The Rural Assembly

According to their webpage, “The National Rural Assembly is a movement of people and organizations devoted to building a stronger, more vibrant rural America.” At the core of their work is the Rural Compact: “The National Rural Assembly encourages individuals and organizations to endorse the Rural Compact, a basic statement of principles for building a stronger rural America that improves opportunity for all of us.”

The great thing is, the Compact is as specific as it is open-ended. The compact supports specifics such as making sure broadband is available in all rural schools, assuring preventive health care is available to all rural Americans, and supporting financial and structural investments in rural communities that can help keep youth from having to choose between leaving their homes and finding a job and/or make a decent living. The Compact also focuses on greater environmental protection while also supporting job creation, understanding that the two need not be mutually exclusive.

One of the things that really stands out to me is that in the context of the Rural Assembly’s Compact the term “rural” or “small town” is not defined in that devise way Sarah Palin revived during her Republican National Assembly speech (Although it was certainly around long before her speech). Rural is, instead, a diverse collection of places across this nation where we have rich cultural heritages but also poor incomes. Where we have beautiful mountains or valleys or prairies but we also have large companies who do a great deal of damage to this land, and we often find ourselves forced to work for these companies if we want to remain here. In a lot of rural communities there are just no jobs at all, even though rural areas are full of creative thinkers, inventors, artisans, writers, etc. We have the resources. We just have to put those resources to work.

Rural, this diverse collection of places, is not homogenous and it’s for sure no Utopia. But it is a beautifully diverse place just as important to this nation’s success as any other.

So, what I really like about the Compact is it does away with any mention of rural as being some sort of pastoral, racist, or time-warped collections of places—a stereotype that is so counterproductive to doing anything to address the beauty and problems in rural America— but instead embraces “rural” this way:
“Rural America is more than the land. It is a way we are connected in culture, heritage, and national enterprise. While it may be vast, it is far from empty. Sixty million of us live in the American countryside, and far more grew up there. Rural Americans reflect the full diversity of the country in who we are, what we do, and what we want to achieve.”

To read the contract in full and to add your name go here:Read and Sign the Compact.

You can also see who else has signed it, which is a great way to find out people in your area to work with.

At this past year’s Assembly meeting, videos created by rural youth were screened. The videos address areas of concern such as “Education,” “Environment,” “Heath”, and “Investment.” These videos are great because in our media world we hear so little from rural youth about how they perceive their lives and their futures and opportunities and lack thereof. Somehow in much of popular culture rural is almost synonymous with elderly people. But that’s so far from true. To see the videos go here and scroll down near the end of the page.

These videos reminded me how important media production opportunities are for young people. I am so excited to think about the possibilities of getting documentation opportunities available in our own rural area of central Arkansas.

Maybe you have already heard about the Rural Assembly or have worked with them. I would love to hear about it.

Please consider joining the contract! And if you live in the central Arkansas area, I am waiting on a response from them as to how we can get our area more involved in the Assembly. I will keep you posted!

Visiting the Native American Museum was an amazing experience. I had chills as I wandered in and out of the rooms. I could have spent days there. The museum was so alive, so fluid, so filled with voices. There wasn’t just one story being told, but instead a multitude of stories were being told at the same time, thus creating in the viewer the occasional feeling of sensory overload. There were videos playing; exhibits seemed to run together; objects at times felt almost crowded in their display cases. The museum exists in direct aesthetic opposition to our nation’s dominant museum norms and, because of this, tells a story that is non linear and, in my opinion, focused on human rights, human potential and resistance. At every level it is a museum about Native American life not just in the past, but Native American life today and the many dreams for tomorrow.

Some day I would like to write more about the museum experience and the different ways in which it made me really believe that museum exhibits can be places of interactivity and dialog. I have been to lots of museums, but nothing has quite ever moved me, or spawned such inner and outer dialog, as this one. If you have not been, I highly, highly recommend it. Give yourself a whole day to soak it all in. I think this kind of multi-level storytelling and viewer interaction is a perfect example of what museums have the power to do. They are not there just to show. They also have the potential to generate dialog and to remind us that stories overlap. Stories are messy. They also have the potential to transform.

I am curious. Other people that have been through the museum (folklorists or non)–can you share your thoughts?

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.”

Creating the Cultural Memory Bank was not a part of the original plan. According to their webpage, they actually set out to interview elders and share this information with those outside of the community. But in conducting the interviews with elders, they soon began to realize that this traditional knowledge was desperatly needed within the community as well. So they began documenting the stories of the elders in the community for the younger generations. One of their first projects was a student-centered CD-Rom focusing on Navajo agricultural traditions. Their work in documenting the community for the community is ongoing.

Additionally, anyone can order the seeds and try them out. In fact, if you plan on growing the seeds you can also become a part of the Gardener’s Network where you provide feedback and share your experiences about growing the seeds.
Gardener’s Network

A Model for Human Rights Education
In preparation for a grant writing project for Kentucky Remembers!, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what makes education human-rights based. What is human rights education anyway? Human Rights education is not just about the subject matter. It’s also about the approach. In other words, it’s not just about the kind of knowledge that’s being shared but also how that knowledge is being shared. I am constantly on the lookout for education programs that connect human stories with our daily lives and help us connect our daily lives with others daily lives. Stories that teach us how to take care of our fellow humans, take care of the land, take care of ourselves.
What I like most about the mission of this project is its ability to be intrinsically open and forever ongoing. For example, the goal of keeping a cultural memory bank is not just about the past. It’s about the future. And why just save the seeds for the communities from which they came? Instead, they share these seeds with anyone who wants to grow them.

