# data[].attributes.headline
Food as Kin in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: 

# data[].attributes.subject
Food as Kin in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: 

# data[].attributes.body
Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

By Maxwell Zawatsky

This paper will argue that Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants urges kinful interactions between human beings and plants—particularly those used for food.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Harvest107 - Ending Hunger One Garden at a Time

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At Harvest107, we know that 3 billion people aren’t getting the nutrition they need. We believe everyone deserves healthy food to eat, so we help people grow organic, nutritious vegetables to end hunger sustainably.

# data[].attributes.headline
"We’re determined to grow food on unused spaces in ways that create jobs, preserve water, and equitably distribute the food."

# data[].attributes.subject
"We’re determined to grow food on unused spaces in ways that create jobs, preserve water, and equitably distribute the food."

# data[].attributes.body
The Food is Free Project is a worldwide movement growing community and food. The first Food is Free garden was planted in 2012 in Austin, TX but has spread like wildflowers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Food is Free Project is a worldwide movement growing community and food. The first Food is Free garden was planted in 2012 in Austin, TX but has spread like wildflowers.

Now over 350 cities around the world have started Food is Free Projects and we invite you to start one in your community this season. It all starts with that first front yard garden or shared harvest. Let us know if we can offer any advice along the way and share your #foodisfree photos online. We're all in this together.

Learn how the first Food is Free Project sprouted in Austin, TX and how you can get started with your own #foodisfreeproject

"Never underestimate your power to inspire and affect your community around you. Even the smallest of acts can really ripple out." - John VanDeusen Edwards, Founder of Food is Free Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Food is Free Project is a worldwide movement growing community and food. The first Food is Free garden was planted in 2012 in Austin, TX but has spread like wildflowers. Now over 350 cities around the world have started Food is Free Projects and we invite you to start one in your community this season.

# data[].attributes.headline
THE SERVICEBERRY: An Economy of Abundance  by Robin Wall Kimmerer

# data[].attributes.subject
THE SERVICEBERRY: An Economy of Abundance  by Robin Wall Kimmerer

# data[].attributes.body
As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

Christelle Enault is an artist and illustrator based in Paris. She illustrates for major newspapers, including Le Monde, The New York Times, and Libération, and for publishing houses, including Actes Sud Junior and Albin Michel. She spends her free time in the natural world, collecting and drawing plants.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?

The cool breath of evening slips off the wooded hills, displacing the heat of the day, and with it come the birds, as eager for the cool as I am. They arrive in a flock of calls that sound like laughter, and I have to laugh back with the same delight. They are all around me, Cedar Waxwings and Catbirds and a flash of Bluebird iridescence. I have never felt such a kinship to my namesake, Robin, as in this moment when we are both stuffing our mouths with berries and chortling with happiness. The bushes are laden with fat clusters of red, blue, and wine purple, in every stage of ripeness, so many you can pick them by the handful. I'm glad I have a pail and wonder if the birds will be able to fly with their bellies as full as mine.

This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are-along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain, gathering in the towers of cumulonimbi. You could call them natural resources or ecosystem services, but the Robins and I know them as gifts. We both sing gratitude with our mouths full.

Part of my delight comes from their unexpected presence. The local native Serviceberries, Amelanchier arborea, have small, hard fruits, which tend toward dryness, and only once in a while is there a tree with sweet offerings. The bounty in my bucket is a western species- A. alnifolium, known as Saskatoons-planted by my farmer neighbor, and this is their first bearing year, which they do with an enthusiasm that matches my own.

Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Sarvis, Serviceberry-these are among the many names for Amelanchier. Ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance. The tree is beloved for its fruits, for medicinal use, and for the early froth of flowers that whiten woodland edges at the first hint of spring. Serviceberry is known as a calendar plant, so faithful is it to seasonal weather patterns. Its bloom is a sign that the ground has thawed and that the shad are running upstream-or at least it was back in the day, when rivers were clear and free enough to support their spawning. The derivation of the name "Service" from its relative Sorbus (also in the Rose Family) notwithstanding, the plant does provide myriad goods and services. Not only to humans but to many other citizens. It is a preferred browse of Deer and Moose, a vital source of early pollen for newly emerging insects, and host to a suite of butterfly larvae-like Tiger Swallowtails, Viceroys, Admirals, and Hairstreaks-and berry-feasting birds who rely on those calories in breeding season.

In Potawatomi, it is called Bozakmin, which is a superlative: the best of the berries. I agree with my ancestors on the rightness of that name. Imagine a fruit that tastes like a Blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an Apple, a touch of rosewater and a miniscule crunch of almond-flavored seeds. They taste like nothing a grocery store has to offer: wild, complex with a chemistry that your body recognizes as the real food it's been waiting for.

For me, the most important part of the word Bozakmin is "min," the root for "berry." It appears in our Potawatomi words for Blueberry, Strawberry, Raspberry, even Apple, Maize, and Wild Rice. The revelation in that word is a treasure for me, because it is also the root word for "gift." In naming the plants who shower us with goodness, we recognize that these are gifts from our plant relatives, manifestations of their generosity, care, and creativity. When we speak of these not as things or products or commodities, but as gifts, the whole relationship changes. I can't help but gaze at them, cupped like jewels in my hand, and breathe out my gratitude.

In the presence of such gifts, gratitude is the intuitive first response. The gratitude flows toward our plant elders and radiates to the rain, to the sunshine, to the improbability of bushes spangled with morsels of sweetness in a world that can be bitter.

Gratitude is so much more than a polite thank you. It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.

If our first response is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return. What could I give these plants in return for their generosity? It could be a direct response, like weeding or water or a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind. Or indirect, like donating to my local land trust so that more habitat for the gift givers will be saved, or making art that invites others into the web of reciprocity.

Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. I accept the gift from the bush and then spread that gift with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry. You know how it goes.

To name the world as gift is to feel one's membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy-and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the "thing" has not changed. A wooly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that "thing" in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You're likely to take much better care of the gift hat than the commodity hat, because it is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking. I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given. Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance.

How we think ripples out to how we behave. If we view these berries, or that coal or forest, as an object, as property, it can be exploited as a commodity in a market economy. We know the consequences of that.

Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We've surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love. I'm wondering how we fix that. And I'm not alone.

