Subverting the poverty narrative

South Dakota has an interesting poverty narrative. While the word poverty gets thrown around a lot, nothing forces you to face the ways in which we see, experience and speak about poverty like living on a reservation.

While I was born in one of the poorest counties in the nation, on one of the poorest reservations in the nation, I then lived on the other side of the state as a young adult. The general level of affluence in Eastern South Dakota (or East River as most South Dakotans call it), coupled with it being a place where people (despite a couple reservations over there) sorta forget that reservations and Indians even exist, makes even a tribal member like me deal with some culture-shock in moving back to a reservation community as a 30-year-old mother used to experiencing daily miles of prettified lawns and streetscapes.

Even though I know most of the ‘pretty’ lawns I’m used to looking at are an environmental disaster in their own right with huge inputs of chemicals, potable water and lack of truly beneficial ecological outcomes, comparisons between there and here have given me some interesting insights.

All these various factors have been rolling around in my mind for the past six months, at least, if not the entire year, since moving, like a pebble being tossed by a fast moving stream. I think it’s time for me to layout a few of these observations.

Before I do so, though, a little history about lawns. The idea of a lawn has been discussed much lately as a way for our European, especially English, ancestors to prove they were noble (or laster, the aspiring merchant class) and not ‘poor.’

How did a lawn prove that? It proved that quite literally they needn’t use all their land in growing food. They could afford the luxury of leaving land untilled, unlike those cottagers down the road, using everyspace available and like Dickon in “The Secret Garden,” only adding such flowers as were ‘easy’ for poor people to cultivate-needing little space and time.

In the next couple posts, I’m going to look at the true poverty excessive lawn creates, how feeling (and being) poor can inhibit sustainable living and how overly prudent sustainable living can aggravate generational poverty.

We all must start asking the hard, unsettling and uncomfortable questions about why we are failing at living more sustainablty in our region. I believe that our conditioned responses to the various facets of the poverty narrative has something to do with that.

We must force ourselves to get over our knee-jerk reactions and learn to tell different stories and subvert the poverty narrative that is destroying our families, communities and this land.

Mending the hoops of human existence

We are all a bunch of raging hypocrites when it comes to living sustainably. I have to confess to you, my friends and neighbors, that this has driven me more times than I can count to impotence on this website.

It is hard to write about sustainability, and even harder to justify why we cover what we cover, when all the amazing people who are contributing probably feel (like I know I do) that they’re so not worthy of writing about sustainability when we ourselves fall so short. In fact, I have not been able to get enough content in recent months to justify keeping us going.

This does not change the raging need for voices that are united about the hideous ways we’re defiling Mother Earth, our neighbors, our children and ourselves.

When fuel oil or electricity from coal plants keep us warm, as long as we’re using drinking water to defecate in, when we eat food according to the dictates of science and macroeconomics, we don’t know our neighbors, we can’t fathom soiling our hands in our own food production–or can’t because of the rules of our communities or limitations of rental agreements, when we wear clothes made from a cesspool of chemicals and child slavery across the far oceans, when we literally can’t feed, shelter, clothe, and care for our families without buying into the insanity of our current system–and I’m talking about us crunchies who’re ‘trying,’ then we MUST do something about it.

We CANNOT give up. We CANNOT remain voiceless. That’s like the slave who will only speak to his own freedom after he has been freed. That is not how it works.

As much as we bandy the word sustainability about, what is the definition of it? To me, mending every eco-hoop of our life has always been my goal, my dream, and my hope for myself and my family.

In Lakota thought-life, we understand ‘mending the hoop’ or ‘mending the circle.’ Well, if I may be so bold, I am now going to make the mission and goal of Sustainable Dakota Digest this: To be a prophetic voice demanding, challenging and celebrating the mending of the hoops that make up human existence.

When we first started, we wanted to share information and resources to help people become more sustainable. I tried not to step on toes, because I didn’t want to discourage anyone from trying. While that still concerns me, let me explain what we’re going to do now.

We’re going to criticize everyone, demand lives of fully mended living from ourselves and our neighbors, challenge the gate keepers of our communities to make it possible for us to do this, and we’re going to celebrate our achievements along the way. We will share the same sorts of information we shared before, but we will give you a critical breakdown of where these options succeed and where they ecofail. We will be ruthless and thus being true to our spirits who know better. We will be cheerful as we get to work, because joy is as necessary as a working knowledge of applied science.

We will utilize every eco-mending tool in our collective toolbox. If we’re rather Lakota, we’re also pioneering in many instances and can pull from that collective experience. This is the season of Advent, so I would challenge us to imagine that the King who came once as a baby, will indeed one day return to a tumultuous earth that is showing who the Firstborn’s brothers and sisters truly are.

Now, let us get to work!

Sincerely,
Tasiyagnunpa, your fellow hypocrite

So you think you're green?

Try moving someplace where what you eat, the people you spend time with, your dining choices, everything that you’ve trained yourself to do to live more simply and sustainably is GONE.

I had no idea, when I moved to Eagle Butte, SD, from Brookings, SD, almost a year ago, that I would have such crunchy culture shock.

I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Western South Dakota, on/near reservations, middle of everywhere, so I wasn’t unprepared. No, what I was unprepared for was how difficult it would be for me to be green in the same exact ways I had accustomed myself to.

