Unshod with D. Firth Griffith

God Is Red: Sacred Indigenous Agriculture with Taylor Keen, Episode 2

• Daniel Firth Griffith • Season 4 • Episode 32

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This yarn with my friend Taylor Keen explores the intersection / divergence of indigenous wisdom and modern agriculture, emphasizing the sacredness of food and the importance of traditional practices. We discuss the historical context of agriculture, the impact of corporate practices on indigenous methods, and the need for a deeper understanding and spirituality of the relationship between humans and Earth. 

Taylor highlights the significance of rituals in agriculture and the memory embedded in seeds, advocating for a return to indigenous practices to foster a more sustainable future and more. Taylor also touches BIGFOOT and figures like Bigfoot and the historical context of agricultural practices in America, emphasizing the need for a return to more harmonious and collaborative ways of living with the land.

Episode website HERE.


D. Firth Griffith:

Hey, welcome back to the podcast. This is episode two of our series titled God is Red, with my dear friend, my brother, my mentor, taylor Keene, degree from Dartmouth, two master's degrees from Harvard, where he also served as a fellow in the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. He's a Cherokee Nation citizen, he's the founder of Sacred Seed, which is the topic, the heart source of this episode, which is an organization devoted to propagating tribal seed sovereignty, and he is a member of the Earthen Bison Clan of the Omaha tribe, where he is known by the name Bison Maine. He lives in Omaha, nebraska, and, yeah, this is an episode.

D. Firth Griffith:

I have long spoken on this podcast and just a whole gargantuan plethora of other podcasts about the non-regenerativeness of regenerative agriculture, the problems of industrial agriculture, the problems of the industrial mindset within the regenerative or green agriculture movements, the idea of production at all costs being well, just not honorable, unkind. And in this conversation, taylor and I get to sit with these thoughts. His next book, book two, following his previous Rediscovering Turtle Island, has a chapter, a chapter dedicated to this subject, which I cannot wait to read. I just cannot wait. Before we jump in, a quick reminder Join us online at Substack. It's titled Unshod Link is in the show notes. All of my books you can access on the platform there. And then all of these episodes are housed in a very conversational or Yarny like way, where you don't just listen, you actually get to participate and ask questions and dialogue and actually take these thoughts one step further, both in the general consciousness of humanity, but you know, especially in your own consciousness, in your own lives, in your own ways.

D. Firth Griffith:

The last thing that Taylor and I want to do is just yell at the ether, this faceless, nameless ether, and so join us, I implore you, and share this episode. If this means something to you, share it, please. It means the world to us. This is a non-monetized podcast. I do all of it and, yeah, you know it costs money and it has power. It. You know it costs money and it has power. It has great medicine, and so we do it. But share it, rate it, love us, join us, conversate with us.

Taylor Keen:

It means the world. And so, without further ado, episode number two of God is Red, with Taylor Keene Transcription by CastingWords language the people that move against the current, and I'm dialing in from the lands that we call Nebthuska, which means flat water, it's the Omaha's word for the Platte River and I carry the name of Bison Mane for the earthen bison clan of the people that move against the current. Planting is pretty heavy on my mind right now because with sacred seed I've got always have at least a few plots locally and we mark springtime by the first thunder, or thundersnow, mipahanga is what we call it. So when that happens we start preparing, and typically in the month of April we're preparing our plots and then we plan according to the cycles of the moon in May and try to get things in around the new moon and try to get things in around the new moon. A lot of those reasons why are not understood by modern people.

Taylor Keen:

Indigenous ag has been shepherding agriculture in the Americas for 15,000 plus years. The Three Sisters methodology is still a lot to be learned by agriculture of today. So whenever we plan I always offer prayers around to creator and spirit. May we, may these seeds of life transform our lives, and may they be teachers, may they nourish our mind, bodies and soul. We always pray for a bountiful harvest, and then, when harvest time comes, we pray for a good winter, especially for our elders and our children, that they may survive, and we pray that the harvest in the fall is bountiful enough to sustain us until the next spring, when life begins anew. That's where my mind has been the last few days.

D. Firth Griffith:

I appreciate those words. I appreciate them. Yeah, the ritual the ceremony of spring planting is, I don't know. I think it's bastardized when it's seen as overly scientific. Maybe you know a lot of farmers in our area. Look at, you know the weather predictions and calculations for frost seeding, you know spring legumes or something like this. But it's so linear, it's so cold, you know, and I can't help but think that a lot of the coldness and the linearity in our society is just our food following behind us, if that makes any sense.

