FoodLove 6: Dr. Darshan Elena Campos
Rest in peace Dr. Darshan Elena Campos, spirited away in Boricua waters, Mar. 11, 2024. May your work continue.
Episode 6: Dr. Darshan Elena Campos
Meet Dr. Darshan Elena Campos, a Fulbright specialist in education, former professor at Stanford and other higher education institutions, domestic violence survivor/thriver, healer, and remarkable decolonizing activist.
Of her lineage, Darshan says that “she was raised on welfare and flea market capitalism by her single Askenazi mother in a small coastal community on ancestral Awaswas territory in a town now named Santa Cruz, California. Her father, a Boricua born on ancestral Lenape territory, has been missing, homeless, or incarcerated for most of her life — and his own.”
Through indigenous and intuitive ways in Borikén, she continues to heal herself and marginalized communities through land, seeds, trees, and a new business model for this era.
Darshan lives the practice of her work. In her “medicine wheel” for a reimagined paradigm for business and decolonialized business education, she addresses “all dimensions of ecological resilience as central to actualizing an organization/product/brand.”
Listen to her as she describes testing the method for viability via several projects, including Somos Semillas Antillanas (a mobile seed library of indigenous plants and trees), Vivero Sin Nombre / No Name Nursery, a native tree nursery that gives Indigenous trees such as guamá, níspero, guayaba, and guanábana to people who love them.
Dr. Campos writes, “the name Vivero Sin Nombre talks to our grief as Boricua, as people of the Indigenous Black Caribbean who have never known freedom. It calls attention to the 4645 Boricuas we lost in 2017 and the millions and millions of murders of First Peoples/Pueblos Originarios and Stolen Africans on our shores and across Turtle Island and Abya Yala since 1492 . . .” Her mother vision is “a #MigratingUniversity that teaches geologic, Indigenous, and local living histories and a #DecolonialBusinessAcademy that emphasizes #rematriation and reparations as central to business leadership.”
Dr. Darshan Elena Campos and Zulma Oliveras-Vega are co-founders of Fundación Yamoca Opia (Two Spirit Foundation), which provides rapid housing for queer, nonbinary, and trans youth who have been forced to flee their families and communities on Borikén, the biggest island of the archipelago of Puerto Rico.
Here is her recipe for Tree Love, a recipe for healing with a photo from me of trees on the bank of the Elwha River, a sacred place for salmon and our indigenous peoples here in the Pacific Northwest.
Tree Love
Ingredients
Instructions
- Let's step into nature and fall in love with local tree!
- If one tree calls your attention, hear its call. If it isn't a tree but a small grove of trees or an entire forest, look at each tree as its own being and one among family. What about this tree, grove or forest is calling to you? Leaves, flowers, scents? The texture of the trunks? The seeds scattered across the sidewalk or bare dirt? The crunch of leaves or their sounds on the wind?
- If you have the physical ability for touch, place your hands on its trunk. Alternatively, imagine the feeling of its bark on your flesh. Connect!
- If you sense a warm, living connection, pursue it across the seasons! Nourish the tree and your closest neighbors by gathering tree knowledge. What is the tree called by your area's first people? If the tree isn't Indigenous, how did it come to grow in your local area? Does the tree have medicinal uses or provide edible fruit or roots? How can you make a living, loving connection to this tree across the seasons of your life and your local ecosystem?
- As you move about your life, listen to the trees and all the life they nourish. Now ask yourself, how can you promote community reforestation?
