Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience

by Enrique Salmón

"Eating is not only a political act, it is also a cultural act that reaffirms one’s identity and worldview," Enrique Salmón writes in Eating the Landscape . Traversing a range of cultures, including the Tohono O’odham of the Sonoran Desert and the Rarámuri of the Sierra Tarahumara, the book is an illuminating journey through the southwest United States and northern Mexico. Salmón weaves his historical and cultural knowledge as a renowned indigenous ethnobotanist with stories American Indian farmers have shared with him to illustrate how traditional indigenous foodways—from the cultivation of crops to the preparation of meals—are rooted in a time-honored understanding of environmental stewardship. In this fascinating personal narrative, Salmón focuses on an array of indigenous farmers who uphold traditional agricultural practices in the face of modern changes to food systems such as extensive industrialization and the genetic modification of food crops. Despite the vast cultural and geographic diversity of the region he explores, Salmón reveals common the importance of participation in a reciprocal relationship with the land, the connection between each group’s cultural identity and their ecosystems, and the indispensable correlation of land consciousness and food consciousness. Salmón shows that these collective philosophies provide the foundation for indigenous resilience as the farmers contend with global climate change and other disruptions to long-established foodways. This resilience, along with the rich stores of traditional ecological knowledge maintained by indigenous agriculturalists, Salmón explains, may be the key to sustaining food sources for humans in years to come. As many of us begin to question the origins and collateral costs of the food we consume, Salmón’s call for a return to more traditional food practices in this wide-ranging and insightful book is especially timely. Eating the Landscape is an essential resource for ethnobotanists, food sovereignty proponents, and advocates of the local food and slow food movements.

Genres: Indigenous, Food, Nonfiction, Science, Anthropology, Gardening, Environment

184 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2012

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to Enrique Salmón's Eating the Landscape through The Colors of Nature , this covers some of the same territory, but I learned even more about the Colorado Plateau that we had just been driving through. The landscapes of my baby-self, and so many of my dad's stories. But no one in my family ever had anything as awesome as this:

I recall the many plant-related lessons I learned in my grandma's herb house. this latticed structure was filled with hanging dried and living plants as well as pungent and savory smells from the many herbs hanging from the ceiling. The roof was no longer visible through the layers of vines that draped over its eaves to the ground. (3)

I love this connection between food and landscape, so obvious and yet I had not quite seen it in this way before.

...because so much of the food we are discussing in this book comes directly from the land, food landscapes remain intact when old recipes are regenerated. The food itself, and the landscapes from which it emerges, remembers how it should be cooked. This can happen because the food itself activates in us an encoded memory that reminds us how to grow, collect and prepare the food. (9)

Thinking about what our food teaches us about our landscape...well. I have learned a lot through my short time on smallholdings, through growing up in the desert, but I don't know enough.

An essential lesson for us, as we continue on our current self-destructive path of monocropping, genetically modifying our food using artificial irrigation, and overfertilizing, will be to relearn how to cook our landscapes: the manner in which we sustainably steward our food crops, relying on a process that began in our home kitchens. (10)

It is not just loss of knowledge through city living or supermarkets, I think of Vandana Shiva writing about just how much the proponents of monocropping have actively destroyed. Yet there is so much happening that gives me hope. Like Emigdio Ballon, come from the highlands of Bolivia to Tesuque Pueblo of New Mexico. Working now with the Pueblo to grow fruit trees and beans, and maintaining a seed bank of heirloom crops.

I think too of settler and scientist arrogance, the kind that has driven unsustainable agricultural practices through the fields and lives of small farmers on the land for generations. Not seeing the complex systems these farmers were often embedded within:

For the longest time, the conservation and environmental movement had assumed that the human-environment equation would always result negatively for the land...until recently, researchers had not considered the possibility that humans could actually enhance their landscapes; that human communities might actually play a role in enhancing diversity; or that humans could be a keystone species of some ecological systems. (75)

In southern Arizona the Hohokam are everywhere, I remember hearing stories, imagining their presence across the land. There is a chapter on the Sonora desert and this:

The word Hohokam from the Pima language -- always translated as '"those who have gone," or "those who have vanished." Archaeologist Emil Haury, who has studied the Hohokam, provided a more literal translation of "all used up." (82)

Damn.

