Fresh Banana Leaves

I didn't think I would come out of this never wanting to hear someone talk about banana leaves again

This book introduced itself as a taking a scientific look into caring for our places through an indigenous scope but ultimately fell short of that. While this book illicits some wonderful emotions of optimism and turned the wheels in my head, giving me ideas of what more I could be doing, it read more like a memoir of sorts. It fell flat as the book progressed and I began to get tired of listening to the same story be used to teach the same lesson over and over again, at times questioning if i had put my book dart in the right place. I do recommend this book as it does a great job of triggering an emotional response but if you are already feeling that and have already broken past the narrow scope of western science, then this book would have little to contribute to you.

I didn't think I would come out of this never wanting to hear someone talk about banana leaves again

This book introduced itself as a taking a scientific look into caring for our places through an indigenous scope but ultimately fell short of that. While this book illicits some wonderful emotions of optimism and turned the wheels in my head, giving me ideas of what more I could be doing, it read more like a memoir of sorts. It fell flat as the book progressed and I began to get tired of listening to the same story be used to teach the same lesson over and over again, at times questioning if i had put my book dart in the right place. I do recommend this book as it does a great job of triggering an emotional response but if you are already feeling that and have already broken past the narrow scope of western science, then this book would have little to contribute to you.

I’ve had a stretch of nonfiction books that sound like they are one thing and then present me with something very different, so add this to the list. I thought I would be reading about Indigenous science, Indigenous ways of sustainably supporting humans. What I got was a LOT about the problems for Indigenous people with the legacy of what Hernandez labels settler colonialism.

The perspective was good, and I learned some important things. For example, the creation of our national parks has often meant the displacement of Indigenous people. I was both shocked and not shocked to read that.

One chapter that is a good example of the mismatch of expectations to what I got from the book is Tierra Madre. This chapter is about collectives of Indigenous women who create traditional clothing. There was some information about how the details of clothing show the significance of nature and certain plants to Indigenous culture and spirituality. That was interesting, but I had been hoping to hear something about what these garments are made of and how those natural resources are managed differently from the West.

Unfortunately there’s also a lot of repetition, almost word for word, of specific information. I also found the language often more simplistic than I would like, but Hernandez does say late in the book she’s trying to write an accessible work on the topic.

I still learned some things and gained the Indigenous perspective of Central America, which I didn’t realize I was getting.