Planting Seeds on the Banks of the Missouri

Buffalo Bird Woman was born in an earth lodge in 1839, along the Knife River, in present day North Dakota. She grew up to be an expert gardener of the Hidatsa tribe, growing corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers along the fertile bottomlands of the Missouri River. In 1917, anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson published Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians, a faithful transcript of his interviews with this remarkable woman.
In this book (since retitled Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden: Agriculture and the Hidatsa Indians), Maxidiwiac (as she was known in Hidatsa) talks of field preparation, planting, harvesting and storage — along with the songs and ceremonies that lead to a good crop. You get a sense of what a social occasion gardening was. When the first green corn was plucked, the women and children would gather, breaking off a piece of stalk, sucking the sweet juice — “merely for a little taste of sweets in the field.“

Reading this book brings back a lost world, especially life beyond the garden rows:

“Little girls of 10 and 11 years of age used to make dolls of squashes. When the squashes were brought in from the field, the little girls would go to the pile and pick out squashes that were proper for dolls. I have done so myself. We used to pick out the long ones…squashes whose tops were white or yellow and the bottoms of some other color. We put no decorations on these squashes….Each little girl carried her squash about in her arms and sang for it as for a babe. Often she carried it on her back, in her calf skin robe.” from Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden

Brand new to our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library is S.D. Nelson’s Buffalo Bird Girl: A Hidatsa Story — a faithful telling of Buffalo Bird Woman’s childhood. Full of historic photos, maps, and Nelson’s own artwork, this book beautifully captures Hidatsa life on the edge of change.

“Digging sticks are still used in my tribe for digging wild turnips; but even in my grandmother’s lifetime, digging sticks and bone hoes, as garden tools, had all but given place to iron hoes and axes.” — from Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden

And here’s a few more excellent volumes on Native American foodways. There are many, many more on the Land Library’s shelves!

Native American Gardening: Stories, Projects and Recipes for Families by Michael J. Caduto and Joseph Bruchac, Pueblo Indian Agriculture by James A. Vlasich.

Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson, Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation by Gary Paul Nabhan.

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Work, Enjoy, Together Now

The intersection of food, people, and the land has produced some of the most positive and vibrant writing of today. One of our favorites in the recent crop of good books is Farm Together Now: A Portrait of People, Places, and Ideas for a New Food Movement by Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker. The authors visited twenty farms over the course of a single summer. Each farm is profiled with extensive interviews, along with beautifully evocative photographs. The farms are innovative in different ways, but most are dedicated to missions of sustainable agriculture, food justice, and the strengthening of their local food systems.

Here’s just three of the inspiring farm projects featured in Farm Together Now, along with links to each organization’s websites:

–City Slicker Farms: bringing fresh, healthy food to the inner city neighborhoods of Oakland, California.

–Anarchy Apiaries: a one-man operation in New York’s Hudson River Valley, with the mission of raising honeybees in a natural way, in the hopes of reducing Colony Collapse Disorder among the hives.

–The Acequiahood of the San Luis Peoples Ditch: founded in 1852, this cooperative farm organization manages the common ownership of water in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The ditches (acequias) delivers the water, and also ties together the entire community.

All twenty farm projects have inspiring tales to tell. The authors of Farm Together Now returned from their travels with this thought:

“By understanding how these individuals are creating solutions for their lives and the lives of those whom they care about, we feel more optimistic about our future. We present their stories here because we know that a new food system can only emerge if the diversity and complexity that these folks embody are part of the discussion.“

For more on Farm Together Now, be sure to visit farmtogethernow.org.

Also featured above: Lisa Hamilton’s Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness. With the ease of a born storyteller, Lisa Hamilton profiles three farmers bucking the agribusiness establishment — a Texas dairyman, a New Mexico rancher, and a North Dakota farmer. The Land Library strongly recommends Deeply Rooted, along with books such as these:

Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community by Thomas A. Lyson, Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture by Darrin Nordhal, and Mark Winne’s Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture. A few years back, Mark Winne joined us for a wonderful Rocky Mountain Land Series presentation, and he is the subject of one of our earlier posts.

For more good books on this rich topic, click here, and explore!

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The Power of Books & The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

This was one of the most surprising, memorable, and inspirational books we’ve read in the past year. William Kamkwamba’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is many books in one. Kamkwamba gives us a vivid tale of a child’s growing up in the African nation of Malawi. The African landscape is an important character throughout this story, as is Malawi’s corrupt government, and the drought and famine that brought William’s family to their knees.

