Plant Communities and the Defense of the Territory

Valiana Aguilar and Ángel Kú from Colectivo Suumil Móokt'aan, a partner organization of Spore in Yucatán, are visiting Berlin. The collective consists of a group of young people who live in Sinanché, a Mayan community in Yucatán, and are building a collective learning space for the local community here in the form of a Solar Maya. In the workshop, together with them, we will take a practical approach to the planting of mixed crops. These include, for example, the "three sisters" cultivated together for over 3 millennia in Mesoamerican milpa agriculture: maize, beans and squash.   

Building on the idea of symbiosis between different plant species, Valiana Aguilar and Ángel Kú will present their project, which works to preserve and transmit traditional Mayan knowledge and applied ecological technologies. Maya communities, whose food systems and cultures are closely linked to the milpa and maíz, have protected the diversity of their surrounding ecosystems for centuries as guardians of forests, water, and seeds. According to Suumil Mookt'aan, maintaining community relationships with nature, including through forms of collective learning, is part and expression of what is also called defensa del territorio in the Latin American context. This involves caring for the coexistence of indigenous communities with the diverse web of life that has evolved over thousands of years. This form of symbiosis includes the diversity of animals and plants  as well as  indigenous forms of agriculture and forestry, traditional knowledge, cosmologies, cultures and languages. Defending this type of territory is of far-reaching importance because, despite land grabbing and colonization, indigenous groups continue to protect much of the biodiversity still preserved in the world. Moreover, in the face of global crises such as global warming and the loss of fertile soils, indigenous food systems can provide pathways for regenerative stewardship of the natural world.