--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks Margaretha, Jason & Elaine for this great set of opening
topics/questions.
In forming a response, I find myself reaching for a bowl of blueberries, and
trying through think through my relations with these plants. This is not
metaphoric for me. My neighbors and blueberry stewards, the Passamaquoddy are
named for the Pollock which they (used to) eat. They do not say “ We eat
Pollock", they say "We are the People of the Pollock” or "We are Pollock". My
work on the blueberry project has been largely volunteer so far, but the
payment in blueberries sustains me. I suspect the farmers know of their magic
when they offer them to me, and that I too will come under their spell. So I
speak from an enchanted place, and under the spell of that enchantment. And
these forms of enchantment are just barely strong enough to sustain the
mourning I also feel when I consider the risks facing this “ Oikeios”
In Seven Cheap Things Jason clarifies:
Oikeios names the creative and multilayered pulse of life making through which
all human activity flows, shaped at every turn by natures that consistently
elude human efforts at control. It is through the oikeios that particular forms
of life emerge, that species make environments and environments make species.
So the Blueberry oikeios begins with glacial deposits and glacially formed
“barrens” that sustain very few plants with the exception of white pine, wild
low bush blueberries, and weeds. During the past 10,000 years these barrens
have existed in co-productive relationships with Wabanaki peoples like the
Passamaquoddy who tended, harvested, and burned the barrens. Burning (also
practiced by Plains Indians to maintain both prairie & bison) rejuvenated the
berries, and kept weeds in check (without destroying them completely). They
also used blueberries to preserve meat, and as a medicine. This
nutrition/medicine gave rise to the annual pilgrimages that brought whole
families to the barrens to rake, reunite, celebrate and party! So ceremony and
ritual, community building and fun were also part of this oikeios. So was
death. In more recent times, and with the addition of both mechanized harvest
and migrant labor, these parties have resulted in drunken fights and occasional
deaths. This discovery reminded me that this culture was not utopian, just a
biologically, socially and ecomonically productive oikeios. And more
important, a very old oikeios that might be sustained for another 10,000 years.
Local reporter Ruth Leubecker, who was recently interviewed by one of my
students said that blueberry farms had been in her family for 7 generations.
She represent a more recent oikeios, one in which european settlers, having
pushed the former residents onto reservations took over the barrens and tried
to keep them productive. Through the Maine Land Claims Settlement in 1980 and
the resulting reacquisition of lands, some of these former blueberry barrens
returned to the Passamaquoddy.
In the past generation some of these family farms grew bigger and were acquired
by corporations who saw the potential for profit. Enter capital, and
multinational food corporations.
Currently, with favorable government subsidies, and climate change dramatically
increasing Canadian production of low bush berries, and with the cultivation of
monocropped, engineered, and single species high bush blueberries, we’ve seen
two years or market collapse for local wild blueberries. Farmers have left
berries on the fields to rot, because they can’t sell them. About half of the
field are in the hands of multinationals, and the other half in family farms
and Passamaquoddy. This economic crisis may shift that balance, and the small
family farms here will go the way that the Maine potato industry went, and the
way that so many local, family-based enterprises have gone. In comes
mechanization, mono cropping, and the possible end of the million-clone wild
blueberry. Once the single most marketable clone is found, the others will
likely go the way potato varieties and apple varieties have gone.
Having spent nearly a decade creating a more resilient community ecovillage, I
begin to understand the invisible labor required to “make life” that is
resilient, biodiverse, regenerative, and also the terrible loss when that
“making life” is in jeopardy by a “making more money than life” formula.
Our current solution is to create a disruption, and resistance in the form of
an online and physical museum that would tell the story of these wild plants
and the people who tend them. The word "wild” here is both descriptive and
strategic. UMaine researchers, funded by a blueberry tax paid by local
farmers, engineered the highbush plants that are outcompeting their local low
bush varieties. The high bush plants are mono-species, planted by humans, and
cultivated like most ag crops. The