Forced to leave school due to his family’s dire circumstances, William discovered a tiny volunteer-run library, and soon came across two books: Junior Integrated Science and Explaining Physics. Both of these books laid the groundwork for an unexpected find one day — one of those serendipitous encounters that libraries are so very, very good at — especially when matched with a curious mind like William Kamkwamba’s:

“…I squatted down to grab one of the dictionaries, and when I did, I noticed a book I’d never seen, pushed into the shelf and slightly concealed. What is this? I thought. Pulling it out, I saw it was an American textbook called Using Energy, and this book has since changed my life. The cover featured a long row of windmills — though at that time I had no idea what a windmill was.”

This book provided William Kamkwamba several ah-ha! moments over the next few days, chief among them, how such knowledge might help his family, and at the same time, unleash his best dreams for a future ahead:

“With a windmill we’d finally release ourselves from the troubles of darkness and hunger. In Malawi, the wind was one of the few consistent things given to us by God, blowing in the treetops day and night. A windmill meant more than just power, it was freedom.”

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a wonderful story, full of grit, ingenuity and hope! Please check out the following 3 minute video clip. Among other great images, you’ll see William Kamkwamba proudly holding up the library book that started it all!

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Recalling Voices, Tastes, and Traditions

We all have one particular food so wedded to our sensibilities that it has the power to resurrect the past. During the years I worked in professional kitchens, the foods many of the other cooks and I longed for weren’t the risottos scented with saffron or the rabbit braised with fresh truffles we were preparing for the award-winning menus. Rather they were someone’s grandmother’s potato salad, an aunt’s famous gingerbread, a mother’s meatloaf. A piece of the past is what we really wanted to eat. — Lynne Christy Anderson

When Lynne Anderson hung up her chef’s jacket, she turned to a career in teaching. Her first class was a roomful of immigrant adults, many of whom hadn’t been in a classroom for decades. Searching for a common language, Anderson discovered that “the language turned out to be food.“

And that also planted the seed for Lynne Anderson’s recent book, Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens. Anderson visited the kitchens, and broke bread with immigrant families from Haiti, Cape Verde, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Sudan, Latvia, Morocco, Chile, Ireland, Vietnam, among other lands. “For the last few years, I have had the great privilege of hearing these stories and learning about the roles that food plays in the lives to those who have left almost everything behind….These wonderful meals came out of kitchens that, for the most part, were devoid of high-end stoves and fancy appliances. Rarely was there a cookbook or measuring cup in sight. Here, the cooking was done by feel. In backyard gardens, vegetables were harvested for dinner, or grape leaves and mushrooms were collected at coveted foraging sites….And finally, when the harvesting, shopping, and cooking were done, there was the breaking of bread at kitchen tables.“

This is a beautifully written book, full of wonderful stories that span cultures and generations. Plus there’s recipes!

Given the vital intersection that exists between food and the land, we keep looking for books on the common language of food. Here’s just a few related titles from the Land Library’s shelves:

The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans by Patricia Klindienst, Hidden Kitchens: Street Corner Cooking, Kitchen Rituals, & Visionaries (Stories & More from NPR’s The Kitchen Sisters) by Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson, Arab/American: Landscape, Culture and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts by Gary Paul Nabhan

The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber (an American/Jordanian memoir), Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity by Jeffrey M. Pilcher, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food & Family by Laura Schenone

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Rigorous Science & Passionate Concern: George Schaller’s Latest Work

George Schaller has been described as one of the finest wildlife biologists of all time. At the age of 26 he traveled to Central Africa to study and live with Mountain Gorillas, embarking on the first field study of those gentle giants. Over the next fifty years, George Schaller’s field work took him from Africa to the Tibetan Plateau. Most remarkably, Schaller’s dogged research continually inspired subsequent wildlife protection wherever he pitched his tent across the globe.

Many, many years ago the Land Library purchased our first Schaller book, somewhere along the 8-miles of books at New York City’s venerable Strand Book Store. The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations (pictured above) was one of the first studies of the lion’s social life, and it set us on the path to gather all of George Schaller’s works, including his 2007 memoir, A Naturalist and Other Beasts: Tales From a Life in the Field (also pictured above).

Learn more about each chapter of Schaller’s remarkable life, in books such as these!

A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts by Pamela S. Turner (from our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library), The Giant Pandas of Wolong by George Schaller, Hu Jinchu, Pan Wenshi & Zhu Jing, The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior.

