Agricultural Hemp Production within Indigenous Communities

"An Indigenous Community Cannabis Initiative." "Hemp For Hopi."

Tribal economic sovereignty is an important and crucial step in helping resolve many issues that indigenous communities face, from food deserts and improper nutrition affecting community health to lack of education and employment opportunities. This project seeks to integrate scale-able agricultural hemp production into these communities to initially provide employment opportunities at varying levels of skill. With the goal ultimately to promote indigenous self-sufficiency this project seeks to establish indigenous communities as providers of raw hemp materials for use in innovative industries such as carbon-negative materials, petrochemicals replacements, and health/pharmaceutical products. One large barrier for healthy agriculture within Northeastern Arizona is water infrastructure for scaling agricultural production beyond cultural farming for subsistence.

By blending traditional Hopi farming techniques adapted for the area with modern agriculture, this project seeks to use sustainable hemp production within indigenous communities to reinvigorate the culture of dry-land farming and self-sustainability. The goal is to create regenerative systems coupled with indigenous practices within the local environment that sustain economic output. With a rapidly changing climate utilizing drought resistant crops supported by innovative irrigation systems that will offset the negative impacts of our carbon footprint and provide resiliency for underrepresented communities that are impacted most by desertification will be paramount to their future growth.

By re-establishing hemp as a cash crop, we want to reshape how individuals and communities envision cannabis in their lives; using hemp as a catalyst as well as a medium to generate conversations we hope to bring awareness to the multitude of applications of the cannabis plant. By placing unrepresented Native peoples as curators of a new materials revolution this project seeks to parallel the green movement combating climate change with traditional indigenous ideology surrounding naturalism and place these communities at the forefront.

A majority of Hopi tribal members possess the knowledge of dry-land farming corn, this indigenous technical knowledge can directly translate to the cultivation of hemp. There is also basic requirements for entry into the labor workforce making this more accessible to a younger workforce.

This solution looks to impact 18,327 Hopi tribal members. We would like to provide employment and skill development opportunities to any tribal members interested in agriculture or industrial manufacturing.

This solution has the goal to establish an economic industry within indigenous communities to provide for the future growth of the communities it supports though employment opportunities and skills development.

Conversation with community leaders on interest and potential industry.

Solve at MIT offers a unique opportunity for a project to get the feedback and connections needed to get it past being an idea and towards being a solution to issues being faced by communities today. The hope is that by connecting with this network it will help catalyze the conversations and actions needed to get this project off the starting blocks and moving towards benefiting communities at large in meaningful ways. This project also presents the opportunity for a misrepresented people to re-appropriate their lifestyles by capitalizing on the economic opportunity of a historically misrepresented plant.

There are no current organizations backing this project.

This project would benefit most from working with a network of tribal entities, non-profit indigenous organizations, educational institutes, and industry or regulatory leaders. Considering the industrial hemp agricultural pilot program being instituted in the state of Arizona is still in a fledgling state connecting with an educational institute and industry leaders to provide valuable scientific insights to support the implementation of this project would be invaluable.