I come from a background of union activism, art & philosophy, direct-action environmentalism, public school education, and building trades. By using this lens of understanding, you can look at these systems and choose your leverage points. Tyson Sampson Indigenous people, in general, dont use pesticides. In historical terms, science has been used to dispossess a lot of Indigenous Peoples of land. We have to have reverence and respect for those unknowns. My own history is of extreme poverty, marginalization, and struggle. In another sense, a cultural sense, decolonization is about the process of removing colonizing thoughts from your own mind and colonizing behavior from your own lifeway. In the 1930s and again in the 60s, The National Resource Conservation Service came in and put in elk and deer-proof fences. SOIL is the educational branch of the Earthaven Tree. Perhaps it is the willingness to play the superior that is the root of the problem? Then come back and try again. And if we have privilege and agency within that unjust and atrocious system, we must commit to using that access to dismantle that system. . Indigenous People need room to tell those stories. Think about what it means to be a true friend to somebody. It leaves the common farmer and the common Indigenous person outside of understanding, and thats a problem. The middle of the scale reflects the value we believe the program holds and the low-end offers a more accessible entry point. Native people continue to live and many continue to tend their council fires, which have been maintained for hundreds of continuous years. In an indigenous community, there are some things that just cannot be commodified land, water, air, animals, even the health of the people, all of which are considered collective resources. When we plant corn, we dont plant just for us, we plant for the environment around us too. But it is very much the opposite of what agricultural systems are today, which tries to kill everything except the plant that you want to grow. Please consider your needs and resources to determine what might be a stretch, but not a strain. However, it seems to me that there are ripples of injustice coursing through the permaculture community, manifesting as a pattern of landowners and/or self-proclaimed leaders doing things that hurt, offend, oppress, and devalue others. Pomo people do different things than Navajo people. I have had a handful of discussions about decolonization in terms of giving land back to indigenous populations. I maintain a permaculture design/build practice for residential and farm clients. My lineage of earth skills teachers includes Mike Douglas and Mal Stevens of the Maine Primitive Skills School. It doesnt include indigenous people because only colonizers and settlers are considered farmers in America. So saying something like Permaculture allows us to remember how to be indigenous to a place makes a metaphor of indigeneity and thereby erases the lived experience of real peoples who are actually indigenous to Native America and who still resist the campaigns of genocide and expropriation of land and resources that continue to this day. Exploring the Intersection of Permaculture and Decolonization. Agriculture is usually the point in our American historical narrative where Indigenous People are separated from the rest of civilization.