by Nancy Corson
Carter I
If you have read
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s BRAIDING SWEETGRASS: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and
the Teachings of Plants, you have found one of the wisest and most
beautifully presented teachings about what we seem to regard as a recent
discovery. Her work, along with others I’ve
presented here, more accurately shows that “regenerative
agriculture” is a reclaimed gift of indigenous peoples that we’ve
largely ignored until recently.
What Kimmerer
richly describes in science and story can be summed up by a generic comment in
AI: “Native American regenerative
agriculture is an ancient, holistic system based on reciprocity, viewing land
as a relative rather than a resource.”
When people ask
what one thing she’d recommend to restore the
relationship between land and people, Kimmerer says, “Plant
a garden.” She braids the wisdom of her
Potawatomi tribe and its ancestors into her own family practices and into her
teaching and writing. When she discovers that most of her class in General
Botany is bored because they know food plants almost exclusively from supermarkets,
she decides that from then on, she will begin her class in a garden. There,
they have the best teachers I know, three beautiful sisters, commonly known as “The
Three Sisters.” She elaborates how these three: corn, beans, and squash
together “feed the people, feed the land, and
feed our imaginations, telling us how we might live” (129).
“For
millennia, from Mexico to Montana,” she writes, “women
have mounded up the earth and laid these three seeds in the ground, all in the
same square foot of soil. When the colonists on the Massachusetts shore first
saw indigenous gardens, they inferred that the savages did not know how to
farm. To their minds, a garden meant straight rows of single species, not a
three-dimensional sprawl of abundance” (129).
As she explains the interconnected chemistry
of corn, beans, and squash, she reminds us that this demonstrates the principle
of reciprocity: a community can flourish if each of its members recognizes
their unique gift and shares it with the world.
For a clearly
illustrated presentation of the ways reciprocity and gratitude are at the very
core of Kimmerer’s culture, from its Creation Story
to its language. To its pathway to sustainability, I recommend supplementing
her book with “The Honorable Harvest.” It’s a 53-minute YouTube
video developed
from her presentation at Western Washington University, in May, 2021:
For further
stories of reinstating indigenous knowledge that begins to rebuild healthy
cultural and environmental cycles for the benefit of both land and communities,
see Stories
of Life Change.
In her essay, “Discover
the Roots of Regenerative Agriculture in Indigenous Cultures,” Hannah Arledge
provides a good overview of the effects of European colonization, outlining
factors worldwide that eroded indigenous knowledge, native biodiversity, and
food sovereignty. For example, she notes
ways that the physical landscape itself was transformed: “fences
demarcated land-holdings, oversupply of non-native food sources reshaped local
diets, foreign animals like horses altered landscapes and flora, and farming
focused on large-scale monoculture production to meet the demands of a global
market. The allure of new wealth drove the extraction and exploitation of
resources and human labor, devastating the land and people groups with many
expressions of violence; removing indigenous knowledge, native biodiversity,
and food sovereignty in the process.”
Arledge also
discusses the salutary effects of the tradition known as milpa, which
some of her San Diego-based team learned about while visiting partners in
Mexico. This is another name for the tradition of the Three Sisters, which
Robin Wall Kimmerer has described, built on the foundation of ancestral
Mesoamerican diets and regenerative agricultural practices.
Though I don’t cover
it explicitly here, Arledge also includes material about Chagra, a “dynamic
agroforestry system practiced by indigenous peoples in the northwestern
Colombian Amazon.”
Arledge notes
that among the partners of Plant with Purpose groups, it is understood that a
key part of environmental restoration is spiritual renewal.” In keeping with
this, she ends her piece with a quote from Waoroni leader Nemonte Nenquimo’s “A
letter from the Amazon: You destroy what you do not understand”:
“What I can say is that it has to do
with thousands and thousands of years of love for this forest, for this place.
Love in the deepest sense, as reverence. [The forest] has taught us how to walk
lightly, and because we have listened, learned, and defended her, she has given
us everything: water, clean air, nourishment, shelter, medicines, happiness,
meaning.”
An inspiring
movement to improve
the health of the land and the community through food sovereignty is developing
for the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska in the rural northeast corner of
Kansas. The closest grocery store is about a half-hour drive away, and the only
other options are a casino restaurant and a gas station convenience store. (See Will Pry’s article.)
“For members of the Iowa Tribe, the
importance of food sovereignty goes deeper than nutrition access. By focusing their resources on the tribe’s
growing farm operation and establishing a free trade zone near the Missouri
River, the Ioway [also known as the Báxoje] are working to preserve their
culture, exercise self-governance, and care for the environment.”
Not only does
their Ioway Farms focus on large-scale food and feed production, but it also
uses regenerative agriculture practices that prioritize soil health and crop diversity
across 2,400 acres of row crops and 2,500 acres of pasture. The tribe also raises corn and soybeans as
cash crops and runs a beef livestock operation, selling pasture-raised steaks.
In addition, Iowa Bee Farm, the largest tribal apiary in North America, sells
honey for food processing and home consumption.
And there’s more.
“The money will come, and it’s going
to help us prosper as a tribe,” they say, “but if
we can help our people be healthier, then that’s the ultimate goal.
"These lands, they will take care of us – both from a
spiritual aspect and from a physical aspect," said Brien, the tribe's
director of communications. "They will feed us if we treat them correctly.
Our Mother Earth will feed us; she will give us everything we need if we treat
her correctly.”
“Holism is about everything being parts of
the whole,” said Lance Foster, tribal historic preservation officer and former
vice chair of the tribe. “You cannot have health without the land.
You cannot have good food without the land. The Ioway don’t have a word for wilderness, because to
us, it wasn’t wild. It was our home.”
In conclusion, I
found other contemporary examples of Indigenous peoples leading brave and
exciting initiatives for protecting the Earth through old and new ways. Here is
one recently in the news from Canada:
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/2025/12/16-first-nations-indigenous-led-natural-climate-solutions-initiatives-20252026.html
On December 17, 2025, the Honorable Julie Dabrusin,
Minister of the Environment, Climate Change and Nature, announced an investment
of up to $13.1 million for 16 First Nations-led climate action initiatives
through the Indigenous-Led Natural Climate Solutions Fund. These initiatives
will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by conserving, restoring, and enhancing
land management of important ecosystems.
I have found this exploration to be inspiring. I hope that our readers will continue to
study and to support allies past and present who are practicing regenerative
agriculture on our receptive Earth.
Nancy
Corson Carter,
professor emerita of humanities at Eckerd College, has published THREE poetry
books, Dragon Poems The Sourdough Dream Kit, and A Green Bough: Poems for
Renewal (most recent) and three poetry chapbooks. Some of her poems, drawings,
and photos appear in her nonfiction book, Martha, Mary, and Jesus: Weaving
Action and Contemplation in Daily Life, and in her memoir, The
Never-Quite-Ending War: a WWII GI Daughter's Stories.
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