AGROBIODIVERSITY, LOCAL GENOTYPE PLANTS, AND RELATIONSHIP REPAIR
BY CHARLIE ALLER
The first time I met Apios americana, I thought it was a wisteria vine. I had grown up around tons of Japanese Wisteria, and its leaflets were just similar enough that my inexperienced mind jumped to the familiar. I played by the Rivanna River all the time as a young person, and I’m sure it had twisted around my ankle more than once- but it was unknown to me.
In recent years groundnut has become another living being I cherish and look to for guidance and sustenance. I have only eaten the tubers a couple times. The sustenance I get comes from planting seeds and roots, learning its growth habits, and knowing that a time will come again when it will be numerous and understood enough to feed my community, human and non-human alike. The guidance it gives me comes in the form of dreams which I cannot escape. The land, teeming with food, banks of the river unchallenged in their winding, water and floodplain and ridge and forest known and appreciated and loved with service.
The term 'agrobiodiversity' refers to the collection of ecosystems, organisms, and varieties of cultivated crops that constitute our food systems. If we can realize how expansive this concept really is, it can help us reframe the false dichotomy between cultivated land and wilderness. Thank you to Alexis Yamashita of Ujamaa (https://ujamaaseeds.com/) for introducing me to this powerful concept.
Apios is one of the more visible members of a largely unacknowledged family all around us– the plants, fungi, and animals that constitute part of the agrobiodiversity that has been tended, appreciated, and partnered with by indigenous people all over the world. Some of the agriculture practiced by Indigenous Monacan, Chickahominy, and other tribes in our region was readily comprehensible to early colonial settlers. Crops of corn, beans, squash, and many trees, have all been a part of their agricultural traditions for over a thousand years. Other plants, like Apios, appeared to colonizers merely as useful wild foods, a resource that nature provided that anyone could use in a pinch, beneath the special status and effort of cultivation. For many plants and many people, that perception continues to this day. It is that unwillingness to acknowledge the instrumental nature of indigenous lifeways in forming these plant communities that denies them their place in our understanding of agriculture and relationship to land.
Growing local genotype plants, whether food for humans or not, is a supportive act between us and this land. Local plants are part of the ecosystems that make all agricultural processes possible, and so fit under the broad umbrella of agrobiodiversity. Choosing to work with plants that have existed and persisted in the region we currently inhabit is one way of ensuring that the systems which make our lives possible have the best chance to continue in the face of climate chaos and other disturbances. It is a way to spread hope for the future of all people in spite of ongoing cultural upheavals. It is a sign of our respect for those plants and the long history of evolutionary processes which they have survived. It is a way to express that we see the part of wild plants in the whole tapestry of life, and desire to spend our time and energy participating in a future with them in it.
Our place in this landscape is not static, it is a process. Every person I meet, human, fungus, plant, or animal, may offer their wisdom, or share an experience through which we both learn. When I meet an organism, like Apios, who has a deep and living story of relationship with Indigenous people, one lesson that comes up over and over again is simple but direct: Give the Land Back. The statement lives in my mind thanks to a diverse movement with many constituents, leaders, and interpretations. I am not one who holds a singular solution to the complex issues involved, but engaging with those issues is a matter of justice, a call we must all attend to. What I hold in my heart is a glimpse of that justice: The return of Indigenous groups’ responsibility for, stewardship of, and agency over the management of their various ancestral lands. That process may be radically difficult and complicated by capitalist economics and colonial cultural norms which are arrayed against it, but the process of land rematriation is worth working for. These sacred relationships between people and the land must be returned and repaired. The dream I spoke of before is not mine, but lives with this land. I hope to be woven into it throughout my life.