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13
Heaven Continues-
The dynamiting of the sacred site is the end
of religion and the end of culture. It is the end
of the Munduruku people. When they dyna-
mited the waterfall, they dynamited the Mother
of the Fish and the Mother of the Animals we
hunt. So these fish and these animals will die.
All that we are involved with will die. So this is
the end of the Munduruku,
says a mournful indigenous elder, Eurico Krixi
Munduruku. The message Valmira Krixi delivers is
equally chilling:
We will come to an end, and our
spirits too. It is double annihilation,
in life and in death.
Today, more than 13,000 Munduruku Indians live
in 112 villages, mainly along the upper reaches of
the Tapajs River and its tributaries, including the
Teles Pires River. This indigenous group once oc-
cupied and completely dominated such an exten-
sive Amazonian region that in colonial Brazil the
whole of the Tapajs River Basin was known by
the Europeans as Munduruknia
The sudden appearance of rubber-tapping across
Amazonia during the second half of the 19th cen-
tury shattered the power of Munduruknia, and
deprived the Munduruku of most of their territory.
They just kept fragments in the lower Tapajs and
larger areas in the upper reaches of the river, but
even so it was only a fraction of what they occu-
pied in the past
The Indians are outraged by the lack of respect
with which they are being treated. A statement
issued in 2011 asks: What would the white man
say if we built our villages on the top of his build-
ings, his holy places and his cemeteries? It is, the
Munduruku say, the equivalent of razing St. Peters
in Rome to construct a nuclear power plant, or
digging up your grandmothers grave to build a
parking lot.
The Nation-State has established a hi-
erarchy of values based on criteria like
class, color and ethnic origin. In this
categorization, certain groups count
less and can be simply crushed.
The ethnocide continues, in the way people look
at us, the way they want us to be like them, sub-
jugating our organizations, the way they tell us
that our religion isnt worth anything, that theirs is
what matters, the way they tell us our behavior is
wrong. They are obliterating the identity of the In-
dian as a human being.
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Kathys Garden:
The Token Vegetable Garden
I would rather have roses than rutabagas any day; certainly I would much rather have
lilies than zucchinis. My practical friends look down their noses at me, smugly detailing how much
more feet of cauliflower theyve put in, how many dozens of peppers & tomatoes, how many hills of
beans & rows of lettuce. Come late summer, however, I am popular with friends who planted 84 zuc-
chini plants & have bushels of baseball bat sized squash to give away or compost. I am one of the few
gardeners to benignly, even happily, accept a huge zucchini or two to make my annual token loaves of
spicy zucchini bread I am one of the few gardeners who didnt grow zucchini.
My partner claims I grow flowers instead of vegetables because the eating of green stuff is contrary
to my Pastafarian religious diet, consisting of noodles, fettucini, & spaghetti. This is a lie, of course.
Pesto is green, isnt it?
Actually, I do grow vegetables tucked here & there in my gardens, for the practice, if nothing more.
Suppose, runs even my impractical mind, my family HAD to depend upon what I grow, Id better
be able to grow something edible. It is a token sort of vegetable growing but one I recommend to
you if you have not already rototilled a big rectangle & set out 92 nice Swiss chard plants.
As in everything, the key to token vegetable gardening is passion. If you are only going to be grow-
ing a few things why bother to plant anything but what delights you? So what if zucchini grow easily,
with their enormous leaves & their vicious spiny stems. If you dont like zucchini, which I consider
one of the most insipid foods on the planet, dont plant it. I grow patty pan squash now & then, both
the gold and the lovely pale green kinds they have a wonderful nutty taste if you delicately steam
them when they are small. The yield is nothing like what your sturdy zuke will give. I dont care.
Salad gardens work very well as token vegetable patches. I tuck leaf lettuce everywhere in my semi
shaded upper garden bright green, bronze, red, -- all the sorts I can manage. They are pretty; they
benefit from the attention I give nearby flowers & herbs. Red Sails endures the summer heat best of
any kind Ive tried. Deer Tongue is pretty & Buttercrunch unsurpassed in flavor. A packet of lettuce
seed will give you more lettuce than you can eat. Plant a pinch here & there every week or so; eat the
thinning& then gently gather the outer leaves (dont pick the whole plant). In your salad garden you
can gown greens that are hard to find in markets red raddichio, smokey flavored argula, pleasantly
bitter endive. You can also have beautiful coarse cucumbers & honey and startle unwary dinner
guests when you put them in salads.
Everyone grows tomatoes. I dont usually, except for the little sweet cherry tomatoes my children
love. Sweet 100s cant be beat. A single plant will keep small munchers happy for weeks. I grew big
tomatoes year after year before realizing my family like the tiny ones best. Whatever sort you grow,
freshly picked sunripened tomatoes are an adventure not a thing like the supermarket sorts, which I
suspect are a way of recycling Styrofoam packing material. Somewhere there are tomato factories
where Styrofoam is shaped into balls & sprayed red before it is shipped to your local grocery. People
who want real tomatoes grow their own.
Paying attention to your familys pleasure as well as your own is more important than it might seem.
I remember the year that, having a garden space brilliant with sunlight & rich with river silt, I decided
to plant melons lovely, dripping honeysweet cantaloupes. When my melons ripened dozens of
them it turned out that only I & one of the resident basset hounds liked them. Everyone else reacted
as though theyd been offered a platter of banana slugs. Belle, the hound, & I spent a few warm
summer evenings sharing cantaloupes in the melon patch a slice for her, a slice for me but we
couldnt, between us, eat all that bounty.
I do grow Swiss chard (though not 92 plants in a rectangle). The way to make it tasty, by the way, is
to lightly saut it with plenty of garlic in a bit of oil. Boiled chard is unfit to eat. Red chard is particu-
larly pretty & can be tucked into your flower garden where it looks tropical and barbaric next to orange
& yellow flowers or contrast enticingly with pale pink & purple ones. Parsley is pretty in the flower
garden too, as is small leafed basil along sunlit paths.
But plant what you like. Is it sweet corn you crave or
really beany flavored old fashioned pole beans? Do you
hanker for sunwarmed strawberries or tiny fresh pas?
Whatever it is, you can probably grow it, but if your gar-
den is limited by all your roses & lilies, or because you are
writing a great book & havent much gardening time, just
make sure that anything you plant is exactly what you
most want. Your neighbor will bring you zucchinis.
Dont worry.
-Kathy Epling
Civil Liberties
Monitoring Project
707.923.4646
clmp@civilliberties.org
Office upstairs
773 Redwood Drive Garberville
www.greenfuse.work