Taylor Keen:

It does. Spring planting should be a ritual. It should be a ceremony for everyone. We've done reverence for Mother Earth, who provides us life.

D. Firth Griffith:

We, we, uh my wife and I um, I think we're going to be talking quite a bit about all of the tendential thoughts and beliefs and heart senses around this issue, so I'm not going to belabor it too much. Uh, now, at the very front of this episode, but, uh, maybe six, seven years ago, uh, you know, morgan and I we stepped away from oh I don't know, like the thought leadership in the regenerative ag space and again we can flesh that out more in the future if needed. But we've found a really interesting home in the harvest side of it from an animal perspective, and maybe over the last four or five years we've developed a really interesting practice. We call it a ceremony. It's a very modern new ceremony writ for people that don't have that ancient ceremony, um, you know, around this open and consensual harvest where people come out and they experience death for the first time and I only bring all of this up because there's a lot of details that I'm skipping over to make the claim, to make the mention that it's so interesting watching food become sacred to people and witnessing that will teach hundreds of people a year through these sacred courses we call them sacred workshops where they come out and there's ceremony and there's time and there's talking and there's stories. And then we harvest and there's blood and certain things happen and they see the sacredness, they see the realness of their food for the first time and they're covered in blood. And I always say that grief and the ceremony around that harvest is not unlike glitter, in the sense where your hands they'll smell like blood and awful and intestinal fluids and synovial fluids from the joints for days and days and days. You just can't wash off that smell and it lives with you, it stays with you and it changes people. You know, and one of the interesting conversations I had following the last podcast you and I did last week, episode one, uh, of this series, god is red Um, one of our students, uh, from a recent course.

D. Firth Griffith:

I had a good conversation with him. They called and was really touched I'll just say it that way by your words and your spirit, the space that we got to sit and dialogue in and he said that after this sacred field harvest, grief and glitter course that I just mentioned, that he's found it really hard to partake in like food because it's just, it's just nourishment, it's just chemicals, it's just linear science saying you know, eat this amino acid or this calcium or this whatever, and make sure you get enough protein in your life or fiber or whatever, and it's just dead. All of the food around us is dead, but when you actually see that livingness, that the true wholeness, the kinship and the food it's, it's different, you know, and uh, and we got to question with each other, like, like our children, they're so freaking blessed it's unbelievable in my opinion. But like every day, uh, because our children, they, they forage for most of their foods, maybe 50 to 60, 65% of their foods. We forage, uh, around, uh, around this general community, here and um, and then we harvest our own meats.

D. Firth Griffith:

And so, you know, our daughter she's four and I bet she's been a part of a hundred you know sacred, very intentional ceremony, rich harvests, where she's just, you know, got to witness and eat liver in the field, raw and things, and, and it's just common to her. And every, every meal, every meal, um, like just today for lunch, we were sitting there, my wife was delivering some provisions locally or whatever, and it was just our three kids and myself and our four-year-old her name is Sequoia, she, uh, she, dad, sheia. She asked a question that is so common in our house, which is Dad, who is this, who is this? You know not. What is this, not, what kind of food is this or whatever? Can I have more? But like, and she knows Sybil, and she goes, oh, ceri's daughter, you know, and Ceri's daughter and you know, she got to be there at the harvest and there's no knowledge and kinship there. There's, there's, there's something more to it. It's not perfect. I want to talk about all of that in this, in this conversation, but the idea that food is sacred has no place in the agricultural conversation. Yeah, I think we have some really interesting conversations to have and I don't want to dawdle anymore.

D. Firth Griffith:

I think the only thing I wanted to add in some sort of recap of last week's conversation, I had a couple of conversations with a couple of people, maybe three, so I guess that's more than a couple, but maybe three or four. One of these folks reached out after listening to the episode and they made the comment that when you mentioned in I think it was towards the middle, maybe the middle of the second half maybe of that conversation that Indigenous peoples had their chance and now it's our turn had their chance and now it's our turn. You were speaking about general genocides or generally pushing you know indigenous tribes, nation clans out of the way as obstacles of Americans, you know manifest destiny or empire, colonial settlement or power right over this land or something, and that really struck a chord with them. It was how they were trained, it was how they were raised, it was how they were schooled, it was the way that the history was taught to them, both in elementary school all the way through college. And James K Polk, an American president, just opened up the entirety of the American West.

