Video: How Indigenous Wisdom Can Help Us Design An Autonomous Future of Food

Across the globe, the importance of food sovereignty is central to indigenous cultures. On February 9, 2021, Vivien Sansour and Linda Quiquivix discussed the importance of linking the two, and how an understanding of food systems and indigenous rootedness in the land is key to unpacking systems of power and oppression these communities face. Sansour, founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, and Quiquivix, a geographer and educator, draw connections between the communities they both study and represent by centering storytelling as a way of reclaiming identity and belonging in relationship to the land.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

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I'm Diane Moore and I have the privilege of being the Faculty Director of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. And it is my great pleasure to welcome you to our first webinar of the spring term entitled From Palestine to the Americas: How Indigenous Wisdom Can Help Us Design An Autonomous Future of Food. I want to thank Hilary Rantisi, Associate Director of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative for conceiving and organizing this wonderful panel and to Navi Hardin and Reem Atassi for helping organize all the technical dimensions of our time together.

I am going to be introducing our moderator, my colleague, Dan McKanan, who will then introduce Vivian and Linda, our distinguished speakers for today. It's my pleasure to introduce you to Dan McKanan, Professor Dan Mccannon, the Emersons Senior Lecturer here at HDS. Dan is perfect to moderate this panel because his research focuses on religion and social transformation with a special emphasis on intentional communities, sustainable agriculture and leftist activism. His latest book, just published in 2020, is Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism.

Thank you, Dan, and thank our panelists. I'm very excited about our conversation today. And I'll turn it over to you, Dan.

Thank you so much, Diane. It is wonderful to be here. And I am very much looking forward to this exciting conversation, bridging Palestine, the Americas and the food that all of us share.

I bring you greetings from snowy Somerville on the land of the Massachusett and Pawtucket peoples. And it is my great honor to be moderating this conversation between two inspiring activists and spiritual leaders from opposite sides of the globe. I'm a seed saver myself, and so I'm especially excited to think together about the connections between the tiny packets of life we call seeds and big questions of empire, capitalism, and the self-determination of indigenous communities.

Today's conversation will feature two speakers, Linda Quiquivix is a geographer, popular educator and translator, whose work connects Latin America and the Middle East. She has a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Brown. She's currently completing a book called Palestine and The Wretched of Empire: Race Cartography and the Afterlives of 1492.

This book makes the connection between what is happening today in Palestine and 500 years of empire in the Americas. It examines both map-making and international law to show how self-determination movements exit from or integrate into structures of race and empire. Sometimes, unfortunately, replicating the relations of domination, they've sought to resist. Linda's commitment to popular education means that she's also working on a popular education text Palestine 1492 on the same subject. And she's active with the abundant table farm in Oxnard, California.

Vivien Sansour is an anthropologist, photographer and the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. This project works with farmers, who are recovering threatened heirloom species, and with the public to raise awareness about Palestinian culture and Palestinian biodiversity. By bringing heirloom species to people's dinner tables, Vivien makes them part of a living culture rather than relics of the past. She has spoken and exhibited her art in places across the world from Istanbul to New York and Chicago.

Currently, she is a fellow at Harvard's own Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, where she has completed an autobiographical book that weaves stories and sketches of nature, struggle, womanhood, triumph, and social change. Linda and Vivien first met in Palestine in 2010. As a Native American scholar-activist, Linda sensed she needed to understand the Palestinian struggle. And Vivien was a Palestinian artist and activist who is already connected to indigenous rights movements in the Americas. So it was natural that the two of them would become deep friends.

They also share a conviction that effective activism always has a spiritual dimension. And that spirituality is most alive when it's expressed through food and food ways. Unfortunately, we won't be able to share any food over Zoom today, but we can share this conversation.

This event will be a conversation among friends. And after about 40 minutes, we'll invite all of you in the audience to join in the friendly conversation that Linda and Vivien have created. Linda and Vivien, I invite you now to turn your cameras on. And Linda, I would ask that you start us off by telling us a little bit about your theoretical work and how it has been enriched by Vivien's powerful storytelling.

Thank you so much, Dan. Thank you to the-- Thank you to everyone for hosting this space. I'm speaking from unseeded chumash land on the Central Coast of California, where I was born and raised.

I'll begin and I'll do very, very briefly, a very short bio because I get told quite often that that's something that I leave a secondary. And it ends up being a primary interest for a lot of folks. And it helps them make sense as to why I got involved with this work.

So I come from an undocumented migrant family from Guatemala with my roots. My last name is a Mayan last name, Quiquivix. And where my family ended up migrating to was an industrial-agricultural community in Central Coast of California called Oxnard.

