SACRED HOOP REWILDING
Sustaining the wild food gardens
We become what we eat and what we eat becomes plentiful. When we value wild foods we are stepping towards integrating humanity with nature.
Huge tracks of monoculture farms is unsustainable without oil and machinery. The farmed crops disappear within a couple of years when not cultivated but wild food gardens can thrive for many decades without tending.
When Native Americans cultivated food they anticipated their gardens to thrive for seven generations. They knew that when they spread seed and roots of edible plants, they would feed people far into the future.
We can restore the abundance of diverse wild gardens. It begins with eating, learning, and walking.
Sea battered glass and old rusted chain
A piece of old bone, curved this way;
a punched leather strap and an old iron hinge,
these feasts for my eyes and pockets.
Three hundred years of mechanized industry
have not taken it out of me,
this gathering energy.
Nor have four thousand years
of gender grinding
scattered the gatherer to dust
on the long dry wind.
Even fifteen thousand years of
farming have not tamed
this way to be,
has not taken the gather from me;
the seeker, the seer,
the wandering
sharp eyed collector
finds pieces again, pocketing
and gathering myself to me.
- Anne Benvenuti
Mission Statement
Sacred Hoop Rewilding is dedicated to the regeneration and sustenance of Indigenous migratory life-ways through the tending of wild food gardens.
Our non-profit goals are:
*To educate people about Indigenous Nomadic life and to promote and support families living in nature with native foods.
*To preserve Hoops or wild gardens that provide diverse annual foods.
*Connecting interested people with opportunities to learn how to collect, eat, and spread native edible foods.
*Advocating for Native Peoples to reclaim and teach their Wild Food Traditions.
*Networking resources, information, land access, vehicles, tools, funds, teachers, supporters and Rewilders.
*Publication of educational materials and offering educational opportunities to the public.
*Working with public officials and government institutions to support native food habitats and the people living with them.
“I am one of the last of the hunter-gatherer people, who practices this life-way with my heart and soul. We did not plow the earth- we fed her what she fed us.
“We all live on sacred life hoops- our annual travels collecting food are our traditions and our way of life. Our planting is deliberate, but without effort. The seeds we wait for naturally fall into the holes left by the digging of the roots. Everywhere across the desert our bread root is blooming!”
“These people today do not hear me, they will not see it. They will not see anything that requires their sacrifice. People are faced daily with the failure of their ways.”
“But if one collects the seeds of the plants one eats, and plants them back, then that one is working to make things more abundant.
“Our choice in todays world is to either do what we can in despair and hopelessness, or
to see how amazingly beautiful and effective our small acts of love are. Each seed we collect and carefully scatter with intention is an act towards recasting a life based on destruction into one that feeds and supports life. We need to reclaim the all but forgotten skills needed to nurture meaningful relationships with each other and all of life
in symbiosis with nature.”
-Finisia Medrano
