An arts-based approach to community documentation and revitalization of nutritious and drought-tolerant indigenous crops for climate change adaptation

Indigenous knowledge and traditional practices around indigenous small grains are critical tools in the quest to improve community health and adapt to climate change. As a scholar and an artist, I work with Indigenous communities in Sikkim in the Indian Himalayas and in Mazvihwa, Zimbabwe, documenting nutritious and drought-tolerant indigenous small grains using arts-based methodologies, such as drawing. This course of study began with my 13 months of fieldwork (2011–12) in the Lepcha Indigenous community in Sikkim. I demonstrated how dependence on a monocultural cardamom agricultural system introduced in the 1950s had collapsed due to plant disease while local agricultural biodiversity was being lost. This research used both qualitative and quantitative methods, involving case studies at three scales on land use changes in the Lepcha territory following the expansion of cardamom. The first is a coarse-grained GIS study of land use change for the village from 1989 to 2012. The other two are fine-grained key-informant interview studies—one on land use change, and the second on the persistence of traditional food plants. I found a decline in crop diversity in the area devoted to the monocultural cardamom cash crop system. Thus I documented 36 neglected traditional food plants with my illustrations, including 16 indigenous small grains, and 20 gathered plants, representing 14 different plant families. Decreased cash crop production was also evident in Mazvihwa. During the preliminary field study in 2016, I found that indigenous small grains survived in the fields significantly more often than monocultural maize. There I conducted drawing workshops, created an opportunity for community members to reconnect to the neglected plants, and to revalue their Indigenous knowledge. My project builds a collective community resource as communities reflect on their traditional skills and knowledge around neglected small grains, contributing to maintaining agricultural biodiversity and ultimately contributes to planetary health. Funding Scott Travel Scholarship from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley, and the Public Scholar Initiative of The University of British Columbia. Declaration of interests I declare no competing interests.

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