When I have a few moments I like to create memes like the one below, and then set them free on the internet. It’s a way to let people know about the epic, nonfiction saga of the Americas that I had the opportunity to live, write, and publish. The freely-available online saga is Odyssey of the 8th Fire. The true pilgrimage tale proceeds for over 225 deepening days from Atlantic to Pacific across the landscape and soulscape of both ancient and modern Turtle Island (North America).
A Fresh Breath of Storytelling Wind: Reviving the Legend of the Rainbow Warriors
Once oft’ told, the story that I came to know as the legend of the rainbow warriors has in recent years been drowned in the ceaseless tsunami of online information. The tale has slipped beneath the digital flood at a time when its vision is sorely needed.
It’s time to invoke a great whirling surge of Nilch’i Diyin (Holy Wind) into the story, and thereby help it rise back to the surface
The rainbow legend has been glimpsed in vision and then articulated in myriad ways for hundreds of years in various parts of the world, often as well on Turtle Island (North America). The story is told from a spectrum of perspectives, given life by storytellers using music, words, art and dance to animate the tale in their own creative way.
In brief, the legend relates that when the world becomes desperately dirty, sick and chaotic with divisive hate agents at work in realms of race and religion, many people will recognize that they are destroying themselves and the earth they depend upon for survival. With spiritual insight and support, the rainbow warriors — people of all colors, cultures and spiritual outlooks — will respond creatively with insight, intelligence, honesty, caring, sharing and respect. Through personal example and positive, peaceful means, this rainbow network of awakened souls will establish a golden era of peace.
Often mocked as pixie-dust fantasy or outright condemned as fakelore rather than folklore, the rainbow legend persists because it has deep roots, and because it echoes a venerable theme in storytelling: paradise lost, paradise regained. We are squandering paradise in our modern world. Is it therefore surprising that there should arise hopeful tales of a time when a better world may be attained?
Whirling Rainbow (author’s collection)
Mythologist Joseph Campbell noted that a society that does not have a myth to support it and give it coherence goes into dissolution. “That is what’s happening to us.” Campbell wrote in Transformations of Myth Through Time. And that, I feel, is why it is worthwhile to tell the rainbow tales again in yet another way, to contribute a picture of what I regard as a coherent and positive mythic dimension of understanding for our times.
For 200 years or more a dominant myth in the developing world has been an interpretation of the American Dream suggesting that most people can attain wealth by taking from the land and sea at an industrial scale with a mechanical consciousness, and that happiness will follow from profit. This myth is relentlessly reinforced by advertising images. Yet the unbridled pursuit of these versions of the myth, often by people deep in sleep, has plunged us into a nightmare of environmental devastation, economic upheaval, ethical bankruptcy, and cultural confusion.
As I write more than 40 wars are raging around our world, and another 200 or more armed conflicts are underway. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has reported that “the weather is noticeably more chaotic.” Our world is home to more than 7.5 billion human beings. Well over one billion of those human beings are hungry or starving.
In the midst of these stark realities, various myths or frames are conjured via the broadcast voices of demagogues, and the bloody, fear-provoking images so common in movies, music and computer games — the fear-driven myth that the world is hate-filled and chaotic beyond redemption. For many people, in the absence of something more wholesome, such barren and toxic visions become embedded in the psyche as working myths, albeit often unconsciously. Yet the rainbow tales are as possible as the visions of a global death spiral. The enactment of our future is up to us.
The Environment of the Soul
I’ve encountered a spectrum of rainbow myths, beginning in the 1970s when I read the book Warriors of the Rainbow, by William Willoya and Vinson Brown, and then in dozens of other readings and listenings. As is the custom among storytellers and as a lifelong journalist, I passed on the tales I heard later in my own words at gatherings, and in my writing.
My 1992 book Legend of the Rainbow Warriors was an exercise in creative nonfiction. The book relates many of the ancient versions of the rainbow warriors legend, uniting a chorus of voices. It cites seers such as Black Elk and Crazy Horse of the Lakota, Quetzalcoatl of the Toltec, Weetucks of the Wampanoag, Plenty Coups of the Crow, White Buffalo Calf Woman of the Plains, Eyes of Fire of the Cree, Ku’Kulkan, Quetzalcoatl and Montezuma of the of the south direction, the Peacemaker of the Haudenosaunee, Padmasambhava of Tibet, and Alinta of Australia. I included in my book some of the teachings that I’d absorbed over the years from Grandfather William Commanda, Don Estevan Tamayo, Arvol Looking Horse, Martin Gashweseoma and Thomas Banyacya, Oh Shinnah Fastwolf, Slow Turtle, Sun Bear, Reuben Snake, Cachora, Grandmother Doris Minkler, Manitonquat, Don Jose Matsuwa, Dona Josepha Medrano, and others. Though they lived at different times and in different places, they shared a sense of what would unfold.
Legend of the Rainbow Warriors was my effort as a journalist to create an account of one of the core myths of the Americas, and to also explore of how that myth might be playing out in real time.
Do the voices and the rainbow tales add up to something that is ultimately, absolutely verifiably true? That is for you, the reader, to consider and to create. Mythologist Joseph Campbell looked at it this way: “A myth is something that has never happened, but that is happening all the time.”
Greenpeace’s flagship, Rainbow Warrior. (Wiki photo, Creative Commons).
Those devoted solely to measurable evidence run the risk of missing the point altogether. The rainbow tales are both myth and mystery. Myth creates the opportunity of inspiration, a chance to become aware of something the intellect has not the scope to grasp: access to “the supersensensible environment of the soul” as poet William Butler Yeats expressed it. To this the myth adds a note of mystery: spiritual truths knowable not through reason alone, rather but through contemplation or revelation.
My friend the late Leon Secatero, To’hajiilee Chapter of the Navajo Nation, explained to me that he appreciated these teachings not as prophecies, but rather as knowings.
