Community | November 25, 2009 | 8 comments

Thanking indigenous peoples for the food we eat

source: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_19672.cfm

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JanforGore
This Thanksgiving as you sit down to your feasts, remember the indigenous farmers of our world whose long traditions of cultivation and caring for the earth have brought forth the fruits of their labor and love for this planet for all of us to benefit from.

Then make a pledge that you will fight to preserve these traditions that provide soil health, biodiversity, and life for them and us.

NO GMOS this Thanksgiving or any day!

To these great people I say, thank you with much love and respect. May we realize the gifts we have been given before it truly is too late.
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8 comments // Thanking indigenous peoples for the food we eat

  • Nocturnus
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  • JanforGore
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  • JanforGore
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      JanforGore  

    • Excerpt:

      This Thanksgiving, the Organic Consumers Association gives thanks to the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere for their contributions to agriculture.

      75% of the food crops grown in the world today were first cultivated by Native Americans. These include corn, beans, peanuts, cotton, potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers, avocados, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, squashes, black walnuts, pecans, chocolate, tobacco, rubber, and sunflowers.

      In "Pristine Nature: The Founding Falsehood," Steven H. Rich explains that the New World that European colonists believed was a miraculous wilderness was actually a "human-created landscape full of food and useful plants":

      Native Americans had managed the woodlands and grasslands to produce native game animals, native birds and fish, berries, nuts, greens, fruits, bulbs, corns, mushrooms, roots, basketry and cordage materials, firewood, weapon-making and building materials, medicines and ceremonially important plants.
      Many 'wild' native plants that exist today are in fact the products of ancient Native American genetic selection and propagation projects that favored better-tasting and more useful varieties.

      Popular belief that pre-Columbian America was a "pristine wilderness" is false and based on racist stereotypes that reduce the highly successful and extremely intelligent adaptations and achievements of Native American societies to the instinctual behavior of wildlife or "nobel savages in a state of nature."

      Native American elders remember better times. "The white man sure ruined this country," said Southern Sierra Miwok elder Jim Rust. "It's turned back to wilderness. In the old days there used to be lots more game: deer, quail, gray squirrels and rabbits."

      There are no "spontaneous Edens" on earth. The New World paradises were created by the sweat of millions of Native Americans caring for their land.

      Today, indigenous farmers remain the custodians of an immeasurable wealth of biodiversity.

      more at the link.

    • 2 years ago
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