Sustainable Foods from the Four Corners
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Grow them Sustainably, Irrigate them Slowly:  Honoring Farmers and Ranchers in the Painted Desert
By Gary Nabhan, PhD., Center for Sustainable Environments Director

On an unseasonably warm day in the Painted Desert, Slow Food convivia in the Southwest co-sponsored a special event celebrating sustainable farming and ranching re efforts rooted in the cultures of the Four Corners states. Organized by the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, “Sustainable Foods of the Four Corners” was hosted by the Turquoise Room at the historic La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, where new Southwestern cuisine pioneer John Sharpe regularly features the unique foods and vintage flavors of the region.

Although most people do not think “agriculture” when they think of the Painted Desert, Grand Canyon country, and the Four Corners area, this region has the longest continuous history with the most diverse set of heirloom crops and rare breeds of any existing American agricultural tradition. At the event, community members were able to listen to the moving testimonies of Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, Hispanic and Anglo farmers and ranchers who struggle to stay on some the same arable lands that have been farmed for two millennia. Twelve of these individuals were honored as “culture bearers” of their communities’ time-tried traditions and adaptive innovations. In their own words, they demonstrated how the stories of their land, their farming practices, their engagement with rare seeds and breeds are as interesting to the public as the food products they produce. It is ironic that American institutions like the Smithsonian have for decades honored performing and visual artists as “treasure keepers of rural traditions,” but not the farmers and ranchers upon whose work these derivative arts depend.

Southwestern cuisine is widely celebrated, but support for the agricultural traditions upon which it is based is still needed. Award-winning food writer Deborah Madison gave examples of heritage food promotion strategies from her book, Local Flavors, in a slide show of lessons learned from her visits to numerous farmers markets across the country. Folklorist and musician Tony Norris offered a workshop for the seventy farmers and ranchers present about fresh ways of telling their personal testimonies of life on the land, and later in the day, hosted Grand Canyon country musicians in a “Music from the Land” jam.

Perhaps the greatest attraction was the all-afternoon market of regionally produced, sustainably grown foods, featuring periodic cooking demonstrations by Sharpe, Madison, Lois Ellen Frank and James Whitewater. Two dozen farms, ranches, non-profits and collectives offered their products for sale, ranging from Navajo-Churro lambs and goat cheeses to dried tepary beans and smoked chilpotle peppers. Three hundred visitors roamed the grounds of historic La Posada, one of the Southwest’s most colorful resorts, renovated by historic preservationists over the last four years in a manner which has received international acclaim. Simultaneously, each honored farmer or rancher talked for five to ten minutes about their motivations, aspirations and challenges.

The evening five-course tribute banquet featured Hopi piki bread from Verlie Tawahonva on Third Mesa, blue corn muffins from Santa Ana Pueblo crops, Shepards Lamb from Antonio and Molly Manzanares, a Syrah from Sutcliffe Vineyards, vegetables from Crooked Sky Farms, tepary beans donated by Native Seeds/SEARCH and assorted goat cheeses from Stargate Valley Farms. After remarks by John Sharpe of the Turquoise Room, John Sutcliffe of McElmo Canyon, Colorado, and Kevin Dahl of Native Seeds/Search in Tucson, awards were presented to the farmers and ranchers identified as culture-bearers by NAU interns working last summer on a Ford Foundation-funded project to promote grassroots solutions to food sustainability.

As the evening closed, there was one more surprise: the largest agricultural repatriation to any Native American tribe in history, as the Hopi tribe’s Natural Resources Department received more than eighty pounds of some seventy varieties of seeds of fourteen native crop varieties. Most of these crops had been cultivated by their ancestors since prehistoric times, but some had fallen out of use due to various external pressures affecting Hopi society. Coordinated by the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office and the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, a new tribal seed bank will make some of these seed varieties available for cultivation by Hopi farmers for the first time since World War II.

Thought to have been lost by some Hopi farming families, dozens of heirloom varieties of vegetables, grains, gourds and cotton have been grown periodically at farms run by the USDA and non-profit conservation groups, and then sequestered in seed banks to keep their viability high for future germination. The donors of seeds sending back to the Hopi tribe have spent hundreds of hours researching, documenting and packaging these seeds for their return. Donors included: the USDA National Seed Storage Laboratory and Regional Plant Introduction Stations, coordinated by Dr. Henry Shands; Native Seeds/SEARCH, a non-profit based in Tucson, coordinated by Dr. Suzanne Nelson; the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, coordinated by MacArthur Fellow Kent Whealy; and members of those organizations, including Shane Murphy, Debbie Mancuso and Penny Wells.

Micah Lomaomvaya, the Hopi Natural Resources Planner and a farmer himself, accepted the seed on behalf of the tribe, and will be involved in the future management of the seed bank and its use by community members. Lomaomvaya has been personally committed to reviving traditional rain-fed agriculture, which kept community food self-sufficient through the 1930’s, but has suffered a steady decline since then, due to drought, land use, and culture changes.

Seeing the dozens of colorful varieties of corn, bean, amaranth, sunflower, squash and cotton seeds reminded us how diverse an agricultural legacy the cultures of the Southwest have engendered. But what can’t be seen by merely looking at the seeds in baskets and bags is their remarkable adaptations to drought, heat, sandy soils, root knot nematodes, and rust diseases. Nor is it easy to fathom all the varied cultural and nutritional uses that the Hopi and other tribes have maintained in their communities to this present day.
While some of the seeds will be grown this summer in fields, others will be maintained at tribal offices, where workshops on seed saving and keeping traditional crops free of genetic contamination will be undertaken later in the year. As for the farmers and ranchers, many seemed newly inspired, ready to return to their work with renewed resolve.
 

Arizona Daily Sun articles on this event:
Think globally, eat locally
Banquet recognizes farmers and ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico.

Produced by NAU's Center for Sustainable Environments. Co-sponsored by Slow Food USA and the Turquoise Room at historic La Posada in Winslow, Arizona.

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