Leon’s friend and colleague, Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez of Guatemala, elaborated on that insight. Longtime President of the Maya Elders Council and a initiated Daykeeper, Don Alejandro told me: “There is truth in the teachings about the rainbow and the rainbow people. People from all of the Americas will unite with people from all the other nations, and they will realize that we are all family, brothers and sisters. This is not my personal vision, but a cosmic vision presented by all the elders – a vision that we all share.”
A Kitchen Table Telling
I’ve heard 40 or more tellings of rainbow mythology over the decades. On the afternoon of May 13, 2006, I heard another convincing rendition while traveling with my friends Stephen Clarke, and Carlos White Eagle. We were seated at the kitchen table in a rustic ranch house in Haystack, New Mexico, visiting with Navajo Grandfather Martin Martinez, his wife Janice, and their daughter, Kay.
Grandfather Martinez at the 2004 Sodizin Ceremony on Tzoodzil (Mt. Taylor, NM).
Grandfather, in his 90’s and nearing his transition on the Beauty Way, had life experience as a rancher, a rodeo rider, a Code Talker in World War II, and for many long, honorable years as a community leader, a traditional Singer, and the ceremonial keeper of Tzoodzil — the Blue Bead or Turquoise Mountain, now called Mount Taylor. Rising majestically under the blue skies of New Mexico, Tzoodzil is the South Mountain among the Four Holy Mountains that mark the Four Corners of Turtle Island (North America)
As we sat around the kitchen table in the family ranch house, Grandfather told us a story. He spoke in Navajo, and his daughter Kay translated. We smoked a pipe in a sacred manner, and Grandfather said he could remember long ago when he was a boy hearing some of the Medicine elders talk. The Medicine elders told him that during his lifetime there would come a dark era when many problems would arise on Earth. For many people it would seem as though there was no hope.
At that time, the elders told him, the rainbow people would arrive. These rainbow people would find a way to bring healing. The elders told him that it would be a good and important — and that he would see it come true. Grandfather told us that he had never experienced that teaching in fullness until our moments at the kitchen table, and that he was happy to be in ceremony with us, some of the rainbow people. He offered us his warm smile, and three totems. Then he settled in contentment.
Basic Wisdom
An underlying premise of the rainbow legends is that there is a basic wisdom that can help solve the world’s problems. This wisdom does not belong to any one race, religion or culture, but is a tradition of caring, sharing, and sacred light and sound that has existed throughout human experience and that has been expressed by many human beings, certainly including the saints spoken of in the world’s formal spiritual institutions, as well as thousands of other human beings of less formal renown.
We are in a time when many millions – actually billions – of people can and are by circumstances called to give the archetype expression in their lives. Thus the challenge is laid down before us all: live up to the promise.
In light of the legend, my understanding is that rainbow people choose themselves and then strive to live with exalted physical, moral and ethical courage, appreciating that the problems and weapons of the world have been made by the human mind, thus they can be unmade. Rainbow warriors and rainbow walkers need to cultivate compassion, a fundamental attribute of human beings, which will gift them with energy and the power to take action. They will also have to develop insight and intelligence, which will guide them to apply the power of compassion via skillful means.
Rainbow warriors and walkers do no harm, inflict no pain, and cause no suffering. They work to set things right by good example. Their lives are about having integrity, being brave, and standing forthrightly but peacefully for all that supports life. Their quest is for safety, sanity, and respect. According to the legend, ultimately they are triumphant. So the story has been told to me. So in my way I tell it to you.
Our Long Walk as Human Beings
Return to Creation ~ Teachings of Weetucks
With the permission and the encouragement of my friend Manitonquat, I wish to share one of the stories from his book Return to Creation, it’s the story of a Wampanoag teacher who lived many years ago in the Algonquin region we now call southeastern Massachusetts. I’ve been fortunate to have Manitonquat (now 87) as a friend for nearly 40 years. He always tells a good story. With respect, Steven M.
Return to Creation
by Manitonquat
I lie with my back upon the earth. I rest deeply, supported securely on the bosom of the Mother as she turns me toward the Father. The blue depth of my Sky Father’s mind absorbs my own mind.
Manitonquat
A few frail puffs of cloud fleet across his face like quizzical expressions. The salt wind from the low tide flats sighs through the marsh grass and rustles the silver poplars in a glimmering dance.
It is good to lie flat on the ground and feel the strength of Mettanokit, our sacred Mother, the earth, radiating her healing energy through our cleansed bodies, filling our thoughts and feelings with her beauty.
The earth seems totally good. The grass, the trees, the rocks, the sand, the river, the ocean, the clouds, the winds, the seagulls, terns, and cormorants sailing and dipping though them – all these seem connected, and I am connected to them all. My body dries warmly with the caressing rays of Nepaushet, glowing golden beyond the sky. What a marvel that it is there, close enough to keep me from freezing, not so close as to burn me up! What a marvel that it exists at all! What a marvel that the earth exists, and that life exists upon it!
What a marvel that I exist and think these thoughts! What a marvel that anything exists, that there is a universe of billions of galaxies with billions of stars and billions of planets in each, and no doubt billions of life forms all struggling to survive and become more conscious. It is very mysterious.
There it is. A vast universe, space, energy, matter, all connected and all following the same natural law. Everything has found a place in it.
And here we are, tiny humankind, one of millions of species of living creatures on one little speck of dust, wondering what our place is and doing some strange things with the brief time of our individual lives: creating death, creating violence, creating famine, creating hatred, loneliness, fear and sickness. How strange!
Pondering the stars, the sun, the earth, the winds and waters and all the other living creatures, I note that everything is working together in a wonderful way. A feeling of perfect trust in Creation pervades my whole being. I have no trouble finding my own path in all this.
But then I look at the human beings, beings capable of love, of beauty and joy. I see humans wrapped in fear, mistrust, and hopelessness. They are angry and frustrated, pursuing self-destruction and destroying the earth along with them.
