Two gatherings held within days of each other, one in Chümoukedima and another in Kezoma village, have pointed to the same testimonial, Nagaland’s food future is being decided in its past. At the “Ecologies of Care” workshop, scholars and farmers spoke of seed libraries and vanishing grains. At the Millet Festival, officials spoke of drought-hit villages doubling their income through a crop their grandparents once grew. Different settings, same caution - indigenous knowledge is being lost faster than it is being recorded, even as it is proving to be the most reliable answer to today's climate crisis.
It is worth pausing on the phrase used by indigenous food sovereignty activist, Seno Tsuhah that there is no food system without a seed system. This is not over-romanticizing. A seed carries within it generations of adaptation to a particular soil, a particular slope, a particular rainfall pattern. When a hybrid or market-bought seed replaces it, more than a plant variety is lost. Farming decisions shift from household hands to corporate supply chains, and communities lose a measure of control over what they eat and how they live. The concern raised at the workshop, that food production may be driven more by profit than by well-being, deserves serious attention in a state where market dependence is rising even as traditional granaries empty.
The examples from Kezoma village make the case in practical terms rather than abstract ones. Millet, once pushed to the margins and in places reduced to a decorative crop, is being credited with helping farmers survive recurring drought and, in some cases, double their earnings. This is indigenous knowledge validated by measurable outcomes, not nostalgia. The lesson is straightforward, crops that were dismissed as old-fashioned were often simply well-suited to terrain that newer crops cannot handle.
Yet gratitude for tradition should not be mistaken for a plan. Oral transmission, as noted by researchers at the workshop, is fragile. Knowledge held only in memory and practice can disappear within a single generation if it is not documented, taught and actively used. The four-step approach proposed at the workshop, ‘remember, document, research, revive,’ offers a workable framework, but frameworks succeed only when institutions commit resources and time to them, not just declarations.
Here, the signing of the ‘Naga Well-being Pedagogy Vision’ by four institutions is a meaningful step, provided it does not remain a ceremonial document. Bringing indigenous farming knowledge into formal curricula, building seed libraries beyond a symbolic collection, and pairing students directly with village farmers are ambitious commitments. Their success will depend on sustained funding, consistent follow-through, and genuine partnership with the farmers who are the actual custodians of this knowledge, rather than treating them as subjects of study.
Government support, as promised at Kezoma village, must go beyond machinery and festivals. Irrigation, seed banks, soil conservation and market access for indigenous crops need coordinated, long-term investment, not seasonal enthusiasm tied to a single event.
What emerges from both gatherings is a shared recognition that resilience already exists in Naga villages, encoded in seeds, oral histories and farming techniques passed down over centuries. The task now is not invention but preservation, and the will to treat that inheritance as infrastructure for the future rather than a relic of the past.
