Description
Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience is an illuminating journey through the southwest United States and northern Mexico. Enrique Salmon weaves his historical and cultural knowledge as a renowned Indigenous ethnobotanist with stories American Indian farmers have shared with him to illustrate how traditional Indigenous foodways from the cultivation of crops to the preparation of meals are rooted in a time-honored understanding of environmental stewardship. The book explores a range of cultures including the Tohono O'odham of the Sonoran Desert and the Raramuri of the Sierra Tarahumara. In this fascinating personal narrative, Salmon focuses on an array of Indigenous farmers who uphold traditional agricultural practices in the face of modern changes to food systems such as extensive industrialization and the genetic modification of food crops. Despite the vast cultural and geographic diversity of the region he explores, Salmon reveals common themes: the importance of participation in a reciprocal relationship with the land, the connection between each group's cultural identity and their ecosystems, and the indispensable correlation of land consciousness and food consciousness. Salmon shows that these collective philosophies provide the foundation for indigenous resilience as the farmers contend with global climate change and other disruptions to long-established foodways. This resilience, along with the rich stores of traditional ecological knowledge maintained by indigenous agriculturalists, Salmon explains, may be the key to sustaining food sources for humans in years to come.