Because I'm a botanist, my fluency in the lexicon of berries may not easily extend to economics, so I wanted to revisit the conventional meaning of economics to compare it to my understanding of the gift economy of nature. What is economics for anyway? It turns out that answer depends a lot on who you ask. On their website, the American Economic Association says, "It's the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives." My son-in-law teaches high school economics, and the first principle his students learn is that economics is about decision-making in the face of scarcity. Anything and everything in a market is implicitly defined as scarce. With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.

I'm way past high school, but I'm not sure I grasp that thinking, so I fill a bowl with fresh Serviceberries for my friend and colleague, Dr. Valerie Luzadis. She is an appreciator of earthly gifts and a professor and past president of the US Society for Ecological Economics. Ecological economics is a growing economic theory that expands the conventional definition by working to integrate Earth's natural systems and human values. But it has not been standard practice to include these foundational elements-they are usually left out of the equation. Valerie prefers the definition that "economics is how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality. It's a way of considering how we provide for ourselves."

The words ecology and economy come from the same root, the Greek oikos, meaning "home" or "household": i.e., the systems of relationship, the goods and services that keep us alive. The system of market economies that we're given as a default is hardly the only model out there. Anthropologists have observed and shared multiple cultural frameworks, colored by very different worldviews on "how we provide for ourselves," including gift economies.

As the berries plunk into my bucket, I'm thinking about what I'll do with them all. I'll drop some off for friends and neighbors, and I'll certainly fill the freezer for Juneberry muffins in February. This "problem" of managing decisions about abundance reminds me of a report that linguist Daniel Everett wrote as he was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest. A hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question-store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn't he store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.

"Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother," replied the hunter.

I feel a great debt to this unnamed teacher for these words. There beats the heart of gift economies, an antecedent alternative to market economies, another way of "organizing ourselves to sustain life." In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds which enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is "we" rather than "I," as all flourishing is mutual.

Anthropologists characterize gift economies as systems of exchange in which goods and services circulate without explicit expectations of direct compensation. Those who have give to those who don't, so that everyone in the system has what they need. It is not regulated from above, but derives from a collective sense of equity and accountability in response to the gifts of the Earth.

In his book Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein states: "Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other." If the community is flourishing, then all within it will partake of the same abundance-or shortage-that nature provides.

The currency of exchange is gratitude and relationship rather than money. It includes a system of social and moral agreements for indirect reciprocity. So, the hunter who shared the feast with you could well anticipate that you would share from a full fishnet or offer your labor in repairing a boat.

The natural world itself is understood as a gift and not as private property, as such there are ethical constraints on the accumulation of abundance that is not yours. Well known examples of gift economies include potlatches or the Kula ring cycle, in which gifts circulate in the group, solidifying bonds of relationship and redistributing wealth.

The question of abundance highlights the striking difference between the market economies which have come to dominate the globe and the ancient gift economies which preceded them. There are many examples of functioning gift economies-most in small societies of close relations, where community well-being is recognized as the "unit" of success-where the interest of "we" exceeds that of "I." In this time when the economies have grown so large and impersonal that they extinguish rather than nurture community well-being, perhaps we should consider other ways to organize the exchange of goods and services which constitute an economy.

In a market economy, where the underlying principles are scarcity and maximizing return on investment, the meat is private property, accumulated for the well-being of the hunter or exchanged for currency. The greatest status and success comes from possession. Food security is assured by private accumulation.

In contrast, gift economies arise from the abundance of gifts from the Earth, which are owned by no one and therefore shared. Sharing engenders relationships of good will and bonds that ensure you will be invited to the feast when your neighbor is fortunate. Security is ensured by the nurturing of bonds of reciprocity. You can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother. Both have the result of keeping hunger at bay but with very different consequences for the people and for the land which provided that sustenance.

I haven't studied economics in decades, but as a plant ecologist, I've spent a lifetime asking the plants for their guidance on any number of issues; so I wondered what the Serviceberries had to say about the systems which create and distribute goods and services. What is their economic system? How do they respond to the issues of abundance and scarcity? Has their evolutionary process shaped them to be hoarders or sharers?

Let's ask the Saskatoons. These ten-foot-tall trees are the producers in this economy. Using the free raw materials of light, water, and air, they transmute these gifts into leaves and flowers and fruits. They store some energy as sugars in the making of their own bodies, but much of it is shared. Some of the abundance of spring rain and sun manifests in the form of flowers, which offer a feast for insects when it's cold and rainy. The insects return the favor by carrying pollen. Food is rarely in short supply for Saskatoons, but mobility is rare. Movement is a gift of the pollinators, but the energy needed to support buzzing around is scarce. So they create a relationship of exchange that benefits both.

We've surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love.

In summer, when the boughs are laden, Serviceberry produces an abundance of sugar. Does it hoard that energy for itself? No, it invites the birds to a feast. Come my relatives, fill your bellies, say the Serviceberries. Are they not storing their meat in the bellies of their brothers and sisters-the Jays, the Thrashers, and the Robins?

Isn't this an economy? A system of distribution of goods and services that meets the needs of the community? The currency of this economic system is energy, which flows through it, and materials, which cycle among the producers and the consumers. It is a system for redistribution of wealth, an exchange of goods and services. Each member has an abundance of something, which they offer to others. The abundance of berries goes to the birds-for, what use does the tree have of berries other than as a way to make relationships with birds?

Eating too many berries has the same effect on birds as it does on people. Fuchsia splats decorate the fence posts. This of course is the whole point of berries-to make themselves so irresistible and plentiful that birds will come and feast, as we are doing this evening, and then distribute the seeds far and wide. Feasting has another benefit. Passage through a bird gut scarifies the seeds to stimulate germination. The birds provide services to the Serviceberries, who provide for them in return. The relationships created by the gift weave myriad relations between insects and microbes and root systems. The gift is multiplied with every giving, until it returns so rich and sweet that it burbles forth as the birdsong that wakes me in the morning. If the abundance had been hoarded, if Juneberries acted solely for their own benefit, the forest would be diminished.

Charles Eisenstein expresses that we have created a grotesque economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into money, a currency that enables us to purchase things we don't really need while destroying what we do.

I think that the Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency. Without gift relationships with bees and birds, Serviceberries would disappear from the planet. Even if they hoarded abundance, perching atop the wealth ladder, they would not save themselves from the fate of extinction if their partners did not share in that abundance. Hoarding won't save us either. All flourishing is mutual.

