20. Seeds: The Life Keepers — with Milka Chepkorir Kuto

Written By alexa firmenich

“It does not mean anything if you have a land, and the relationship is gone, and the values and the spiritual connection of the people and the land is gone. What gives us so much pride as a community is to refer to our ancestors, and our clan systems, and our family roots.”

- Milka Chepkorir Kuto

 

SYNOPSIS:

Seeds. Memory keepers. Speckled time travelers. Capsules of deep, earth wisdom. To control seeds is to control life. Or perhaps, rather, to know seeds is to know the keys to life. To be a seed is to hold the genetic code of turning starlight into matter, of morphing your body into soft green tips that tremble in the wind and drink fire. There is a deep co-evolutionary relationship that exists in your bones, between humans, land, ecology, and seeds.

And we are losing them. This genetic wipeout is due to the advent of hybrid seeds when for the first time in history, a seed could be patented, privately owned; chemical agriculture and cultural extinction soon followed.

This loss of diverse and flourishing seed systems directly correlates with a loss of cultural identity for thousands of communities around the world. Life for rural communities fractures. We’re losing the seed keepers. The freedom of seeds, and resilient seed systems, becomes a political act of justice on food sovereignty, indigenous rights, and restoring power back into the hands of farmers. So how does this rich history weave into the story of today’s guest?

Milka Chepkorir Kuto is an anthropologist and climate and human rights activist. She is a member of the Sengwer indigenous community who primarily live in Kenya’s Rift Valley, and she has become a representative for her people in defending their land rights after violent evictions from their traditional lands by the Kenya Forest Service. Milka is also a Coordinator of Defending Territories of Life at ICCA Consortium, and has worked the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her community is working to revitalize people-land relationships through indigenous knowledge systems and Milka works with the women to save and protect their ancestral ways and seeds systems.

As Milka speaks, you can feel in her spirit this visceral connection to place, story, food, culture, a weaving of seed, hand, heart, human, forest. Milka herself is a seed, a story keeper, a culture holder, an inspirational tie between ancestral knowing and the modern world.

 
 

GUESTS BIO:

Milka Chepkorir Kuto is an anthropologist and climate and human rights activist. She is a member of the Sengwer indigenous community who primarily live in the Embobut forest in Kenya’s Rift Valley, and has become a representative for her people in defending their land rights after violent evictions from their traditional lands by the Kenya Forest Service. For the three years Milka worked with the Forest Peoples Programme, she fought for the recognition of Sengwer community land rights needed to sustain her community’s culture and traditional way of life.

Milka is also a Coordinator of Defending Territories of Life at ICCA Consortium, and has worked the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She and her community are working to revitalize People-Land Relationships through Indigenous Knowledge Systems.

QUOTES:

  • But that is our land. Our ancestors are there. We go there to seek directions when we lack rain, we go there to pray to our God and to our ancestors when we have distresses on our land. They are there and that is where we know they are, in the waterfalls, in the thick forest.

  • There's no care that is given to the trees like we would care for them. There's no care that is given to the birds and the bees and the monkeys like we would give to them.

  • It does not mean anything if you have a land, and the relationship is gone, and the values and the spiritual connection of the people and the land is gone.

  • What gives us so much pride as a community is to refer to our ancestors, and our clan systems, and our family roots.

  • You, as a person, don't introduce yourself in singularity. I am not just me. I am my clan first. And then I am my family. Just how you introduce yourself has a huge spiritual connotation and relationship to our land.

  • I think I have found myself in this moment in the life of my community and this moment in the cycle of humanity where there’s a huge force against what is right, what is ethical, what is just to the earth, and what is just to communities.

  • Actually people are getting sick with the other foods. Can we go back to our foods and not get sick? So we do not need the dispensary that is put in our community right now. People are like, yeah, so let's walk back to planting our indigenous trees. Because we want to return back our honey system.

  • Recognize that humanity is one. And that all of us have the responsibility given to us by the Creator to take care of what we have been created to take care of.

  • You don't have to be in the forest to take care of the planet. We don't all have to come from forests. Just take recognition of who you are, and where you are, and what best you can do for the planet.

  • You see the way monoculture happens? There is a mono behavior, mono ways in which we need to do things. We don't have to be the same. We don't have to be uniform. We just have to be human, and relate to the earth with the dignity. So if you are in a system that is causing injustice to the earth and to the communities that are taking care of it, then what you need to do is to call that out and not be part of that system.

LINKS:

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21. The Science of Plant Intelligence & Neurobiology — with Paco Calvo