And so I grew up and all of us grew up with a very, very deep and intimate understanding of where our food comes from because we see it every day when we're commuting to school. We see the fields in the field workers. And something that is sometimes unsaid but often said is that we need to, especially children of undocumented migrants, need to really focus on our education because the idea is that we don't want to work in agriculture. That's the negative of what is opposed to education.

And I was raised that way as well. I didn't want anything to do with agriculture. I wanted to also prove that I was a modern human. I didn't know that concept back then. But I definitely knew instinctively that I needed to show that I wasn't soil, that I wasn't dirty, because racialization in the United States equates Native American and Black people as closer to nature, which is supposed to be a bad thing.

And so then I was trying to prove how we're not close to nature if we're trying to be these modern subjects. So I always did have a very political/social justice streak to me and a massive curiosity that led me to just do a self-study on Palestine without knowing any Palestinians, without knowing Jews or Muslims or Arabs. I was just very curious because I would watch the news, and I would be confused. So I did a self-study on Palestine.

At the same time, I started a Master's in Geography to study borders. And I was studying a lot of the US-Mexico border. And I was going to do a doctorate that-- I was going into a doctorate and I was going to do my dissertation on the Mexico-Guatemala border because it's starting to replicate the US-Mexico border quite a bit. And this was back in the early 2000s, even back then.

But my self-study on Palestine made me obsessed with the question of Palestine that I couldn't concentrate on my dissertation research, that my advisor, thank goodness, told me, "Why don't you just change your topic because you're not going to graduate," because I would just talk about Palestine instead of Guatemala and Mexico. So I had already backpacked Palestine by myself just to see the place. It reminded me a lot of home, which was I was not prepared for but I was excited about.

I ended up moving to Palestine in 2010. I got involved a lot with Palestine solidarity and awareness in the years before that. And I did notice that in the United States, there wasn't back then in the mid-2,000s a connection, a willing connection from a lot in the movement to connect with undocumented migrants, Native American, Black people, Black struggles. There was an idea of we were the defeated ones and Palestinians in the US didn't really want to connect with that. And it made me very sad.

But when I went to Palestine, I felt more of a kinship there, where I felt that my struggle and our struggles here in the Americas were more interesting, a lot more interesting to folks there. And this is just a generalization but it was hard for me to continue doing this work when I felt unseen. But I was curious and so I continued.

And then I met Vivien in Palestine. And I was shocked that this woman spoke Spanish fluently, had been to South America, and had lived with many people in struggle there, and studied a lot about the situations and that and our struggles because so many of the Palestinians I knew would go to Europe or to North America to study. But Vivien, instead, went to the global south, so it's like, "Oh, this woman is special."

And I was very, very grateful to meet her because I was doing research on land and maps as a geographer. I did a genealogy of the use of modern cartography in Palestine, Israel. And so the question of land for me was a theoretical question. It was a rights question.

I was also accompanying the Zapatista movement in Mexico at the time and I still do. And there is also very much a land-based movement. But it wasn't until I started to intimately accompany the Zapatistas and Palestinians on land questions that I understood that land was far more than just like a principled right. It was the conditional possibility to live otherwise, to live in another world.

And so I started thinking a lot about food with the work that Vivien does. She introduced me to some farmers. I started to think about how I was working so much in refugee camps where the question of land was of utmost importance. But here I was in some farms in Palestinian villages that still had land access even though it was really difficult and under threat.

But a lot of the youth did not want to farm. They wanted instead to work in a bank or in an office or wear a suit and tie. And here, they had land but they didn't want anything to do with it. And I was shocked. But then I saw myself coming from the same similar situation in California where I was completely turned off by land, like I just wanted to work in a clean office or indoor space.

And I realized so deeply how I had been accompanying and helping others struggle for land that I didn't understand the deep significance of it myself until I am very, very closely accompanying these movements. And I started to, then, reflect on myself and, in particular, the question of food where I had no idea how to grow food. I knew where it came from abstractly. It came from these industrial fields. But the actual food I ate, I didn't know where it came from.

And I was then, I realized how dependent I was on a capitalist system of industrial agriculture, exploitative agriculture, because precisely, because I was taught I was not taught to even forage, grow food, things like that. And so I came into this crisis. And it was really sweet getting even befriending Viven even more closer because she introduced me to-- She came to California several years ago and introduced me to an urban garden in Pomona.

And it was a-- I always call it this-- spiritual connection that I had with just picking the spinach from the ground and putting it in my mouth. It was one of the very first times that I actually had a direct relationship to food, and I started thinking about the importance of the question of autonomy, of being able to have the conditions to create these other autonomous existences, worlds.