D. Firth Griffith:

I think in the early 1830s or 40s you may know that date better than I that the American Indian was an obstacle to American progress and that just lived with them. And then, when you said those words, it opened up something in their heart that they're wrestling with and that made me very happy. So thank you for your words, thank you for the time. It's a blessing, beyond what I can iterate here, to sit with you in this way. So thanks again for being with us, taylor.

Taylor Keen:

Thanks for having me. That sentiment was born out of the last 10 years with my nonprofit Sacred Seed In a sense, trying to rediscover indigenous environmentalism and indigenous ag, and worked with peoples had their chance and now it's our turn. That's the secret tenet of modern agriculture, and by secret I won't say it in public, but I know it's there because I've come up against it so many times that I can't get around it.

D. Firth Griffith:

Maybe this is a fine place to start. I think this conversation is just voluminous. I think we could talk for hours and hours and hours. I've written books on it. You're in the middle of the deep work of writing a book, at least partially, on this subject, and your work over sacred seed, as if there's a lifetime, a lineage of a culture of thought. The point is, I think we could talk for a long time and maybe so just to begin small and I realize we don't have all of the time in the world to talk about it but maybe just to start small to some degree.

D. Firth Griffith:

What, what I have found interesting is and I'll speak this way and then maybe you can help me improve it and then expand upon it what I have found very interesting is the general white disposition in the regenerative agriculture space to defend that creative power.

D. Firth Griffith:

So, for instance, the leaders, the innovators, the originators of the green agriculture regenerative, sustainable, organic, permaculture, biodynamic, I don't care what it goes by the green agriculture movement have power and they defend that power as the originators. It's a very strange thing. I think it has to get into the heart of the colonizer. I think it has to get into many things thing. I think it has to get into the heart of the colonizer. I think it has to get into many things, but maybe let's start there and then we can kind of progress into a general, more open conversation about conventional and regenerative and control and three sisters and traditional ecological knowledge and everything else. But why do you think that is? Why do you think that regenerative agriculture has to defend itself so often as the originator of a better way, a new way? I think a lot of this goes back.

Taylor Keen:

I began to think about it and rethinking it now that I'm on book number two.

Taylor Keen:

But in Rediscovering Portal Island, the chapter where I address this is entitled the Founder's Dilemma of America, and that term really comes out of one of my academic disciplines, which is around entrepreneurship and the biggest killer of startups out there whether they're social entrepreneurship or for-profit or technology, it's always founder's dilemma.

Taylor Keen:

Social entrepreneurship or for-profit or technology is always founder's dilemma. You come up with an idea and to feed our ego, we think we're doing it justice by holding onto it and not changing it and not letting it adapt. And it's the biggest killer of organizations, especially small ones, because they don't blossom with the environment that's around them, they don't listen to other people or adapt their strategy and pivot. So I took that sort of mindset towards trying to understand to what we are referring to today, to what we are referring to today that regenerative ag is. It seems to me very self-congratulatory. I believe in the last podcast and we've had so many wonderful conversations of late. I don't remember what we've recorded and what we just talked about, but the and I've not seen it. But we've discussed um, the documentary common ground.

D. Firth Griffith:

Yeah, that was, that was really potent. That's another thing I could mention. The number of comments back based upon that mention of common ground is is is unbelievable. A lot of people never, uh, saw what you and I saw, if that makes sense, like it was a new thought to them but a powerful thought. So yeah, that was on the last podcast. Sorry, I hate interrupting you, please go.

Taylor Keen:

No, no, not at all. But you know, the Superman of pioneer agriculture. That's what I refer to that as, and it's so self-congratulatory and to me it reeks of ego when right in front of their eyes, if they choose to see it. Members of the green regenerative movement don't need to look any further than to what indigenous peoples were shepherding on this continent for the last 15,000 years plus, and that timeframe may go back even further. But when we're talking about ag in the Americas, we're talking about a type of grass teos that, with the help of the human hands of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, turned it into corn and developed the three sisters indigenous agricultural system or complex. That is right there in front of them but it's still being ignored by the green green movement, even though it's been there for 15,000 years plus. And the only way that I can explain that is ego.