What an irony that a creature of such intelligence and creativity can appear so stupid and destructive! I recall that the stupid, destructive history of this species is still very recent.
For most of the million or more years that human beings have existed, they have lived in harmony with the natural laws. For most of that time they lived in small circles we call tribes and took care of each other and their environment. They sang and danced and told stories.
Even today in those few areas where civilization has not brought its attendant oppressions upon the natural tribal peoples, they still live that way, close to each other and the natural earth cycles.
In order to consider the complicated causes of the destruction we see today, we need to get in touch with the basic reliability of the universe. We need to experience that simple feeling of rightness that attends our contemplation of existence apart from the confusions of human activity. When We do so, the understanding that pervades our perception of Creation is one of trust. Trust.
It is a lack of trust that lies behind all the destructive behavior of human beings: the wars, the crime, the greed, the suspicion, the barriers, the isolation, the hurt, the inability to love. All of these begin in fear: the fear of not surviving or of not getting enough, the fear of dangerous and malevolent forces one perceives at work in the universe, the fear that beneath the sweetness lurks the truth of poison and evil.
From a human perspective what we need to know is if the Creation is benign or malignant. Is there safety in it? Take a little journey With 
me now. Take the magic feather, and we will rise together and soar above the forests here of pine and oak. There below us are the lands of the Pokonoket Wampanoag, the woods, the beaches, the bays, the rivers and lakes where once were the villages of the Acushnet, the Sakonnet, the Pocassett, the Mattapoisett, the Assawompset, the Nemasket, and the Assonet.
There is Lake Watuppa where some of my forebears lived, and just above it our Watuppa Wampanoag Reservation where we have many ceremonies during the year. Beyond is the wide reach of the Taunton River, which our people knew as the Titticut, a major waterway for us, proceeding north from Fall River.
We will come down on Assonet Neck that narrows the river a little beyond Assonet Bay. There is a state park with a little building that houses and protects a large rock. This is known as Dighton Rock. There are marks carved all over the side facing the river.
There are many theories about these petroglyphs saying that they were made by Vikings, Portuguese explorers, even Egyptians. There are dozens of theories.
Of course, our people know they were made by our ancestors, but theories seem to keep the scholars and hobbyists happy, so we let them alone. They never ask us anyway.
There have been additions over the years, but the basic message was set into the rock a long time ago by a prophet of our people. His name was Weetucks.
At that time, it is said, our people had begun to fall away from the Original Instructions explained to them by Maushop who had departed, many millennia before. He had come to feel that the people depended on him too much and that he was impeding their growth. So he called them together and told them they must assume responsibility for each other, for the Earth Mother and all their relatives, the children of the earth. Then he went away towards the rising sun, there to remain until the world’s end.
After many thousands of years the people had become confused because they had neglected the ceremonies and forgotten the stories and the knowledge that Maushop had taught them. The people were quarreling again, and seeking magic because they were afraid. They forgot to care for each other and began to gossip and to quarrel.
There was a young widow who became pregnant and would not say who the father was. People were superstitious. They thought the father might be a magician or a demon, and they shunned her. She lived in the forest, some distance from the village. and kept to herself. When the baby was born it was a boy, and she called him Weetucks. The boy grew very quickly and soon was helping his mother, hunting and fishing and repairing the lodge.
Wampum
When Weetucks was about twelve years old and coming of age, he told his mother that it was time for him to seclude himself alone for a time, in the traditional way. She did not know how he knew this, for he never went into the village or talked to anyone, and anyway the people had all forgotten about such ways.
He was gone for the turning of a moon. People thought he was lost or hurt and searched for him. When he returned he went straight into the village and collapsed on the water path. He was covered with dirt. for he had buried himself in the earth to receive knowledge from the Mother. And he had been on a mountain top to receive knowledge from Father Sky. from Grandfather Sun, from the winds and the distant stars. When the village people saw Weetucks covered with dirt they knew that he had been given his direction on the medicine path. For they remembered that to go back that way into the heart of the Mother and receive her teachings was the traditional beginning of such a journey.
When this occurred with no instruction from an elder it meant that the knowledge came directly from Kiehtan, from the Creation itself. So they knew this boy must have a special knowledge, and when he spoke they came and listened. He spoke of the old ways, though he had been taught them by no man or woman. He taught them about the Original Instructions of the Creator. He spoke of Maushop’s teachings. of the ceremonies that had been forgotten and how they should be done. He showed them again how to heal themselves in the sweat lodge and mud bath ceremonies. He spoke of healing herbs and other knowledge. Some of these things are well-known now, and others are closely guarded secrets to be known and used in a sacred manner only by our medicine people.
Weetucks was visited one night by two spirit guides from the place of the departed ones, who came to take his mother back on the Star Path to the Land of Souls. At that time they spoke to him of the things that would happen to the land and her people in times that would come.
When the ceremonies for his mother had been completed, Weetucks gathered all the people to tell them of the prophecies he had been given. He said that Hobomocko’s whisper of fear would one day spread across the world, and it would bring disease, violence, and starvation over all the earth. Many would die in confusion and ignorance, but those who remembered the sacred teachings, the Original Instructions, would be able to save their children and heal the earth. Many would lose their way, take a wrong turning, leave the sacred path, yet they would still be able, if they understood in time, to retrace their steps and return to the way of Creation.
Those who returned to Creation would raise theIr children in the right way. These children would begin a whole new world, a world in harmony with all Creation, a world of people guided only by their heart’s joy in love and beauty. He showed the people the rock on which he had carved the story of the Great Spirit creating and giving instructions to all beings.
Dighton Rock
On the right side are two human beings~ at the culmination of Creation, one listening and returning upon the sacred path. and the other preparing to continue on a path that leads to his own destruction. shown by a bolt of lightning ready to strike.
