Food, Culture, & Future Generations
With Ed Mendoza
Native American Farmer, Poet & Permaculturist
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 6:30-9pm Food & Music, Raffle
La Casa de la Raza, Santa Barbara, CA
Eduardo
(Ed) Mendoza (Xikano-Nahuatl), farmer, author, activist,
and Director of Indigenous Permaculture de
Aztlan, comes to Santa Barbara to speak about his
experiences in California and Mexico, growing food and growing culture.
A Santa
Barbara native, Ed has been growing gardens since he was a boy, learning
from his father. Working in the fields picking crops while in high school
and college, he later graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, with a
degree in Agricultural Science. He learned about growing blue corn from
Mexico from his adopted grandfather, the late Rafael Guerrero, one of the
founders of D-Q University in Davis, California.
In 1993
Mendoza became an agricultural advisor for the Traditional Native
American Farmers Association and started to train in
Permaculture (PERMAnent agriCULTURE), a design system
based on ecological principles for creating sustainable human
environments. He worked for the Gila River Indian
Community, establishing an aquaculture and farming program to teach young
juveniles about traditional crops. Ed helped establish the Casa Blanca
Growers Cooperative which grows mostly traditional organic crops. He has
also been part of the Permaculture teaching team for Indigenous
Permaculture
(www.indigenous-permaculture.org)
teaching at the annual Indigenous Permaculture Design Course in Sante Fe,
New Mexico.
The
purpose of Indigenous Permaculture de
Aztlan is to assist indigenous nations in North, Central
and South America learn the means to be economically self sufficient and
to respect culture and ceremony, and restore lands for future
generations. Part of the vision is to encourage youth to go to these
countries to help, learning through cultural exchange.
Recently
Ed Mendoza has traveled to Belize and Guatemala to teach about
permaculture and the importance of growing and saving traditional seeds.
He has worked with a coalition of traditional growers that traveled to
Italy for an International Slow Foods Conference, learning farming
methods from around the world. He has been invited to Columbia, Thailand
and Argentina to demonstrate sustainable farming techniques, and will be
going to Baja, California to teach a workshop on rainwater harvesting,
while participating in a mesquite bean harvest with the Seri Indian
community.
Mendoza
recently won a place in the Writers Place contest for his poem,
As the Peaches Come, and has a
newly finished manuscript titled Mud &
Blood. He reads regularly at Art in the Alley in
Casa Grande, Arizona and has read in New York and in New Mexico. Poems
are about family, love, the streets, the desert, growing food, life and
prayer. He is currently writing a novel and is doing research on his
families history in Mexico and California. Ed is a respected member of
his community and considered a ceremonial leader and regularly
participates in Sun Dance, Native American Church and other
ceremonies.
The
evening event takes place at La Casa de la Raza, in Santa
Barbara, CA, 601 E. Montecito St, on Sat, Oct 27,
6:30-9pm. Food, Music & Fundraising raffle for
Permaculture de Aztlan projects with
Indigenous Communities in North, Central & South America. Sponsors
are Santa Barbara Permaculture Network & La Casa de la Raza.
Donations welcome. For more information, please call (805)-962-2571
margie@sbpermaculture.org
,
www.sbpermaculture.org
-end-
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
(805) 962-2571 P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190 margie@sbpermaculture.com www.sbpermaculture.org
"We are like trees, we
must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." -
Anonymous