The ‘First Nations’ storyline in regenerative agriculture

There are nine different stories of regenerative agriculture that I identified in my PhD research. These stories impact the way people interpret, talk about and practice regenerative agriculture. They are consequently important for understanding debates about how regenerative agriculture should be defined and measured. Each story comes from a different agricultural lineage (e.g., organics, holistic management or permaculture) and subsequently emphasizes different things when defining regenerative agriculture. This blog post is an extract from my recent publication in Sustainability Science. You can read the paper here for more information: Regenerative agriculture: a potentially transformative storyline shared by nine discourses

Artwork by Hannah Cox of Nanny Potts Illustration. First Nations people view themselves as relations in an extended family of more-than-human kin. In this artwork we see an Indigenous man fishing alongside a water bird, each following their own lore.

In the First Nations storyline, regenerative agriculture is a new name for practices that First Nations people have been doing for tens of thousands of years

First Nations people have been practising regenerative forms of land custodianship for tens of thousands of years (Ahmed et al. 2021; Hawken 2021). This history has gone predominantly unrecognised in regenerative agriculture because other storylines have an ethnocentric bias, originating in the colonial global North. However, First Nations people challenge regenerative agriculture to not just repackage practices from their cultures but also recognise their deeper worldviews: “inspiring a consciousness shift that hopefully will support us to go from a dominant culture of supremacy and domination to one founded on reciprocity, respect, and interrelations with all beings” (Angarova et al. 2020).

First Nations people view themselves as relations in an extended ecological family: “the whole of the universe is family to Aboriginal people. I practice that every day, it’s fundamental to who I am. My relationship with the earth is as if she were a family member and I’m enjoying her wisdom but bending my back for her care” (participant 6). First Nations languages structurally support relational ontologies. E.g. in English 30% of the words are verbs, whereas for Potawatomi, the proportion is 70% (Kimmerer 2013). In Potawatomi a bay, or a day, a hill or a colour—these can all be understood as verbs, instead of nouns. This animates the world—if a bay is a doing word, rather than an inanimate thing, it is imbued with livingness. Yunkaporta (2019) writes in the dual first person, which he translates as us-two, as such expanding the first person to take in another—similarly to Deep Holism. Kimmerer (2013) critiques the lack of pronouns for non-human beings in English. She proposes the pronoun ki (or kin), inspired by Bemaadiziiaaki, the Anishinaabe word for ‘beings of the living Earth’ (Kimmerer 2015).

More-than-human kinship is an important aspect of the First Nations approach to regeneration (participant 22) and is embedded in cultural practices (Salmon 2000). As participant 6 demonstrated, “I do a greeting to the sun every morning and it reminds me of, not just who I am, but what my responsibilities are. And if you do that every day, you start the day reminding yourself that you are responsible for the dignity of the earth.” Participant 9 referred to regenerative agriculture as a stepping-stone between Western and Indigenous ontologies: “when we come from this anthropocentric, Western colonial view, we need stepping-stones because First Nations ways of being and living are so, so far beyond what Western colonial spaces can really perceive.” If we look at how far each type of regenerative agriculture is departing from the status-quo, we see a scale that moves between two different ontological perspectives. Regenerative agriculture “is part of an iteration of where we need to go, it’s not fully formed in the fact that it can’t be fully formed” (participant 8).