A Corn Farm on a Bridge (Long Version)
Friday is a perfect day to create a fresh new project about food insecurity and many other related things ... Friday carries a particular looseness ... The sense that we can begin something without Monday through Thursday pressing down on it ...
Food insecurity is hunger ... yes ... but also consider geography ... who is allowed to be close to what nourishes ... and who has to travel great distances ... or wait ... or make do in the meantime ... This is also a question of human dignity ... A meal is medicine and memory ... Systemic machinery and the personal moment of somebody standing somewhere wondering what is possible with what remains ...
Given our publishing work pertaining to Dakota and Ojibwe foodways ... there already exists a prominent thread about what gets severed ... when food systems are disrupted ... Not just calories but relationships ... and connection with sacred local land ...
Real voices braided together ... each one distinct ... but kindred ... Lightness and weight held ... Allowing sweet natural humor to happen ... feed ... as a way of carrying what might otherwise be too difficult to say with total straight seriousness ...
Grandma walked eleven miles for commodity canned ham and government cheese ... and said that it was not even good cheese ... but she made do ... She enhanced it with other collected ingredients ... We remember the veins on her hands ... and traced them ... Veins of our land here is where rationed recipe ingredients thrived ... along the melancholy paths ... Even under a nightmarish skin ...
The first food insecurity government phrases ... Long literal hunger said like cold and hot weather ... Two bold contrastingly different sounding expressions ... Waited out with tea that was earth colored water pretending ... With critically necessary storytelling ... so that we could forget the empty feeling in our stomach for an hour or less ... Our lands fed us without asking us for anything ... Except saying thank you in a very respectful way ... Then that food got taken with the government land grab ... This history is actually ongoing in minds ...
Sometimes we grow things in impossible places ... A corn farm on a bridge ... A seed in a crack ... That is what our people have always done ...
A warm circle just widened ... Voices made room for everybody ... Ancestors ... Babies not yet born ... Four-leggeds ... Avian beings ... Ones who swim ... and that which roots in soil ... How these ceremonies enter a frame or rounded outer edge ...
Tables take a long time to become what they are ... We have to wait for the tree first ... tree has to wait for the seed ... and somebody waits for all this to become a place where we set food down and converse with each other ...
Liffey auntie says marriage is just two people agreeing to confuse each other forever ... but kindly ... haha ... That is what happens at tables ... Two daughters together watch everything even if you think they do not ... My mom thought we were not paying attention and now we cook almost exactly like her ... including how we hold a carved wooden spoon ...
We are in-between and go-between ... That is a simple definition of what storytellers are ... We get to be in community ... That is the part that matters most ... Free from having to be ... we get to also be a gift for somebody handed to us ... Surprise ... That is the whole thing ...
We are the earth our little ones will stand on for a while ... I like that! ... You do not own them ... you just get to be their ground for now ... We are knucklehead nutritionists ... The best kind ... Ones who are aware they do not know everything ... Food matters and the rest is a learning process ... Five squirrels foraging ... Old ways coming back around ... Children used to know where food came from by just going outside ... Now we have to teach foraging again like it is new ... We are all better human beings when we get outside for a good length of time ... Be on the other side of windows and doors ... walls came after ... haha ... Outside should actually come first ... Most developed nations for the most part left that behind ...
It is an honor to connect with you ... White men do not say that enough ... or they say it and do not mean it ... But when they mean it ... when we actually feel their honor in the marrow of our bones ... well ... These are not stories meant to receive money or profits ... We are excited to sit well with you all ... There is a way to do it right ... and hopefully this is it in progress ...
We have to keep stoking a fire or it goes out ... Analogously that is what we are doing ... Feeding life so it can be alive ... Keeping a fire going is a responsibility ... We do not start one and walk away ... We started it and now we have to stay ... Old-growth altar ... Not an altar we buy at a store with a credit card ... One that grows and takes longer than our whole life to become what it is ... Longer than our grandparents' lives ... Our cousin is learning to harvest wild rice the old way ... Manoomin ... the good berry ... It is not just learning what to pick ... it is learning how to be the kind of ready person who gets to pick it ... Rice knows if you are not ... The rice has been here longer than any of us and has seen things ... Remembers people coming wrong ...
Shifting now ...
Space for relationality ... a fancy phrase for saying we need each other ... Whole generations forgot that ... Some of us are trying to remember again ... It is slower than we want it to be ... But faster than it was ... Political moments ... We keep saying political like it is separate from meals ... Hunger is not political ... Hunger is just hunger ... Your body does not know what party ... It only knows an empty stomach ... Politics made hunger complicated ... Hunger was never confusing ... We are hungry ... We eat ... That was the system dating back to Neanderthals ... Then man's governments put a lock on Mother Nature's foods and called it civilization ... Now we have food deserts ... Which is a way of saying certain leaders decided your neighborhood does not need a grocery store ... just liquor stores ... and check cashing operations ...
This is a segment that makes us less able to sleep ... It is not scarcity ... it is allocation ... who deserves to eat and who does not ... According to individuals who have never gone hungry a day in their life ... American exceptionalism is the myth that it will not happen here ... famine is for other places on earth ... Situations we feel sad about for a few minutes ... It is also happening here ... Ask any relative ... ask any Indigenous grandmother ... ask children in school who only eat when school is open ... Nobody talks about summer ... Auntie who works at a food shelf says summer is when she sees the same kids every week ... Looking thinner or heavier each time ... That is only a twenty-minute drive from the closest shopping mall ...
