Slow Food Waltz

Gary Nabhan speaks in Eugene, OR
Gary and a panel, including Aggie Pilgrim, discuss food, healing the earth and native involvement in ecological restoration



Gary Habhan at the West Eugene Wetlands. This week I attended the Willamette Valley Indian Cultural-Ecological Restoration Workshop.




Gary Nabhan spoke, his new book Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods, is about how if we want to save endangered foods, we must start eating them. Check out a prior post, where I discuss this!

Here is the warm and wise indigenous grandma Aggie Pilgrim, a Takelma Indian Elder. She is one of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. She spoke and prayed at the gathering.


Aggie would like for all of us to pray that she and the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers will get a audience with the pope where they will ask him to REVOKE a 15th century edict that called for the "doctrine of conquest."

According to their Web Site:

WE ARE THIRTEEN INDIGENOUS GRANDMOTHERS who came together for the first time from October 11 through October 17, 2004, in Phoenicia, New York. We gathered from the four directions in the land. . . affirming our relations with traditional medicine peoples and communities throughout the world, we have been brought together by a common vision to form a new global alliance. . . Ours is an alliance of prayer, education and healing for our Mother Earth, all Her inhabitants, all the children and for the next seven generations to come.

We are deeply concerned with the unprecedented destruction of our Mother Earth, the contamination of our air, waters and soil, the atrocities of war, the global scourge of poverty, the threat of nuclear weapons and waste, the prevailing culture of materialism, the epidemics which threaten the health of the Earth's peoples, the exploitation of indigenous medicines, and with the destruction of indigenous ways of life.

We, the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, believe that our ancestral ways of prayer, peacemaking and healing are vitally needed today. We come together to nurture, educate and train our children. We come together to uphold the practice of our ceremonies and affirm the right to use our plant medicines free of legal restriction. We come together to protect the lands where our peoples live and upon which our cultures depend, to safeguard the collective heritage of traditional medicines, and to defend the earth Herself. We believe that the teachings of our ancestors will light our way through an uncertain future.

We join with all those who honor the Creator, and to all who work and pray for our children, for world peace, and for the healing of our Mother Earth.

For all our relations.

In these videos, I interviewed Aggie about what she ate when she was growing up. She talks about fishing for eel and salmon on the Klamath. She talks about running a smoke house and the huge apple orchards around her home and how her mother used to break wild horses.



Aggie talks to a group at the Willamette Valley Indian Cultural-Ecological Restoration Workshop this week



She talks about a biofuel concoction her grandson made to run the lawnmower....

"He's not a rocket scientist, if he can do those things, why can't our government?"

She talked about her fear about gas and food prices:

"I'm concerned about elders living out remotely, with the price of gas and the price of food, we're going to have more and more elders dying, I can feel that."

She reminds us all to SAVE OUR SEEDS!

"I've been prophesing for many year, telling people that they need to save their seeds. Seeds are very crucial."
And she give us a call to action!

"All of us are in this leaky canoe together, whatever you can do with your knowledge that you have, put it to good use!"

"We are the wisdom keepers.." She says of the elders. Along with the other 12 indigenous grandmothers, she says they have 1,000 years of wisdom.