This was the last message of Weetucks. There was a great feast. Many people had come to hear the prophecies, including the Turkey People from across the bay, who had sometimes been enemies, but now made a new peace with our people. The celebration lasted all through the night with much rejoicing and merriment.
Before dawn the people followed Weetucks to the shores of the Turkey Bay where he bade them farewell. As the sun rose behind them. Weetucks walked across the waves towards the western heavens and was never seen again.
It’s a curious fact that the Hopi people of the southwest also have an ancient carving of prophecy on a rock and its message is much the same. That is what the carvings on Dighton Rock are really about, unknown to all the scholars and archaeologists.
That is not all of the message of the Dighton Rock. but it is not time now to reveal more. I am instructed to tell this part of the prophecy now, as it is in keeping with other prophecies of the peoples of Turtle Island, such as the Hopi message of the Great Purification, the Lakota story of the White Buffalo, and the Anishnabe prophecies of the Seven Fires.
These prophecies are being told now because it is believed that some will hear and heed. Some from every race and nation will begin to retrace their footsteps and find the sacred path again.
For any of you who may find it hard to believe such old tales from a people who are strange to you, let me speak briefly about the 1968 
report of the Club of Rome. This club is comprised of scores of the foremost scientists of the world, from every area of learning, who studied the trends of the first six decades of the twentieth century and projected them into the future. This scientific prophecy reads just like our own. Famine, disease, violence, all increasing in our lifetime into the greatest destruction humanity has yet experienced, more devastating to more people than the fire, the ice, or the floods of past eras.
Scientist Isaac Asimov wrote in an editorial in his magazine a few years ago, that he thought we had a less than fifty percent chance of surviving the next thirty years.
But you can be your own prophet. Look at what is happening today in the world all around us. Topsoil is washing away, water tables are receding under the earth. Water and air are becoming more polluted. There is acid rain and a hole in the ozone layer. This is the first time since this world was formed that the relationship between the Earth and the sun has been changed, and it changes more each day. Population is increasing. Famine and starvation grow as more and more of the earth is owned by fewer and fewer people. Fear and mistrust are rising on every hand. Families are breaking up, isolation increases, generation gaps widen, children are abandoned, abused, neglected.
People try to escape through drugs or actual suicide. The courts and prisons cannot keep up with the rising rate of crime, which is itself becoming more and more violent. Terrorism is the political mode of the times, between nations, races, religions. Terror stalks the streets of the major citIes of the civilized world. Governmental intelligence agencies plot assassinations and the overthrow of governments. Multinational industrial cartels squeeze the last life’s blood out of the earth and her tribal and peasant peoples, while the military complex fingers its triggers and demands more sophisticated weapons of destruction.
You don’t have to be a scientist or a visionary to see where all of this must inevitably lead. And no one who has the public’s attention, no political leader, no voice of authority and respect, has put forward any workable solution to all this.
Manitonquat (Medicine Story)
Under these conditions I do not find it strange that there is such apathy and frustration, such hopelessness and barely suppressed anger among people today. I do not find it surprising that young people turn to drugs or cults or the immediate thrills of sensual pleasures or to amassing wealth and courting fame.
And yet when I speak to you here and now, whenever and wherever I speak, at ceremonies, gatherings, on radio and television, the message I bring is one of hope.
The message I bear, from prophecy, vision, and instruction by the traditions of my elders, is that it is not too late for those who listen and heed. Humankind has created all of the problems which it now faces, and humankind can solve them, if we but will.
The same genius that has created weapons of incredible destruction and has probed beyond the earth to the very stars could certainly find a way to bring the peoples of earth together for their own survival.
But it is as though we were in a burning house and all the people in it, instead of trying to put out the fire, were just redecorating their rooms and even robbing each other to do it.
There is no doubt in my mind that millions of people will not be able to survive the holocaust that we are even now preparing for 
ourselves. There is also no doubt in my mind that anyone can still find the Sacred Path of the Creator, and that each of us who does has the power to create with others a society of harmony and joy, wiser and stronger for the lessons of this age of terror and confusion.
It is hard, in a world that already has so much suffering in it, to think that it will soon be worse beyond our imagining. But because it is hard, we should not refuse to see it, to look at it, think about it, and to take action in our lives. People speak of political problems, economic problems, sociological problems, psychological problems, and everyone has a pet theory of how to solve his or her own pet problems. Those are just bandages on the sores of a diseased body.
A deeper remedy must be found for the inner cause of the disease. The disease is caused by oppressive and hurtful social systems. We do not see the fundamentally oppressive nature of these systems because all of society teaches and fosters basic philosophical and spiritual errors. At the deepest level the disease is spiritual.
Spirituality as I conceive it is simply the relationship of all things in the universe. Instead of thinking only of ourselves, we must consider our families, our children, our unborn generations, our planet and all the beings who share it with us, as well as the star-beings throughout the cosmos, and the connections among all of these. Where it must all begin is with trust.
Unless we trust that the Creation is good, that it works, that we are good, and that we can learn to live in a good way in this Creation, we give ourselves over to force or to despair. When we do not trust, we resort to force for protection, to police and armies, and we set up a counterforce.
But once we have this trust, we need only to discover the way that Creation works, find the path and follow it. It is the way of harmony, the way of cooperation with natural law.
Fortunately, we have many guides who have followed that path before us and many who are following it now. And we have the guide of the heart within us. There is an old native saying that every step we take upon the Earth Mother should be as a prayer. Now, a prayer is just a way of becoming really conscious, really tuning in to all the relationships of everything in existence.
Wampum carving
To make every step a prayer is simply to be totally conscious in every act we do. Most of us spend most of our waking hours half asleep, only dimly aware of our feelings, to say nothing of what is going on in the world and of the connections between things. Whatever we do has a meaning and an effect. We can ask ourselves, if I am really conscious, what effect will this action have upon Creation? How will it affect me, affect my family and my community? How will it affect the planet? How will it affect the future and the generations to come?
