Ofrenda Magazine (OM): Tell us a bit about Iwígara, the book: How do you typically describe it? What prompted you to write it?
Enrique Salmón (ES): Actually, I did not come up with the idea to write the book. It was an editor at Timber Press who reached out to me to suggest the idea. Years ago, the press had published a book by Daniel Moreman called Native American Medicinal Plants. I have a copy of the book in my personal library. It is a great resource if you are looking for information on how Indigenous tribes use certain plants or what the plants’ native names are. It is very extensive but reads more like a dictionary.
Timber Press was wanting something more than just the names and uses of plants. They had seen my previous book, Eating the Landscape (University of Arizona Press, 2012). In that book, I presented American Indian agriculture using lots of story and Indigenous perspective. Timber Press was hoping that I could approach Indigenous plant knowledge in a similar way. I suggested that I focus on a smaller number of plants, sharing them from an Indigenous perspective through story. They agreed, and I immediately contacted my American Indian and Ethnobotanical network of friends and colleagues from across the country and asked them to give me a list of ten plants that they felt were the most important ones from their region or culture. From the various lists that I received, I came up with the eighty plants that are in the book. Each plant is unique, and each plant entry, I hope, reflects the spirit and soul of the plant.
OM: The title is special: Iwígara. Can you share a bit about what the word iwígara means and how it relates to the phrase you coined, kincentric ecology?
ES: The word iwígara comes from my Rarámuri language. It has several meanings, but most simply, it alludes to the idea of interconnected and overlapping cycles of shared breath, life, and energy. My people, like so many other Indigenous peoples, believe that we are directly related to everything around us. We share life energy, such as breath, with all the animals, insects, rocks, and plants. They are our kin, our relatives.
When one makes choices with a landscape based on the concept that everything around you is a relative, then the land management practices that emerge from that realization tend to be sustainable. Practices connected to managing the land become more of stewardship and ministering to the land. This is the central concept of kincentric ecology.
When people read about or hear me explain kincentric ecology, they often assume that I am speaking about reciprocity. However, reciprocity assumes an exchange that resembles commodification. This is very much a Western concept. Kincentricity is not an exchange. It is a responsibility to our human and non-human relatives, to the ancestors of those relatives, as well as to our descendants.
I am often bothered by non-Native people and organizations who so easily misappropriate Indigenous land management practices. I am bothered by their imperative to identify “models” for everything. It demands that there is a single “Indigenous” agricultural model. It’s as if 10,000 years ago, all our ancestors from across the continent sat down one day to decide how they were going to go about farming. Besides, models such as permaculture or regenerative agriculture are ultimately Euro-American frames applied to Indigenous practices.
The larger implication of this thinking is that interested individuals can pick and choose which agricultural model they want to follow—or that they can mix and match all of them. It reminds me of what Wintu leader Caleen Sisk-Franco once said about how non-Native peoples approach religion and spirituality. She said that, to them, religion is like the cereal aisle of a grocery store: everyone can pick and choose their favorite one. However, there is only one box of Wintu. Indigenous ways of interacting and relating to our local lands are not something that we choose one day and then change our minds about the next. We are our lands, we are the rain that nourishes the land, we are the rocks, we are the salmon that spawns in the rivers, and the eagles and bears that feed on those fish. We are the pollinators. What we do to them, we do to ourselves.
