The story of the Maskoke Peoples is, as that of all Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island, a narrative of dispossession, cultural assimilation, and treaty violations. Pressured out of their homelands by government-imposed elimination insurance policies, Maskoke Individuals had been displaced from their territories in 1836. Solely in 2018, did a small neighborhood of Maskoke Individuals lastly rematriate a few of these ancestral lands and return to dwell as soon as once more in what’s at present known as Alabama. Ekvn-Yefolecv, (ee-gun yee-full-lee-juh), a time period that embodies the which means of “returning to Earth/returning to the homelands,” is an ecovillage neighborhood that lies on 2,657 acres and was created for the aim of linguistic, cultural and ecological sustainability. There are solely a handful of remaining Maskoke individuals who communicate their language, so an necessary a part of the neighborhood’s efforts are directed towards language revitalization by way of immersion whereby kids are raised solely within the Maskoke language, with their curriculum centering on conventional agricultural and ecological information. Their efforts have confirmed profitable, as they’re now dwelling to the one fluent-speaking Maskoke kids on the planet.
Meals sovereignty, together with the decolonization and reIndigenization of their diets, is a serious part of their day by day lives; Maskoke elders too typically die prematurely of persistent sickness, taking with them their language and ancestral information. Returning to a extra conventional weight loss program is essential to securing higher well being situations for the ecovillage. With help from the Keepers of the Earth Fund, residents launched into a mission to reintroduce necessary components of the standard weight loss program. The lake sturgeon, sacred to the Maskoke Individuals, was extirpated from Alabama’s streams within the Fifties by a mix of things, together with the development of hydroelectric dams and the deliberate elimination by settlers. The neighborhood constructed an aquaculture facility, then traveled to Anishinaabe homelands (Ontario, Canada) to spawn the fish, return embryos to Maskoke homelands, hatch them out, develop them out, and over time have reintroduced the sturgeon fingerlings again into the watershed. They lately expanded the neighborhood’s aquaculture facility, creating area for different endangered species of sturgeon which are additionally native to the bioregion. Residents seize fish waste from the ability and divert it to their greenhouse with the intention to improve nutrient density in greens they develop for neighborhood consumption.
Co-founders Tawna Little and Marcus Briggs-Cloud keep that as a result of Maskoke Persons are a historically agrarian society, their day by day modern lifeways should be fixated on regenerative agriculture if their language goes to outlive. Marcus, who has by no means spoken a phrase of English to his and Tawna’s kids since their births, states “We needed to deliberately create an area the place we are able to dwell on a regular basis in our language! It’s a fairly easy actuality to understand that if our day by day actions will not be carried out in our already fragile language, it’ll inevitably die.” He expounded on the connections between language and reIndigenization, “Our conventional lexicon inherently lends itself to conversations participating conventional ecological, cosmological, agricultural, astronomical, ceremonial and different types of information; so, as a substitute of adjusting our language to accommodate the environmentally abusive realities of settler-colonial industrial capitalist ideology, we would have liked to alter the way in which we dwell by recreating a society by which our language as soon as functioned best- one premised on ecologically regenerative lifeways.” Amongst their commitments to regenerative agriculture, is Ekvn-Yefolecv’s return of bison to the panorama, in addition to critically endangered livestock breeds like American Guinea Hogs, San Clemente Island Goats, Gulf Coast Sheep, and a number of other heritage rooster breeds. Ecovillage residents actively create silvopasture (timber, forage, and animals all coexisting on the identical land), primarily for carbon sequestration, whereby they implement holistic administration (intensive rotational grazing) to enhance soil well being.
