This post is part of Rebecca Salazar’s 2023 Lazarus Summer Internship.
A bit on creating a podcast episode for my independent project: I chose to record a short pilot episode for my project because I wanted to move away from the traditional written academic work and think about how sound and movement, all those things that contribute to the animacy of life, cannot be flattened down into the written word. In the podcast I reflect on my positionality as a reconnecting native who was raised mestize but prefers to take on the placeholder of xicanx identity. My experience in dissecting why the Three Sisters is a site of resistance and rematriation has been the basis of my understanding of the role of seedkeeper as somebody who maintains the sanctity of plant-human relationships and can place them in terms of the community-identity that characterizes diverse indigenous communities. The cross-time and cross-generation relationship or kinship building that maintains life and culture today has given me hope for our relationship to the earth and the role of indigenous activists, farmers, scholars, and people to lead the way in restoring human-non-human relationships during the growth of climate change as a symptom of neocolonialism.
Listen to the podcast episode The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency below: