"Seeds of Resilience: The Cultural Dimension of Agricultural Biodiversity in Indigenous North America" — A Public Lecture by Rowen White (Sierra Seeds) hosted by CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA
Join Mohawk Seedkeeper Rowen White as she shares her insights about Indigenous seeds and their stewards across North America and her home community of Akwesasne in upstate NY; stories that embody the vision of relationality and kinship between humans and plants and explore the depth of the cultural dimension of plant biodiversity in North America. She will share the collective vision of intercultural healing that emerges when we centre Indigenous leadership, traditional ecological knowledge, cultural memory, and sovereignty of living in relationship with the cultural inheritance of land, seeds, and other more-than-human kin. Stories from her work at the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network will paint an uplifting picture of inter-cultural climate sanity for the regenerative land stewardship movement in these times of great transformation.
This lecture will be accompanied with presentations by Yara Dowani and Mingxin Li, recipients of the 2024 Food Action Awards, which were launched by CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the RCA to support initiatives using food as a tool and methodology to address the climate emergency. The Awards platform ways to advance infrastructural prototypes, field trials, landworkers networks, BIPOC farming initiatives, queer ecologies and microclimatic environments among other strategies towards building alternative diets that benefit human and more-than-human nourishing.
Yara Dowani, Om Sleiman Farm, will present Regeneration Towards Liberation, a project that addresses a season of drought by testing syntropic farming as a regenerative method for food production in Palestine. As the co-founder of Om Sleiman farm, Yara is engaged in conducting field trials, building on her multiyear efforts to find a model for a regenerative polyculture that can produce healthy food for the community and a collaborative ecosystem using local plants and available resources. Mingxin Li will present his project Golden Butter, Golden Motherland. Focusing on a season of wetland disappearance, Mingxin’s work is situated in Zoige Marsh—the world's largest alpine peat wetland located on the eastern border of the Tibetan Plateau. Engaging the local community in seeing, riding, collecting, producing, tasting, storytelling, and memory retrieval—the project works to reactivate and transmit ancestral food and pastoralist knowledge between generations to form new networks that can support ongoing and future environmental crises.
The event will take place in the Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Dyson Building (accessed via Hester Road) in Battersea.
If you have any access requirements for the lecture please email Lucy.Last@rca.ac.uk.
Seats are limited, so please confirm by booking your free ticket.