Up near Phoenix, along the salt river, they built extensive irrigation systems. Left them. Salmón writes that this is possibly because they became salinized, silted up. Instead of upping the ante, the people returned to a simpler agricultural system, one that was more beneficial to their landscape and more sustainable over the years.

Damn. I can't imagine that conversation, our current reality is worlds removed from that kind of thinking. Perhaps this is a great part of the problem. One other thing I never have experienced, but so want to:

The diversity of the Sonora Desert seems more obvious the farther one travels through its namesake Mexican state. (128)

There are lots of stories here of the Colorado plateau, the fields in canyons and along washes hidden from sight -- oh, I wished so much we caught just a glimpse. He writes of Peabody Coal's draining of the aquifer and the drying up of springs. An enterprise bringing death to extract energy, destroying place to facilitate movement. A mindset alien to the people here, and to me. I loved the description of a concept from Juan Estevan Arellano:

Hispano querencia: that which affords his people a sense of place. Querencia is also simply the love for the land and place. (118)

Salmón continues:

To Hispanos, querencia is a blend of mental spaces not only involving bioregionalism but also including emotional, spiritual, cultural and ecological health. When people think of land the concept is enmeshed with notions of cultural memory. These and other mental spaces merge into a multidimensional blended space... (118)

This is the space of resilience, of community, of words. The thing evoked so powerfully in Jimmy Santiago Baca's poetry describing these same places. It is strange finding the language of development I am so familiar with rewritten, recoded in this way:

Story is at the core of community resilience. It comprises the matter, substance, and adhesive of human capital. Stories communicate our values through the language of our heart and our emotions. Stories are what we feel. In northern New Mexico, enough of the viable land remains in which the story of querencia can be housed. (121)

More ways to reframe development debates, from The Declaration of Seed Sovereignty that came out of the Traditional Agriculture Conference held March 10-11, 2006 in Alcalde, New Mexico:

Sustainable stewardship and cultural resilience are neither decisions nor rights. Nowhere in the Declaration of Seed Sovereignty does the notion or term of rights arise. Instead, the associations conferred to include in their "living document" concepts of relationships, generational memory, embodied practices, spirituality, caring, respect, traditions, and celebration when declaring their revival and survival of their way of life. Together, these concepts reflect identity connected to responsibility towards one's place in a community within a landscape. (150)

Everything is relational and connected.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Salmon combines his personal story with that of others in the Southwest to offer a compelling glimpse of how food connects all of us to the Earth's bounty. I hope people from other regions follow this example and share how language, culture, and food interact to form distinct regional identity and resilience in the face of rapid change.

[Lulu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Food sovereignty is my fried bread and butter so it was difficult not to like this. I really enjoyed the style of the book- more of an account of time spent and food shared rather than an anthropological 'telling' which acknowledges his positionality as an observer or passive contributor and not as a 'dooer' like those whose stories he was sharing. This was congruent also because we should be required to get to know these people with their stories, not their stories exclusively as can happen. A lot of crossover with te ao Māori.

[Cliff Weverton · Rating 4 out of 5]

very enjoyable read that stiches together a tapestry of Indigenous American ecology - a brave vision in the face of neoliberal technocratic solutions. the author's belief that youth have lost their way began to get repetitive and paternalistic towards the end.

[Ishita · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply personal and engaging set of stories tracing Salmón’s grounding, relationships, and work in food sovereignty and Indigenous food cultures. It was a privilege to ‘meet’ the tireless activists and elders who are seeking to reclaim traditional, sustainable food systems for their communities.

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

first farming bookclub book!

[Bram · Rating 3 out of 5]

4 stars for content, 1 star for readability, rounded up.

I have learned much from this book, and for this I am grateful. It is not what I would call good writing, however. Some paragraphs are repeated almost verbatim within the space of a few pages, entire paragraphs in the first and last chapter are near-identical, and many sentences seem to simply have been strung together without looking back.
I will not go into further detail, as I think this is a valuable book, and content is more important than form here. However, a constructively critical proofreader would have made this a much better book overall.