Food is one of them, water shelter, communities. So it made me think a lot about how even though I was very anticapitalist in theory, I actually didn't know how to live without capitalism. And questions like of where my food comes from was the one that really hit me over the head with it. So that was for me a catalyst for doing the kind of work that I do now in terms of like seeing Palestine through a lens of--

The book that I'm writing, the popular version as well as the longer academic version with the citations, is about how it is that the situation of colonialism, global colonialism, racialization, capitalism, empire, just to use the shorthand for it, how it has made it so that we're incorporating into its logic, into its world. We have to buy everything in order to survive.

We've been removed from learning how to cocreate our existence, our world. And how that was not at all unique to Palestine, and it's not unique at all to Israel, and it's not unique to the United States-- it's a logic that is trying to dominate the world and create just one world.

At the same time-- and I'll just wrap up because I want Vivian to come in here, because the stories that she was able to tell and to paint allowed me and allows a lot of us to see that there are other worlds in Palestine that are being extinguished, but they're there, and they can teach us other ways to live.

And I feel like that's the importance of her work. And one thing just to illustrate is the question of the olive tree, the way that olive trees are understood in Palestine. When I first got into Palestine movement work and research and scholarship, I would read about Israel uprooting olive trees, how that was a violation of private property.

But I go to Palestine and I'm with farmers, and I'm listening to stories like that Vivian tells, and olive trees are not objects of property. They're family members, which I hadn't heard before in any of the literature, but that completely changed the way that we relate to the world. That to me was like a whole different existence, that an olive tree is your family member rather than an object of property.

You relate to the world in a very different way. Your existence is very different, let's learn more about that. And I realized that what was happening in the narrative of the olive tree as an object of property, was a very, very well intentioned way for many Palestinian scholars and activists and solidarity folks to try to get the West to understand that Palestinians have rights. They're just like you. They're just like all of us.

And strategically, that can be super helpful, but what ended up, I see that what ended up happening is that a lot of people actually believed then that olive trees were objects of property. Many of the people who were using this narrative or reading this narrative and not really getting that kind of spiritual take on it that Vivian's work allows us to see.

So for me, what's so important about Vivien's work is I speak so much in the theoretical realm about questions of difference and how we live and empire's logic, and how we can live in other worlds. We can create other worlds. We don't have to have this one. And people say, well, what would that look like? And I can point them to the Zapatistas who have a lot of those examples of Vivian's work.

There's a lot of really great work at highlighting the examples in Palestine. Even if she doesn't use that language of these are other worlds, you know, I feel like that's how our work has actually grown up together. In these last 10 years, we realized just the other day that we're both writing books, and they're different genres. But they actually do go pretty well together in that she paints the picture of what I'm kind of introducing in a popular way as theory, critical theory.

So I'll leave it there to pass it on over to Vivien, because I do wonder, Vivian, if you can maybe talk a little bit more about if this does resonate with you the way that I talk about a pluriverse, other worlds, and how it's very clear to me how you paint those for us. And I'm not sure if it's intentional or maybe just so normal to you that you don't even see that that's what you're doing because you're already a subject of these other worlds.

Thanks, Quiqui, and thank you everybody for this wonderful opportunity to be together here. It's very strange to have this conversation, especially with Quiqui in a Zoom, because usually, she and I are sitting for hours somewhere and just kind of talking, and then we realize, oh it's six hours later and now there's other people listening to us.

So I don't know what will come out of my mouth, but how wonderful not to understand oneself sometimes so that we can actually imagine something new for ourselves. And I think this is kind of what I sit with all the time and I think about. And when we talk, I feel like I've been doing something that came out of resisting the reality that I didn't like in my life, and then how do I create a new life.

So for me, it wasn't a theory. It wasn't something that it really came out of a lot of pain, a lot of pain from watching people I love, things I love constantly disappearing. We're in a constant state of saying goodbye to things, which as we speak right now in this very moment, is happening.

So I did grow up in Palestine, and for me, my education, although I went to school, I was really a terrible student. And where I feel like I learned was in the hills, on the terraces touching things. And the teachers were basically the grandmothers, the aunties around you who sometimes throw a shoe at you because you went and climbed the tree and broke a branch or whatever.

And so it was the almond trees. It was the soil. It was all of it. They were the teachers. And for sure, my mother, who I think she already held another world within her very, very difficult world where she is a woman who was basically given away to marriage and patriarchy, but inside, she is still this rebel who kind of has to always dance between these two worlds, right.

And I think the greatest gift my mother gave me has been to basically kind of push me more towards creating a more unified world within me, although that's very difficult to achieve because of the colonial reality we live in, because of the violence we live in. Even if we want to be wholesome within ourselves to say, like Kiki was talking about how we find in ourselves even though we carry certain visions or theories, yet how do we learn to live without the old story?