For the last many years, George Schaller’s field studies have centered on China, Tibet, and the greater Himalayan region, captured in books such as these: Stones of Silence: Journeys in the Himalayas, Tibet’s Hidden Wilderness: Wildlife and Nomads of the Chang Tang Reserve, Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe.

Collecting all of George Schaller’s books has been a rewarding pursuit, so imagine our excitement this week when we opened a box containing his very latest work:

“This is a remarkably close-up and revealing story from the world’s top field scientist. In Tibet Wild Schaller addresses such little known creatures as Marco Polo sheep, snow leopards, chiru antelope, horse-like kiang and the peoples that live with them. He writes penetratingly, but with a grace and sensitivity that touches the heart.” — William Conway, Senior Conservationist, Wildlife Conservation Society

Before the Himalayas, before Africa, came Alaska’s Brooks Range. In 1956, as a 23-year old graduate student, George Schaller joined an Alaskan wildlife expedition led by the legendary biologist Olaus Murie:

“Olaus encouraged George’s wanderings. He believed a scientist should gather his or her data on foot, every sense alert, notebook and camera in hand….For George, the Murie expedition was to become the model for the rest of his career: exploration, rigorous science, passionate conservation, and a deep, heartfelt connection to wild places and wild animals.” — from A Life in the Wild by Pamela S. Turner.

Fifty years later, in the summer of 2006, George Schaller returned to Alaska’s north in the company of three fresh young graduate students — the next generation of field biologists to come!

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Living Lighter on the Land

“Fans of Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution will be delighted by Sowing Seeds in the Desert, his last book. It is a rich treasure trove detailing how his own philosophy of farming evolved and how he decided to apply what he learned on his own farm in Japan to other parts of the world. His insights into the tragedies of taking Western, industrial agriculture to places like Africa to ‘enrich the national economy,’ and his alternative approach of working with indigenous farmers to enable them to become self-sufficient are instructive for all of us.” — Frederick Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Masanobu Fukuoka”s The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming was one of the first farming books the Land Library acquired. Our collection has just come full circle with the arrival of Fukuoka’s last book Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security, an inspiring summation of his lifelong work to develop sustainable agricultural techniques.

Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008) was a farmer and philosopher who was born and raised on the Japanese island of Shikoku. In 1975 he wrote The One-Straw Revolution, a best-selling book that described his life’s journey, his philosophy, and the farming techniques that came to him as he worked closer and closer with nature. This small volume eventually was translated into twenty-five languages, and helped make Fukuoka a leader in the worldwide sustainable agriculture movement. He continued farming until shortly before his death in 2008, at the age of ninety-five.

Here’s a wonderful film clip on the life and work of Masanobu Fukuoka:

Masanobu Fukuoka in the field, along with his earlier book The Road Back to Nature: Regaining the Paradise Lost (out of print, but on the Land Library’s shelves).

As many of you know, the Land Library hopes to open an Urban Homestead Library in Denver, full of books on living green in the city, with titles on organic gardening, urban farms, beekeeping, city-bred chickens, goats, pigs — plus many more topics on living lighter on the land. The works of writers such as Masanobu Fukuoka, Wendell Berry, and Liberty Hyde Bailey will form the philosophical backbone of this collection. Help us make this happen!

And for more on the Land Library’s farming collection, here’s a book-filled past post:

–The Work We Do: On the Practice & Philosophy of Farming

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Greening the Food Desert

Will Allen’s parents were sharecroppers from South Carolina, but their son never dreamed of being a farmer — he had other plans for his life. After years on the hardwood floors of professional basketball, Will Allen built a successful career as an executive at Procter & Gamble.

But here’s the unexpected turn. Cashing in his retirement fund, Will bought a two-acre plot of land, a half mile from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project — set in the middle of a food desert with only convenience stores and fast-food restaurants to serve local residents. In the face of tremendous obstacles, that two-acre plot grew into Growing Power, the nation’s preeminent urban farm — a food and education center that now produces enough vegetables and fish to feed thousands. And along the way, jobs have been created, public health has improved, and a community in need has come together. Today, Growing Power helps develop community food systems across the country.

We’re excited to add Will Allen’s new book to our growing collection of books on the urban food movement. The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities is an inspiring place to begin!

In 2008, Will Allen was awarded the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant” for his work on urban farming and sustainable food production:

“Will Allen’s remarkable story, told with eloquence and compassion, conveys the universal value of social justice and real food.” — Alice Waters

Growing Power has become an educational tool for the urban farm movement, especially focused on teaching the next generation of farmers & health-minded consumers.

Here’s a few more recent books from the Land Library’s Urban Homestead shelves!

