The Boiled Down Juice

I recently saw this exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C. The artist, Nora Naranjo-Morse, who is a Santa Clara Pueblo, is the first Native American woman to make an outdoor sculpture in D.C. What amazed me most about these beautiful sculptures is they will eventually be worn away by the wind and rain, thus purposefully eroding over time.
You can listen to the podcasts about this exhibit here.
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Just the other day my friend Dr. Kristin Dowell, an anthropologist who works with Native American communities, suggested I look into a project called Native Seeds, a seed bank and cultural memory bank based in the southwest. It am so excited about the information that I had to post about it.
Native Seeds

Started in 1983, this organization was one of the founders of RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions ), and safegaurds seeds native to Native American communities in the southwest. What’s even more amazing is not only do they safegaurd the seeds, they also maintain what they refer to as a Cultural Memory Bank. Their website explains it this way:
“In the late 1990s, NS/S undertook to expand our seed bank efforts to include a cultural component, integrating cultural information – the agricultural practices, stories, songs, and recipes associated with specific crops in the seed bank – with our existing database of collection information. In effect, we would combine the geneticist’s concern for conserving unique traits of a crop with a folklorist’s concern for conserving oral history about the crop.”
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Rethinking Globalization:Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World textbook

I just read about this textbook from Rethinking Schools. It was published in 2002. This resource textbook teaches students 4th-12th grades social justice issues as an interconnected web. As the authors say in the introduction (which can be found online as well), (more…)