Anjela Barnes is a Piscataway woman. Her heritage with the tribe is part of her everyday life. She is a steward of her ancestral homeland now known as Piscataway Park.
The people and the land
The Piscataway people are the first stewards of the land and waterways in the Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia area. When the European settlers arrived in 1608, the Piscataway had lived in villages and relied heavily on agriculture for generations. Their Tayac, or chief, ruled from where Piscataway Park currently stands in Southern Maryland.
The capital of the Piscataway was laid out like the town of Pomeiooc seen in the image on the left. The women bred and cultivated crops such as maize, pumpkins and tobacco. The men hunted, fished and gathered wild plants.
Land and water in the Potomac region allowed the Piscataway to build homes and grow food. They are significant as the central chiefdom of the Piscataway people.
(Photo courtesy of The British Museum/Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0)
But the once close-knit relationship between human and nature have grown apart.
How is industrial agriculture affecting the environment? According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, agriculture expansion accounts for almost 90% of global deforestation. Trees and forests, our existing natural carbon capture technology, are cleared and replaced with croplands. Soil, the planet’s carbon storehouse, is plowed, tilled, or disked many times a year with added chemicals and synthetic fertilizers.
The current food system produces about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the largest contributions come from agriculture, land use and related activities, reported by Nature Food. The abundance of food is overflowing, but nature pays a heavy price, and so does the climate.
Transitioning to more sustainable global food systems could contribute about 20% of the global mitigation by 2050. The Indigenous people’s belief system and knowledge of agricultural practices are central to making that transition.
The Accokeek Foundation has managed 200 acres of Piscataway Park since 1957. The centerpiece of its work has been the National Colonial Farm.
National Colonial Farm is a demonstration of community-based agriculture.
“It’s more of a return and a reciprocal relationship. Not just with the people in the community, but also with the land."
In Indigenous culture, extra food is shared within the community as a sign of wealth, giving thanks to the abundance and wealth the harvest provides, instead of making a profit out of it.
The farm adopts “both traditional and contemporary agricultural practice”, or regenerative agriculture, a conservation and rehabilitation approach to the food and farming system. “Our goal is to regenerate healthy soil through all of our growing and pasture management of the animals,” Barnes said.
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Indigenous lands make up around 20% of the Earth's territory yet containing 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity. Although it's a clear sign that Indigenous People are more effective stewards of our environment, researchers found that Indigenous people across the contiguous United States have lost 98.9% of their historical lands, reported in Science. The consequences of land dispossession and forced migration continue to affect tribes today.
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Barnes and the Accokeek Foundation are dedicated to preserving the biodiversity of plants and animals.
In the National Colonial Farm, a variety of field crops are grown and cultivated for heirloom seeds to pass down through generations, including Indigenous, European and African seeds brought by the settlers and the enslaved in that time period. The livestock seen grazing in the fields at Piscataway Park are also rare, endangered breeds of domesticated livestock.
Barnes's work with the foundation embodies the Piscataway values of careful stewardship of the natural environment and reciprocity in all relationships. These values emerged out of the experience of living for so long in this place, and they all point toward the importance of paving the way for future generations.
This belief system is key to re-establish a close relationship between people and nature, which leads to a more sustainable lifestyle. A study from Journal of Environmental Psychology found that nature connectedness is linked to an increase in mental well-being and pro-environmental behaviors.
As factory farms continue to take over the agricultural landscape of the United States, challenges to incorporate stewardship and reciprocity in our current food system include limited land access and high operating costs for smallholders and family farms. More consumers need to actively support local or regional farmers and take responsibility to hold farmland available and affordable over a long term.
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