Tibicos:In Healing Colonization
For some of the time I lived in Denmark, I worked with refugees who sought asylum from violence in North Africa. I had a huge heart for the refugees coming to Denmark because I knew how difficult the society was to get along with by that point. For the most part I just spoke English with refugees who wanted to practice. It was encouraged for me to come up with topics for these discussions. As a human from an entirely different part of the planet from these people, and all of us meeting in a third location on the planet, what do we have in common? I settled on the bees. And I even had one of the women I was speaking English with ask me why we are so obsessed with bees here in Denmark because she had other teachers in Danish making conversations about bees. Bees help food grow all around the planet. Every culture has access to honey. Bees represent a uniting experience for humans. Eggs for eating also are found in communities across the planet. After eggs and honey, the foods humans have in common become microscopic.
Every culture across the planet has fermented beverages growing symbiotic colonies of bacteria and yeast, but only one of these SCOBYs is documented to exist in cultures across every continent. It happens to be the fermented beverage I prefer to make daily. My preferred fermented beverage is made from adding tibicos SCOBY to fruit juice. Tibicos has many names across the planet. It is most commonly known as water kefir. But I struggle with the word kefir for identifying what I am talking about. First because milk kefir and water kefir are not the same SCOBY. My part of the planet has designated milk kefir as just kefir. Also, there’s no agreement on pronunciation in English for the word “kefir” so people don’t recognize the word when pronounced with Arabic syllable emphasis vs. English and you don’t know which word the person you are talking to has heard before. Tibicos gives a fresh start for the completely novel microbiome that most people have never experienced. And it acknowledges the indigenous people of Turtle Island.
Tibicos is a colony of gut healers that humans included in their diet for hundreds of thousands of years. Arguably the human immune system evolved as humans consumed tibicos because some of the single celled members of the tibicos SCOBY are pure raw material for building certain immune cells. Hunter-gathering cultures shared water sources with the ruminant animals they hunted or shepherded and that’s how humans discovered the existence of tibicos in every culture. As humans shifted into more agrarian societies, fermenting tibicos became something done at home for families. The elder women of the village provide a collection of ferments to their community. When these agrarian societies inevitably come up against violence and experience displacement in their history, most connection to tibicos is lost.
After a few hundred years of conquest and exploitation across North America, diabetes is identified here on the planet first. The colonizers of North America severed their connection with tibicos SCOBY so thoroughly (at least compared to all the other cultures on the planet) that the changes in sugar digestion are noticed, studied and remedied with a brand new medication! And when new immigrants come to the western world, they remember the recipes from the elders in their families and try to replicate the bubbly sweet drink their grandma made them before the war. Losing connection with tibicos gives way to the modern soda pop industry where food scientists are trying to replicate grandma’s beverage but with tweaks that make it easier to manufacture and sell. One of those tweaks is leaving out fermentation from single celled microorganisms that have seeded human guts for millennia. I am absolutely not saying that tibicos can heal diabetes, but I am certain that it allows sugar digestion to be less toxic. I never eat sugar without having tibicos first.
What if healing colonization in all its forms means reconnecting not just with lost land and culture but with the microbial allies that have supported human health for thousands of years? The story of tibicos is more than just a story about fermented beverages; it is a story of resilience, community knowledge, and mutual care passed down through generations, surviving long enough to be documented on the internet. In the modern US for profit health system, healing is often reduced to managing symptoms with costly pharmaceuticals that are disconnected from the roots of human biology and community wisdom. Preventative health practices, by contrast, center health as a shared responsibility for society. This responsibility nurtures natural, accessible practices like fermented foods while also calling for local not for profit health networks. Wellness is not a commodity but a mutual gift supported by connection between humans and to our natural world. I make Tibicos:Ins because reclaiming tibicos for yourself is one small but meaningful way to resist the extractive systems of colonization and profit and to build a foundation for health that is rooted in accessible self-love, not money.