Restoring southeastern grasslands for the proliferation of native perennials can also be a precedence. This species diversification effort offers a forage polyculture within the pasture that finally improves the ruminants’ omega 3:6 ratio and phytonutrient richness, in flip offering nourishing meals for ecovillage residents upon harvest of these animals. After turning into residents of the ecovillage, adhering to the neighborhood’s weight loss program has led to a number of individuals dropping vital weight and reclaiming their mobility, others having ended dependence on previously prescribed pharmaceutical medicines akin to antidepressants and even insulin for diabetics. The ecovillage’s reintroduction of endangered species to the ecosystem has been of deep religious significance. Marilyn Cloud Dunson, Ekvn-Yefolecv Elder and Maskoke language speaker, sums up properly the significance of those actions, “Oketv tat hiyowat, vcakēt owēpēkv, ponvttv, vpēukv, omvlkv fullicēyat vcayēcēt ponvttv vhonvpsvkvhanat svhēcēt, hompetv tis sēcvfeknickv ohfvccvn hompetv honticēt vpoket owēs. Nak-omvlkv pun somēcēkon kowēyat ohfvccvn nettv-setētayen vototketv sohfvcficēyat estē-catē em oponvkv setemponahoyēt vpokēt owēs. (This can be a very sacred time. We look after these animals in order that they might be restored. They make us wholesome, in addition to the meals we develop. We’re right here so that every one of these items don’t perish, together with our language that we communicate on a regular basis whereas we fulfill this work).
The neighborhood calls for a non-toxic and ecologically regenerative constructed atmosphere that features timber framing from timber harvested on-site, conducting ceremonies to achieve consent from every tree earlier than harvest, felling and milling the timber to bypass embodied vitality related to the importation of timber from off-site, and mortise and tenon joinery with inexperienced timbers that avoids an energy-intensive wooden kiln drying course of concerned for lumber options. They set up wheat straw bales and hempcrete wall techniques, after which apply earthen clay-based plasters to the partitions and flooring. Different options of the constructed atmosphere embody a number of 20,000-gallon rain catchment cisterns, anaerobic bio-digesters that mix human and animal manure with meals scraps to generate methane cooking gas, net-carbon-negative rocket mass heaters, residing roofs which are irrigated to scale back temperatures inside buildings throughout sizzling months, and a bunch of different low-tech built-in regenerative techniques. Ekvn-Yefolecv is located in a fire-adapted ecosystem. In partnership with The Nature Conservancy, they’ve burned 2,000 acres of their ecovillage over the previous 4 years for the restoration of the critically endangered montane longleaf pine ecosystem, which hosts the culturally vital, but endangered, red-cockaded woodpecker. Ekvn-Yefolecv is an income-sharing neighborhood, which means all residents of the neighborhood work day by day all through the ecovillage in change for meals, lodging, and a $400 month-to-month stipend.
As co-director Tawna Little put it, “I previously related this envisioned ecovillage lifestyle with being poor, which is how I grew up. I promised myself I’d get out of poverty, and right here I’m utilizing composting bathrooms and residing on 4 hundred {dollars} a month. However I notice that in having the privilege of working straight with Earth day by day that I’m not poor, and that I’ve company in selecting to dwell in proper relationship with Her. We maintain the land in widespread and decide to residing merely in recognition that the buildup of cash is tied to the abuse of Earth and the exploitation of human our bodies world wide.” Ekvn-Yefolecv continues to work to construct a linguistically, culturally, and ecologically resilient neighborhood for future generations to inherit. Kvlpv Jeter shared, “We’re honored to be a accomplice of Cultural Survival’s Keepers of the Earth Fund, particularly as a result of the very title of the fund encapsulates all that we stand for in our ecovillage, and it feels so good that they see us and help us in our efforts to be good stewards of our Indigenous Maskoke homelands!”
In 2020 and 2023, Ekvn-Yefolecv acquired a Keepers of the Earth Fund (KOEF) grant to help their work. KOEF is an Indigenous-led fund inside Cultural Survival designed to help the advocacy and neighborhood growth initiatives of Indigenous Peoples. Since 2017, KOEF has funded 310 initiatives in 41 nations by way of small grants totaling $1,603,307, in addition to offered technical help benefiting 328 Indigenous Peoples. KOEF offers grassroots Indigenous-led communities, organizations, and conventional governments to help their self-determined growth initiatives based mostly on their Indigenous values. Predicated on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Survival makes use of a rights-based method in our grantmaking methods to help Indigenous grassroots options by way of the equitable distribution of assets to Indigenous communities.
High picture: Maskoke residents of Ekvn-Yefolecv collect for ethnobotanical training in a language immersion context, on their conventional homelands they rematriated, 180 years after compelled elimination. Photographs courtesy of Ekvn-Yefolecv.
