Tompkins Weekly, 11-22-23
By Cathleen Banford
Recently I was asked to develop an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion outline to share with our newest Sustainable Finger Lakes board members. Building Bridges provided us with a “Walking Our Talk” workshop a few years ago and this outline will also explore overlapping content, but there is always more to learn.
“Working to create justice is a gift to the land,” noted author Robin Wall Kimmerer as she visited Cornell’s Ithaca campus to share insights about Restoration and Reciprocity and Land Justice. She eloquently highlighted important ideas about land restoration and the need for “Re-storyation: historical and contemporary,” including the importance of “Engaging with Indigenous people to identify stories, names and relationships with land” to better understand Indigenous world views.
We listened to Kimmerer’s story about a plant called “tortoise eats it,” which teaches how “Indigenous languages are a repository of ecological knowledge. “She emphasized the importance of a two lens perspective, Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. TEK is an Indigenous world view of “land as home, land as source of knowledge, land as sacred, land as moral responsibility, land as inspirited, land as identity, land as sustainer, land as residence of non-human relatives, land as ancestral connection, land as healer.” Kimmerer reminds us that the most biodiverse spaces in the world are homelands of Indigenous peoples who have lived synergistically with local ecologies; by example they provide vital teachings in the face of our climate crisis. Kimmerer adds, “It’s not only the land which is broken but the relationship to land.”
