Photo by Ben Fahrer
Dr. Rupa Marya, a physician, activist, writer, mother, musician and composer, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice, and she is co-author (with Raj Patel) of the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.
Dr. Marya also works to decolonize food and medicine in partnership with communities in Lakhota territory at the Mni Wiconi Health Circle and in Ohlone territory through the Deep Medicine Circle (DMC), which is dedicated to restoring societal and individual health degraded by capitalism and colonialism. A critical aspect of DMC’s work is reestablishing the place of indigenous peoples as leaders in their ancestral lands.
The following interview was conducted by Arty Mangan of Bioneers at the 38-acre DMC farm south of San Francisco.
ARTY MANGAN: What are you trying to accomplish on this land?
RUPA MARYA: Over the seasons and over the years we are looking at what happens to the soil when you give land back to Native people and you work together and blend techniques from contemporary agroecology with Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We are starting with annual crops, and then we will be rebuilding perennial food systems that were native to these regions. This is the first stage in what Ben Fahrer, DMC’s Director of Agroecology and Land Stewardship, considers a 20-year project of moving all the ecological engines on the land in that direction.
The first year, we did some keyline plowing and dug some swales. When the rains came, the fields of neighboring farms flooded, but in our fields, the water infiltrated the soil. We had groundwater recharge from all the water in the swales, and that allowed us to start planting our 100-fruit-tree orchard this year.
ARTY: Is rain your main water source?
RUPA: We have a water catchment off of a 6,000 square-foot roof that captures about 100,000 gallons a year on average.
ARTY: Do you have trouble with invasive plants?
RUPA: In the riparian area outside of the fenced agricultural zone, we’ve been removing the invasive plants to give room for the nettle to come back. There are amazing patches of nettle here. Some of these patches have been stewarded for a long time and can grow to about eight or nine feet tall. We will be using the stems for fiber to make rope. There are two different native varieties of nettles here side-by-side.
This riparian zone was all covered with invasive ivy and we’d been pulling it slowly, but during heavy rains this winter, the creek flooded and ripped it all out. Now we’re going to plant a California native basket garden here so that our Native friends can come in to harvest and process all the sedge and dogwood, and I regularly walk the creek to document the fish that are here.
ARTY: What aquatic species do you see?
RUPA: There’s mostly steelhead trout, and then some baby Coho salmon. I’d say hundreds of steelhead and maybe a handful of Coho. I still haven’t gotten good at distinguishing the fry, but when they’re juveniles I can tell them apart. I like to walk with my binoculars and just look at them; that’s been my favorite thing to do here.
ARTY: Many conventional farmers view wildlands outside the farm boundary as antagonistic. How do you see the wildlands interfacing with the farm?
RUPA: It’s been amazing to find red-legged frogs, an endangered species, in our peppers. Part of our work is extending the reach of the wild systems into the farm so that the ecology of the farm and the wild land ecology are consonant and harmonious. It’s been really beautiful to watch and survey who’s here and how they’re being impacted by our activity.
ARTY: How is the food that you grow distributed or marketed?
RUPA: The first field we put into production last year is about an acre-and-a-quarter and we gave away 32,000 pounds of food from it to community groups in San Francisco who were experiencing hunger. During the pandemic more political will to feed people experiencing hunger got activated, so we capitalized on that and moved forward a model that we call “Farming is Medicine,” and we’ve received good funding support to advance that model as a piece of public policy.
ARTY: It’s great that you got philanthropic funding to get the project going, but do you have a long-term plan for its economic sustainability?
RUPA: We need an alternate food system, one in which farmers are positioned as stewards of our health to take care of the earth and feed people, one that is not based on the profit motive, on the very capitalist structures that have caused the degeneration of the earth and our relationship to the web of life. I don’t think you can have a genuinely regenerative agriculture system that’s based in capitalism. I think it’s an oxymoron. It’s antithetical. To be truly regenerative, you have to have practices that honor both the earth and people. We need a system that doesn’t extract from either people or the earth, but our current system extracts from both. Even in industrial organic or regenerative agriculture, you’re seeing abusive labor practices, the exploitation of a labor force made vulnerable by our immigration system.
Ideally, the Deep Medicine Circle model of agriculture should be funded through a utility, in the same way we pay for our sewers, our electricity and the other things that we consider important for human life. We see the creation of a public food utility starting in a very local way and expanding out from there to provide income for all farmers, so they can have great livelihoods. All people working on land – farmers and farmworkers – should be honored for their labor with great salaries and benefits and support.
ARTY: How do you see this farm fitting into that vision in, say, twenty years?
RUPA: This farm is a seed. We’d like what we’re building here to help seed the futures for other groups to be able to do this kind of work and show how non-Native and Native people can live together and work on land in ways that sustain the health of the whole system. This system of agriculture would be supported through a food utility that captures dollars not only from food programs but also from health programs because you’d be advancing universal basic nutrition for everyone who lived in the urban environment through this peri-urban/urban relationship.
We also have a rooftop farm in Oakland, and we have opportunities to build out more rooftop farms and urban food system solutions that would also be supported by the food utility model because they’re providing ecological services in the urban environment as well as climate benefits from having a complex ecology in your neighborhood. These models benefit more than just the people who eat or grow the food, they benefit everybody, including the birds and the animals. We see being surrounded by wild ecology as part of the solution of what the future of city living looks like.
ARTY: An important part of your vision is being an ally with local Indigenous people and returning land back to Indigenous control. Who are the Indigenous folks you’re working with and how do they inform your vision?