Taylor Keen:

How many conferences I've been to with folks in the regenerative ag movement. And I remember I was at the ecosphere studies conference down at the land Institute now four or five years ago and listened to a presentation by my friend, liz Carlisle. Liz Carlisle was discussing indigenous women and a natural indigenous collective and how they worked together to process the corn. We're not talking a little corn, we're talking a lot of corn to feed a large community. And I remember at the end of her wonderful talk, someone in the audience immediately began to appropriate those notions into their own and they're very excited. Another academic we have to come up for a term for this. You don't need to make up a term, the term's already there. So it's just natural. And to me it's the reaction of new people to a new land and that's what happened here in the Americas. That resulted in the Dust Bowl was bringing of European tilling methodologies and straight rope planting and ignoring the indigenous ag system. The indigenous ag system over-farming to such a degree that damaged the prairie landscapes and resulted in an ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl. And still haven't learned from that. It seems almost religious the fervor which we plant every agriable acre possible in the United States and it's not economically sustainable. Just look at the role of subsidies historically in the United States. This is where my head's been at more recently, understanding how did we get to the big ag complex, big seed companies Monsanto, syngenta, cargill, cargill.

Taylor Keen:

Intellectual property in the United States around plants historically was very laissez-faire and open to everyone. Seed sharing was everything and the early United States Patent Office helped facilitate sharing of seeds in between people Until in the 1930s other entrepreneurial thinkers supported the idea of coming up with plant patents, utility patents, and that came forth in the 1930 Act of the Plant Patent Act, and that set everything in motion and it was pretty much supported by the early nurse nursery industry. And the first patent was for a variation of a of a rose. That just lasted a little bit longer and even then it was controversial whether or not that was. You know the terminology and patent languages around, basically them being unique and different. Everything just built then until beginning in the 1980s when there were a series of Supreme Court rulings that pretty much allowed big ag to develop patents for anything that they wanted to, and that's when the germoplasm wars began and that's what the world we live in today.

Taylor Keen:

What really prompted my movement towards developing Sacred Seed came from my lifelong mentor, dr Duard Walker, chair Emeritus of the Anthropology Department at Colorado, boulder and gosh. I've known Duard for over 30 years now and Duard's one of the good guys of anthropology and Deward's one of the good guys of anthropology Spent his life advocating for indigenous people's rights. He's the one who turned me on to notions of sacred geography. So if people wonder where those ideas came from and rediscovering Turtle Island, most of them came from Deward's influence upon me, and he advocated for indigenous people's religious freedom, which resulted in some wonderful work in the Indian Religious Freedom Act in the 1990s. He and Walter Echo Hawk from Native American Rights Fund did a lot of that. So Duert's heart's always been in the right place, and somewhere around the early 2000s Deward caught wind of what Monsanto was doing in the country of India after basically the regulations to protect them from global corporate interests were lifted in the hopes to help them and allow those big companies to come in and use the system that came out of plant patents and utility patents to bring in their genetically modified organisms in the form of seeds and to displace the indigenous farmers.

Taylor Keen:

It was cataclysmic in its results and displaced the indigenous seeds that were there, isolated the indigenous farmers, put them on these onerous contracts with seeds that are unnatural. Most of what we eat is unnatural, and by unnatural I mean it doesn't grow on its own, it doesn't propagate itself, and the legal system around patents is now dominated by these big companies who have far more resources than most of us who are doing small scale agriculture and ultimately they have a lot more power over us than what we think. And with sacred seed, all my indigenous heirloom crops, especially with the corn it's when pollinated, and if some of theirs were to cross-pollinate mine, they would own my corn. And that's what Duard was warning me about. He started the conversation many years ago saying young man Duard's going to be 90 this year. He always calls me that. He says what are you doing to protect your tribal corn? And at that point I knew very little.

Taylor Keen:

Handful of years later I was serving on the National Council for Cherokee Nation and a couple of years earlier some members of our council had inquired about the state of our Cherokee seed bank and basically we discovered at that point that we had very little. And so my friend and colleague at the time, pat Gwen, works in our environmental division down in Cherokee Nation. He started the search for trying to find all of our seeds again and it was very impactful to me. He had already begun on that search. But we went to the USDA seed banks and very glad that the Bureau of Ethnology did a lot to collect a lot of those at the time because the powers of colonization began to work and most modern indigenous peoples had lost a lot of those seeds and we had to go back and reclaim them for our own. And Pat went to USDA seed banks museums, went back to the Cherokee old country, to the Eastern Band in North Carolina, and they had seeds.

