Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute (FTPI) is a Native-American women-run organization dedicated to teaching sustainable indigenous ways of living in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. The Institute provides resources that support the Pueblo people through knowledge preservation and education.
Roxanne Swentzell created FTPI in 1987. Swentzell tells Food Tank that before creating FTPI, she learned about permaculture and built her own sustainable homestead. By doing this, she discovered what farming techniques worked in her area and then began sharing this knowledge.
“The name, Flowering Tree, came from the novel “Black Elk Speaks,” in which there is a prayer to make the tree of life bloom again,” Swentzell explains. “We felt that this was what we were trying to do also. Flowering Tree would be our living prayer.”
Today, FTPI offers workshops and resources to promote healthy and sustainable lifestyles and to pass on traditional knowledge. While the programs are designed for the Santa Clara Pueblo Tribe, the Institute also opens them up to other members of the community. The Institute has three seed banks, a greenhouse, ceremonial women’s house, restored adobe, and more. It offers classes on how to lead healthy and sustainable lifestyles and facilitates seed saving and other cultural practices. These include farming and gardening, composting, animal husbandry and processing, adobe construction, mud plastering, pottery, and weaving.
“As a native-, woman-run organization that focuses on the health of the local communities, Flowering Tree has been impactful around areas of home, food security, teaching youth, and empowering women of color,” Swentzell tells Food Tank. She explains that there is a limited understanding of the sustainable life-ways of Native American knowledge but that there is also a growing interest in the subject.
“Indigenous knowledge is needed more than ever to find balance and meaning in these challenging times,” Swentzell says.
One important indigenous practice is seed saving which, according to the First Nations Development Institute (FNDI), has been historically necessary to preserve seeds critical to indigenous culture and food systems. According to the FNDI, many indigenous communities have developed ways to save seeds for hundreds of years.
At FTPI, Swentzell says the seed banks are an important resource for the health of the planet. The Institute has facilitated seed saving and sharing for decades. By saving seeds, she tells Food Tank people can ensure that these seeds continue to exist and increase biodiversity.
“Industrial farming has shrunk and depleted so much of the food diversity and stability of ecosystems that we are in grave danger of having it all collapse,” Swentzell says. “Instead of our food systems being in millions of hands caring for crops they love, it’s in a few mega corporations that don’t care about individuals but only about making money.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, four companies control the majority of crop seed sales in the U.S. Two of these companies provided more than half of the United States retail sales of corn, soybean, and cotton seeds from 2018-2020.
Swentzell believes heirloom seeds can serve as “helpers” for a biodiverse healthy future and saving them does not necessarily take a lot of effort. By saving and sharing seeds, she believes, people also develop community and a shared appreciation for the planet.
“If we all saved seeds of one variety of plant we loved, there would be so many cool diverse plants being nurtured because of all our unique tastes,” Swentzell tells Food Tank.
For the Pueblo people, Swentzell says their tribes have survived because the community continued passing on of knowledge. She tells Food Tank that FTPI is working to preserve this knowledge and that doing so could provide an alternative and more sustainable way of life.
“It is so important for us to understand our traditional tribal ways in order to continue as Pueblo people,” Swentzell tells Food Tank. “It’s something we love and as a diverse culture within the USA, it seems vital that there be different views on how to live that might be better than the mainstream cultures that are proving to be self-destructive.”
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Photo courtesy of Shelley Pauls, Unsplash