As I watch the Robins and Cedar Waxwings fill their bellies, I see a gift economy in which abundance is stored "in the belly of my brother." Supporting a thriving bird community is essential to the well-being of the Serviceberry and everyone else up the food chain. That seems especially important to an immobile, long-lived being like a tree, who can't run away from ruptured relationships. Thriving is possible only if you have nurtured strong bonds with your community.

This system of exchanges looks like an economy to me; but I'm a plant ecologist. I wonder whether an economist like Valerie would see a gift economy in the Serviceberry's distribution of goods and services. I want to know if natural systems could be understood as analogs to economic systems? Could we engage in a kind of economic biomimicry to design systems of exchange which benefit human people and more-than-human people at the same time?

"Yes!" Valerie says, as if she'd been waiting a long time to be asked this question. "Natural systems can surely be understood as analogs to economic systems."

Imagining human economies which are modeled after ecological systems is the realm of ecological economists like Valerie. This is quite distinct from environmental economics, which tallies up the costs and tradeoffs of choosing to wreck or restore ecosystems. Ecological economists ask how we might build economic systems that meet citizens needs while aligning with ecological principles that allow long-term sustainability for people and for planet. Valerie says that "ecological economics emerged after observing [how the] neoclassical economic approach fails to provide for everyone and does not adequately consider the ecosystems that are our life support." From a strictly utilitarian view, we've created a system such that we self-identify as consumers first before understanding ourselves as ecosystem citizens. In ecological economics, the focus is on creating an economy that provides for a just and sustainable future in which both human life and nonhuman life can flourish."

What might Serviceberry teach us here? She replies, "Serviceberry, or shadbush as I learned it, provides a model of interdependence and coevolution that is the heart of ecological economics. Serviceberry teaches us another way to understand relationship and exchange. With a serviceberry economy as our model, it prompts the opportunity for articulation of the value of gratitude and reciprocity as essential foundations for an economy." Reciprocity-not scarcity.

As a participant in a traditional culture of gratitude, with a bucket full of berries in my hand, there's something I've never quite understood about human economics, and that is the primacy of scarcity as an organizing principle. Capitalist market economies depend on the motive force of scarcity in order to regulate markets with supply and demand.

As a person schooled by plants, my fingers stained with berry juice, I'm not willing to give scarcity such a prominent role. Gift economies arise from an understanding of earthly abundance and the gratitude it generates. A perception of abundance, based on the notion that there is enough if we share it, underlies economies of mutual support.

There is no question but that all living beings experience some level of scarcity at various points, and therefore that competition for limited resources, like light or water or soil nitrogen, will occur. But since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this is achieved by shifting one's needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting "if there's not enough of what you want, then want something else." This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote to scarcity-induced competition.

Evolutionary biologists would perhaps reject this notion, framing the lifeways of Serviceberry as maximizing self-interest through natural selection, which is the same sort of argument made by market economists: maximizing self-interest in economic behavior through competition for scarce resources. Competition between individuals for success is seen as the driving force.

Valerie points out that even ecologists are reevaluating the assumption that intense competition is the primary force regulating evolutionary success. Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has found that competition makes sense only when we consider the unit of evolution to be the individual. When the focus shifts to the level of a group, cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving, but for thriving. In a recent interview, author Richard Powers comments, "There is symbiosis at every single level of living things, and you cannot compete in a zero-sum game with creatures upon whom your existence depends." And yet, we continue to operate our economic systems from the foundation of competition. I think the Serviceberries discovered this long ago, and we humans need to catch up.

What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from gift economies?

What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from gift economies? When I examine Serviceberry economics, I don't see scarcity, I see abundance shared: photosynthate is usually not in short supply, since sun and air are perpetually renewable resources. Of course, sometimes there's not enough rain, and then the scarcity ripples through the web of relationships, for sure. That is real scarcity: when the rains don't come. A physical limitation with repercussions that are shared, just as abundance is shared. That kind of scarcity is not what troubles me.

It is manufactured scarcity that I cannot accept. In order for capitalist market economies to function, there must be scarcity, and the system is designed to create scarcity where it does not actually exist. Because I have not thought much about economics since my introduction to it in high school decades ago, I realize that I had just been accepting the principle of scarcity as if it were a natural fact, not an economic assumption.

I try and lay out the understanding for myself, to think like an economist, not an ecologist. In order for money to be made, there must be commodities to be bought and sold. The scarcer those commodities, the greater the revenue. So, I guess I do understand this: market economics demands that abundant, freely available, earthly gifts be converted to commodities and made scarce by privatization and a high price. This seems crazy, so let me test my understanding with the example of pure, beautiful water, a gift from the skies. It was previously unthinkable that one would pay for a drink of water; but as careless economic expansion pollutes fresh water, we now incentivize privatization of springs and aquifers. Sweet water, a free gift of the earth, is pirated by faceless corporations who encase it in plastic shells to sell. And now many can't afford what was previously free, and we incentivize wrecking public waters to create demand for the privatized.

In contrast, in Indigenous societies all over the world, where remnants of gift economies endure, water is sacred and people have a moral responsibility to care for it, to keep it flowing as the lifeblood of Mother Earth. It is a gift, to be shared by all, and the notion of owning water is an ecological and ethical travesty.

The Indigenous philosophy of the gift economy, based in our responsibility to pass on those gifts, has no tolerance for creating artificial scarcity through hoarding. In fact, the "monster" in Potawatomi culture is the Windigo, who suffers from the illness of taking too much and sharing too little.

At one point while writing this essay-as I was struggling to imagine how the ways of Serviceberries and ancient gift economies could help us imagine our way out of the mutually assured destruction of unbridled capitalism-I needed a break from the Windigo shadows that were creeping toward me. Thankfully, I was interrupted by a text from my neighbor, Paulie. As though she were reading my troubled mind from across the valley, Paulie invited me to come pick berries at her farm. Serviceberries. For free. The tingles of synchronicity propelled me from my desk to the orchard.

She planted this orchard with commodity in mind, part of her revenue stream as a small local farmer; an innovative crop destined for "pick your own" fees, which can be lucrative. But instead she has invited her neighbors to come and pick for free. Her labor and expenses are not free: tilling, irrigation, and marketing cost real money. The trees cost money, as does the gas when Ed mows between rows-and the Serviceberries would not be paying their own way.

She is losing the return on her investment by inviting us to come fill our buckets with this surfeit of sweetness. She is not obeying the rules of the capitalist market economy; she is not behaving in a way that will maximize her profit. How un-American.