Urban Farms, Sarah Rich’s just-arrived book that provides in-depth profiles of 16 innovative urban farms, including Will Allen’s Growing Power Community Food Center; Free-Range Chicken Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful, Chicken-Friendly Yard by Jessi Bloom (good gardens and free-range chickens can co-exist and thrive!); Aquaponic Gardening: A Step-by-Step Guide to Raising Vegetables and Fish Together by Sylvia Bernstein, the subject of a recent Rocky Mountain Land Series program, and a technique central to Will Allen’s urban farm.

“Will Allen is a hero and an inspiration to urban farmers everywhere. Now, with The Good Food Revolution, we learn how Allen rediscovered the power of agriculture, and in doing so transformed a city, its community, and eventually the world….Told with grace and utter honesty, I found myself cheering for Allen and his organization, Growing Power.” – Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, and The Essential Urban Farmer.

For much more on Will Allen and Growing Power, be sure to visit their website!

And for more inspiring examples of innovative farms and farmers, check out one of the Land Library’s favorite past posts:

–Work, Enjoy, Together Now

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A Young Artist’s Vision, and the Family That Saw it Through

It’s early yet, but this may be one of the publishing events of the year: Joy M. Kiser’s America’s Other Audubon — a beautifully illustrated book that resurrects an all-but-forgotten natural history classic. Here’s much more about this wonderful new book, best told by the following publisher’s notes:

“Most people are familiar with John James Audubon and his seminal book, Birds of America. But few are aware of another monumental volume of stunning artwork, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, created by a remarkable American family.
Inspired by viewing Audubon’s lithographs at the 1876 World’s Fair, twenty-nine year old artist Genevieve Jones (pictured above) began work on a companion to Birds of America, but this time illustrating the nests and eggs that Audubon left out. Her brother collected the nests and eggs, her father paid all publishing costs, and Genevieve and her girlhood friend learned lithography and undertook the work of a lifetime.
Tragically, Genevieve Jones’ life was cut short by the sudden onset of typhoid fever. She died at age thirty-three. Her family, deeply in mourning, labored for seven more years to finish the project in her memory.”

Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, alongside Genevieve Jones’ illustration of the Wood Thrush’s egg and nest.

Ninety copies were originally printed in 1886, and only about twenty-five copies now exist. Originally the Jones family took subscriptions for the eventual publication of the book. Among the original subscribers: President Rutherford B. Hayes, and a young Harvard college student by the name of Theodore Roosevelt.

Joy M. Miller writes in America’s Other Audubon: Howard (Genevieve’s nest-hunting younger brother) spent the rest of his life trying to market remaining copies of Gennie’s book. In the end many were given to his children and grandchildren. He never stopped believing that Illustrations of the Nests and Birds of Ohio would one day be considered priceless.”

American Goldfinch nest, illustrated by Genevieve’s mother, Virginia Jones, and Genevieve’s depiction of a Warbler’s nest.

“If Audubon is the Robinson Crusoe of nature art, then the Jones are the Swiss Family Robinson. America’s Other Audubon is a vital work of scholarly reclamation that will, I hope, introduce a wide world to the remarkable Genevieve Jones and the familial collaboration her life and death inspired.” — Jonathan Rosen, author of The Life of the Skies.

Genevieve’s Memorial Portrait (courtesy of the Pickaway County Historical Society), alongside her illustration of an Indigo Bunting nest.

“The story of the gifted-but-doomed amateur, the passion of the undertaking shake us. The beauty of the plates and their accessibility, until now denied all except a few who owned the rare original book, make this a rich gift to all who find interest in the natural world.” — Annie Proulx

Mourning Dove nest, illustrated by Virginia Jones

For much more of Genevieve Jones, her family, and this nearly lost treasure of American natural history, be sure to visit the Smithsonian Institution Libraries Website. It will inspire you to seek out a copy of Joy M. Kiser’s America’s Other Audubon!

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The Wilderness Work of Sigurd Olson

Sigurd F. Olson (1899-1982) was a rare blend of author, naturalist, and wilderness advocate. He devoted his life to the exploration (and protection) of the Boundary Waters region of northern Minnesota. Sigurd Olson wrote over a dozen best-selling books, and we’re happy to report that his 1972 book, Wilderness Days, has just been reprinted in a beautiful new edition, featuring the classic cover art of Francis Lee Jaques.

Olson served as the president of The Wilderness Society from 1963 to 1971, and helped draft the Wilderness Act of 1964. Fortunately, he lived to see President Jimmy Carter sign into law the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978.

