The Boiled Down Juice

Social Justice educational publishers and organizations Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change have published a middle and high school history curriculum based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. A copy is available for free download here. To download a free copy you must agree to respond to a survey and provide feedback after completing the book. You need not be a middle or high school teacher to download a copy.
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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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(the links for the seed shop and the foodbank’s blog can be found at the bottom of this post).

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. (more…)