And now it is happening to more people ... Spreading out ... Circle of hungry getting bigger while we are not noticing ... Not coming down the pipeline ... Now ... Today ... While we are working on this ... Countless families going hungry in America ... we had to stop counting ... We cannot count what we are not seeing ... We can tell what a society cares about by what it counts ... we count money and votes very carefully ... We count hungry people like it is a rough estimate ... Like close enough is good enough ... Close enough is not good enough if you are the one who did not get counted ...
Food sovereignty has answers ... Not all of them ... But some ... The ones our grandmothers knew but could not pass down because the language got erased ... Though sometimes the answers come in dreams ... Hands always reach for fry bread first ... It is ancestral memory ... Might just be that we love the taste of fry bread ... Haha ...
We do not know where our tap water comes from ... That is an easy thing to learn ... Takes twenty minutes or less ... We drink it every day and do not know anything about it ... It passes through us everyday ... We asked our nephew where eggs come from ... He said the store ... How would he know? ... That is on us to correct ...
How to be a champion for food systems ... sounds like something for people with degrees and funding ... But it can also be a pot on a windowsill ... A corn farm on a bridge ... One thing is all we need and the rest follows ...
Every family needs somebody to tend the small fruits ... Who wants to be the blueberries boy? ... Somebody has got to do it ... We told our daughter we would grow kale and she said she would be willing to wear it as a new kind of fashion ... She was not joking ...
Lazy Gardener ... Haha ... That is what we call our cousin ... He just sits by his garden and talks to himself ... But his garden does fine ... Our pumpkin heads never survive drops from a porch ... We keep growing them because the splat is a tradition ...
We do not have to do everything at once ... That is the thing nobody tells us ... And is it not beautiful that our world will not fall apart if we start small? ... Start with one seed and see what happens ...
We have value ... Starting every time from where we are ... with what we have ... which is usually more than we realize ... There is something growing in us we did not plant ...
We said to our father ... Dad we are going to start a loving garden ... We had this elaborate collection of Mayan seeds ... Saved for years ... Waiting in jars like little prophecies ... Sometimes we would hear them during the night ... Without saying anything ... dad went ahead and built this huge corn farm on a bridge ... A bridge ... Maybe something told him to ... Something older than our ancestors ... We had to remind him to harvest it ... He just stood there looking at it ... A corn farm on a bridge ... Like he could not believe it ... Dads are like that sometimes ... They do not say much and then build something humongous ...
Returning to the wealth that we have known means to give food away ... That is the return ... That is the economics of it ... Not hoarding ... Giving ... More we give the more there is ... It does not make sense until we do it ... Then it makes sense in our chest so to speak ...
Returning to be a village ... Not just living near each other behind walls ... Actually being a village again ... Knowing who in the village needs what ... Showing up without being asked ... The way people used to just know when to come over ... Before phones ... They would sense it and start walking ...
Whether you are a fisher who knows where the fish run ... Not because someone told you ... Because something in you knows ... Or a forager who can find what is hidden ... Or somebody who just knows where the good berries grow and is not stingy about telling ... Our relative will not tell anyone her berry spot ... She will drive you there ... She is not being mean just careful ... That area fed her family through hard years ...
Making sure to scale up ... To have the ability to move into larger markets ... Why not ... Why should we not? ... Why should we stay small just because that is what they expect? ... It looks like supporting gardens as a universal idea ... Not just a hobby for people with backyards and free time ... Like breathing ... Something everybody gets to do ... Everybody knows how to do ...
Lifting up food education ... The kind that lives in kitchens ... Teachings of the old growth table ... that took longer than our lives to become what it is ... The listening table ...
It is about preservation ... The old ways ... Drying ... smoking ... salting ... and fermenting ... So that in times of emergency ... we are able to feed the people who desperately need it most ... Not waiting for someone to show up with supplies ... Holding what is needed like we knew something was coming ...
Our grandma had a cellar ... We could survive for three months down there if we had to ... She was not fearless ... She was ready ... There is a big difference ... She used to say something like ... These jars tell me what to make ... and what was missing ... Her cellar had slightly chipped jars older than us ... She would hold one up to sunlight streaming through a cellar window and say ... This jar remembers how to get to the heart of everything here ... We believed her voice and most of what she said ...
In talking circles everybody gets to speak ... Words go around and come back changed ... Sometimes they even come back around saying things that nobody said ...
First Indigenous faith ... Not the kind with buildings ... the kind that believes there is enough even when we cannot see it ... the kind that plants seeds in frosty ground because Spring is around the corner ... even if we will not be here to experience it ... The kind that builds a corn farm on a bridge because something older said to ...
Quiet now ... that is where abundance lives ... In a faithful timeless circle ... Also ... in speechless hands that recall building a corn farm on a bridge ... Like taking instructions from someone we are not able to see with our eyes ...
That unexpected One appearing ... wheeling a shopping cart of bright squash around a village block ... following the sun's direction ... not caring what her close neighbors think ...
Seeded prophecies are waiting ... with a softness that holds laughter and tears ... longer than our uncle has been saving ketchup packets ... and he has been saving them since before we were born ... Something is always waiting for us ...
- Oyparaploo