I think, ultimately, what human rights education is about is making connections between ourselves, our community, and world. But for human rights education to be sustainable it has to not just teach us what those connections are, but also provide insight and inspiration which can in turn lead us as humans to to be more diligent in understanding how these connections fit together and to begin to look for these connections on their own.

I think a big part of what human rights education is teaching and learning how to always be asking, ‘how do these things work together?’

What do you think?

I am learning more everyday about the importance of eating locally grown food, especially food grown from heirloom seeds (a catchall term for seeds that have not been genetically modified). A few recent conversations with a close friend who is involved with Slow Foods and the Fayetteville Farmers Market reminded me about how I have been wanting to post some information about a great place to get heirloom seeds in Arkansas.

Heirloom seeds produce food that tastes much better, has a wider variety, and a higher nutritional value that genetically modified seeds. But that’s not the only reason to invest in growing them and/or support farmers who sell them. Heirloom seeds and the farmers that grow them operate in direct opposition to major corporate seed/pesticide companies like Monsanto and Dow. Huge companies like Monsanto and their non-diversified seeds that produce sub-par vegetables have purposefully put generations of small, local farmers out of business both in the United States and around the world. They have polluted our food sources and water sources with chemical fertilizers and made it so that farmers have to produce food on a mass scale if they want to make a living at farming.

To make matters worse, these genetically modified seeds and their vegetable offspring have little power to withstand changes in climate, new strains of disease and other such instabilities.

In fact, if you begin looking deeper into the information about food shortages around the world, you will discover that one of the problems creating these shortages can be traced back to the lack of crop diversity and mass-scale farming created by major seed/chemical companies like Monsanto.

In short, I think heirloom seeds are (or at least potentially are) radical little specks of plant and animal resistance to a cooperate owned food system that pits urban dweller against rural farmer and creates environmentally stupid situations like shipping in tomatoes from Florida even though we can grow them just fine right here in Arkansas. I think also ties in with the injustices that happen every day at meat and poultry processing plants across our state.

I just recently found out about the Northcentral Arkansas Heirloom Seed Shop and Food Bank when trying to hunt down some heirloom seeds in Arkansas. What I find so potentially wonderful and amazing about this place is not do they sell heirloom seeds; they also operate a food bank to help bring a sustainable solution to food insecurity in Northwest Arkansas. It’s one of those ideas that is so creative and ingenious because it makes so much common sense.

This is a direct and regional solution to the low nutritional deficit, food insecurity, and instability caused by genetically modified crops, and this Seed shop and foodbank seem to be addressing that link in a practical, solutions-based manner.. I am curious about how things are working out for them and once I get a chance to learn more about the operation I will post some more information.

The website has information about the difference between heirloom and hybrid seeds, the importance of getting away from genetically modified food, and an online catalog from which to order seeds.

They also have a blog about the Foodbank. It has not been updated in a while, but it still has some interesting information.

I am in the midst of writing a post about what I have been learning about the importance of growing our own food and the heirloom seeds and who this all relates to folklore and a food culture of social action. But I wanted to make sure to get this information up now.

If you want to learn more about the fight against Monsanto in particular, go here: Millions Against Monsanto.

If you want to learn more about the importance of heirloom seeds, Barbara Kingsoliver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life has some great information, especially chapters three and four.
The book also has a website
If you have any other reading suggestions, please let me know!

Also, I would love to hear if anyone has ever been out to the seed shop, knows anyone who saves/grows heirloom seeds, or any other related comments.

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),

“For example, in the Huaorani Indian struggle in eastern Ecuador (depicted in the role play, “Oil, Rainforests, and Indigenous Cultures,” p. 268), the debt crisis forces the government to aggressively seek sources of cash – like oil – to make interest payments to international banks. Transnational oil companies take advantage of widespread poverty to pay starvation wages to workers in terribly unsafe conditions. And like a bull in a china shop, they maraud through fragile rainforest ecosystems. In the quest for profits, oil companies treat people and the environment simply as resources to exploit. But not only are rainforests being ravaged, the indigenous cultures that depend on those rainforests are also in danger of being wiped out.

If oil companies successfully sucked all the oil out of the Huaorani’s territory in Ecuador – perhaps as much as $2 billion worth – it would power cars in the United States for only 13 days. Thus, the more we taught about issues in the Third World, the more it brought us home – home to an epidemic of consumption that links us to the poverty of others around the world, and links us to the growing ecological crisis that threatens the very existence of life on earth.”

The book includes exercises that address math, science, reading comprehension and problem solving skills. I have not read this textbook (other than the example essays and lesson plans online), but plan on interlibrary loaning it. Is anyone else familiar with it?

This morning I just read the following article, linked from the MADRE webpage. Containing comments from the leader Wangari Maathai who worked to begin the Green Belt Movement,
this article connects climate change to women’s issues and women’s daily lives, to foodways, to the folklore of daily life. Please read it.

My point here, which may seem both obvious and even pointless is that we can’t separate oral history from daily life; we can’t separate cultural studies from climate studies; we can’t separate people from place. Our knowledge of this interconnectivity has to lead to action–both large and small. I think we can begin by seeing the ways in which our work as students of culture is inseparable from our lives on this planet. We talk a lot about the concept of place, but I think we must enlarge this concept to think about place in a way that acknowledges environmental degradation.