Transcript
Reyna Banteah: When you eat the food that comes from the land you grow up on, it gives you more sustenance than just providing you with something to eat. That sustains us, not just nutritionally, but spiritually too.
My idea of farming was rooted in my Zuni knowledge of agriculture. We've been practicing all this knowledge for hundreds and thousands of years. A lot of these seeds, they carry the genetic memory of where they're coming from. Growing seeds here in the southwest means that we have seeds that are being able to withstand the droughts that are happening, the increasing climate that we're going through, so they are adapted to the place that they're from.
There's a sacredness of eating the foods you grow, the more you take the time to slow down and plant your own food and grow it and save the seeds. That whole process is the way we heal. Being able to heal myself, but also healing all the past traumas from different generations. The ability to gather together, that's the glue that holds the families and the community together.
We're all contributing to something important. That's what helps this knowledge keep moving, is that we are able to share it with other people.
A lot of my goals are just to be able to have agriculture become part of our daily lives. Again, the continuity of our people is having the younger generation have the skills to be able to keep the culture moving forward.