Taylor Keen:

I'm writing right now about a seed pioneer, and I mean that in the best of terms. Carl Barnes grew up in the Pantanal of Oklahoma and, drawing on what he perceived as his Cherokee roots, became very intrigued about growing indigenous heirlooms and by the end of his long life at 85, he had gathered somewhere over I would guess around 1500 varieties, because I was there whenever the his collection was brought to an indigenous seed savers group called Brady and the sacred and I just tried to eyeball count of how many varieties were there and that's what I guess somewhere between a thousand and 1500. His hybrid planting methods helped bring back a lot of strains of indigenous corn and in the process he came up with some new hybrids like glass gem, which many of your listeners may have grown. It's beautiful kind of pastel, iridescent, translucent corn. It's amazing to look at, wow. And he developed those out of hybrid seeds from the tribes of Oklahoma.

Taylor Keen:

But one of the things he discovered in growing a lot of these is that, to use his terminology, the seed remembers witnessed it as well with the Pawnee seed preservation efforts through Deb, echo, hawk, et cetera, that as they began to grow, some of their older strains, some of those strains, were lost. But the DNA of the corn remembers and six, seven, eight, ten years later they would find seeds of types of corn that they thought they had lost and it was remembered in the DNA of the others. Just fascinating. As human beings we have the most complex DNA of the animal nation. We always forget that we're animals, but we are. And in the plant nation, corn has the most complex DNA and I think that's why we have such admiration for corn and, hopefully, corn for us. I've always pontificated at this time of year of planting and harvest, at this time of year of planting and harvest, when we're weeding and toiling in the hot summer, who's in control of whom? Are we in control of the corn or is the corn controlling us?

D. Firth Griffith:

the plants.

D. Firth Griffith:

This is scientific for my liking, but in the book I wrote last year are you familiar with the xenohormesis hypothesis out of Stanford? No, tell me more so we'll talk about it scientifically and then I think we can add some more living language to it later. But it was a scientist, anthony Yoon Dr Anthony Yoon, I believe, was his name out of Stanford, maybe early 20-teens, and they were studying revertitrol, a chemical produced during wine production, and what they started to find was these non-nutritive packets of information generated during the fermentation process or the creation of the wine process, so non-nutritive packets of information. This caused him to look much more into it and what he realized is that all life on earth produce packets of information that has zero nutritive value, that when that packet is consumed with that plant so let's say corn it produces nutrients that the human digests when we eat it, of course, scientifically speaking. But it also produces information to help that human or to help that animal that's digesting its nourishment, its own life form, its own spirit force, to understand how it needs to live in order to also survive. And so it's a cross-species, across-nation, across-kingdom communication device and something that's very interesting to me in regard to what you're saying, because I think plants communicating with us, directly, affecting the way our bodies function.

D. Firth Griffith:

I think scientifically is very interesting, but I think spiritually or creatively or whatever word we want to use when we apply that same thought to quote unquote indigenous foods, that is to say, foods that have grown in this environment and have seen many things, they have many friends and they are well loved by many other kin. The same conversation that we can have in the human side about indigenous peoples being wisdom holders. They hold the wisdom that we, my people, have long forgotten due to colonization and migration and genocides that happened 2,000 years ago, etc. The same conversation we can have from the human-to-human perspective, we can also have from the human to plant perspective. This corn has seen what Western Hemisphere climate climate change, growth, deprivation, drought, monsoons it has good access there. The DNA, as you were saying, remembers, and so I wonder how much the Xenoharmesis hypothesis would change as the DNA of these plants become even more and more ancient. I find that fascinating.

Taylor Keen:

I love when science reinforces things that the indigenous mind, I truly believe, inherently understands Eat what the mother provides, when the mother provides it. That's what I always refer to it as Eat the asparagus in the spring. Let it signal to your body what's going to happen. Just look at modern agricultural methods of, in essence, people trying to figure out how to encourage human dominion over the planet, trying to outthink it, and it seems to be a whole lot of effort to do so. Planting things separately rather than together, planting only certain types of things, things that can be controlled, things that can be scientifically altered, automatically altered, and it just ignores the, the natural power of mother earth and how, over thousands, if not millions of years, all these ecosystems developed and adapted.

