When I picked up this book, I thought that there would be the more foundational talk around the indigenous version of sustainable practices that makes the WEstern concept of conservation obsolete.

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i just felt like it was mostly stuff i already knew and was written more like an academic essay then the personal narrative i was looking for. She has a wealth of knowledge and a perspective I have not heard nearly enough from so I will look forward to what she does next.In Fresh Banana Leaves, Jessica Hernandez describes how Indigenous communities in Mexico care formilpas ,agricultural fields in which multiple types of plants are grown together because they can support one another. Some of the chapters felt very separate from each other (as though they were written as individual chapters out of context of the whole book and then stitched together in manuscript format), which could explain the repetitiveness of parts of it. Braiding Sweetgrass and Moss were lyrical in their interweaving of indigenous ways of thinking and doing along with Western Science. Melissa’s Banana Leaves range from six to eight feet in length and up to two feet in width and are carefully folded and rolled for shipment. Jessica Hernandez, an environmental scientist, draws parallels between her father’s story and that of the banana tree.

Fresh Banana Leaves — An Indigenous Approach To Science Fresh Banana Leaves — An Indigenous Approach To Science

And granted the root of the problem when talking about colonialism is usually the same, but it just was redundant to read the same paragraph of ideas a dozen times throughout a relatively short book.I’m giving this book 4 stars because even though I was let down by some elements, I do believe sharing indigenous narratives is crucial, and I appreciate what Dr. Yes, under the lens of Western environmentalism, banana trees are an invasive species to my ancestral native lands. After the half way mark, in my opinion, the author stopped focusing on conservation and started turning to blame. But this still doesn’t go far enough, Hernandez argues: In such studies, non-Indigenous people often end up speaking for Indigenous communities.

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some sections of the book were good, but others were extremely structurally disorganized, such as the chapter that, by the title, i expected to be about indigenous food, but instead took a sharp segue to talk about the geopolitical history of banana republics and why comparing the january 6th insurrections to them was offensive and incorrect, before veering back to talk about climate-change-intensified hurricanes' effects on indigenous crops and then over to a metaphor comparing tamale preparation to indigenous resilience. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous science has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as “soft”–the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization. Fresh Banana Leaves offers seeds—through the form of lived experiences and historic practices that come from the author’s own ancestors and relatives. Ultimately my biggest dislike was the blame game (and apparently everyone was to blame as well as everything) and at times this sounded like one of the politcal books I read from time to time where all the woes of the world came from the other guys.What I said is just how I felt about the book (I'm glad other people found it amazing and that we are all learning), and it saddens me that I gave it a bad rating. If humans as a population were more sustainable then conservation would not be that big of an issue. I've cut it down because A) no one needs to know that many of my thoughts and B) I don't mean to make this review a shortcut instead of reading the book in its entirety and learning from the author herself. It sounded more like she was preaching to the choir rather than raising awareness and throwing in some education. The author also urges readers to take a holistic view and consider how language and gender affect the multifaceted experiences of Indigenous peoples.