How do we learn to live without whether you want to call the capitalism or patriarchy or whatever in the academic series. Also, I'm sure there are many of them that I don't study, and that was part of also the conversation Kiki and I were having yesterday, as we were preparing to share our stories here today, which is how do we-- well, not how do we, but actually, she was sharing with me about Fanon.

And I was like, what. I feel that. I experienced that. And she's like, well, yeah, I mean, he wrote about that. But because for me, it hasn't been an academic journey to study this, it's been how do I create another world, and where I felt great intersection and why also, I think-- I don't think I was intentionally like, oh, let me go to Central America.

Or it was more that I was trying to figure out why is it that we live in this kind of messed up reality. So it was a journey and discovery of why do I have all this pain. It was really the pain that drove me to go and discover, really, you can say, discover new people and new terrains, but it was really discovering myself.

And it is true that the more we know ourselves, the more we can actually create these new worlds and be more able to honor the people who are in our lives. And so I think my time in Central America was really powerful because I really got to see that you know, here are these people somewhere across the world who have the same pain, who share the same pain, the pain of being severed from who you are, the pain of being severed from your food ways, which do represent in a lot of ways who we are.

Because our food ways, our product of how we decided to interact with nature, how we figured out how we're going to survive, this is how we also learned. This is what became like-- we were needed in the soil of where we were born like. We can try to separate ourselves as much as we can, but then you get a whiff of a smell and you're like, oh, that feels familiar.

And so I guess to speak a little bit about my work and how I really didn't set up to be so-- I was just really on my journey to discover what can I do to kind of just calm this angst that I have, and how can what I do be something that I can offer to the world. And I found a lot of that healing in the seeds, in the stories of the seeds, more than the seeds themselves actually, because I discovered when I returned home, that every seed had had a story.

Everybody had some relationship with it that they would talk to me for example about wheat, and they would refer to a kind of wheat as a being, as a living being that was part of our culture. So for example, one of the stories that I love to share so much is the story of the [INAUDIBLE] wheat, which is called [INAUDIBLE], but a lot of people when I talk to them about it they refer to it as, oh yeah, Abousamra.

And Abousamra in Arabic means the dark and handsome one. It's like a way to flirt. And so I was fascinated when I talked to people that they would refer to it in this flirtatious manner. And I also fell in love, and so it was a journey of also not just falling in love with this sweet that told the story that, oh wow, you know, my people were people who offered the world cookies and cake. How different that is than the story I've been told since I was a child, that oh, we're not good enough.

I need to go to university. I need to go to the cities. I need to, I don't know, wear a suit and tie in order to be valuable. And then I discovered, oh, actually, my great-grandparents offered the world bread, and then I started to think even about the story of Jesus and Christianity and like how I grew up in Catholic tradition where we learn about bread for the world. You know, what does that really mean?

And I started to associate even that religious, and it depends on how you read it, also spiritual story, in a whole different way. Like, why is Easter so important to us as also a symbolic story of us through the like developing something that gave generosity to the world?

And how do we shift the dynamic from looking at ourselves as just oppressed people who need something and who can't stand on our feet to really shifting into, wow, we are people who not only are able to achieve autonomy, but we are also people who can extend that and extend that generosity to the world. And so for me, I became also really fascinated with the story of corn.

And Kiki and I are always talking about ourselves and our relationship as trigo and maize-- wheat and corn. Because she is from the People of the Corn, I am from the People of the Wheat. Although sometimes we wonder if we just switched, because I feel really connected to Central America and the Caribbean, she feels really connected to the Middle East. Sometimes more than I am.

And I should mention, we are born on the same-- in the same week in the same year. And our mothers are born in the same time too, so it's a bit crazy if you think about possible reincarnation in this world. But anyway, yeah, and when I learned a lot about corn and I also traveled in Guatemala and I saw the same pattern of how people who have been oppressed, who have been taught, that we have to really look up to our oppressor and be like them.

We've kind of integrated this idea about ourselves that we really are-- who we are, the corn is not good enough. Let's go eat Popeyes and Pizza Hut and go to McDonald's. It became-- I saw it in the Americas-- especially South, obviously, and Central America and the Caribbean-- as much as I saw it in Palestine. And it really shows how we are all part of this global system that's actually oppressing us rather than giving us power.

And so seeds and our stories of our ancestors and how they developed these foods for us became a way, a platform to talk about who we are. And to actually inspire others in order to join us in this. And I'll just say one little thing before-- I prefer if we-- yeah, I guess got into a discussion.

That for me, particularly as a Palestinian, we always-- I lived in the United States, and always I'd meet people, they ask me, where are you from? And I say, I'm from Palestine, and they're like, oh, Palestine doesn't exist. You don't exist.

