Seeds of Our Ancestors: stories of millet from Japan, Himalaya, and Zimbabwe
DATE : March 1 – April 22
LOCATION : Lobby Gallery, Liu Institute for Global Issues,The University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada)

Artist statement

Around the world, people have passed down ancestral seeds and farming practices from generation to generation.
Farming of millet is one such ancestral knowledge, passed through generations. Millet has been an important staple food for many communities especially in Asia and Africa, cultivated for thousands of years and deeply embedded into culture and place. Millet consists of several small-grained cereal species, such as foxtail millet or finger millet. Millet is known for its high nutritional value, and they have a high degree of tolerance to difficult environmental conditions, such as drought, cold, salinity, and low-fertility soils, as well as having the ability to be stored for decades. However, millet cultivation is declining globally, and there is an urgent need to revitalize it and preserve ancient seeds.

2023 is the UN Year of Millets, highlighting the important role of millet as a food crop for climate-resilient farming and its high nutritional value to communities around the world. Using an arts-based and community-engaged approach, Saori’s doctoral research explores the meaning of millet cultivation for cultivators and community members in Japan. During the pandemic, Saori initiated a collaborative research project, bringing together her Indigenous community
partners in Zimbabwe and Himalaya, using social networking applications. As a result, the project turned into a collective analysis of the shared meaning of ancient millet cultivation across borders, which will be published as a chapter in a forthcoming book.

Millet cultivation forms a way of life–through this laborious process, people find the joy of cultivating grains, and
strengthening community ties by collaborating for planting, harvesting, and threshing together. Millet therefore has high potential to contribute to wellbeing, as well as respond to the climate emergency.

Artist Profile

Saori Ogura is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of
Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at The
University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Collaborating with Indigenous and local communities in the Eastern Himalaya, Zimbabwe, and Japan, her passion is to revitalize nutritious and climate-resilient small grains, which contributes to the wellbeing of the people and the land, food security and
improving community resilience. As an artist, she uses
different mediums such as photography, drawing, and
documentary film for her research. She is a Public Scholar and a Student Fellow for Climate & Nature Emergency. She was the recipient of the 2017 Nikon Salon Miki Jun Inspiration Award for her photojournalism project documenting her time living in Sikkim and Darjeeling in India’s Eastern Himalaya.

The post Seeds of Our Ancestors: stories of millet from Japan, Himalaya, and Zimbabwe first appeared on SAORI OGURA.

Life with the Forest : Inspiration from the Sikkim and Darjeeling Himalaya

DATE : 22 September – 5 October
LOCATION : UBC Forest Science Centre, Atrium

Photo Exhibit Information

The forest is life for people in the Eastern Himalayas. Scholar and artist Saori Ogura lived in the region for one year, from 2011 to 2012, to better understand the indigenous Lepcha, or Rongkup, people’s ways of life and wisdom borne of living with the forest. During her stay and many subsequent visits, Saori captured portraits of the villagers’ warmth and strengths, as well as their livelihoods – especially the great diversity of traditional crops, which are on the cusp of disappearing. Despite rapid lifestyle changes wrought by external forces, the village life still gives us insights into the intricate relationships people have developed over many generations, enabling them to live in harmony with the forest.

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND FOOD SECURITY

How can we become beings who can continue living on this earth? My research aims to create processes for communities to become independent and survibable in the face of existential challenges. My past ten years of experiences living with Indigenous communities in the Himalaya, Africa, Asia, and North America inspired me that their Indigenous knowledges, currently under threat of obliteration, and their adaptive strategies can teach us how to solve critical global issues in our rapidly changing physical environment. Relying only on modern science limits our ability to discover ways to continue our survival. In order to solve this problem, it is crucial to also examine the cumulative Indigenous knowledge we have stored by having survived on Earth for the past thousands of years. As a scholar and an artist, I seek to inspire the ways humanity can cultivate sustainable relationships with the natural world and become stable in the coming era of change.

a local boy pointing out an Indigenous crop (Kutnyemin Lepcha language) in a shifting agricultural field

In order to see the world through different lenses and to experience lives in Indigenous villages, I stayed with the Lepcha Indigenous people in the Indian Sikkim Himalaya for a year, at the foot of the 8500m Mt. Kanchenjunga (2011-2012). There I found Indigenous knowledge was rapidly disappearing and the local economy was devastated by a plant disease that slashed cash crop cardamom production in the early 2000s.

I conducted interviews in local Nepali and Lepcha languages to study land use change in the villages over the past 100 years, which later became part of my Master’s thesis. Using GIS, I mapped and quantified land use change, and using ethnography, I analyzed the process of cash crop agricultural fields replacing the agricultural biodiversity, and using ethnobotany, I documented thirty-six threatened Indigenous food plants that are only persistent in most remote villages with hand-drawn illustrations.

I named this method Historical Ethno-ecology Approach. I became convinced that maintaining crop diversity is one of the key ways to mitigate both the risks of losses to plant disease and the fluctuations of global economic systems. Maintaining diversity became my life task.