In one fell swoop her berries rolled from the commodity column on a spreadsheet into the beribboned box called "gift." The berries hadn't changed a bit: they were still juicy and bursting with antioxidants. The farm hadn't changed either. It's a small, family operation, diversified with an array of crops that generate revenue all year-from early spring lambs to Christmas trees. The only thing that changed was whether the folks who came to pick berries were asked to put pieces of green paper into the coffee can inside the barn door.

I asked her why she did it, especially in these pandemic days, when every small business is struggling to make ends meet. "Well," she said, "they're so abundant. There's more than enough to share, and people could use a little goodness in their lives right now." People came to pick in the cool of the early evening, socially distanced at opposite ends of the rows, isolated yet somehow connected by the rhythm of fingers moving from bush to bucket-and mouth. "Everyone's so sad now," she said, "but in the berry patch all I hear are happy voices. It feels good to give that little bit of delight."

But it's also education, she says. Most people don't know Juneberries yet, and giving them away is an invitation to try them. True, Juneberries have long been a staple food for traditional people who share habitat with Amelanchier alnifolia. Harvested in great quantities, they were used as the basis for pemmican, the original energy bar. Now used for making pies and jam and cramming your mouth full, they are celebrated as a gift from the land but are little known as a product in the market economy.

Paulie has a reputation to uphold for being no-nonsense in her approach to life, so she qualifies her explanation: "It's not really altruism," she insists. "An investment in community always comes back to you in some way. Maybe people who come for Serviceberries will come back for Sunflowers and then for the Blueberries. Sure, it's a gift but it's also good marketing. The gift builds relationship, and that's always a good thing. That's what we really produce here-relationship, with each other and with the farm." The currency of relationship can manifest itself as money down the road, because they do have to pay the bills. Free berries might translate to better pumpkin sales, because people will want to come back to a place they have a relationship with. "People feel like they got something more than they paid for," she explained. "They learned about a new food, or watched the kids climb on hay bales." Good feelings are the real value added. Even when it's paid for as a commodity, the gift of relationship is still attached to it.

Hoarding won't save us ... All flourishing is mutual.

The ongoing reciprocity in gifting stretches beyond the next customer, though, into a whole web of relations that are not transactional. They are banking goodwill, so-called social capital. "Being known as a citizen is always of value," she says. If someone leaves a gate open and her sheep end up in my garden, there's a cushion of goodwill in place so that the munched dahlias may be forgiven. "The way I see it," she says, "always value people over things. There's that old line that farmers like to spout, 'Without farmers, you'd be naked, hungry, and sober.' But it goes both ways: without good neighbors, you'd also be alone, and that's worse."

And that customer who comes to value the smell of ripe berries and the view of lambs on pasture and the memory of their kids climbing on hay bales-they just might vote for the farmland preservation bond in the next election. That's a fine return on investment from a free bucket of berries.

I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding market economy that reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: relationship and purpose and beauty and meaning, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use.

You might rightly observe that we no longer live in small, insular societies, where generosity and mutual esteem structure our relations. But we could. It is within our power to create such webs of interdependence, quite outside the market economy. Intentional communities of mutual self-reliance and reciprocity are the wave of the future, and their currency is sharing. The move toward a local food economy is not just about freshness and food miles and carbon footprints and soil organic matter. It is all of those things, but it's also about the deeply human desire for connection, to be in reciprocity with the gifts that are given you.

The real human needs that such arrangements address are exactly what we long for yet cannot ever purchase: being valued for your own unique gifts, earning the regard of your neighbors for the quality of your character, not the quantity of your possessions; what you give, not what you have.

I don't think market capitalism is going to disappear anytime soon; the faceless institutions that benefit from it are too entrenched. But I don't think it's pie-in-the-sky to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy, where the good that is served is community. After all, what we crave is not trickle-down, faceless profits, but reciprocal, face-to-face relationships, which are naturally abundant but made scarce by the anonymity of large-scale economics. We have the power to change that, to develop the local, reciprocal economies that serve community, rather than undermine it.

In Sacred Economics, Eisenstein reflects on the economy of ecosystems: "In nature, headlong growth and all-out competition are features of immature ecosystems, followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources. The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call forth the gifts of each of us; it will emphasize cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear. Money may not disappear anytime soon, but it will serve a diminished role even as it takes on more of the properties of the gift. The economy will shrink, and our lives will grow."

I see this in the example of my neighbors, both the farmers and the berries. Yes, they have to pay the bills and are part of the market economy, but with every commodity traded, they add something that cannot be commodified and which is therefore even more valuable. People come for a sense of connection to the land, a laugh with the farmer as a fellow human who cherishes the crisp fall air-not for the commodity of a pumpkin, which after all you could buy anywhere.

Continued fealty to economies based on competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance, is now causing us to face the danger of producing real scarcity, evident in growing shortages of food and clean water, breathable air, and fertile soil. Climate change is a product of this extractive economy and is forcing us to confront the inevitable outcome of our consumptive lifestyle, genuine scarcity for which the market has no remedy. Indigenous story traditions are full of these cautionary teachings. When the gift is dishonored, the outcome is always material as well as spiritual. Disrespect the water and the springs dry up. Waste the corn and the garden grows barren. Regenerative economies which cherish and reciprocate the gift are the only path forward. To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance - Robin Wall Kimmerer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

# data[].attributes.headline
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer

# data[].attributes.subject
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer

# data[].attributes.body
“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Bestseller
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub
A Washington Post "2020 Holiday Gift Guide" Recommendation
A Minneapolis Star Tribune "2020 Holiday Book Recommendation"
A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020​"
A Food Tank Reading Recommendation for Fall 2020
Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the hardcover special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon, and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book-gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred-and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Indigenous, Nature, science, Native American, traditional ecological knowledge, Natural history, Ecology, botany, plants, essays, environment, spirituality, nonfiction, life sciences, spiritual, teaching, wisdom

Like this book? Sign up for occasional updates

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer is no stranger to addressing the biggest issues of our times through art. In the...

Join Robin Wall Kimmerer at Door County Library for the Write on Door County Reads 2024.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub A Washington Post "2020 Holiday Gift Guide" Recommendation A Minneapolis Star Tribune "2020 Holiday Book Recommendation" A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020​" A Food Tank Reading Recommendation for Fall 2020 Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the hardcover special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages.