And only recently I really started to think about why I fell in love with the story of seeds. Because seeds gave me this platform to affirm and to kind of rebel against this idea in a big way, to say-- you can say I don't exist all you want, but biological evidence or cultural evidence-- the food you eat proves that I exist. And so I just wanted to say that I'm continuing to work with people like Kiki and others in hopes that we can dismantle these lies that we've been taught.

And not to go back to the past, but to extract from the past the stories and the wisdoms that can help us design a better future. And how can we design this better future and expand more spaces, more tender spaces, for future generations so that they can continue this work.

Thank you both so much. I'm really taken by this image of the People of the Wheat and the People of the Corn as identities that resist a empire, and also identities that don't set people apart, but enable bridge-building. That to be a Person of the Wheat is to be connected to someone who is a Person of the Corn. Not separated from them.

I wonder if each of you could say a little bit about how this work of finding a personal identity that resists the imposed identities of empire builds into collective power for transforming the structures of empire?

If I may, I can go first. Yeah, the question for me as being a Person of the Corn-- as I mentioned earlier, my last name is a Maya last name. Sadly, it is very common in the Americas for many people to not recognize themselves anymore as Indigenous because of these Mestizaje lightening programs, whereas in the United States, the strategy for settler colonialism was to try to exterminate physically Native Americans.

In Mexico, Central America the strategy has been to exterminate them-- exterminate our consciousness of ourselves as Native American, even if our bodies are still brown. So here that has been the dominant strategy in Mexico and Guatemala. And so I didn't even recognize-- I knew that I was Indigenous, but my family never liked to talk about it.

And things like understanding myself as a Person of Corn. And this is a very Maya tradition, the People of Maize. That was on the one hand-- and here's where the collective, I think, is really important to Dan's question-- is that I was very afraid of being different than what society wanted me to. I was trying to be a really good student for my family-- and that's a lot of undocumented migrants with their kids.

Please just be very well-behaved, go to school, listen to the teacher, do everything. And I did, but I was also curious about a lot of things and very critical about a lot of things. But I couldn't speak them out loud, because for fear that I would be seen as insane, crazy. And it wasn't until I was able to meet other like-minded spirits that I was braver.

I became brave enough to speak out loud. And Palestinians were-- and I tell Vivien this all the time-- the first time I ever got permission to refuse something I didn't like. I was like, there's this entire society over there that's saying no. Wow, I didn't know that was still possible.

And so then I saw the refusal and the resistance in so many other places that I hadn't been able to see before. The collective ends up being incredibly important, because if it is true-- as I argue, as I'm showing and articulating and with so many other works and thinkers that say this-- if it's true that the modern world is trying to impose a one world on all of us, and not respecting other possible worlds, then we're-- in order to create, to exit out of that dominant world or to have alternatives, we can't do that in isolation. We can't do that by ourselves.

It has to be-- worlds are societies. Whether it's societies of Homo sapiens, but also of other life and with the entire environment. And so questions like the collective become absolutely crucial for a possibility, but also as a spiritual foundation in that the modern world tries to individualize us in a competitive-- so that we relate to difference, to others who are not us in a competitive way, rather than understanding how we could share the world together in all of our difference.

Without absorbing difference, without an annihilating difference. Keeping difference, just learning to share the world. And that is all a collective endeavor, and I think that that's absolutely the key for the trying to get out of this place where we keep replicating the logic of our oppressors and trying to be free. We then have to oppress other people, whether it's the good immigrant versus the bad immigrant. The good Palestinian versus the bad Palestinian.

Sadly, the state of Israel is a perfect example of rather than struggling with the rest of us wretched of the Earth, the Zionist movement decided to be the wretched of empire, not the wretched of the Earth. And so has differentiated, sadly, that movement from us. And the state of Israel then works with empire to help commit genocide in Guatemala, for example. And maintain apartheid in South Africa, and so many of those other really unjust situations.

But that for me is how I immediately think of this question of a resistance and refusal. It has to be the collective, but what kind of collective? And then were these massively spiritual questions, and what kind of world do we want? Who are we? What is a collective? What do I want? What do we want? Those kinds of things. I'll leave it there and allow, please Vivien, to share.

Sure, yeah. Couple of years ago, I went on this amazing pilgrimage in Mexico. And those who know me know I always say Mexico for me is the center of the world. And we walked for hours to get to this little cave, really, where we just knew that this is where the first corn was found. Or the first evidence of corn, domesticated corn was found.

