Ancient Wisdom

First, I love PBS - support your local public television stations!; yes, spoken like a true member.  After working about 30 hours straight, including most of the night, on a client project, on what was still technically my vacation (the weekend bookending my vacation week), I needed a zone out this early evening - I numb my brain, and fire it up at the same time, with television.  It started with The Great British Baking Show, then continued ...

...To a documentary on Native Americans reclaiming their ancient foodways, including one of the better known experiments, the Pueblo Food Experience - it, in particular, advocates a cold turkey return to traditional Native American foods to combat modern health issues.  But the reclamation of the ancient foodways also encompasses saving and growing heirloom seeds, foraging, returning to traditional agricultural methods, hunting game that was available before the European settlers arrived with foreign wheat and sugar and other inflammation-inducing foodstuffs - basically, a movement toward returning to pre-colonial foods.  The interesting corrollary theory to explain the high incidence of diabetes, among other ailments, in the Native American community, and the alleviation and reversal of those by returning to a traditional diet, is that certain body types, based on ethnicity, are more suited to certain areas and lands and foods indigenous to those lands, that the ancestors of these indigenous groups had already solved for those health issues by basing their diet around foods that were then available to them - so, in the Native American community, the holy trinity of squash (that provides vitamins and antioxidants), beans (protein), and corn (carbs), supplemented by meat from hunting and fishing and fruits and greens from foraging.  Of course, the converse of that is that certain other groups don't belong here; now THAT sentiment could get controversial in these global times.  But that last is just application of a logic extension in my head - it was not articulated in the documentary or book.  What WAS articulated was pride of place and space, how the departed ancestors paid a dear price and fought for the current generations to be able to live on that land.

So then that was followed by a documentary on the Barefoot College of India, which offers night school in rural areas to children who might otherwise grow up illiterate due to local poverty and the tradition of putting children to work in the fields or in the familial domestic setting.  The schools teach to all ages through pragmatic curricula imparting knowledge that is relevant to ordinary rural villagers - helping them to improve on the problem solving in which they already engage and building on what they already know from techniques passed on from one generation to the next, emphasizing that that "plebeian" rural knowledge IS knowledge and has value, and is sometimes superior to the new ways.  Also, that the ordinary problems are deserving of enhanced solutions. 

The themes of these two documentaries dovetails nicely with the current movements that question Eurocentric systems and assumptions and hierarchies.  And calls out the harm inflicted.  Those, of course, are the big theoretical and political issues requiring attention - the macro of it all.  Whereas the foodways reclamation movement and Barefoot College efforts advance solutions to some portion of that macro level harm on a micro level to micro problems.