Cultivating Solutions through Deeply Engaged Community Work

My work involves developing a pedagogical and community science method utilizing art to enhance the process of revitalizing Indigenous crops that are disaster-tolerant and can help adapt to changing climate. Rapid loss of Indigenous crops and dependence on monocultural agricultural systems have been increasing the vulnerability of local communities in different parts of the world. In order to revitalize diversity of indigenous crops, I use arts-based approach to understand Indigenous People’s worldviews that is critical for revitalization. Through my field research in Zimbabwe in 2016, I found that drawing enables us to better observe and capture the knowledge and wisdom of local people.

I spent much of my time in the villages of Mazvihwa drawing illustrations of the Indigenous crops and asking the villagers about the plants – how they plant, when they harvest, and how they book them.

Drawing the plants helped me to discern the non-linear, non-positivist relationships between the people and the plants by not observing them as objects, but seeing the life of plants as part of their dynamic human-environmental relationships.

My study uses a community engagement process that uniquely combines on-the-ground ethno-botanical fieldwork with art to develop strategies for climate change adaptation. My field sites are in the Sikkim Himalaya and Zimbabwe. My PhD research is focused on Mazvihwa, Zimbabwe, where Indigenous crops are seen by villagers as helping them to adapt to climate change and advance food sovereignty.

My vision has developed through travelling to remote places and seeking to understand the world through local people’s perspectives, therefore my work became solution-oriented and interdisciplinary in nature.

For more information about my research, visit
https://www.grad.ubc.ca/campus-community/meet-our-students/ogura-saori

Please also see my article published in the Branchlines.

Saori Ogura. 2017. “Indigenous Agrobiodiversity and Climate Change.” Branchlines : Vol. 28: Nov. 1.

https://issuu.com/ubcforestry/docs/bl_28.1

The post Life with the Forest : Inspiration from the Sikkim and Darjeeling Himalaya first appeared on SAORI OGURA.

“Learning from Rong” ロンに学ぶ

~The way of life outside of modern industrialized societies~

The Indigenous Lepcha People call themselves Rong. They have been living in the Sikkim Himalaya for hundreds of years, interacting with the biodiverse forest. A hundred years ago, the Rong were cultivating a variety of traditional crops, including rice, buckwheat and millet, in shifting agricultural fields. With the expansion of monocultural cash crops, like cardamom, many of these traditional crops have been replaced. However, diversity of traditional crops—which have high nutritional value and are often resistant to drought—is key in creating resilient communities that can adapt to climate change.

I lived in Lepcha villages, learning from the forest the way the Rong do in the hopes to see the world through their eyes. Through these experiences and interactions with these communities, I became more conscious of what it means to be human and exist on Earth.

I believe combining Indigenous and scientific perspectives on traditional plants will foster our understanding of human–nature relationships. I also believe that collaborative community art projects enable us to better observe and capture the knowledge and wisdom of local people, the life of plants, and interrelations between people and plants.

My photographs were selected by the Nikon competition, Juna21. I exhibited my photographs and illustrations from Sikkim and Darjeeling in the Nikon Salons in Tokyo and Osaka for two weeks. I was awarded the Miki Jun Inspiration Award from Nikon for this exhibition, and gained an opportunity to have another exhibitions in Japan in December 2017 to January 2018.

https://ced.berkeley.edu/events-media/news/ced-alumna-saori-ogura-receives-prestigious-nikon-salon-photography-award

Presenting my research in the Himalayas with photography and illustrations at the Nikon salons was my experimental method for combining science and art to reach out to general public, raising awareness on the value of traditional livelihood strategies for climate change adaptation. To this end, this solo exhibition entitled “Learning from Rong: Exploring the diversity of lives outside of industrialized society” posed a question about what it means to live as a human on the earth, and gave insights on lifestyles that are in harmony with local ecosystems. This is a foundation for a new methodology I am developing, combining photography and illustrations to improve food security and climate change adaptation.

Historical Ethno-Ecology Approach in Sikkim Himalaya
Master’s thesis submitted to UC Berkeley, 2015

The indigenous Lepcha people have lived in Sikkim, a world biodiversity-hotspot, for more than eight centuries. Their traditional agricultural practices, hunting and gathering, enabled them to be self-sustaining in the biodiverse forest. Cultivated agriculture began around 1900 with the introduction of wet rice and cardamom. In the 1970s, commercial cardamom got expanded. In 2000, cardamom production collapsed due to disease. My research involves 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 2102. The other two are fine-grained key informant interview studies—one on land use change, and the second on the persistence of traditional food crops. I found decline in crop diversity in the area devoted to the monocultural cardamom cash crop system, which regionally resulted in a forest cover increase after the crash of the cardamom, and the persistence of traditional food crops only in the most remote villages.

I’m grateful for Dr. Kamal Bawa and the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (http://www.atree.org) for letting me gain these experiences in Sikkim.

The post Learning from Rong – Award-winning exhibition at Nikon Salon, Tokyo & Osaka first appeared on SAORI OGURA.

The post People and Plants: Sustaining Agrobiodiversity through Art and Science in Zimbabwe first appeared on SAORI OGURA.

“inspiration from the Himalayas”

The post “inspiration from the Himalayas” first appeared on SAORI OGURA.