This begs the question–so you think you’re green? Do you think you have sustainable living fairly well integrated in your life? Maybe you’ve about conquered a mostly locavore diet. Or buy mostly natural and artisan? Walk/bike everywhere, every day by living close to work, food, shopping needs?

Whatever you defined as the best way to be green, to live more sustainably, please realize something–GREEN GURU YOU ARE NOT.

When people discuss living sustainably, be advised that what you have to share is as individual as you and not necessarily useful or adaptable to others.

This is the hard lesson I’ve learned…even though I knew this in principle, heck, even the idea of SD Digest was to offer info and insights unique to our region, I still faced crunchy culture shock in moving.

Let’s just say that I’m Sheldon and somebody paintballed my seat.

And I’ve been scrambling ever since.

Seriously, right now, I’m hard pressed to identify much in my life that is overtly green. I finally had to give up what I knew, to learn this place and its needs better.

So, as I figure this all out, all I do know is that I must.

That it doesn’t freaking matter where you live, how much you make, your housing options, food options, shopping options or anything else–NO EXCUSES, we must learn to live sustainably.

Now.

Feedback: How do you live sustainably? How would that be affected if you moved to a different place, town, county, etc?

Planning to Can. Gardens optional.

Current pantry photos. Photo by Maria Birch.

In the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in home gardening and home food preservation – canning, dehydrating, freezing and pickling or fermenting.

These days it is not necessary to grow a garden in order to have fresh produce for preserving.

Nor is it necessary to preserve huge quantities of produce.

A new trend is small batch canning. Preserving just four or five half-pints of strawberry jam or a half dozen jars of salsa are two examples of small batch canning.

Persons without a garden can purchase fresh in-season produce at the local farmers market or directly from the farmer or grower.

Ten pounds of tomatoes would make about a half-dozen pint jars of salsa.

A bushel of tomatoes, weighing about 54 pounds, will yield 15 to 20 quarts of whole or chopped tomatoes, or 12 to 15 quarts of juice.

Freezing tomatoes is an easy preservation method. Wash, remove the stem, and place the tomato on a cookie sheet. Put the cookie sheet into the freezer for about a half hour or until the tomatoes start to firm up. Place tomatoes in a zip lock bag and store in the freezer.

To remove skin from a frozen tomato, put the tomato in a pan of cold water. When the skin splits, use a knife to peel the skin from the tomato.

Twelve to 15 tomatoes plants in a garden will yield 15 or 20 quarts of canned tomatoes.

Photo by Maria Birch.

A 48-pound bushel of 3- to 4-inch cucumbers will yield 16 to 24 quarts of pickles. A bushel of 1- to 2-inch cucumbers will yield 35 to 40 quarts of gherkins.

Refrigerator dills are easy to make. Place sliced onions, garlic and dill in a jar. Add cucumbers to the jar. A mixture of vinegar, water, sugar and spices are poured over the ingredients in the jar. A lid is placed on the jar, and it is stored in the refrigerator. It will be ready to eat in about two weeks.

About a dozen cucumber plants will yield enough cucumbers for those 16 or so quarts of dill pickles.

Two pounds of fresh green beans will yield one quart frozen beans. Snip off the ends, cut in one-inch pieces, blanch and place in a quart-size freezer container.

A dozen green bean plants in a garden or containers will provide plenty of beans for freezing.

One word of advice for both gardening and food preservation: start small, learn the basics and go from there.

The size of the garden can increase as you gain skills.

Photo by Maria Birch.

The amount of food preserved can likewise increase as you gain confidence in your skills.

Fruits and acidified foods (pickled items) are safely canned with a boiling water bath canner. Other foods – vegetables and meats – require a pressure canner.

Plenty of information about gardening and home preservation is available online or in print.

One of the best online sources for home preservation is the National Center for Home Food Preservation, http://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/publications_usda.html.

The Mad Meadowlark blog project

In the midst of working at the newspaper as an editor for a few months this last year, I ended my blog project Sustainable Dakota Digest.

While I’m still keeping live the sister youtube page, I felt it was time to close that chapter and see what new project needed to come to fruition.

Well, I’ve been home about a month now since giving up my editorship in order to be home all week with our sons.

Today, that new project hit me…in the midst of some pretty horrible financial news.

Amazing how that can happen sometimes.

Why don’t you head on over, and see what I’m up to now.

“The adoption o…

“The adoption of successful innovation in communities often follows a pattern similar to ecological succession in nature. Visionary and obsessive individuals often pioneer the solutions, but it generally requires more influential and established leaders to take up the innovation before it is widely seen as appropriate and desirable.” [Holmgren, 'Essence of Permaculture']

From my coursework reading for the Permaculture Design Certificate course I’m taking through Glacial Lakes Permaculture. Basically, weeds come first. Then other species.

I am a weed.

Mending the hoops of human existence

Reblogged from Sustainable Dakota:

We are all a bunch of raging hypocrites when it comes to living sustainably. I have to confess to you, my friends and neighbors, that this has driven me more times than I can count to impotence on this website.

It is hard to write about sustainability, and even harder to justify why we cover what we cover, when all the amazing people who are contributing probably feel (like I know I do) that they're so not worthy of writing about sustainability when we ourselves fall so short.

Read more… 532 more words

This is the new vision and focus for Sustainable Dakota. I was ready to pull the plug...and then inspiration woke me up this morning. I love it when that happens! May God's grace rest upon it...