They recently expanded the community’s aquaculture facility, creating space for other endangered species of sturgeon that are also native to the bioregion. The community built an aquaculture facility, then traveled to Anishinaabe homelands (Ontario, Canada) to spawn the fish, return embryos to Maskoke homelands, hatch them out, grow them out, and over time have reintroduced the sturgeon fingerlings back into the watershed. The lake sturgeon, sacred to the Maskoke People, was extirpated from Alabama’s streams in the 1950s by a combination of factors, including the construction of hydroelectric dams and the deliberate removal by settlers. With support from the Keepers of the Earth Fund, residents embarked on a project to reintroduce important elements of the traditional diet. Returning to a more traditional diet is crucial to securing better health conditions for the ecovillage. Their efforts have proven successful, as they are now home to the only fluent-speaking Maskoke children on the planet.įood sovereignty, including the decolonization and reIndigenization of their diets, is a major component of their daily lives Maskoke elders too often die prematurely of chronic illness, taking with them their language and ancestral knowledge. There are only a handful of remaining Maskoke persons who speak their language, so an important part of the community’s efforts are directed toward language revitalization through immersion wherein children are raised exclusively in the Maskoke language, with their curriculum centering on traditional agricultural and ecological knowledge. Ekvn-Yefolecv, (ee-gun yee-full-lee-juh), a term that embodies the meaning of “returning to Earth/returning to the homelands,” is an ecovillage community that lies on 2,657 acres and was created for the purpose of linguistic, cultural and ecological sustainability. Only in 2018, did a small community of Maskoke People finally rematriate some of these ancestral lands and return to live once again in what is today called Alabama. Forced out of their homelands by government-imposed removal policies, Maskoke People were displaced from their territories in 1836. The story of the Maskoke Peoples is, as that of all Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island, a story of dispossession, cultural assimilation, and treaty violations.
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