<
https://grist.org/indigenous/transgenic-american-chestnut-indigenous-rights/>
"When Neil Patterson Jr. was about 7 or 8 years old, he saw a painting called
“Gathering Chestnuts,” by Tonawanda Seneca artist Ernest Smith. Patterson
didn’t realize that the painting showed a grove of American chestnuts, a tree
that had been all but extinct since his great-grandparents’ time. Instead, what
struck Patterson was the family in the foreground: As a man throws a wooden
club to knock chestnuts from the branches above, a child shells the nuts and a
woman gathers them in a basket. Even the dog seems engrossed in the process,
watching with head cocked as the club sails through the air.
Patterson grew up on the Tuscarora Nation Reservation just south of Lake
Ontario near Niagara Falls. The painting reminded him of his elders teaching
him to harvest black walnuts and hickories.
“I think, for me, it wasn’t about the tree, it was about a way of life,” said
Patterson, who today is in his 40s, with silver-flecked dark hair and kids of
his own. He sounded wistful.
The American chestnut tree, or číhtkęr in Tuscarora, once grew across what is
currently the eastern United States, from Mississippi to Georgia, and into
southeastern Canada. The beloved and ecologically important species was
harvested by Indigenous peoples for millennia and once numbered in the
billions, providing food and habitat to countless birds, insects, and mammals
of eastern forests, before being wiped out by rampant logging and a deadly
fungal blight brought on by European colonization.
Now, a transgenic version of the American chestnut that can withstand the
blight is on the cusp of being deregulated by the U.S. government. (Transgenic
organisms contain DNA from other species.) When that happens, people will be
able to grow the blight-resistant trees without restriction. For years,
controversy has swirled around the ethics of using novel biotechnology for
species conservation. But Patterson, who previously directed the Tuscarora
Environment Program and today is the assistant director of the Center for
Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York’s
College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has a different
question: What good is bringing back a species without also restoring its
traditional relationships with the Indigenous peoples who helped it flourish?"
Via Whuffo and Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
