This Week’s Reading
In the first reading, we’ll be looking at one chapter of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book: Three Sisters.
We’ll start with a writing exercise:
- What did you respond to in the Kimmerer piece?
- What did you struggle with or not agree with?
Thinking about food: Discussion
Where does our food come from?
- What did you have for dinner last night (or breakfast this morning)?
- Where did your food come from?
- Are any of you from a farming background?
- How much of your food do you grow yourself (or is grown in your community)?
- What do you do to prepare food?
Three Sisters
In this justly famous passage, Kimmerer talks about what is known as intercropping, or companion planting, the planting of multiple crops in the same area. This was a common farming strategy in indigenous American communities. So in this passage, Kimmerer talks about the “three sisters” — the three staple crops of American indigenous societies — corn (maize), beans, and squash.
We’ll watch this video on intercropping and the three sisters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSwGxJe4bVs
There are a lot of interesting questions that this section raises. The first, of course, is whether intercropping works. And if so, how and in what ways does it work? There’s been a lot of scientific research on this. One recent paper, about an experiment in which scientists worked with indigenous communities, can be found here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-022-10336-z
Going into more depth
Here are some questions to discuss:
- Is intercropping used in traditional agriculture in your home region?
- Does your own culture have any equivalent myths about reciprocity between different plants?
- Returning to the question of different ways of knowing, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes “I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges?” What would such a polyculture look like? And is it desirable?
Homework
For next time read “Putting Down Roots”, and “People of Corn, People of Light”