2 Paddy Clime Ecological Indigeneity in the Naga Uplands Roderick Wijunamai One late morning in December 2020, I was sunbathing on the front porch of my house. My family was about to have our lunch, and my mother had gone into the kitchen to get our meal ready. A paternal cousin from my ancestral village suddenly showed up with a half-filled polypropylene cement sack on her back. “It is meusan [freshly harvested rice],” she said. “I just wanted your mother to taste our harvest.” The cousin had grown up in my house, and my mom had looked after her until she married another villager. When my mother came out with our meal, she was pleased to see the gesture. Nothing excites her more than meusan as a gift, especially during Christmastime. “I can deal with bad curry; I can even go without any curry and just eat chutney with rice if the rice is good,” she would often say. Cooking “good rice” was important for her. Nowadays, our storeroom, where we stock our months-long supplies, is more often loaded with “superfine rice”—a foreign rice variety, pri- marily sold and supplied by the Food Corporation of India, a statutory organi- zation under the Government of India. “Local baan” (baan meaning rice, a short form of chaban), as we call it, is not readily available, and even if it can be found, it is priced very high in the market. The replacement of “indigenous rice” with “superfine rice” marks a transformation in Naga agricultural and food history. It is a trend that worries my mother and many other Nagas. I belong to the Liangmai Naga community that inhabits the Southern Naga Hills, which today are divided by the political border of Manipur and Nagaland. Growing up, I learned to distinguish between local rice and non- local varieties (of which there are many). Local rice has a special place in our community. It confers respect, recognition, and blessing. Food writ large is something we consume not just for our physical health, but also for our cul- tural and spiritual well-being. As such, food is sacred, and treated with reverence, from sowing to harvesting and gathering, and from preparation to consumption. Naga elders often instruct their children not to eat “improper food” (referring to industrial, packaged food and other cuisines from outside the region), and encourage them to eat rice instead. Parents are happy when their children comply. “Rice is the progeny of God; or, perhaps, after God is rice, and after rice is wealth,” Gaidon, a 75-year-old Rongmei man, told my friend Gairan during DOI: 10.4324/9781003484394-2