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Book

Eating the Landscape

Also known as: Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience

Enrique Salmón's 2012 book of Indigenous food-sovereignty essays — the most accessible book-length synthesis of *kincentric ecology* in print and the scholarly bridge between Indigenous foodway practice and the Western academic vocabulary of ecology and food systems. Across nine essayistic chapters Salmón travels through the food landscapes of the American Southwest and northern Mexico — Rarámuri canyons, Tohono O'odham desert fields, Diné cornfields, Pueblo terraces — and tells the same story from many angles: Indigenous food systems are not heritage curiosities; they are functioning, climate-adapted, soil-building agricultures that have outperformed industrial alternatives on the same land, in many cases for thousands of years, and they encode a relationship to non-human nature that the Western category 'environment' cannot describe. Published in the University of Arizona Press's *First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies* series. 184 pages. In copyright; purchase through the publisher or through Indigenous bookseller Birchbark Books.

Cultural

Eating the Landscape is one of the two foundational Indigenous-scholar entry points to the wiki (the other is [[robin-wall-kimmerer|Robin Wall Kimmerer]]‘s [[braiding-sweetgrass|Braiding Sweetgrass]]). Where Kimmerer writes from a Potawatomi perspective rooted in the Eastern Woodlands, Salmón writes from a Rarámuri perspective rooted in the Sierra Tarahumara and the broader Southwest and northern Mexico. The two books complement each other: between them they sketch the Indigenous food-and-land orientation across most of the North American continent.

The book’s central argument:

  1. [[indigenous-foodways|Indigenous food systems]] are working agricultures, not heritage curiosities. Rarámuri intercropping, Tohono O’odham desert-flood farming, Diné dryland corn — these are agricultural sciences with measurable yields, demonstrable climate-resilience, and millennia of empirical refinement.
  2. They encode a kincentric relationship to non-human nature — plants, animals, soils, waters, and weather as relatives rather than resources. This is the orientation Salmón and Dennis Martinez named [[kincentric-ecology|kincentric ecology]] in 1998–2000.
  3. The Rarámuri concept of iwígara — “shared breath” — grounds the orientation. Everything around is alive and shares the same breath; this shared breath is what makes everything related.
  4. Food is the most direct expression of land relationship. What a people eats encodes what they know about the place they live in.
  5. Climate resilience already exists, in Indigenous fields. The drought-tolerant, heat-tolerant, low-water crop varieties that climate-adapted agriculture is now trying to engineer from scratch are mostly already in Indigenous communities, field-tested across centuries.
  6. The knowledge transmission risk is acute. The elders carrying these systems are dying faster than the knowledge is being documented and transmitted. Each death is a library burning.

Practical

The book is short (184 pp.), accessible to non-specialist readers, and useful as a single-volume orientation to Indigenous foodway practice. It pairs well with academic ethnobotany on one side and with poetic Indigenous nature writing ([[robin-wall-kimmerer|Kimmerer]], [[linda-hogan|Linda Hogan]], Joy Harjo) on the other. For 0mn1.one purposes, it is the canonical citation for any wiki claim about kincentric relationships to land or about Indigenous food sovereignty as a model agriculture.

Where to read it

The book is in copyright. Purchase through:

Salmón’s foundational kincentric-ecology paper is available open-access through Ecological Applications (2000) — see [[enrique-salmon|Salmón’s author page]] for the citation.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Shares approach with: [[braiding-sweetgrass]]
  • Contains: [[kincentric-ecology]]
  • Member of: [[book]]
  • Voiced by: [[enrique-salmon]]
  • Kin of: [[indigenous-foodways]] · [[food-sovereignty]]

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Cultural

voiced by

  • Enrique Salmón Salmón's 2012 book of Indigenous food-sovereignty essays

shares approach with

  • Sand Talk Indigenous-scholar tier peer text: Salmón (Rarámuri/Mexico) and Yunkaporta (Apalech/Australia)

2 inbound links · 6 outbound