Taylor Keen:

I just view every one of the seeds just as a teacher, and that's at the core of the indigenous mind is you know, we have phrases like the all eyes, ears and little mouth, and that pertains to everything that we do and that pertains to examining the bounty of Mother Earth, just learning more about indigenous agricultural methods of the past and these past 10 years with sacred seed, visiting with elders in the tribe and seeking their support and permission to try to go backwards into time, and I remember one of my clan gatherings for the earth and bison people and as I was starting sacred seed, I told them what I wanted to do and ask for their blessing.

Taylor Keen:

I told them what I wanted to do and asked for their blessing, even though that we've been colonized for over 150 years. The Omaha, the kernels, as it were, of knowledge that came back out. What people gave me for advice or told me what to do? Sing to the corn, they told me. My mother remembered that whenever I started she came up to me and she was insistent on I remember she grabbed my forearm and she said, when it comes time to plant, only women of childbearing age should plant those seeds, for they are mothers. And that struck with me and that expanded upon all the notions of the importance of the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine and how early Europeans when they witnessed this system.

Taylor Keen:

they had no respect for it. They did not understand it. They would view the men at the time of planting, because women in most indigenous cultures were responsible for agriculture and it's all tied to our mythology of first woman, earth mother, mother corn, the old woman who never dies. She has many names, but it's in honor of her legacy that women would take the lead in agriculture and observers not familiar with that system would see the men not helping and call them lazy.

Taylor Keen:

Right and not understand that you know they were hunting, fishing at the same time, same time. And if they were observed smoking their pipes together and relaxing is probably because they just came back from a successful hunt and did their part for people to survive. I just came back from a wonderful um trip. I got invited to give a book talk up in a uh? Upic indigenous community up in alaska, at a place called igagig, and it was just so wonderful to observe indigenous peoples who still had their original, you know, means and methods for subsistence. I don't like that word, but that's the word that was in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that they have the rights to hunt and to fish and to live the way that they were.

Taylor Keen:

Because, um, my ancestors, we, you know, the bison was driven to be nearly extinct, so many of the animal and the winged and the four-legged were driven to near extinction. Um, there's no more elk in Nebraska. There's no more wolf. All these things were taken away by the colonizers. And to see a people living by the hand of the mother, of what she provides and when, and their knowledge of the understanding of the ecosystems, the relationships between the krill and the red salmon runs and the impact of beaver lodges on the quality of water, and um, I was there at a time, um, not long after the winter ice had broken up, and that's so.

Taylor Keen:

Much of their culture is driven around understanding those things Like when the ice comes, when it's not there, when it breaks up, that signals time for things eggs and had a very complex understanding of how humans can interact with those species and not take too many and encourage the birds to grow more, more eggs. And um, they were um gathering berries at at the time, um, a lot of the cranberries that grow naturally, if they're by the millions it appears over the tundra, and it was just wonderful to witness people just living in harmony, especially by some Americans over-romanticized that we lived in harmony and it wasn't all butterflies and flowerscapes, it was harvesting animals and knowing which ones to cull, when and when to use fire. So so many different thoughts as just, but to see it happen so naturally, it inspired me to continue on my quest to return you know, alluvial soil planting methods of three sisters to where I'm at, when I'm surrounded by modern ag.

Taylor Keen:

It inspired me to continue to want to return the bison and the elk and the wolf to my areas. Bison and the elk and the wolf to my areas um, I think we can all take some lessons from seeing indigenous environmentalism.

D. Firth Griffith:

This, this thought occurred to me, um, when you were speaking. It pertains to a little bit previous in the conversation. But getting back to patents, it's I wonder your opinion on it, and and then I wanted to. I then I have a screenshot here of something Chief Luther Standing Bear wrote that Vine writes about. That you paraphrased the last time. That also now speaks to what you just said, so maybe we can bring that up in a minute.