Our elders have passed down to us a guide for doing this. Our people call this the Original Instructions. Let us consider those instructions next. Let us begin to retrace our steps and find the Sacred Path again.
As we go, let us walk in a sacred manner by letting each step be as a prayer. In this way we will find the Path of Beauty, the Path of the Heart, and return to Creation once more.
(Excerpt from Chapter 3, Return to Creation – Copyright 1991 by Manitonquat).
Notes on the Mountain West Seed Summit
“Whoever controls the seeds in a culture is going to control life.”
~ Emigdio Ballón, Tesuque Pueblo Farm
My notes from the impressive Mountain West Seed Summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico over March 3-4, 2017 – a gathering of seed savers, and people representing seed hubs and seed companies:
Belle Starr, co-founder of the hosting organization, the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, an organization started just three years ago: “We are working to build strong food hubs around the country. The local food movement is huge and growing. But how many are saving seeds? That part is missing.
“What is our duty? Diversity. I hope the thing we carry out of this summit is passion to empower and inspire. That’s how we are going to get diversity. This has to be a grassroots movement. The more people who save seeds, the more resilient the system we create…We hope this will go on for generations.”
Emigdio Ballón, a Quechua native from Bolivia, Agricultural Director for the Pueblo of Tesuque, NM: “The seeds are calling us. They are asking us to help them continue their evolution as they help ours.
Emigdio Ballon (R) speaks with his fellow farmers outside the seed bank at Tesuque Pueblo Farm.
“It’s very difficult for the seeds now. In 2011 we talked about seed security and its relation to food security. That’s when we started our seed bank to protect the seeds handed down to us from time immemorial. Now we are talking also about climate change, and how that is impacting us. How can the seeds sustain us, and our unborn? They need to be protected because of the corporations polluting the earth, and claiming patents over nature. Indigenous people care. Indigenous peoples are protectors.”
Clayton Brascoupe, a Mohawk/Anishnabeg farmer, founder of the Traditional Native America Farmers Association: “What is a seed? Seed is life, mother, embryo, treasure, potential, possibility, relative, our child. All of those things. There is a fundamental, essential relationship that we have.
“We’ve been going along side by side with each other for thousands of years, and now we are in this present generation. We have a treaty, a covenant with the seeds. The seeds are a part of who we are. We have to take care of our relatives, the seeds, and they in turn will take care of us.
“Seeds are the first link in the food chain, and this link is now under threat. Our responsibility is to preserve them for forthcoming generations.”
In remarks to initiate day 2 of the Seed Summit, Bill McDorman, director of the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance spoke about the importance of developing Seed Hubs in parallel with Food Hubs and other local farm and food initiatives. “There’s a real need globally for many more regional operations. Seeds are the foundation not just of our food system, but of civilization itself…This can save us. Regional organizations are the key.”
Andrew Kimbrell, founder and director of the Center for Food Safety, gave a riveting keynote presentation. He began by mentioning that with the financial backing and technical expertise of entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, the Center is about to launch an international online network for seed savers.
He placed this forthcoming network, and the importance of seed saving, in the context of three pending corporate mergers: Bayer-Monsanto, Dupont-Dow, and ChemChina-Syngenta. These mergers, likely to get green-lighted by the Trump-Republican Administration, will place over 60% of the world’s remaining seeds in the corporate control of just three companies. They dominate.
All these multinational corporations are intent on continuing to patent life forms, and to sell allied chemicals as essential, expensive, and polluting inputs to the industrial agriculture system.
The accelerating pace of global climate change and corporate seed and chemical control underscore the imperative need to establish non-corporate seed-saving networks, he said. “We don’t know what seeds we are going to need. But the network will be a key. These are dark times.”
Drawing from some of the material in the well-known book he edited (Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture) he outlined a history of seeds and agriculture in the USA. “Remember the robber barons of the gilded age?” he asked. “We are in the second phase of that.” A century ago the robber barons made their fortunes in railroads, coal, steel, and oil. As succeeding generations of billionaire barons sought further pots of gold, their gaze fixed upon agriculture.
With hybrid plants, poison chemicals (biocides) and patents, robber barons and their corporations over time mutated the meaning and the reality of seeds. Instead of being a commons that united people in ancient and sacred community traditions of caring for a foundational source of life, seeds became a commercial commodity.
Farmers became trapped on technology treadmills: functionaries basically serving as corporate pass-through operations for commercial seeds, chemicals, machinery, oil and gas. Corporations took culture out of agriculture, and substituted industry. For farmers, indebtedness ruled. Whereas just over a century ago as many as 40% of the population was involved in caring for the land and the seed that everything depends upon, only about 1% of the population now has this connection.
Consider where we are now, he said. Via monoculture and intensive chemical use, we continue to deaden and to lose soil. The nitrogen fertilizer of industrial ag leaches out to waterways, creating massive dead zones in our oceans. We’ve lost 90% of our seed diversity. The Center for Food Safety estimates that 35 to 45 percent of greenhouse gases are generated from industrial ag. Thus, the essential elements of farms and food (soil, water, seeds, industrial livestock, etc.) have become zombies.
This system is already dead, Kimbrell said. “It’s a zombie walking. But it’s still unbelievably dangerous. It’s steadily destroying the planet.”
“We are the future. Sometimes we look at these dominant forces, and wonder how can we possibly overcome? But the zombie system is already dead.”
Corporations used to wallow in hubris, believing that nature was no match for biotechnology. But it turns out that biotech is no match for nature. The idea that you are going to control the traits of living things is false.
The answer Kimbrell argued, is for our economy to transform into a wholly owned subsidiary of ecology. “We can only use things to the extent that they regenerate themselves.” We have to go local, biodiverse, humane, and socially just, he said.
Fundamental to all of this transformation is seed. None of it makes sense without seed. Seed is the center that we need.
While stating that he sees organics as a floor for the future of agriculture, he reminded the audience that it’s under attack. The Freedom Caucus (about 30 hard-right Republican members of Congress) has targeted the National Organic Program for destruction.
