is good for it was uh scary and then life-changing.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 57:14
Today we were out there doing some stuff and uh, I was with our two oldest so they're six and no seven and six a daughter and a son and uh, a wasp came out of nowhere and stung my son's esophagus right here and it started to swell and he's kind of screaming and falls down. And our seven-year-old the same one I've been talking about all day, she starts looking around and she sees some plantain plantago major and she runs over to it and she just takes a handful, she puts it in her mouth, she masticates it Nobody told her to do this, you know and then she takes it out of her mouth, this masticated green mush of plantago major leaves, and she shoves it on his neck and she holds it there and then she goes thank you, plantain, thank you for growing here. Plantago major, it, it, it. It sucks out the wasp venom from a sting, walked around with a band-aid on his neck, all you know, all morning with green masticated spit covered. Oh yeah, no, he's fine, he, he's perfectly fine. All the swelling is gone.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 58:30
It's just what a world we could live in and a world of abundance, if you know what I mean if the relationship was there and I think to some degree, agriculture allows us to not have that relationship. I think a lot of people in agriculture I see this all the time. There's plenty of books written on it Quoto Conference you're going to hear this book about. I think agriculture wants to believe that it is a good version of itself when the relationship is there, and I think that's true, but not in the way that people speak about it.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 58:56
I think agriculture to some degree is the creation of gods that are safe and secure and when we're safe and secure, we don't actually have to rely on each other. I think it's the reason that, like the grand system is going to struggle to ever find hope again in its rebirth I mean not among people like you and myself, but among the masses, because we don't actually have to rely on each other. We have this safe and secure pedestal that we can stand on and that pedestal looks like Walmart and Target in some places. It looks like personal wealth and personal racial privilege and others, and it comes in many different forms and flavors. But to have a need and then to have a relationship with those that could fill that need to me is the definition of health, but it only comes in time, and I think that's again where the agriculture and the climate chaos saving ethos goes really wrong. It requires time, intention, it requires openness, humility like you've been saying podcast over podcast the lack of ego. If you're egotistical, you have all the answers. You don't need plantain.
Taylor Keen: 59:59
Kill your ego, save the man, yeah, and find Bigfoot. We're going to talk about Bigfoot next time more.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 1:00:07
I look forward to that, I look forward to that, I look forward to that.
Taylor Keen: 1:00:13
We're doing important work here, I think, if not just for you and me, hopefully for others. It's good for me.