Guest Earth Day Post | Linda Black Elk - Earth Day Message

Medicine patch. Photo courtesy of Linda Black Elk.

Moderator’s Note: It is our joy to present this reflective decolonial essay on
Earth Day 2018. It was shared on Facebook by Linda Black Elk (Catawba Nation)
and she granted us permission to repost here. Black Elk is a highly respected ethnobotanist
with deep ties to family, community, the land and water, environmental justice,
and indigenous food autonomy movements. Her research, writing, lecturing and
most important, mentoring of native youth and young adults, inspires many activists
to integrate food sovereignty, traditional plant knowledge, and the protection
and restoration of the land and water of our sacred homeland commons. Black Elk
was a major positive presence at the 2016-17 Standing Rock #NoDAPL resistance
where she played a vital role supporting elders and mentoring youth. She
continues the good work there and serves as Director of Traditional Medicine at
the Mni Wiconi Clinic, which is a fully integrative clinic focusing on
decolonized medicine that will soon be opening on the Standing Rock
Reservation. What I respect about her work is she listens to original instructions and shows us how the plants are our medicine and the medicine patch is our pharmacopeia.

An Earth
Day Message

Linda Black
Elk | Catawba Nation | April 22, 2018

Years ago, I was in the bank
when a local rancher’s wife walked in. She started informing both the teller
and myself of her current health issues: high blood pressure, high stress
leading to ulcers, and high cholesterol. She said her doctor had put her on
five different pills to manage these issues, and she had started experiencing
side effects from these medications, such as dry cough, frequent urination, and
acid reflux. She was laughing and rolling her eyes at the fact that she had to
“go back in to the doctor and get another pill or two” to alleviate the new
symptoms. 

After a moment, I spoke up
and asked what dietary changes her doctor had recommended. 

“None, thankfully,” she
said. 

“But...you can actually
treat all of those issues safely and effectively, without any of the side
effects...by changing your diet and using a few herbs,” I said.

This woman immediately began
waving her hands in the air and shaking her head saying “Ohhhhh no no no! No
thank you! I’ll stick with what my doctor says, and I prefer my medicine to be
clean! I am a big fan of civilization!” She was laughing incredulously as she
said it.

I wasn’t mad. Her feelings are
not her fault. Our minds and our bodies are so colonized, so “comfortable,”
that we have forgotten about our connection to Mother Earth, to the water, to
the plant nations, the other animals, and to each other. We have a deep-seated
fear of the outdoors, the wild, and anything that is not pre-washed, wrapped in
plastic, and stamped “safe” in a factory. 

It takes as much as nine
liters of water to produce one liter of Coke. This “upside down” structure is
destroying our planet... and it is killing us. So....why? Why Twinkies?
McDonald’s? TV dinners? Breakfast cereal? Why do we think we need breakfast
cereal? Think about the process that goes into making a box of Lucky Charms.
Consider the oats and sugarcane at the beginning of the process. Think of all the
herbicides, pesticides and genetic modification that it took to produce the
oats and sugar that go into a box of Lucky Charms. It takes HUNDREDS of gallons
of water to make a single box...not to mention the gallons of fossil fuels that
are needed to plant, harvest, ship, and process the first two ingredients.
Think about the brown people, most of whom are paid pennies a day, to brave
toxins in the air and soil all around them. Think of the massive facilities in
which the oats and the sugarcane are refined…all of the fresh water that is
used to strip them of any nutrition…fry, bake, boil, beat, dehydrate, bleach,
and extract, them until they don’t even chemically resemble what they once
were.

Once the oat flour and
refined sugar get to the Lucky Charms factory, they will be molded in to cereal
that is literally 40% sugar, dyed with five different toxic food dyes and then
mixed with modified corn starch, corn syrup, dextrose, gelatin, calcium
carbonate, artificial flavor, sugar, corn syrup, corn starch, salt, calcium
carbonate, and trisodium phosphate...each with its own complicated and lengthy
process of creation. All together, these ingredients provide no nutrition or
benefit, so in order for Lucky Charms to legally be considered a breakfast
cereal (instead of a candy,) General Mills has to add , zinc, iron, vitamin C,
niacinamide, vitamin B2, vitamin B1, vitamin A, folic acid, vitamin B12,
vitamin D, vitamin E...each synthesized in a lab with its own exploitative
process using thousands of gallons of fresh water.

We don’t even think about
these processes or the human beings who have sacrificed their freedom, health,
and lives to make us crappy food. We just consume, consume, consume until our
abused bodies give out. We have been bred to not resist. We have been bred to
not question the cycle of birth, illness, and death. 

That’s why I couldn’t get
mad at the rancher’s wife. Being woefully ignorant is a bragging right in a
nation where liars rule. Two years after I saw her in the bank, she died of
congestive heart failure at the young age of 52. She still had kids in high
school.

The solutions to these
issues are simple: we must stop being part of the destructive consumerist cycle
by growing, foraging, and hunting our own food and we must demand that industries
stop exploiting our water, land, and people to make foods and pharmaceuticals
that destroy our bodies and our planet. 

It really is that simple.
Once we start paying attention to the damage that our unbridled consumerism is
causing to our bodies and our Mother Earth...when we realize that we are
dooming our children to the same cycle of illness and disconnectedness...we
will start making changes. 

Start right now. Wherever
you are, go outside and find some dandelions that haven’t been sprayed, wash
them, and throw them in to the eggs, soup, or casserole that you’re making
today. Then, the next time you’re in the grocery store, only purchase items
that look basically the same as they did when they were originally plucked,
picked, squeezed, or cut from their original source. 

No one expects
you to make drastic changes over night, but you can make small changes starting
today. The health of our children, the water, the land, ourselves, and our
Mother Earth depend on it.