In response to a question from the audience, Kimbrell commented on the upcoming 2018 Farm Bill. “If Dante were alive today,” he said, “The Inferno would be about the farm bill.” He said we need to get environmental groups together with farm groups right now, in 2017. “Unless we get ahead of the game,” he commented, “we are lost.”
Three times during his talk Kimbrell quoted the late Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. One example: “I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.”
Echoing this insight toward the end of his talk as an encouragement to seed savers and to others working to build a just, healthy and equitable farm and food system, Kimbrell said: “We face the spiritual challenge of moving from a culture of death to a culture of life.”
~ END ~
Prepping for Resilient Community: Wherever Two or More are Gathered
Note: This article originally published in Applied Biodynamics, journal of the Josephine Porter Institute (Issue No. 90, Fall/Winter 2016-17).
As the Sun approached Summer Solstice, my friend Stephen Clarke stopped by to visit. He sat with me at the picnic table by our garden. In the afternoon light we talked.
Pollen Boy at the Sun – Chaudron
Stephen spun out for me the tale of his recent journey up onto the Colorado Plateau near the Lukachukai Mountains, close by the imaginary straight line that legally, if not naturally, separates Arizona and New Mexico. Among many elements, this part of the Navajo Reservation is a place of high elevation, white reeds, rich farmland, uranium, tangled history and big sky.
Stephen made his journey to sit with some Navajo friends as part of a week-long Nadáá healing ceremony. He’s an astute observer of matters physical and metaphysical, one of the founding parents of both the Taos and the Santa Fe Waldorf Schools in New Mexico, and also the former proprietor and master mechanic at Mozart’s Garage.
In telling the tale of his visit to Lukachukai, he mentioned how the community of people came together in hard work and good fellowship to abide with one another over a week and to make ceremony expressing timeless ways and courtesies, all woven together within a group energy field of respect and humor many times larger than themselves.
“Native people know how to cooperate in community,” he told me. “It’s silent, it’s unspoken, but it is known and known implicitly by everyone. I see that as the Christ energy in expression. Not as a thought or a feeling, but in action. That’s it for sure. I could see it once again as I sat among the people. The Christ spirit lives in the ethers – the biosphere – as it circulates among people and the natural world.”
When I heard Stephen share his observation it summoned for me the seed thought expressed in Matthew (18:19-20) “…if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them…For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.”
Stephen Clarke
“Sure,” he agreed. “That fits. Native people know already that the spirit lives in the land and in their relationships with one another. As part of their way, for thousands of years they have had the understanding of spirit life on a practical level.
“There’s a western axiom that ‘the map is not the territory.’ But that’s not so in traditional Native contexts. The land itself is the map and that land map is also indivisibly the territory wherein life unfolds. Physicality and spirituality are not separated by concepts or perceptions, to be worshiped in a metaphysical superstructure high off the ground, but are appreciated as one interpenetrating and mutually revealing reality. Native people have the land as source of spirituality and as the reference point for their spiritual lives.”
Stephen’s story put me in mind of community supported agriculture (CSA), the movement that took root some 30 years ago in the USA with the inspiration of biodynamic understandings, ideals and techniques. I’ve been involved as a reporter and participant since the start, and thus had a chance to observe the development of CSA in the USA over three decades.
Over that span of time many thousands of people in all parts of the world have come to recognize in CSA a vehicle for approaching land, food, labor, environment and community in a healthier way. But as of late the community dimension, and the intrinsic aspect of relationship to the land, have often been marginalized. Efficiency has assumed primacy with institutional efforts to employ CSA as a “market strategy.” In my view, treating CSA as a “market strategy” is not only antithetical to the initial impulses, but also woefully inadequate to the challenges of our time.
Our era is sharply marked by the mounting, menacing clouds of climate chaos, paralleled by dramatic and urgent shifts in global politics, economics, and social relations. Much more than a market strategy is required. I remain steadfast in my conviction that CSA can play a key role in addressing these issues. It’s time to expand exponentially the CSA vision and reality to hundreds of thousands of community farms around the world, and time also to evolve consciously the community and the associative economic dimensions of CSA.
As Stephen related, Navajo relatives in Lukachukai — with grace and spiritual intelligence, via basic interactions with each other and nature — demonstrated their understanding and appreciation of community and spiritual realities. It’s their way. And their way is part of the strength of the rootstock: the native spiritual, cultural and agricultural knowings that have been cultivated and developed in North America for 30,000 years or more.
A rootstock is part of a plant, often an underground part, from which new above-ground growth can be produced. Grafting refers to the process by which a plant, sometimes just a stump with an established root system, serves as the base onto which cuttings (scions) from another plant are joined.
The cultural ways that arrived in North America from Europe, Africa, Asia and the far south, have never been deliberately grafted on to the rootstock. Instead, there has been a concerted, systematic, violent and tragic attempt to annihilate the rootstock of native wisdom through protracted campaigns of genocide, wholesale landgrabbing, and systematic treaty violations. That pattern has generated a massive energy field of karma, as yet unreckoned, but now coming into focus as tribes gather at Standing Rock in a historic action to protect the earth for life.
A successful, healthy, conscious grafting of the world’s cultural and spiritual ways to the rootstock of Turtle Island (North America) would, I believe, yield an abundant harvest of goodness, including more respectful, appreciative attitudes toward the land that sustains us all, as well as the agriculture systems we employ to bring forth it’s bounty. Biodynamic agriculture and preparations can play a key role in this critical matter
The initial Biodynamic perceptions and preparations were indigenous to Europe. Now the perceptions and preparations are global, and they are employed in many different ways in many different geographical and cultural contexts, including North America. The Biodynamic impulse can benefit enormously from being more deliberately and skillfully grafted with the rootstock of native knowings. Both will be strengthened. This kind of healthy grafting is certainly a prominent theme in the 2016 North American Biodynamic Conference set for Santa Fe, and rightly so. Much good is likely to arise from this sharing and reciprocity.
