We were all seeds once
What role do narratives play in bridging the gap between humans and the land we want to protect?
I found this place on my favourite island, it is a bench made of rocks, framed by two beautiful pine trees. It overlooks the vast sea and there is a natural smell of rosemary, sea salt, and pine that invades the nostrils. Sunsets in ‘El Pulpo’ are unique. But how did I get from admiring the sun to becoming mad?
The idea for this piece came as I was taken by a whirlwind of emotions that made me feel extremely powerless in the face of climate change. So I set out to investigate how we, as individuals, can bridge the distance — occupied by corporate interests—that has been created between humans and the land, leading to the destruction of it.
Being instead of doing
In the world we live in, many are constantly striving to do the right thing: use less plastic, fly less, reduce carbon footprint. I personally constantly swing from guilt to action and eventually feel powerless in front of this gigantic problem of our generation. When I sought a solution, I wondered if perhaps as an individual I should be more focused on being the right thing.
In the research to access and incorporate a philosophy of life that was culturally tied to nature, I shifted to find the answers in the people mainly responsible for the preservation of this earth: indigenous communities.
Indigenous guardianship is one of the most effective approaches we have for protecting the planet’s vital ecosystems. This is obvious considering that indigenous people make up for 5 percent of the world’s population, occupy 25 percent of the world’s land surface, yet support about 80 percent of the global biodiversity.
I do not wish to say that all indigenous cultures are the same, but many hold the values that I was seeking to understand, and the people I spoke to gave me huge insights into how to shift my narrative.
Bridging the gap
It is clear by now that climate change is one of the most difficult challenges we face as a humanity, and we know that if high-level decisions are not taken, not much will be solved. But I yearned to turn my feeling of powerlessness and find how I could change my own conditionings and narratives and work towards a closer relationship to the land.
“Water is reduced from our literal lifeblood to a policy concern, a partisan issue up for debate.”
Tribal attorney Tara Houska describes on Vogue the distance there is between our life source and its survival when she explains the feeling she has when walking into the halls where high-level decisions and legislations about climate change are made. In these corridors, she says “the land that sustains every life on earth becomes a sum of degrees Celsius, carbon emissions, forest acreage, and economic impacts. Water is reduced from our literal lifeblood to a policy concern, a partisan issue up for debate.”
The language around climate change is often negative, it speaks about a threat, a crisis. We are bombarded with statistics about land destruction, climate migration and global warming. Because we cannot relate to the political jargon of media and politicians, we have the responsibility to find graceful ways to integrate a culture that bridges the gap created by corporate greed by other means.
I don’t want to diminish the problem, but I am not surprised that I can’t enjoy a sunset without getting angry: I immediately associate my humanity to the destruction of the planet.
To change the narratives and find a way to think of ourselves as custodians of the earth rather than the destroyers I had to speak to those who have been doing it, better than anyone, for thousands of years.
Storytelling in indigenous cultures
“Narratives are not only told orally,” says Genner Llanes Ortiz, a Mayan anthropologist living in The Hague, “they exist on many levels”. Llanez-Ortiz is currently dedicating his field of studies to investigating Mayan storytelling in festivals, rituals and performance. “My view of narratives has changed a lot, I would think of narratives as stories maybe rooted in the past,” he told me “but now I see stories as movement, stages, moments”.
“Identities are built on stories” adds Pitso Tsibolane, who is studying ways to centre indigenous voices and narratives in the study of ICTs and development in the University of Cape Town. He tells me that most of the stories that he grew up with as a young Mosotho boy had to do with the preservation of the land, violated by land grabbers and corporate interests.
The importance of storytelling in the West was made obvious in the teachings of one of the forefathers of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung, who theorised that characters and archetypes in stories are part of the human collective unconscious.
When we started conversing about the endless treadmill that capitalist greed has put the planet on, Tsibolane reinforced the importance of storytelling when he told me that as a young boy, the way of living and stories of his people contributed in building a narrative in him where the earth’s times and needs were respected. “The land in Basotho culture needs to rest, but commercial farming doesn’t let it,” he said.
Soil to mouth
If someone gave you a plastic bag for dinner, would you eat it? Much of our closeness to the land comes from growing food, but centuries of industrialization and mass consumption have made it that most of what we eat is rarely grown by us. In fact, we are so detached that we continue eating fish that we now know for a fact is highly polluted with the plastic that we use, essentially poisoning us.
The privilege of many, and the loss of tradition and food culture, has detached us from the very obvious role that food plays in our life. How have we become so detached to the simple notion that food means survival?
An interesting story that comes from Mayan history is that of the creation of humans through maize. “This is a story that is represented in different visual forms; in archaeological artefacts, ancient murals,” Llanez-Ortiz says. Then he tells the tale of the gods that tried to make humans with different elements; first wood, then stone, but none of them worked. It was when they mixed different types of maize that humans were created, he tells me. “So it is about self-realisation and reliance, and interestingly it also translates like that when you retell the story in a context of preservation and biodiversity.” The Mayan peasants, he says, can connect with that story and think: “we are made of maize because we grow maize. Maize is what we are made of.”
