It’s wild imagining the world before the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. Italians didn’t have tomatoes. The Irish didn’t grow potatoes. No one knew what corn was. The native peoples of the Americas introduced much of the food and medicine we now take for granted.
But if the colonists did not find a way to make money off them, plants disappeared from common knowledge. Europeans brought Europe to the Americas, down into the soil.
For November, we’ll be talking about native plants and what they mean for the well-being of land and people. How many of the plants that cities, towns and governments grow around us are an illusion of colonization?
This month’s resources are a choose your own adventure. There are quite a few and mostly US-centric. Please send more if you’ve got them, especially if they add a new perspective!
A database of native California plants that you can search by zip code
Videos and tutorials by Regenerative Collective, a group of indigenous and like minded-folks in Southern California dedicated to anti-colonial and regenerative community projects
A video by the New York Times on how lawns came to be
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s timeless and timely book, Braiding Sweetgrass
Another episode of the podcast How to Survive the End of the World, interviewing Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm in New York
This meeting will be on Zoom so no amount of distance is an obstacle. All are welcome to join us on November 29th at 11:30 AM, PST. Make sure to RSVP for meeting details.
See you soon.
The Desert Salon is not a class: it rejects the roles of teacher and student. The Desert Salon is radical: it rejects the divisions that the world makes between us based on skin, ableism, sex, gender, or class. Past meetings have discussed things as massive as the the Imperialist White-Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchy and as local as water price changes. Being a radical is not a requirement, but you just might be inspired.