# data[].attributes.headline
Community orchards and Hyde’s theory of the gift.    “Hyde reminds us that in a gift economy, one’s freely given gifts cannot be made into someone else’s capital.”― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

# data[].attributes.subject
Community orchards and Hyde’s theory of the gift.    “Hyde reminds us that in a gift economy, one’s freely given gifts cannot be made into someone else’s capital.”― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

# data[].attributes.body
This article reports on one particular informal social economy manifestation of decommodification, the community orchard. The author argues that decommodification must be seen not only as the absence of commodity production but as the presence of a different economy and underlying ethos – that of the gift. Lewis Hyde’s theory of the gift provides a lens through which to understand the profound ways that gifting changes
community orchardists’ relationships to land, to food, to labour, and to those who co-produce and enjoy the fruit with them. Gift theory also furthers our understanding of food commons (of which the community orchard is but one example) as decommodified spaces. The author
suggests that theorizing community orchards through the lens of gift theory provides insight into the values and mindsets that characterize non-commodity-oriented food production, which is a necessary step in the direction of innovation and the development of models that are more ecological, community-oriented, and just.

# data[].attributes.headline
Urban Soil & Gardening: Og-woi People's Orchard & Garden

# data[].attributes.subject
Urban Soil & Gardening: Og-woi People's Orchard & Garden

# data[].attributes.body
"This is Part 2 of our episode about gardens: Maile shares some highlights of our November event, Planting Good Relations, which featured a panel discussion with a number of Native American and Pacific Islander leaders who steward community gardens here in the Salt Lake City area. She also shares her own story about gardening, Hawaiian language, and parenting."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 00:00:04 Our ancestors traveled through salt and stars and so do contemporary Pacific Islander communities. Today in this podcast, we consider how to build good relations with the communities we come from in Oceania, the communities we live with here in the Salt Lake City area, and especially the indigenous communities whose lands we live on Speaker 2 00:00:25 As specific islander people who live in Utah. We are nourished by the lands of the Ute, go shoot Shoshone and Paiute peoples. We are far from the ocean, but close to the saltwater of the Great Salt Lake. We are far from the night sky over our home islands, but can look up and see the same stars. Speaker 1 00:00:45 Join us as we explore and build relations of salt and stars. Speaker 3 00:00:59 Relations Speaker 2 00:01:00 Of Salt and Stars is a new podcast produced by the Pacific Island Studies Program at the University of Utah and hosted by faculty members Dr. Angela L. Robinson, who've Chuckies and myself, Dr. Miley Arvin. And I'm Kamal, our native Hawaiian with the name Relations of Salt and sars. We invoke the ties historically forged between the Pacific Islands and Utah, as well as the ones still in formation. Speaker 2 00:01:33 This is part two of our episode around gardens, what they teach us, the medicine they offer, and the connections they allow us to make between the lands we live on and our homelands. In part one of this episode, Angela shared her own stories of her mother's garden alongside some highlights of our recent event, planting Good Relations, which featured a panel discussion with a number of Native American and Pacific Islander leaders who steward community gardens here in the Salt Lake City area. As we said in part one, this land is you go shoot Paiute and Shoshone land. None of us of are of these peoples. We all have homelands elsewhere. As we talk and think about gardening this land, we want to come into better relation with these peoples. And this place, as you'll hear many of our panelists are doing this work by offering medicine grown in these gardens to the community and by creating space for indigenous youth and families to find healing or to just be. Speaker 2 00:02:35 In this episode, we highlight and offer brief responses to some of our favorite insights Panelists shared the whole panel offered so much love and wisdom to everyone present that we had to separate this episode into two parts. So you're listening to the second part, which I, Miley am leading. And again, you can listen to the first part led by Angela by looking for it under our podcast name, relations of Salt and Stars, wherever you get your podcast. You can also watch a video of this panel or listen to the full audio of the panel on our YouTube page, the Pacifica Archive with the handle at the Pacifica Archive 26 50. Please check out the full bios and links to our panelists, organizations, and the show notes of this episode to learn more about their work and how you can support it. You'll hear from Dene Chanin, from Carrie, the Water Garden de ero and Michelle Brown with the three Sisters Garden at the Awei People's Orchard and Gardenia Sa from the Utah Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Coalitions, margarita Saini Mural and Garden, and Jake Fati, Manu with the Healthy Roots program. We start here with some of their insights about their favorite things about gardening. Speaker 4 00:03:56 Oh, my favorite thing about gardening, you know, it's just doing it. I think there's so much ancestral knowledge and memory that comes through it. Um, I remember the first time I grew Blue Corn, which we used for mush. It's one of our very traditional foods. And opening up each ear of corn and just seeing the beauty of those colors and how they congregate together. And then also learning that corn is two spirit. Um, and just like the food, this beautiful thing in front of you, it's sacred, feeds you and nourishes you. It connects you to everything. It has this relationship with a lineage of all relatives that connect us to this beautiful thing that we pray to and eat, and that nourishes us. So, Speaker 5 00:04:48 But my favorite thing about gardening is harvesting. I love eating <laugh>. So, so that's my ultimate favorite when I get to harvest something and eat it and make delicious herbs. So that's my favorite. I have this vivid memory. Um, I was raised most of my life in Anchor Alaska, and it is kind of a strange place for <laugh> a Navajo to be, but very cool. But my favorite thing about gardening is just the soil there from my memory of being a child is so rich and having a garden in my backyard and all the little worms that I would catch and then I would save and then I would go fishing halibut with. So it was like those small creatures that were nourishing the food that I was growing my backyard went on to go catch meat for me, like when I went deep sea fishing. So that's just a really vivid memory for me of like that connection just to the earth itself. Whereas it didn't matter if it was just like coming from the land, it went back into the water and then came back to me. So I, that's my favorite memory about gardening. It's just, it, it goes beyond just that. So Speaker 6 00:05:58 I was asked to be here, um, on behalf of a family member. So we have a, a mural that sits at the awe garden. And so, um, one of my favorite things about that place is, uh, just being reminded of my sister-in-law who, uh, recently passed away from Covid. Um, and so, um, being here, my connection with gardening, I think about, um, my parents raising us to garden just in our backyard. Um, I'm, I'm still learning. I'm excited that I just grew some tomatoes. I'm sure that's nothing compared to <laugh> to what all of you guys are all doing, but, um, that was something exciting for me. Mm-hmm. So we talk about gardening and understanding what vegetable or herb, what it does. Um, I get excited to learn about that. Speaker 7 00:06:54 What the Roots is a program that we've been running through the Pacific Islander Coalition for almost six years now. And it started with, uh, a pretty selfish, uh, self-serving, uh, motive, which