I see parallelism with the relationship that my people, Italians, have with food and the land it is grown on. I will never forget the taste of a tomato sauce made with tomatoes grown on volcanic land under the Vesuvius near Naples. It was the simplest most delicious dish I have ever had. When I tasted that tomato as the farmer explained to me how he grows them, I felt the sun on the fruit touch my skin, saw the blackened soil next to the volcano and saw human hands picking it. The story created a direct connection with the land for me, and it made me appreciate it more.
As I discussed this with Llanez Ortiz, I thought what if the narratives of food such as tomato, which actually comes from Meso-America, were shared in our schools? Perhaps it would create a connection with people who are so far away from us physically.
As a young scholar, Llanez-Ortiz spent periods of time doing research in remote areas in Mexico, and he told me a story that put into perspective a duality that I myself feel, and he gave me a hint of how to overcome it. He told me that one day he was taken to the middle of a field to kneel and ask the soil if it was ok to farm there and to ask for her blessing. Llanez-Ortiz explained that his Western educational curriculum at university did not teach this side of things, that the forest was seen as leaves and wood, and not as a live entity that could listen to a man’s wishes. That respect and empathy to the land he learned from the indigenous people in that remote area, he says, created a vicinity to nature that inevitably integrated into his being, therefore making him feel part of it.
Past and present
Also to note is the connection in the timeline of storytelling in indigenous culture. The stories are always brought back to the present “a lot of the time they may be telling a story from ancient traditions but there is a practice where a story sometimes finishes by saying “yes and I just passed by the protagonist’s house right now today”’ says Llanez. This method of storytelling keeps the young generations engaged and connected to the ancestral and traditional cultures.
Tsibolane told me that living on the land where his people have fought, and hearing stories about it growing up created a sense of pride and belonging that was very special. Years ago I wrote an article about the Ogiek peoples in Kenya, and when I visited their village I experienced this sort of storytelling of the past into the present. An elder told the story of how they harvested honey traditionally, and he showed me the land where his ancestors, and him, used to keep the bees. This was a land he no longer had access to because his family had been evicted by illegal loggers corrupting government officials. He pointed to the land and I saw the story of the past unfold into the present.
“Narratives of indigenous people should not be romanticised because they are also very rooted in practical methods that have made the land thrive for thousands of years”
These conversations I had reinforced the significance of narratives and storytelling in our societies, how if we saw storytelling as both present and past we would lose the distance we have with our ancestors, our land, and our humanity — that same distance that detaches us from other humans and our environment.
“Indigenous narratives are by nature transformative,” says Tsibolane, “they are built, or practices are developed about stories that tell of changing a behaviour or maintaining a good behaviour for example. That is a big role they play” he concluded.
Deromanticising Indigenous narratives
One problem that I identified during my research was that narratives around indigenous people in the western world are extremely romanticised. The word indigenous has somehow become attached to being ancient, rudimental and even extinct. “Narratives of indigenous people should not be romanticised because they are also very rooted in practical methods that have made the land thrive for thousands of years,” said Llanez Ortiz as we weaved narratives through our conversation.
One way to deromanticise indigeneity is to look at the etymology of the word “indigenous”. The word essentially means native; it comes from the Latin word indigenous, “born or originating in a particular place,”.
Llanez-Ortiz proposed an interesting principle to me: that western Europeans find their ‘indigeneity’. And this is not to mean to find the connection to our nationality, a discourse used by many right-wing politicians to excuse violence and xenophobia; but to find our connection to the land, and consequently to our culture. It made me realise the role that finding a connection to the environment actually played in my sense of responsibility towards the planet.
Appreciating a sunset, a tree, finding that connection to nature, is a graceful and elegant way to present an individual with what is at stake. I would rather be bombarded with beauty and informed with the threats to it, than with negative news about the newest climate threat. I don’t mean we should ignore the facts, but that we should leave our powerlessness behind because even if we don’t live to see it, we can have an impact on creating a different culture around nature.
To put it as Llanez-Ortiz did in our conversation “Western Europeans need to rediscover their indigeneity, in the sense of what is the other side of western European modernity?”
“Western Europeans need to rediscover their indigeneity, in the sense of what is the other side of western European modernity?”
To quote Maria Faciolince, who has been working with indigenous cultures for many years, there is a resistance in defending the value of local life, honouring plural cosmologies, and planting seeds every day to grow into more respectful ways of living.
As I pondered how to approach climate change without anger, I began thinking about seeds. I couldn’t help but realise that the one thing humans, animals and plants have in common, is that we were all seeds once.
