Jacque Salomon

Addressing Climate Change through Cultural Protection

“My grandmother always told me, ‘We could not live our spiritual practices or traditions, or speak our language because it was life or death. We had to do that to survive. But that is no more. We needed to go back. But we never went back.’

ASSIMILATION SUCCESSFUL.” –Running Deer, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian

Community

“Funding goes to hospitals and treatment centers. Nothing preventative. Nothing culturally healing. Nothing addressing the TRAUMA of colonization on a population. This is the greatest wound.” –Running Deer, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community

“A friend of mine once suggested that one of the things that Indian People have never really had is a kind of way to overcome the sorrow of conquest…the sorrow of being conquered.” –Jack Forbes, PhD

“I think a lot of the alcoholism has to do with looking around in a world in which your people are still oppressed.” –Jack Forbes, PhD

Forty percent of the American Indian population is obese, and 18% have diabetes. Among American Indian tribe s, Pima Indians have the highest incidence rates of diabetes in the world.

We owe it to our progeny to rise above the pervasive fog of societal and cultural malaise that pervades our conscious awareness. A genocide that was set ablaze on Turtle Island over 500 years ago is finally reaching its completion.

Some of my ancestors inhabited the island of Boriken, which you refer to as Puerto Rico.

Bartolomé De Las Casas writes graphically about the Taino massacres in

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. And some of my ancestors were kidnapped from the west coast of Africa, imprisoned, and enslaved on slave labor camps in the Caribbean. We are their descendants embodying the consequences and aftermath of the invasion, destruction, and savagery of colonization.

How many of us are behaving, thinking, or eating as we would have had imperialism and colonialism not set its voracious appetite on our land and bodies?

The capitalist system that exalted and rewarded such atrocities is the same system that governs us today. The quality of the food and medical treatment we receive today is reflective of a mutation and adaptation of the system that established itself in someone else’s stolen home over five centuries ago.

Is this not the same system deciding what is considered food? When, where, and how much of it we get?

Is this not the same system deciding what health looks like and who is worthy to access healthcare?

Is this not the same system deciding who is worthy and why?

So, what does this mean? Are we lost? How can we be lost when we have holders of wisdom and guardians of

Earth living among us?

I have the honor of supporting my sister-friend and colleague Running Deer. She is Akimel O’odham born and raised on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. She is a chef, activist, speaker, founder of the Let Our Ancestors Rest Campaign (LOAR), but first and most importantly she is a mom; a mother fighting for the right for her children to live in a world with clean air and water. Where food is growing abundantly. A world of reverence for Life and our place in it. Observing her and growing to love her has shown me the depth of suffering our indigenous brothers and sisters carry as they bear witness to a continual and continuous assault on our mother Earth. They feel the violations and violence on her; to have to watch other humans who have had their connection to Spirit…to Divinity… severed...so lost they have become self-destructive; destroying and consuming with no regard for consequences; leaving a path of desolation and death. What can we do when there are specific factors including our environments that influence how we live? This is where a courageous and profound shift is being made by so many amazing people. We are being called to alchemize our experiences and knowledge into healing energy of which the overflow showers healing on our loved ones and communities. Cultural education leads to cultural healing. Cultural healing leads to Cultural Protection. Cultural Protection gets to the core of the climate crisis.

It’s Quantum Mechanics.

It’s Ancient Wisdom.

It’s Indigenous Consciousness.

•Form networks of social entrepreneurs and healers, assets within our communities. •Somatic Healing aims to help release how a physical body holds on to stress, tension, and trauma, rather than only resolving problems verbally. •Cultural Immersion Schools for our youth •Create adult-facilitated, potential-driven, culturally relevant, autonomous learning environments for our children.

•Cultural Education for Adults

•Community Kitchens •Organize and grow our own food. CSAs, farmers markets, community gardens. •Minimizing time spent in artificial and fabricated environments •Creative and Artistic Expression •Create co-ops. •Devise meal trains.

•Heal our own trauma so we can hold space for one another. •Organize and change policy and legislation.

What sets us apart?

During many of my speaking engagements I am asked, “Well, what do you say to Native Americans and their traditional hunting practices?” I usually do not participate in What Aboutisms but I feel it is important to address this particular deflection, as it is central to our path, as an organization. Our organization juxtaposed and examined our activism and advocacy with the glaring challenges to health and wellness festering in our indigenous communities. Colonization is our common enemy. Food has been weaponized as a means to control colonized and enslaved people. Animal agriculture is the most abhorrent manifestation of our common enemy as it destroys the planet, destabilizes the climate, is incredibly cruel and foundational to systemic and environmental racism, dietary racism, and health disparity. To compare indigenous traditional hunting practices to animal agriculture, as if apples-to-apples, is further evidence of the consciousness with which we are engaging. We must educate ourselves in order to represent the Truth of what we are doing honestly, respectfully, and humbly. Decolonizing the diets of our indigenous brothers and sisters is paramount. Challenging the traditions of colonized populations whose entire culture has been nearly decimated by the system creating the disease and lack in their community is deflection, projection, and more evidence of supremacy. We must make space for our indigenous brothers and sisters to heal from the imposed diets of assimilation and together we will marry current science with indigenous wisdom to respond to climate destabilization. Our message is one absent of judgment or criticism but rather steeped in love, protection, healing, truth, learning, unlearning, humility, reverence and service. This is why we support and promote the Let Our Ancestors Rest Campaign. In honor of our mission and commitment to LOAR we have partnered with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) with a program called Native Food For Life to help combat the Diabetes epidemic plaguing the reservations. Currently we are facilitating this program with a small group of individuals representing 5 tribes healing from substance abuse disorder. With your support we are creating a whole plant foods, culinary medicine, trauma-informed, culturally healing support group for the families of these individuals in recovery to create a more healthful and grounded home environment to return to. We are working on plans to incorporate education and somatic healing in the next few months. There is no more time to waste. That time has come and gone dear friends. It is time we remember what it really means to be a human being and take our place as Divine Guardians of Life on this planet of abundance and beauty. It is our birthright. The babies need us to do this. Ashe.

Jacque Salomon is a mother of three sons. Her eldest got his angel wings when he was 11 years old, and her twin sons are her greatest motivation. Her life as a mom is channeled into the social justice education non-profit she co-founded, Seeds to Inspire Foundation. She also serves the community as an ACLM HEAL Initiative Committee Member, a Collaborator Member to JIVINITI Coalition, Supporter of Project Gaia, Collaborator/Supporter to Let Our Ancestors Rest Campaign, Founding Board Member of SimpleVeg 501 (c)(3), Board Member of Eat for the Earth 501(c)(3), Former Pod Advisory Committee Member for PlantPure Communities and Community Liaison to StandUp ASU student club. She received her Certificate in Plant Based Nutrition from eCornell, certified Conscious Parenting Coach, certified HNLP Level 1 Coach, certified World Peace Diet Facilitator and studied in collective and racialized trauma and resilience.

By adopting the 6 Pillars of Lifestyle Medicine, which includes Whole Plant Foods Nutrition, and incorporating Trauma Healing into her life she arrested and reversed chronic diseases such as Type 2 Diabetes, Hypertension, Gastric Reflux, Restless Leg Syndrome, Insomnia, Anxiety, Depression, as well as losing 164 lbs. Realizing the profound power we have over our own health, body and wellbeing, Jacque brings her story to distressed communities challenged with health inequity and disparity; at-risk for future pandemics and climate destabilization.