was our foods are sometimes hard to get here, and when they do get here, they've survived weeks on a ship and sometimes they're not that great or they're coated in wax or they're, and they're expensive. And, um, and which is why our people would eat a lot of canned foods actually, and preserved foods and, and that's not great for nutrition in the end, and that's not what our ancestors ate. That's not our indigenous food ways. And so, um, a few, uh, of us really wanted to just try it here. We knew the growing season was short, as was mentioned. We knew the soil was different that the composition, so we kind of nerded out and we went out and said, who can help us? Speaker 7 00:07:46 And we called into gardening shows. We got folks from Utah State Master Garden Program to help us. We went to our own elders in the community who know how to grow these things back home and, and started pretty small scale with about three families. Uh, and the next year that turned into 10 and the next year turned into 25. And the next year we had a commitment with or contract with, um, Wasatch Community Gardens, which was now giving us space cuz a lot of our folks live in the urban areas or apartments and don't have that space. And, uh, then we started taking it to people's backyards. And long story short, this summer, uh, this year we had 52 families, uh, that were engaged in this. And they're not only growing tomatoes and corn and, and the great, um, you know, things that are meant to grow here or that have been growing here in this climate. Speaker 7 00:08:33 But we're growing taro, we're growing tapioca, we're growing turmeric, we're growing banana trees, we're growing hibiscus, we're growing lau tea, we're growing sweet potatoes, um, things that our people will eat because we don't eat kale and we don't eat celery. And, and, you know, some of these other things, <laugh> and not because they're not good, but because we're not familiar and they, we don't have recipes already with these things built in. Uh, and so I, I don't follow directions. Well, I didn't even answer the prompt question earlier, but to, to that, that's my favorite part of being with this. And I'm not a master gardener either. Um, but when I see people, uh, one of my favorite things is when I see people in West Valley right here, uh, where I live and where I serve on the city council. Uh, I love people rolling down my street, 42 50, uh, and sort of taking it slow and looking out their window like, are those banana trees <laugh>? Are those really, you know, eight foot tall sugar cane and, you know, growing in front of the house? And there are 52 other families this year that are doing the exact same thing. Speaker 2 00:09:34 What folks shared regarding their favorite things about gardens, as you heard often invoked ideas about home, whether that meant one's ancestral homelands, where where we may have been displaced to or otherwise chosen to live now our family, our community, or in a much broader sense, earth itself Speaker 4 00:09:56 Here. I've lived in Salt Lake City for a long time, um, most of my wife and, um, really trying to return back home in a lot of ways in myself here, in my home, my community, but also returning back to my ancestral lands where my grandmothers grew it, Speaker 4 00:10:22 Um, plants that we see nowadays, like, especially maybe in these areas, like, oh, this plant's interesting. Um, it's not from here, but it's beautiful. We're a plant here. Um, and that's done some damage with, you know, the whole landscape as in the bigger picture, um, with like invasive species. But I had a, a relative, a sister from the Chenga Loso span, um, in California. And she was talking, there's a lot of invasive plants in California, um, that take over their traditional medicines. But when she was talking about it, she talked about it in a way of empathy. Like, these plants are also so very much displaced from their homelands mm-hmm. <affirmative> and like look at them thrive and survive. And when I think about what it means for displaced relatives, even, um, being, um, like a climate refugee, so many of us are climate refugees. Um, so many of our homelands have been destroyed uranium coals, um, water contamination, um, like that old Quin mine that was built into the San Juan, um, that ruined farming for years for our relatives. Um, and so I think bringing in the medicine that you need in your space is like reclaiming that and also like healing that part of you, that connection to home that you don't have access to. And that hurts. Like it hurts for everybody. And Speaker 4 00:12:20 I think there's like a beautiful grace in that and like thanking the land, like you provide something for my traditional foods to grow. And like really thinking it, like thinking the land for doing that for you. Um, everybody needs it personally, but I think collectively it is more interesting when you feed off of one another and you do have those teachings and, and being moved and honored by like you honoring your, your relatives who you will miss that grief. The process of like planting something and having that grow. There's that, the healing capabilities for your spirit in your mind in that is far more effective in my opinion than like the therapy, this shitty healthcare system where we have, um, all these bigger structures that harm us. Like that's, it's so simple and I love that simplicity. Speaker 5 00:13:26 I'll just give some of my personal thoughts, but gardens are the solution for permaculture. Um, I know that Oki started as an act of civil disobedience, um, to reclaim like land itself or like re-nourishment what it could be. Um, to me it has been transformative, at least for myself. I've become more interested in gardening and relating and also just as a person, again, just embracing the connections between my body, the plants I eat, the people I communicate with in my community as a whole. It's made me feel more like a earthling than just a human being. So, um, I'm just honestly just excited to see what happens. I know that this garden is relatively new, but I just imagine or envision it taking up the entire Jordan River right there. But, we'll, Speaker 2 00:14:25 One word that kept coming up during the panel was medicine gardens produce medicine that we can share medicine here being something much more expansive than what it means in a western biomedical sense. The medicine discussed here works toward healing many different kinds of hurts. Speaker 5 00:14:47 A tabling event a couple months back at a powwow in Toula and you know, Tom brought some sweet grass with him, put it on the table and we had like our brochures and flyers to educate the community about the issues that are still ongoing with murdered and missing indigenous relatives. And there was a mother who came up to, to look at the brochures and all the information, but the plants sitting there really like captured her attention, which was amazing that it was even there to begin with. And she, we started talking about the plant and she was like, is this for sale? And I was like, no, this is actually like, was grown in the Oak Wai Garden. It is a, it's medicine, you can take it. It's not for sale, it is for free for you to take. And she's like, are you serious? Speaker 5 00:15:34 And I was like, yes. And she was telling me how she's going to use that in her bead work and how she's gonna create something more from that. Like, she was like, I'm not gonna burn this. I'm actually gonna integrate it into my jewelry and my bead. And so I thought that was really beautiful. Like I feel like nature itself is like a work of art, the way things start to emerge on their own and have their own like tendencies. And it's really incredible to see how, like us as indigenous people find so many uses for that. Like to be able to see like jewelry or artwork that depicts the plants that we pull from and that are lifeblood and our stories is really powerful, um, to see it displayed in different places. So, um, we've also had the ability to have a couple of different organizing events at the OII as well. Speaker 5 00:16:22 Last year we did, um, sage pulling, sweet Grass braiding and just binding. That was really a powerful event as well. I think that was maybe