D. Firth Griffith:

But something that is interesting about patents and agriculture and I'm just beginning to really understand this because we live in such an economic society Agriculture is an economic force. It's not an ecological force to me, it's economic. The second, and you can see this on old farms. You run an old fence line here in central Virginia, west side of San Juan. There's just broken down fences everywhere, right? So farmers build fences and they neglect fences when it becomes economically unviable to farm anymore. So you just see the fencing and re-fencing and fencing and dilapidation and re-fencing.

D. Firth Griffith:

I think agriculture in the American way, regardless if it's regenerative or agriculture, is that as patents and as economics, drives agricultural production and output. It's the control, systemization systems for ease of extraction or production. Without community Does that make sense? So the more we can control, the more we can extract or produce or harvest I guess those words would be synonyms, depending on where your heart is in the affair without depending upon community. So, for instance, how are you supposed to harvest a couple hundred acres of wheat by yourself, where you need diesel, you need fossil fuels, you need hydraulic fuel oil and you need, you know, heavy machinery, you need to combine.

D. Firth Griffith:

But if we had a community, right, if we had a clan, if we had a people, if we had a tribe, if we had people that cared, a family, a kin, relationship, you know all of these things. No, now it changes right. So, to some degree, what agriculture is built upon is control for extraction without community. And so you add that community back in, which seems to be, to some degree, the beginning moments of that place-based wisdom, that traditional ecological knowledge, that three sisters idea of collaboration and community and kinship and working together, et cetera. To me it's that first step into that which is community, and not in a very modern talismanic way, talismanic in the idea that I think, just like harmony being a very overused and destructive word, to some degree, I think community is the same thing. I think that if a white person believes in community, they're saved.

Taylor Keen:

Brother, did you talk about the American Grange system? No, please do Janet Walter, who writes on basically the sacred feminine in America, and she's the one who turned me on to the Grange system, primarily in the Western Plains, and a lot of these buildings are still out there. I know there are some in Colorado and further in the Southwest, but they were communal organizations of early American farmers and I want to say this is early 1800s but it involved a lot of storytelling. It may have had Masonic ties because there were degrees for it, but basically they studied Demeter and other feminine goddesses in there. So think early American farmers, so think early American farmers, with these large communal places where they had dinners and puthing houses, probably for wheat, and it was a symbolic, ritual, communal affair. And to me that's what we lost with the role of technology and efficiency. I would assume the Industrial Revolution changed a lot of that, but to me it was a beautiful part of the american past in agriculture. A lot we could learn from that today I'd love to see it come back.

D. Firth Griffith:

And at the same time, you know, I think I see a lot of collaboratives and cooperatives fail in agriculture because, no matter how much we like the idea of harmony and we're romanticized by this idea of collaboration, we don't have to be not, yet we don't perceive that we have to be right like uh, for instance. Um, we were part of this one collaborative uh group that we're trying to work together, just basically kind of create what you're describing, not maybe maybe the goddess worship we weren't that developed yet but meals and and collaboration around harvests and planting to work together. Or just basically kind of create what you're describing, not maybe maybe the goddess worship we weren't that developed yet but meals and collaboration around harvests and plantings and whatever. And it really collapsed because at the end of the day, you didn't need the output, like the wheat that was being produced. Let's say you didn't need it.

D. Firth Griffith:

You know the Walmart, target, amazon, whatever I mean just the conventional grain world right down the street from us on a 2,000 acre wheat field right in the James River Valley here still exists right. So if you win, you win and it's cool and romantic. And if you fail, who cares? You know, you still got the grocery store, and so it's a level of dependence and interdependence that we have to believe that we need, I think, because we do need it. It's just this modern, linear, easily extractionable society that, I think, convinces us that we don't, which is why conversations like this, I think, are so powerful, because there's no delusions. When I talk to people like yourself, I mean just yourself. In general, I think the idea of a delusion that we are an individual species that are able to steward and control Earth, undeniably, inevitably to our outright conclusion, is lost to you. You know, I listen to these people in the ag space and they pontificate and they philosophize and I get so confused Like I don't understand half the words they're saying. And then I talked to somebody like you, a brother, a friend, a mentor, and I sit here and I'm just always stunned by the simplicity of the thoughts. But okay, so, like harmony, I'm just I'm not going to read you this whole quote. It's in God is read by Vandaloria Jr. Read the, buy the book, read it. It's worth, it's worth every moment of your time.