RUPA: We have been in discussion with several different Ohlone groups. We decided to hire an Ohlone person, Charlene Eigen-Vasquez, who is the founder of the Confederation of Ohlone People. She’s a lawyer who specializes in tribal law and health law. She has also been involved in cultural work, building bridges between groups, and working as a peacemaker for many, many years. She is guiding how the transfer of this land going back to Native people would best be done, including who, or what entity, should be holding the land. These are the questions that she’s addressing among Native communities.
Photo By Ben Fahrer
Meanwhile, we’re working with our Indigenous partners on a two-acre field for medicine production and an 11-acre field where Charlene has some great ideas about how to reawaken our understanding that we’re on Ohlone land and that California Native people are survivors of genocide. We all have an obligation to support them in their healing so that they can lead the kinds of ecological work that needs to happen right now when we’re watching skies turn orange, whether it’s in New York or here in California, or we’re watching these deluges happen because we don’t know how to manage the land systems. No settler knows how to manage the land systems here, but California Native people have been in touch with this land for thousands of years and have understandings, that, even if they’ve been dormant, are still there culturally. Our work is to help support that reawakening.
There are folks we work with here who are Ohlone and others who are from other California Native communities. Sage LaPena, a Nomtipom Wintu ethnobotanist, is our Director of Indigenous Plant Medicine and leads all the traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) work happening on the land, including identifying all the plants and medicines already here. Sage is helping us imagine how to make these sites accessible and relevant to California Native people with the cultural practices that they want to bring back.
We’ve also been honored to have the presence of Tiffany Adams, who is a Chemehuevi tribal member from Lake Havasu and also of Konkow and Nisenan Maidu ancestry. She is an incredible artist and thinker.
Land-based projects take time. We say that we are embarking on a 252-year song cycle. 252 years before the elders asked us to come here, (Spanish explorer Gaspar de) Portola landed close by in 1769, ushering in an era of colonization and genocide, but 252 years later songs and ceremonies have started happening on this land again, and people started working together in a way that hadn’t been done ever before in this area. That’s what we’re embarking upon, and it’s challenging and hard. You realize why people don’t even try to do it because wounds are opened that can only be healed collectively, but it’s exciting and it’s beautiful.
ARTY: You say it’s hard, so could you share how you were able to move through the resistance? How did you get the difficult conversation going to initiate a collaboration?
RUPA: It’s not hard getting people to understand what dire straits we’re in as a species, especially people who are working close to earth and who are aware of the dynamics between people that can fracture us at a critical moment when we really need to come together. People like that are drawn into this work, and they show up in incredible strength, grace, beauty, kindness and generosity. We’ve been overwhelmingly blessed by elders who are stewarding this vision with us, and guiding and helping us know how to handle things when they get challenging, so that part has not been hard.
For me, as a non-Native person working to support returning land to Native people, there’s a lot of learning that’s happened and continues to happen, but what I realize is that no matter how hard it is, we’re all in it. There’s something much bigger than me or my lifetime. It’s like planting an oak tree. We planted baby oak trees. I will never see those trees in the fullness of their lifecycle, but they’ll be beautiful for my grandchildren, so when you start planting like that, when you start doing this kind of work, it’s about something that’s so much bigger than you or your ego or your feelings. It’s been a great lesson, and you get over yourself and you keep going. That’s what we’re doing.
ARTY: You’re walking along the creek; you’re slowing down enough to see the Coho and steelhead; you are learning to listen to the land. What are you hearing?
RUPA: I hear that the land is grateful for our presence and our work. I see the way, with just a little bit of interaction, the medicinal plants bounce right back if you remove even a little bit of the invasive plants or you create a little space. I’m getting a sense of the power and the vitality of this space. Most of this watershed is protected Douglas Fir and redwood forest. All the nutrient density comes down and deposits itself in the silt under these alders, and you get huge nettles because they’ve been fed from this entire beautiful watershed.
I see the creek rise with all the songs and prayers. I also feel the sadness of the people who lived here, who offered their medicine and got violence and land theft and genocide and erasure as a response. I feel there’s sadness and confusion here. Even as a non-Native person, I’m learning how to talk to and listen to the land, to be in conversation with it so that we can bring reciprocity back to our relationship to the land. These are all things that have brought me into greater consciousness of all the beings who are and have been here.
What I’ve been learning is that no matter how hard things get, we are living in a time where the seeds need to be kept safe, the seeds need to be adaptive, the water systems need to be reimagined, our relationships to one another need to be reimagined. If we can do that, we can get through this time.
ARTY: Talking about listening to the land and what the land is saying, as I was driving here, up over the Santa Cruz Mountains and down to the coast, I saw that after years of drought followed by 13 “atmospheric river” storms in less than 3 months—a historic deluge that caused mudslides, fallen trees and flooding—plants are again vibrant and vigorous after the much-needed rain. These extreme events can wreak havoc, but they also provide an opportunity. How do you work with this land to make it ready to receive and take advantage of that sort of opportunity?
RUPA: It was beautiful when it was deluging here. Ben was out there in the water with his rain gear on. Everyone else was hunkered down, but Ben said “I’ve got to go out there!” He had his hoe, and he was watching the water run on the land, and then he sat with me and described it. Being with him for the last 10 years of my life has been the most incredible education because I discovered that the way he sees this land is the way I see my patients. He touches the land and moves on the land the way I care for the people who I’m treating as a doctor. He’s doctoring the land. He’s helping to move things so that they can heal over time. He has the ability to have long-term vision, to think how perennial systems can move and shift and come back over 50, 100, 200 years, if we start doing this work now. That’s the kind of planning that most people don’t know how to do or even imagine. That’s been really beautiful to watch and consider how the land will be affected in 200 years by what we do today. That’s wild!
The post Farming as Medicine: An Interview with Rupa Marya, MD appeared first on Bioneers.