close to when the margarita mural was finished and that was an incredible event to attend. So I feel incredibly grateful to that tie back to community and the ability to share outside of that and to invite people to know that that's available to them. Um, and just to share like as much knowledge as possible. It's been really impactful to me about the garden or, you know, what Tom has provided us, where we have an opportunity to do this is learn and practice like indigenous teachings, which I didn't have a space before and even if I had, you know, my own space at home, it's not the same. It's, it's bringing together as a community breeding sweet grass together and learning how about just these plants that we're growing is really beautiful. Speaker 5 00:17:18 And just to share a fun story, um, we did an m i W event and planted the garden and we took some tea home with sweet grass and tobacco and just little seedlings. Um, I will say that I'm really glad my tobacco was still alive, but, but just on the way home someone noticed my jacket and I had taken some extra tea and some seedlings and her aunt had just died like two days beforehand. And it was just really wonderful that I got to just in that moment share the medicine from this garden with her that I had just had by chance. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it's just those kinds of moments where you realize that there's so many people who are connected, we're all connected in so many beautiful ways, but it's just there for us and this is an opportunity that I've had to reach out and connect with other people in a way that I haven't been able to do in any other kind of setting. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So I love Speaker 4 00:18:10 That receiving when someone gives you medicine, like it really, I can't explain the feeling like it's just, she's like, thank you. It's Speaker 5 00:18:23 Like another type of deeper love. Speaker 4 00:18:24 Yeah. But thank you for seeing me and I did need this and it's so special to me. And it goes beyond any kind of material. It's just, yeah, we need more of that. And I think those spaces allow you to like act that way. You know, in other spaces we code switch or change, do all these other things, but to practice being, say, sit with one another mm-hmm. <affirmative> and like really being aware of those things, like, you need this, I wanna give this to you. You know? Exactly. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Exactly. Speaker 5 00:19:01 Well, I think it's been really amazing to kind of see like a wave of a lot of like indigenous peoples coming back to their ways. I think colonization has done so much damage and I've seen a lot of like this younger generation coming back through the curiosity of like the medicines, um, traditional medicines and how to use them and how to to grow them. And so I think like for instance, just me being able to show my five year old like how to smudge or how to use like the actual medicine, um, in the proper way has been really satisfying to me. But I think like I've met so many young indigenous people who have been kept from their traditional beliefs and traditional ways, whether that be through colonization directly or through religious, um, um, reasons and missing out on many traditions that they should be entitled to. Speaker 5 00:20:04 But being dissuaded by religion itself, um, I've, I feel like a lot more, um, indigenous youth are sharing those types of stories. And I think the gardens have been ways to like reconnect with the ways of knowing, um, and a path back to tradition in ways as an adult you can freely do and express. Whereas a lot of, um, these youth or young adults had like, been suppressed from that, whether through like a parent or whether through like an adoptive system where they weren't able to really practice their traditional beliefs. I think that's been really powerful and that's been incredible to see. So I think like other indigenous gardeners showing the next generation the way forward has been really powerful and just new ways of doing things that it doesn't have to be a huge garden. It can be as simple as a single pot in your house and start with that and start with that medicine. Speaker 5 00:21:04 Um, I think social media has been really incredible for indigenous peoples in terms of learning and how to learn from another, whether you're on the different side of the world has been really incredible. Um, I know even just with experience with Jen and her working with a collective called Canoe Journey in Seattle of like, Hey, what, what is this like tea? How am I supposed to, like, they sent it to us and I'm like, how am I supposed to make it into tea? Like how much water? Like how much this or that? Do you guys have seeds? I really like this so I'd like to make it myself. So those types of things. So just reconnecting with, um, our communities and learning about other indigenous communities that I wasn't so familiar with has been really incredible. Um, I'm really grateful for that and just to be the ability to share what I do know or, you know, even just oral, um, storytelling of things that I remember like off of my father's reservation, being able to like stop at the side of the road and pick up Indian tea, take it home, dry it for the amount of time that was right and then, you know, make myself and my sisters a cup of tea. Speaker 5 00:22:18 Like that to me is just such a, an incredible memory. Like the smell itself, whenever I smell it now, I can see all those moments that have passed. So I really appreciate that. And I think like working with, um, other like elders and just those who already know the way they're not gonna be here forever. So I think gaining that knowledge has been really, uh, incredible and I'm just, uh, grateful for that and continue to share as much knowledge as I have with anyone that I may connect with, but also with my son. So I Speaker 4 00:22:56 Really love that. Mm-hmm. Well I think it's turning into like, you know, this panel and this discussion about kinship and relationships. Um, anybody who has actually come willingly to that space has been so respectful. They understand, um, the things that we need and required to go on in a good way. Um, a lot of us are displaced from our families, you know, living in these urban environments from our homelands from the medicine that grows there. The soil here is very different to a lot of the traditional foods that would grow and nourish us, um, and also connect us back to our identities and who we are, um, especially for our children. Um, and I think we're just in that time when we really crave that medicine, um, it's been taken from us, but there are so many ways that we can just be the work for ourselves and to facilitate that. Speaker 4 00:23:59 It hasn't been easy, um, because of personal things, you know, like everyone who's involved in the garden right now, like we're all going through so much just like I imagine everybody else. Um, but sticking with that medicine and however it grows into that, um, I think we're just being really flowy and forgiving and not pushing things. Um, and just really honoring where we're at and really understanding and being so grateful to the land for being patient with us. You know, we haven't really grown very much there. Um, there were a few things, but that was a big disappointment cuz we had like all these big ideas coming into it. Like, this is what we want now, this is what we need now. But we've been humbled because of all these outside forces and influences that kind of prevent us from being who we are and what we want to do. Speaker 4 00:25:02 Um, we're just realizing that it's okay and it's taking some time. There are other things that we wanna be in relationship with besides the plants that teach us, the plants that teach us how to be in relationship with one another and everybody's needs and how they come together. So it's kind of like family. It's going back to these traditional teachings like in our way the Hogan is our universe. Um, we have different relatives that circle around that fireplace and there are no rooms in our Hogans. And so in that way I'm like, in my family, I'm able to see the pains, the struggle, the needs, the love, the