Coming up through the Painted Desert from Flagstaff, we pull into the Kykotsmovi Village convenience store, where Michael Kotutwa Johnson greets us. He’s a faculty member at the University of Arizona’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment and a core faculty member of the UA’s Indigenous Resilience Center. Today, he wears a shirt with broad, faded stripes and a pair of loose-fitting pants. He’s dressed for a day of farming.
Johnson climbs into his copper-colored 1974 Ford F-250, dinged in a few spots and spattered with dried sandstone mud, and leads us up a dusty road to the farm. He pulls over at a Hopi-style dwelling with irregular stonework and a ladder jutting above the roofline.
While many academics spend their careers cloistered in the proverbial ivory tower, Johnson works for much of the year from this traditional stone-and-adobe house. It took him almost 20 years to craft the rambling structure, room by room. Six inches of dirt insulates the roof. The ceilings are low and the walls irregular, but the house is modern enough to have an office with Wi-Fi and traditional enough to have a round, kiva-like space for contemplation.
Johnson’s voice is gentle, with hints of music in it, befitting the opera career to which he aspired. He speaks in rapid-fire paragraphs, if not always with periods, before punctuating his most cogent points with a resonant laugh. “The house isn’t all straight corners, and it’s a little bit hard to keep clean,” he says. “But this is just home — just natural. When it leaks, it leaks; then I just patch everything right back up. And it didn’t cost that much.”
Johnson stays here with his Belgian Malinois, Soya (named for a Hopi farming tool), dry-farming corn, beans, squash and melons. From a dining room lit by a wagon-wheel chandelier, the windows look toward the cornfield.
For anyone accustomed to the Midwest’s heavily fertilized, densely planted and artificially lush factory farms, Johnson’s crop — widely spaced and planted in neat rows on a bare, sandy rectangle — looks nothing like a field of dreams. But he’s not raising some endlessly hybridized corn variety. He’s growing crops uniquely adapted to Hopi lands.
“I’m a 250th-generation farmer,” he says. “We’ve been farming for over 3,000 years. Yeah, it’s a lot of hard work, but there’s something really tranquil about hard work. This is an honest thing to do.”
Johnson grew up in Winslow, where his mother taught junior high and his father, a onetime military chaplain, served as pastor at the Presbyterian church. “My dad would drop me off up here in summertime when I was 10 years old, and I learned how to farm,” he recalls. “I used to hate it because there was only one TV station. But it was good. I learned a lot of stuff back then that still guides me.”
Johnson originally focused on music and hoped to get a Ph.D. in vocal pedagogy. He received a full scholarship to Arizona State University, then struggled with music theory and eventually studied agriculture at Cornell University. “It was a different type of ag — nothing like this,” he says, gesturing toward his corn. “All mechanical. They want you to get a 14-row John Deere planter, and I thought, That’s crazy. I can get 14 Hopi and put John Deere hats on them and watch ’em go to town.” And out comes that laugh.
Johnson’s academic work includes a recent needs analysis of how traditional agriculture is still practiced by the Hopi people and New Mexico’s Pueblo tribes. “It’s interrelated with our ceremonies and our cultural beliefs,” he says. “There’s no separation. We need traditional agriculture to survive in this world.”
He’s especially committed to sharing his knowledge and the joys of farming with younger members of Indigenous communities. Johnson believes that the disconnect between modern society and food production has had especially adverse impacts on Indigenous people, who suffer from high rates of diabetes and diet-related health issues.
In many respects, Johnson’s work comes down to planting seeds — literally and figuratively. School groups come out to see the farm and his house, and in Tucson, in partnership with United Way, he started One Seed, One Child, a program that gives elementary school kids the fundamental experience of raising a plant from just a seed, a cup of dirt and water. “I’m more focused on having those kids learn why they’re farming,” he says. “What are the values behind agriculture?”
He sees another connection between seeds and children. Without asking for permission or offering compensation, multinational corporations have used seeds from Indigenous lands to develop new genetic varieties of corn and other crops. Johnson sees these seeds as a form of intellectual property and, more importantly, as living beings that belong to the tribes. “It’s a harsh reality,” he says, “but I call our seeds the new boarding school children. Because they’ve been taken away from us and propagated wrongly. They need to come home.”
Sometimes, seeds do come home. A friend gave Johnson 800-year-old corn found buried in a Glen Canyon cave in the 1960s, before Lake Powell inundated the site. “They’re actually growing,” Johnson says of the seeds of that corn. “Last year, I planted them too deep and they came up underground. But this year, they did come up, and I’ve been nurturing them. Got cages around them, because of the crows. Crows happen. But this is an act of faith. Keeps me grounded. This is a place of healing for me.”