Indigenous-led Permaculture Brings Resilience and Food Sovereignty to Pine Ridge Reservation

“The Oglala Lakota have been victims of abuses and corruptions for over 150 years which have led to severe food scarcity, health issues, and lack of housing security. It is our mission to change that.”
–Oglala Lakota Cultural and Economic Revitalization Initiative (OLCERI)

Learn more, donate, volunteer with and support OLCERI: olceri.org – Facebook – YouTube

Featuring: Christinia Elea, Founder Tiyospaye Winyan Maka – tiyospayewinyanmaka.org

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Transcript: The following is a transcription of Indigenous-led Permaculture Brings Resilience and Food Sovereignty to Pine Ridge Reservation.

[Robin:] There are very inspiring and exciting things happening at the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is home to the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota. This video is going to introduce you to what they are doing to restore resilience, economic independence, self-sufficiency and cultural revival among the Lakota people.

[Tahera Hamdani:] Being in alliance is about being in service to each other, and when you are in service, it’s about attitude. Being an ally also means that, because I am committed, I am going to explore further, dig deeper, and see where the growth opportunities are for me, and if I can add value.

[Vandee Khalsa-Swiftbird:] Everybody loves the cultural native, everybody loves the ceremonies we share. But when it comes to talking about the hardships and injustices and the reality of what native people deal with on a day-to-day basis, that native is not so popular. So being willing to stand next to that outspoken native who is not always talking about the most popular topics, I think that is what makes a good ally.

[Megan Szrom:]I think showing up as an ally starts with contextual understanding of not only what has happened, but also what is happening. I think it is important to remember that this is not past tense, and these injustices are happening everyday, and we are actually seeing them unfold for people. We are seeing this healing happen for people within a camp, to this very day.

[Wakinyan Luke Chief:] People don’t have clean water, they don’t have running water, they don’t have good food, they don’t have housing, so they are in this mode where they can’t think about intergenerational trauma and epigenetics, and it is hard to heal something when you get a wound and it scabs up and someone keeps coming, ripping it off. It is ongoing. It has not stopped yet, it has been going on for like 500 years. Since then we have been in survival mode, trying to survive, and it is hard to focus on anything else, like building happy communities and having healthy relationships with your children.

[Carl Waln, Jr.:] It’s the willingness to help, the willingness to ask questions when it is appropriate, showing respect for the culture, for the land, for the spirituality, for the people. If you treat the Earth in a good way, the Earth will treat you in a good way. It is a mutual respect, is what it is.

[Tahera Hamdani:] Right now, we have the second annual IWPS Convergence. We had one last year. The convergence is our event to bring together folks who are working on these different projects, who have these skills in natural building, gardening, and to come together in community to show the power of community and what the interrelationships can create.

[Bryan Dean:] We have people from all over the world. All nations converge on Pine Ridge, and we have community-based projects that they help to implement on Pine Ridge.

[Woman:] I would say that this year, we are deepening our relationships, and we are also spreading to support these food distribution networks across the reservations, so this is not one site anymore. This has now become the tool hub for the reservation, and we also have other places where they are creating gardens to heal emotional trauma.

[Tahera Hamdani:] There are a lot of residents who come over, folks from other residences, and we make it very accessible. We will cover fuel costs, whatever it takes. It is free for all native folk, to showcase what is happening, to use this energy to activate and mobilize our projects moving forward as well.

[Bryan Dean:] We work on low cost, alternative, replicable models that any family can implement with a little bit of help across reservations. We build with tyres, and a lot of industrial cast off. Junk, basically. People will approach us and say, “We have a piece of land and we want to do this for a family,” and we go and take a look and if it is within our ability to help them to do their project, we partner up on it and figure out a way to get the funds necessary to get things together. This is our experiential farm or place to build experiments and see if they are replicable, if they are economical enough to be used here on Pine Ridge, and we are all food producers. The hope being that we can put a dent in our food desert here.

[Woman:] When I heard the term “permaculture,” and that was many years ago, I said, “What the hell, it is nothing but white people, and they are going around the world and they are taking the best practices of all the indigenous nations, and they are putting it in packages and saying, ‘Oh, look what we have invented, permaculture, look at this.'” But as my brothers here mentioned, it is something that the indigenous people have been doing for thousands of years!

[Felix Earle:] All this permaculture knowledge that we have, we are trying to reiterate all of it, because like most of you know, our ancestors have been doing it for thousands of years.

My family, we used to cultivate, and we used to plant, and it was communal. It was huge! Practically the whole community came to plant these enormous fields. We practiced crop rotating, everything. We had more than four cornfields, and we would plant these fields in three days. During harvest, that was distributed to everyone. When we plant corn, we plant six seeds. One is for us, one is for family, one is for the animals, one is for the birds, one is for everyone, one is for the Earth. That is how we plant.

[Micheal Alcazar:] As we move from this egocentric, colonialist ideology back towards this indigenous ancestral knowledge that is ecocentric, as we move through that transition, we all recognize and forgive our part in the equation and we actively work towards embracing our humanity, reaching out to each other and recognizing that we are all part of the same tribe — humankind.

[Woman:] I did not want anything to do with it until I came here and I saw how lovingly this permaculture crew touches the ground. But the important thing among our people is to show up, and to show that you mean what you are saying, and that you are going to walk your talk.

[Robin:] I am so thoroughly impressed and inspired by the incredible work of everyone at the Pine Ridge reservation, and I hope you are as well. I would love to see you support them in their mission. There are links in the description to learn more, to get involved and support them, so make sure that you do that. If you want people to see this and be inspired by it, make sure to like, comment and share this video, and if you have not already, make sure to subscribe to this channel, where there will be many more videos to come. I love you all very much, and I hope that you will go out there and make positive changes and be a part of this movement for a better world.