And I sat there in this cave and I wondered about the massive imagination that the person or persons who sat there in this nature and they looked a little teosinte that was not even anything. And decided to dare to try something new. They decided to say, you know what? This little thing does not look like it can feed a lot of people, but let me see if I put it in the ground and practice both science, observation, and art-- which is obviously imagination-- in order for me to maybe envision it to be something.

And they may not have imagined that it will be corn on the cob, but they dared to try. They tried to go on a journey to discover what it could look like. And probably, my ancestors did the same with wheat and all the foods we eat today all over the world in different varieties.

And then to think about the world we're living in, and to think about our obligation, really. And also the magic and excitement of allowing ourselves to dare. To dare to go into a journey together using and threading all the different kind of threads that every culture does provide, every experience provides, every spiritual encounter provides, to weave together a new tapestry for our world.

We may not know what it's going to look like-- if it's going to look like corn on the cob or a parachute in the sky-- but we really have to at least dare to go into the unknown. And I love-- as painful as this COVID crisis has been for all of us and how painful it's been to lose a lot of people we love and to also see people we love suffer-- how also it's been such a massive opportunity for us collectively to think-- to humble ourselves. To humble ourselves truly, and understand that A, we are not fully in control here.

And we can throw ourselves into something we don't understand and we don't know and it's OK. We don't really have to have the answers. We don't really have to have the expected results. Because obviously, all expected results have proven for us that we've really done a terrible job.

And even science now, I think scientists are being challenged because their imagination is being invited back into science. And that's a wonderful thing. And so I guess to answer your question, Dan, I find that understanding maize or any other thread in the world and experience in the world is become urgent, in fact, and essential if we are to survive on this planet in a harmonious way. Because we really do need to become better designers, and definitely better ancestors.

And most importantly, better seamstresses, if you will, so that we can create a better garment. Because we're in trouble here. And I think it's time that we dare to take off our clothes, burn them, and make new fabric.

Thank you both so much. This is the time where we will be opening the conversation to the audience. And I just want everyone to know that we have 100 people in the audience today. You in the audience can't see one another, but we see that you're there. And it is thrilling to be sharing this event with such a large group of witnesses and participants.

The first question comes from Katya Forsyth, who asks, "How do we use spirituality to create an ethics-based food and economic system that counters capitalism?" She adds, "If we understand capitalism as inducing and promoting an ethic of pain, is there a spiritual ethic of joy, generosity, reclamation that can help us transform our food system?"

Kiki? Or should I?

Yeah, thank you. I can share very, very briefly-- I think in under a minute-- an illustration of the spirituality to create an ethics-based system to counter capitalism. At the farm where I work, I do a lot of education work that is from humanities to science all into one. So we do soil science and philosophy. And allow ourselves to observe plants and what it is that they can teach us.

So we were accompanying a pumpkin patch in the fall. And from the beginning to the pumpkin-- which is very rare. Usually when you go to a pumpkin patch, you just go and see the final pumpkin. But this was families-- very small number with social distancing-- that we knew. Just to try to experiment it. And it was then from the sprout over to the pumpkin. So it was for two months.

And we realized as we're observing the pumpkin plant grow that there are parts of it that die off after they have left work for the next phase of the plant to do. So for example, the seed of the pumpkin plant already has two leaves inside of it. So you plant it, the two leaves sprout, and then they do their photosynthesizing work to then allow the true pumpkin to grow.

And then those two leaves, in this case they would die out. They would wither away. Also the blossom that needs to be pollinated in order for the pumpkin to grow, that blossom dies off after the pumpkin has been fertilized. So there's a lot of death that gives way to life.

And so then we started to think about how it is that-- what kind of spirituality that is. And what that would look like in the world if we understood death as our lives. As having perhaps, the meaning of our lives as continuing to defend life. To leave an inheritance, to continue life going and life going and life going for the next in this cycle.

And we realized-- we did a Day of the Dead celebration together with a Halloween fusion celebration. And point out that that's Mesoamerican spirituality. And I also started thinking a lot about the question of martyrdom in Palestine, which was the first time I was confronted with this idea of our dead don't ever die as long as we keep remembering them. And then I realized, oh my gosh, we have Day of the Dead, we do that too.

So this close observation for me of the natural world, of the more than human world, it makes sense to me that many societies that philosophize together with nature instead of philosophize against nature come up with these-- can be the seeds, so to speak, of this more-- of ways for us to start thinking about and practicing a more ethics-based system, which many communities all over the world still do.

And it's just really up to us and our imagination-- especially we're raised Western-- to learn and to be humble enough and to be brave enough to be open to that. Because it can be so earth-shattering for us. And that can be really scary. And here again, is where the collective is important. Because if you're doing it with other folks, then you can be crazy together and it's not so crazy.