For much more on the wilderness work of Sigurd Olson, be sure to read David Backes’ A Wilderness Within: The Life of Sigurd Olson. And Olson’s books themselves tell quite a tale!

Sigurd Olson found his special place along a bare glaciated spit of rock, looking out on the waters of northern Minnesota’s Quetico-Superior region:

“I named this place Listening Point because only when one comes to listen, only when is aware and still, can things be seen and heard. Everyone has a listening point somewhere. It does not have to be in the north or close to the wilderness, but some place of quiet where the universe can be contemplated with awe.” — Sigurd F. Olson

Another very important place in Olson’s life was his very modest writing shack. Last year we posted a piece on writers and their writing huts. Here’s one to add to the collection!

Over the years, the University of Minnesota Press has done a wonderful job of keeping Sigurd Olson’s books in print, among them:

The Lonely Land, Of Time and Place, and Open Horizons

And for more on the landscape that most inspired Sigurd Olson, the Land Library strongly recommends two books from our shelves:

Minnesota’s Natural Heritage: An Ecological Perspective by John Tester, and The Boundary Waters Wilderness Ecosystem by Miron Heinselman.

In August 1921, Sigurd married Elizabeth Dorothy Uhrenholdt. The two spent their honeymoon on a canoe trip through the Boundary Waters, and for the next many, many years, they continued their explorations, by foot, canoe, or snowshoe!

For more on the life and work of Sigurd Olson, be sure to visit The Listening Point Foundation site, along with the Sigurd F. Olson Website!

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A Long and Sympathetic Search: Maynard Dixon and the West

“From 1900 to his death in 1946, Maynard Dixon roamed the American West’s plains, mesas, and deserts — by foot, horseback, buckboard, and ultimately, the dreaded automobile — drawing, painting, and expressing his creative personality in poems, essays, and letters in a quest to uncover the region’s spirit.” — Donald J. Hagerty, The Life of Maynard Dixon

Early on, Maynard Dixon and the American West became inexorably linked. In 1901 he joined fellow artist Edward Borein on a rugged horseback trip through several Western states. What he saw changed his life, and can still be traced in the many paintings, sketches and illustrations that would follow.

Donald Hagerty has captured the remarkable life and work of Maynard Dixon in two recent books. The Art of Maynard Dixon is a large-format monograph, and the next best thing to viewing Dixon’s work in galleries across the country. As much as we love this hefty book, our favorite is Hagerty’s The Life of Maynard Dixon — an illuminating biography that is also one of the most brilliantly designed books we’ve seen in many years. Color images of Dixon’s paintings and illustrations accompany nearly every page of this incredibly rich biography.

The Life of Maynard Dixon is also full of black & white photos from Dixon’s life — here’s Dixon with his wife Edith Hamlin, a noted San Francisco muralist.

Hagerty also documents the more commercial work Dixon undertook. Dixon’s illustrations were featured in several magazines such as Sunset, Scribners, Colliers, Century Magazine, and McClures. To make ends meet he also crafted billboard images such as The Apache Trail via the Southern Pacific, 1917 (pictured above).

It’s a great joy to see the full range of Dixon’s work preserved in Donald Hagerty’s books!

This is the land of mesas, laid down in layers of colored sandstone, red, yellow, pink, and creamy white; carved and hollowed by the recession of forgotten seas; their sides often sheer, or broken into strange isolated slabs, turrets, buttes — the blind blunt architecture of a pre-human world. — Maynard Dixon

Here’s a short film clip, where you’ll have the chance to meet Donald Hagerty and learn more about the life and work of Maynard Dixon:

My object has always been to get close to the real nature of my subject as possible — people, animals and country. The melodramatic Wild West idea is not for me the big possibility. The nobler and more lasting qualities are in the quiet and most broadly human aspects of western life. I aim to interpret, for the most part, the poetry and pathos of the life of western people, seen amid the grandeur, sternness and loneliness of their country. — Maynard Dixon

White Buttes, Utah, 1944

Through long and sympathetic searching, he learned how the almost imperceptible contours of flat plains rise and fall as they flow toward the horizon and how the architecture of mesas and buttes marches rhythmically over the landscape, swelled with the freedom of a deep blue sky. — Donald J. Hagerty, The Life of Maynard Dixon

Open Range, 1942

I do not paint Indians or cowboys merely because they are picturesque subjects, but because through them I can express that phantasy of freedom of space and thought, which will give the world a sentiment about these people which is inspiring and uplifting. — Maynard Dixon

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