But beyond the 2016 conference, fundamental grafting and community questions need to come more into focus. The questions are not just philosophical, but also practical. Considering the status of climate change, they’re also urgent.
Is there, or could there be, a biodynamic preparation that aids, nurtures and supports the grafting of the world’s wide array of cultural and agricultural traditions to the native rootstock and wisdom ways so inseparably a part of North America?
And what kinds of biodynamic preparations could help magnetize the land and thereby rightly draw to it the interest and dedication of diverse groups of people (communities) who will willingly take on responsibility for caring for it as a farm? In other words, how might Biodynamic understandings and preparations continue to foster the growth and healthy development of CSAs, which can help make an important, positive difference as we all seek to reckon with the momentous changes afoot?
I taled briefly with the Josephine Porter Institute’s Board President, Pat Frazier, about some of these questions. Speaking by cell phone after just having finished milking chores on her Colorado farm, she suggested that as far as community and cultural grafting go, there are indeed intriguing possibilities that could be taken up by biodynamic researchers. But in the present, she said, a good starting point is with a familiar prep that’s already been developed: barrel compost. “Barrel compost is oftentimes created in community,” she said. “It just lends itself to that. It’s easy to make, it joins people together, and it’s transferable to community because once the compost dug out of the pit you can store it, and then share it widely.”
My sense is that both kinds of preparations – a grafting prep and a community prep – could help usher us to the level of strength, courage, intelligence and will necessary to meet the challenges of our era.
Note: I will be facilitating a workshop at the North American Biodynamic Conference in Santa Fe, NM, Nov. 16-20, 2016. The workshop is titled CSA Farms: Awakening Community Intelligence. Stephen Clarke will also be presenting via the conference track for the Agricultural Wisdom of the Americas: Entwining Biodynamic and Indigenous Ways of Working with the Land.
Grafting the Food System to America’s Rootstock
As we are rocked by repeated waves of climate change, and sharp shifts in politics, economics, and society, something durable is called for – something strong, wise, rooted in the land, waiting at last to find a home in our souls.
The core native knowings that have been part of culture and agriculture on this land for 10,000 years or more can enhance our capacity to respond adroitly to the dissolving and shattering forces aroused in our era. For the sake of integrity and resilience, it’s time finally to consciously graft the variety of cultures that have come to roost on North America with the rootstock.
Grafting – wikipedia commons
Grafting refers to the process by which a plant serves as the base (rootstock) onto which cuttings from other plants are joined (the scions). Grafting ensures a strong, healthy and productive crown, arising from a mature root system. It’s also a useful metaphor.
The rainbow array of cultural and agricultural ways that have entered onto the continent from Europe, Africa, Asia and southern latitudes, have never been grafted to the rootstock of Turtle Island (North America). Instead there has been an ongoing violent, systematic effort to annihilate rootstock ways through genocide, land theft, and treaty violations. That pattern has generated a massive energy field of karma, as yet unreckoned.
Now, in an era of pervasive change, it’s both an auspicious and a decisive time for the individuals, groups, states and nations of North America to face the historic and contemporary reality by learning more deeply about, respecting actively, and engaging more constructively with the cultural and agricultural rootstock of the land we now share.
As it happens, a grafting impulse is one of the unifying themes woven into the fabric of the upcoming North American Biodynamic Farming Conference* ~ Tierra Viva (Farming the Living Earth). The conference will draw together a multitude of the diverse cultural and agricultural wisdom streams that are part of modern life in the Americas. Come November the conference will create time and space for fusion on the high mountain plains – the altiplano if you will – of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The biodynamic farming and gardening movement is one of many natural scions available for grafting to North America’s cultural and agricultural rootstock. But I feel that biodynamics in particular is a propitious domain for such fusion. A forerunner of organics, biodynamics embraces metaphysical realities that organics chooses not to factor in, and strives to work intelligently with subtle forces. When biodynamics was germinating as an agricultural discipline back in the 1920s, teacher Rudolf Steiner encouraged farmers to make use of an ancient principle from the indigenous knowings native to Europe and elsewhere: “Spirit is never without matter, matter never without spirit.”
Native peoples indigenous to the Americas have likewise long appreciated this foundational truth, and held it in the forefront as they refined a culture and agriculture particular to this place, North America, over 10,000 years or more. Rather than using abstract intellectual constructs such as quantum field theory or general relativity, native knowings are conveyed in elegant, tangible metaphors, such as the teaching of the Sacred Hoop (Circle of Life), or the teaching that we have a fundamental responsibility to take care of the earth, for she is indeed our mother (Tierra Madre, Pachamama).
With presenters from the four directions and a rich mix of cultures, grafting will be in the atmosphere at Tierra Viva. Among the farmers, gardeners and grafters whose voices will sound, Larry and Deborah Littlebird of Santo Domingo Pueblo, peacemaker Patricia Ann Davis of the Navajo/Dineh Nation, Emigdio Ballon of Tesuque Pueblo, Dr. Jose Ma Anguiano Cardenas from Nayarit, México, Karen Washington from Rise & Root farm in New York City, Helmy Abouleish from Egypt, Sally Fox of Verditas Farm, and author/chef Deborah Madison from Galisteo, New Mexico.
Cultural and Agricultural Wisdom of the Americas
The rootstock cultural and agricultural knowings of North America constitute basic understandings for long-term survival on this land. The knowings have been gained not over mere centuries, but over many thousands of years. In light of our present circumstances, these basic knowings are both relevant and essential.
For some time healthy natural grafting processes have been progressing in the array of agroecological movements toward clean, wholesome land, water and food, such as good food, slow food, organic food, food justice, food sovereignty, and a variety of First Nations initiatives. These are all positive and promising, but just a fraction of the food system.