The questions are coming in fast now. So I'm going to try to keep it moving so we can get as many as we can. And the next one builds on what you just said. Anisa Mehdi writes, "Your journeys are pioneering, essential, and brave. What, if anything, has frightened you along the way? Tell us, and then tell us how you surmounted that fear." Vivien, would you like to take this one?

Anisa, are you serious? This is a beautiful question, actually. Because a lot of people think I'm so brave or I don't have fear or something. And it's not that. I think a lot of things have frightened me, so much that those who know me and Kiki here-- and I'm about to say it here in public-- a lot of the things that I actually took on in the last decade have put me in bed for a week or two, sometimes more.

So it's not that I don't die or I don't fear. I think-- I guess I don't know how to answer this question fully, because it's such a personal experience for each one of us. How to overcome this fear for me is to be willing to go to it. Is to be willing to go to it, even in the midst of it. To be willing to trust my eternal being. To trust that if I die today, it's really not a death, it's a transformation.

And it sounds really like, whatever, ru-ra, whatever. But it's actually real. Once you really-- again, the more you work with plants, the more you understand, it's just a matter of transformation. And then the more you connect to your inner self, the more freedom you have. The more freedom you have to go for the things that you believe in.

But I think for me it's a bigger commitment inside that I'd rather die, literally, than not have lived fully. And not have tried and not have surrendered to the mediocre existence of oh, OK, well this is how things are. I think I just can't deal with-- I mean, we really have to really refuse this, this is how things are, and at the same time be willing to live without certain comforts. And trust that those comforts that we think are providing us safety are actually not necessarily providing us safety.

But even if they are-- even if they are in the earthly realm or whatever, that other safeties become available to us. So maybe I lost all the friends who thought that I was crazy because I was doing something that was so unconventional. But I've gained other friends and millions of communities that-- millions, you know what I mean-- tens of communities, including my relationship, for example, with Kiki and our community here.

How we've expanded our community through actually finding the support that we give each other. Because I don't know you, Dan, we just met. But I already know that if I were in Harvard and I needed something, you and I share a similar ground that I can say, hey, you're my brother now. Can you? Do you? And if you can't, you will find something for me.

And it's not because you actually know me, but you know me on the level of we share this desire to break the fear and create something new.

Thank you. The next question comes from Nidal al-Asrat, who noticed that you mentioned the lack of land in refugee camps. And asks about young generations living in urban refugee camps, many of them with a farming background. What can be done to help preserve those connections to the land in the context of crowded refugee camps?

I want to-- is it-- may I on this one? Nidal is my brother. And I worked a lot in Aida Refugee Camp. And he was one of the first people I met there, and we've worked very, very closely since. And it was so formative to me. I was with Nidal in Aida Camp for probably a little over a year until I went to my first Palestinian village. And it's Beitin, and it's close to Aida Camp.

And Beitin was where there was all of this land and no youth who wanted it. And I was like, but the camp right there has a lot of youth that want land, and wow this is. And I realized my context, most of us-- indigenous, Black, people of color-- have been forced to be urbanized. And so that has led to this even greater separation between us and food growing and earth and land and nature that many of us don't want to go into the wild. Or just like how I didn't want to be part of agriculture.

Recognizing it though as essential for the possibility of creating autonomous futures, freedom futures, how land was so key. I realized I was in a similar bind as folks in the camp, except that at least in the camp the land question is still really, really deep in consciousness. Whereas in my existence, in many of our urban existence in the United States, land is just not even a question.

And so what I had-- in the urban context, we have this question a lot about, what does autonomy look like for those of us city folks? And the best that I've been able to find now is actually similar to what Aida Camp has been doing. Aida Camp has been able to create urban gardens on their rooftops-- which it's so crowded, and there isn't land, they've created something out of nothing.

And that's what Palestinians are so incredible at. Rebuilding, things get destroyed, they rebuild. They keep, keep, keep doing it. And I realize that for us in an urban context, what we could do is just-- even just planting something little, if you can follow that little plant around like what happened with me-- I cried tears of joy the first time the first seeds I ever planted sprouted. It was a miracle to me.

And then later, I moved on to a community garden plot where I was able to learn how plants look like from seed to seeding. I think that training for that creation of that other world-- if we don't have all the questions like land access, I think that at least we can start there. I feel like that's what Aida Camp is setting a really great example of doing, is keeping the land consciousness.

Not just in the heart of refugees, but also in the lived experience in the camp as much as possible. Which is also so beautiful that Nidal referenced this, is that a lot of people, a lot of our parents, grandparents come from villages and have all of this incredible knowledge. And so what that allows is a new relation between generations to occur. Which in my context in the United States, it's important.