D. Firth Griffith:

But Chief Luther Standing Bear writes we did not think of the great plains. I'm sorry, let me start over. We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth as wild streams with tangled growth, as wild. Only to the white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was the land infested with wild animals and savage people. To us, it was tame, earth was bountiful and we are surrounded, and we were surrounded with the blessings of the great mystery. Not until the hairy man from the East I love that not until the hairy man from the East came with a brutal frenzy, heaping injustices upon us and the families that we loved, did it become wild for us. Right, and there's so much more there. Again, we could have a whole conversation about that. I mean all of it.

D. Firth Griffith:

But the idea of like wildness being savage and wildness being everything we need, like that's the dichotomy that I think he's putting right in front of us. He calls it tame momentarily, but like the wild, tangled masses was everything we need, and it was home. Only when the white hairy man from the East came did that home become wilderness, wild, savage, and I think that's a huge difference, right, because, like when, I think, when people listen to you talk, it's about like Eden, it's about they. We can't just return to the Paleolithic Eden of our past, like we have modern problems, et cetera, and it's like I think we can first come to an agreement or maybe a conjoined understanding of what wilderness is, or maybe a conjoined understanding of what wilderness is, what the wild is and what savageness is not.

Taylor Keen:

I was smiling as you were reading that, whenever you said hairy man, because in book number two I'm eventually going to get there. But I want to talk about something that's been appropriated away from indigenous peoples, and that is the entity for lack of a better term known as Bigfoot, and the translation of them in nearly all of the languages means the race of hairy men. And no, Bigfoot makes many people smile. I'm obsessed with Bigfoot. I've got Bigfoot T-shirts and little figurines and everything else. But being up in Alaska and being with other folks from the Pacific Northwest, um, they call him the guardian of the forest, and the way that it was translated to me was um, whatever they are, I believe they're shape shifters. Maybe they're interdimensional beings, Because most Americans are looking for hard scientific proof, which is such a white way of thinking Proof rather than just believe Right. But their purpose here is to protect the plants and animals from us. Let your listeners chew on that one for a while.

D. Firth Griffith:

That that's powerful. I like, I want, I want your opinion on this. So I've I've been very public and vocal about this and I've gotten my ass handed to me many times. But agriculture is pensioned. No, agriculture is. Demand for harvest to me is uncomfortable.

D. Firth Griffith:

We see this in the Dominion Covenant, in Genesis that we talked about Western concept. It's a very Enlightenment concept. It's a very modern concept in the way of property and the property to conscience and the right to property and all these things that are very implicit or have been made very implicit to the American federal system, the political system, and obviously has ancient roots in Greece and such. But generally speaking, a very modern concept that you put in time and you develop property. That property then has economic value. That economic value then brings you up in society. So property or time is equal to society and we have a lot of injustice that follows that right.

D. Firth Griffith:

The conversations at hand, the, you know, chattel slavery of the American conquest, I think, is a derivative of that thought. But agriculture is not spared, I don't think, from being nest, uh, in that same thought structure, that same thought, bubble agriculture in the modern way, also the regenerative way, is humankind putting a seed in the earth so that when that seed grows, they inevitably can then harvest it right? So the thought of bigfoot protecting plants and animals and nature, if you will, the rocks and everything else From us, from us To me is the antithesis of agriculture. Does that comparison make sense? What do you think?

Taylor Keen:

about that. Yeah, the other dimension that I would add to it is most of modern farming lacks spirituality. Most of modern farming lacks spirituality. I think I said this in rediscovering Turtle Island. But until we love Earth as we would love our own mother, until it's a religion, it's not enough. Until it's religion, it's not enough. For if we as human beings put ourselves in dominion over the plant and animal nations, we will but destroy ourselves. That's from the law of orders, the Odawa people of Canada, and that just makes perfect sense to me. The only way back is if we can define the land as the source of religion. We said in the last episode that God is red and God is the land. God lives through the land. We have to understand that and hold it with the reverence that it's due. If we could treat the land the way that they treat the biblical scriptures, I think we'd be a lot better off in this world.

D. Firth Griffith:

Okay, that's it for now. Thanks for joining us next week, taylor and I, for the third iteration of these yarns. God is red. We'll be talking about the Principia Theologica, the unified cosmology and origins of humanity in the stories we tell the tales that hold our culture and that our culture also holds. So if that's your jam, stay tuned, thank you.