Where grafting is acutely needed is in the industrialized, chemicalized, genetically manipulated and patented realms of corporate culture and agriculture. They dominate our food system. And that food system has become one of the most ecologically destructive forces on our planet, a leading contributor to climate chaos. The agriculture system’s dependence on dense, lifeless minerals and an array of poisons, exists in parasitic parallel with an increasingly dense and sick culture at large.
The structure of the dominant food system has origins that extend back through history at least to genocide of native people and theft of their land, to slavery on farms and plantations, to the corporate forces which have driven hundreds of thousands of farm families off the land, to our current wholesale dependence upon, and exploitation of farm workers. All that has to be faced, reckoned with, and resolved, or it remains toxic – toxic in a turbulent era.
But the potential is there for the dominant food system to begin intelligently and skillfully grafting its culture and agriculture to the rootstock. A good starting point would be embracing the teaching of the Seventh Generation – to take into consideration the impact that every corporate project or action will have on our children’s children’s children unto the seventh generation. When a person or a corporation is sure decisions and actions will not harm, but rather will bring benefit to that seventh generation, then it’s time to act. What a profound difference that simple graft could make if taken sincerely.
The healing proposition of grafting has for centuries been eloquently told through the hemisphere-wide saga of The Condor and the Eagle as they are joined via the agency of the Quetzal. It’s an uplifting story, and it expresses a core understanding held by many traditional people in North, South and Central America. Simply hearing the story and paying attention to it creates a healthy bond of understanding.
In keeping with both traditional and emerging understandings, the North American Biodynamic conference in Santa Fe holds promise for further cultural and agricultural grafting progress.
~ END ~
*Note: I‘m a member of the Biodynamic Association, and also one of the presenters at the upcoming Tierra Viva conference. Having had years of involvement with CSA farms and food coops, as well as having had the opportunity to walk thousands miles with native wisdom keepers, I’m strongly drawn to exploration of the cultural and agricultural grafting theme. At the conference I’ll facilitate a workshop titled CSA Farms: Awakening Community Intelligence. ~ S.M.
History is made by people who do things now.
Elizabeth and I went to the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico last night to hear Winona LaDuke and Mililani Trask speak as part of the Lannan Foundation’s programs on cultural freedom. Among the many insightful and rousing remarks they shared with the audience, one seemed to me particularly well suited for a meme:
True Saga Commemorates an Epic American Spiritual Quest
Twenty years have come and gone, and thus I am moved to acknowledge and commemorate a great adventure for our era, and the telling of the true tale of that adventure as Odyssey of the 8th Fire.
The 8th Fire saga tells the real story of a great, long prayer walk in 1995-96 from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The story arises from the deepest roots of our land, but takes place in the present and the future. In it, circles upon circles, spiritual elders make a great and generous giveaway of the teachings they carry.
The actual writing of this epic-length, nonfiction story of the 2,500 mile prayer pilgrimage for the earth took place some 11 years after the final steps of the walk. I wrote Odyssey of the 8th Fire over the course of 225 consecutive days beginning in early summer 2007 and finishing in the deep of winter 2008.
Elizabeth- 2015
At the time my wife Elizabeth Wolf and I were living on Calle Contento in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Over those intensely demanding 225 days, Elizabeth provided intellectual, emotional, creative and spiritual support in a thousand ways, and thereby made possible the writing and online publication of the epic, nonfiction saga Odyssey of the 8th Fire. While holding down a fulltime job at Blessingway Authors Services, she remained close to this project as my Muse, critic, and companion from the first word through the last. Her multitude of contributions made an enormous and enduring difference.
Thank you darling Elizabeth for making it possible to spin out in words this ambitious spiritual saga along the Beauty Way, and to make of it a great giveaway for the people. ~ S.M.
Here’s just a short take from the 8th Fire account of the final day of the long Walk for the Earth:
Day 225 – TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY – February 2, 1996 – Odyssey of the 8th Fire
“We are a part of all that we have met. Yet, experience is an arch wherethro gleams that untravl’d world whose margin fades forever and forever when we move.” ~ Odysseus to Athena, at the end of The Odyssey
Whirling Rainbow Skysign & Sandpainting
…Evelyn Commanda, representing the Algonquin peoples, held one end of the Seven Fires Wampum Belt, and Liz Dominguez, representing Chumash peoples, held the other end. Together, slowly and solemnly, they walked the belt out into the Pacific Ocean, where in a sacred manner they washed it with the waves…
…we were a circle of nearly 80 people representing all the colors of humanity, and many of its spiritual traditions.
We began to express ourselves, to pray. One of the things we gave thanks for on the beach was the tremendous support we enjoyed as we walked. So many wonderful people stopped, or went out of their way somehow to ensure that we succeeded as best we could. So many people responded, and helped us along.
Some people became very interested in the depth and specificity of the prophecies we carried, while others didn’t care very much about that kind of information at all. They just felt we were doing something worthwhile by walking, and that’s all they needed to know. They acted out of basic human goodness. Now in our final ceremony, we sent our gratitude and good feelings to Creator and all the helpers with our song and prayer for all…
Link to the full account of Day 225 of the Odyssey of the 8th Fire.
What they greatly thought, they nobly dared
2015 – This year marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the great prophetic, multicultural Sunbow pilgrimage from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 1995 under guidance of traditional native wisdom keepers and the skysign of the Whirling Rainbow.
The journey began — and remains — the Odyssey of the 8th Fire. I’m honored to have had the opportunity to tell this epic tale freely on the web, and grateful for the help that came to support me in doing it.
As the meme below attests, I’m moved this 20th anniversary year to beat upon the drum, to write, and to otherwise let people know about the journey that took place and that in my mind remains unfinished. That’s a key. Via the Odyssey of the 8th Fire everyone has an opportunity to make a parallel literary and spiritual pilgrimage across Turtle Island (North America). From that journey, I feel, much is to be gained.
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