I think it might be a little bit different in Palestine, but when you're a kid from an undocumented community, the narrative is that you need to be better than your parents. Better than the previous generation. And so then you're taught implicitly that you don't have anything to learn from the other generation.

You have something to teach them. You're their translator. You're the little kid and you're serving as the interpreter for your mom and for society, right? So then these kinds of practices can make us feel like we're superior to our parents. Because we know more, we got the better education.

And so what this kind of work does-- and actually in Oxnard, we started an Oxnard Heirloom Seed Library completely inspired by the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. And immediately, we knew that a big part of this work was for us to recreate new relationships with our parents and with our elders in a community where they have something to teach us. Even if they may be illiterate, they have something to teach us.

And that kind of intergenerational work isn't done enough in movement spaces. But it's essential for the-- if the movement is about creating other possible worlds, other existences, it needs to be so broad-encompassing. So yeah, Aida I think it's setting a really great example as a refugee camp that recognize problems of maybe that alienation away from agriculture. And so we're going to keep it in the camp. And that is such a beautiful way to maintain this consciousness, not just in hearts or in minds but in actual life.

We have time for one final question. So I'm going to fold two together. William Beyer asks to hear more about the ways in which heirloom seeds are more powerful than standard seeds. And Hubert Murray asks-- points out that seeds thrive on water as well as land. "You've talked about repossessing the land in resistance to empire, what about water?"

Wow, I love this question. Well, sorry what was the first one? The first one was about heirlooms.

In what ways are heirloom seeds more powerful?

Yeah, so this year-- OK, I think I can answer both in one hopefully quick way. So one of my fascination with heirloom seeds was when I first started to actually understand a term that I used to hear a lot when I was a kid-- because I come from also farming community that also has changed-- is the word Baal. And Baal refers to the Canaanite deity of fertility.

And imagine from thousands of years ago, today we still use the word Baal to refer to seeds that are adapted so much-- or as we say in Palestine, they know the soil. And they grow with zero irrigation. So clearly, our ancestors were smart enough to figure out ways to coevolve with nature and create food systems that didn't require the violence against the earth. And so-- although agriculture is violent in nature, but that's a whole other discussion.

But one of the things that we're having to deal with-- and so heirloom seeds, because they know the soil, they really know also how to fight. They know how to deal with thirst. A lot of times in Palestine we say we love thirsty plants, even with mint or sage or the heirloom tomato. We don't like when it's irrigated, it loses the flavor. So we like it's thirsty.

And it's so intelligent, it has learned how to-- in its relationship with humans, the heirloom tomato in Palestine adapted and figured out a way how to drink the moisture retained in the soil in the rainy season and to drink the juice. So we're talking about tomatoes, okra, zucchini that grows in the summer with no rain.

This is not Northeast summer, this is the Palestinian summer, Mediterranean summer, no rain. And so how do you-- so they learned how to live with thirst, if you will, although they're drinking their share. And so having said that, this year we also when the lockdown started, we started this other farm. And one of the things I wanted to do is we need to grow more food anywhere we can, because we don't know what's happening.

We have a lot of closures, we are in a triple lockdown between military, COVID. It was too much, which still is a really horrible situation. But one of the challenging situations was that we actually ran out of water. And so here we have these ag plants and these lettuces and everything that were shriveling, because we don't have water.

And so I decided that we want to build a cistern-- which is an old thing that most Palestinians have done-- which is a rain-harvesting cistern. But the reason why I want to share the story about the cistern is that once we dug the cistern when we were digging to build it, we found these geodes that really tell the story that all of this was ocean before it was even Palestine or Israel. Before human species existed.

And so how do we learn from these aquatic beings that are basically us? We were maybe fish, or I don't know frogs before we were these humans committed to nationalism, right? And even when we look at water now, look at all of us. You go to see a body of water, we're like oh wow, it's a coming home. Because you--

And so for us in Palestine as everywhere-- and I know we're running out of time-- water is really essential. And we've had to kind of save our homes by collecting these remnants of our aquatic home through really the rain. Because water is so-- it's not scarce, it's just not equally distributed. And that's one of the greatest violences obviously, the violence of the oppression that we're living through.

Huge communities are being literally-- are dying of thirst, especially in the Jordan Valley. But I know we don't have time, but I mean, this is something I love to talk about. Not because it's just-- it just allows us to again, expand our understanding that our species is just new in the grand scheme of life.

Thank you both so much for giving us this wonderful glimpse of the larger world, the hidden ocean, that is there beyond the limiting world of empire. You've given us so much to take away, and thank you to everyone in the audience for sharing this transformative conversation today. Have a wonderful day.

Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Diane, and everybody. See you later.

Thank you all. See you later.

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