care. I'm aware as a relative of what's going on with each individual. And I, I think about that structure with the garden too. And whoever comes in, like, what's going on in your life? Like, I want to support that. I want to, and the garden's here to help nourish you. What kind of medicine do you miss? Please? Like, I invite you to just like grow that there you have that sovereignty. I want it to be that space for it. And, um, I really hope it grows into it. I don't think it's a lot to ask for. Um, but yeah, we just really want a beautiful safe place to gather and have ceremony. We want sweat lodge there. We wanna be surrounded by our medicine, um, and just come in and be ourselves. Speaker 2 00:26:44 The panel particularly shared some personal stories of how community gardens have helped with processing grief and other traumas. Speaker 6 00:26:54 As I mentioned before, margarita, she was, uh, one of the founders for Yuba sec, which is the Utah Pacific Islander Civic. We can engage in coalition, which is a connected heavily with our, we're all connected with the health coalition and we don't grow, um, in all four seasons. We're very tropical. And so when you go to the garden, there's a raised, um, garden bed and you'll see some tropical flowers there. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, and thank you for, for healthy roots, um, bringing that. Um, and that space brings a lot of self care, just a place to reflect, to bring peace to process grief, um, just not only for our family members, but also the community. So when we talk about these spaces, that's what, what it has provided for us. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Speaker 7 00:27:49 Our old folks have been watching the Stars this past, uh, this week, Wednesday, just a couple days ago. Um, the mat, which is an important constellation that marks our harvest season, um, rose for the first time this year at Sunset, which means that next Thursday, which is the New Moon after the rising of mat is our new year. This is our harvest and our, our bountiful season. Um, it doesn't look like it here in Utah, but in Samoa and in Toga and other places in the Pacific, they're celebrating their first fruits festival next Thursday. And I'm really happy and grateful for our partners here that we'll be doing the same in this very building and out here, uh, watching the New Moon and the Stars rise next Thursday or next Wednesday, right. And, um, presenting those fruits. And so, uh, we present them to our families, to our chiefs, to our ancestors, including Rita, uh, who we, uh, she's an ancestor now. Speaker 7 00:28:45 We'll be presenting to her. And, um, that's my, actually my favorite part about the gardening is that the plants teach us, the plants in our culture are, they have stories, they have genealogies, um, there are certain vegetables that are, are ancestors that we descend from. And it's cool to work with these kids at the Granite School District and, and teach them not just about the nitrogen cycle and all these cool, you know, biological photosynthesis, um, but also remind them like, well, we have an actual connection. Our genealogy links us to these plants and they nourish us, not just physically, but spiritually. And that's what we're trying to do on a small scale. We're, Speaker 4 00:29:28 Um, we got a good amount of money. Um, and our goal with the grant, because we do a lot of, um, missing and murdered work or responding to that violence, um, we wanted to do, first of all, that work is really hard. Um, and this relates to gardening. Gardening, being in community with your relatives who see you, who already understand you, who recognize you as a person, as a spiritual being without, um, these titles, um, without like these credentials, um, they're just our relatives, especially our youth and our elders and their caretakers and how they take care of, you know, that in between stage of those life periods. Um, we struggle a lot in our communities because of colonization. You know, it's given us a lot of violence to deal with in our bodies. We are also perpetuators of violence in ourselves, um, onto our relatives. Speaker 4 00:30:41 And we saw the Garden being a program for youth to connect with ancestral teachings as a violence prevention measure for sexual violence. And the big one, the umbrella one, um, which is missing and murdered violence and all those things, the displacement from land, um, research extraction, climate chaos, um, the domestic violence, the sexual assault, all these different things fit underneath missing and murdered violence. And so it's hard always responding to the crisis because it's ongoing, it's ongoing. Um, and so we really needed a place to just like be ourselves in that space. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, I needed that. I was in a place where I, you know, suffering from depression, suicidal ideations, feeling the pain, um, being re-traumatized by, um, you know, I lost my auntie, she was murdered. I have a relative here, Shannon Scott. Um, she's Kit Mat, so she's my father's clan or my great, uh, my grandfather's clan. Speaker 4 00:32:02 So we're relatives and I found her through the garden. Um, and we met there and we made that connection and she's my family. Sh um, Shannon Scott was murdered and she had two babies. Um, and like having those babies there and recognizing them, like getting down on the ground and looking at them and just like holding them, uh, that's like the hard, I know how hard it is. I know the manifestations of like that trauma and how it goes into like your life. I saw it with my sister Samantha. She was three months old when she lost her mother, and that's in her body. Um, and it's manifested into all these like other health things, food, um, whether our re relatives are responsive to it, you know, sometimes we can be like, oh, this will heal you, this will heal you. Yoga will heal you just being in the community or, um, growing something's gonna heal you. Speaker 4 00:33:06 Some people aren't at that place. Um, I'm not at that place a lot of the time. Like I don't have the energy to do that. Like, no, I need this things first. But the growing things and just being yourself, however you show up, however you're affected by colonization, however that you want to heal, um, that space should be for you. And making those connections is a huge safety net for our young ones especially. Um, I think it's really important to be aware of how they need to feel safe in a world that's getting really more chaotic and violent and confusing and encroaching in us in every single way. So establishing spaces that, one, it is like a distraction, but it's the best kind of distraction because it's returning back to our ways. Um, and we're adapting. We are indigenous people have adapted for time and memorial to our environments and to different relations. And I think in those ways, through prayer, we can really see together how to heal these things. Um, because we do embody so much knowledge and I think that needs to be recognized. We are the experts of our own realities and our hurts and our pains, and it should be us who, who guide that process. Um, so take a minute to digest everything. Speaker 2 00:35:04 De ended her remarks with a beautiful invitation to the Carry the Water Garden. And the other speakers must have shared how to get involved with Awes, Awei, people's Orchard and Garden, as well as the Healthy Roots program. Speaker 4 00:35:21 I like to see that anybody who wants to be a part of like the carrot of water, um, it's your garden that you do wherever you think that's gonna take care of you and your relatives. You're missing a medicine in your life and you wanna share the abundance of that. Like, please come grow that best space as yours to do it. Um, and just wanting it to be a safe space. You can go whenever you want to, like all ideas and all those things. And I think that's where we are at. Um, we did have a clear vision, but I think the capacity, personal things that came up, um, this past year, we've all gone through some crazy things, crazy hard, hard things. And so, um, how are we gonna show any in capacity like this, yours, the lens there. Um, and we love you all, um, and in being awareness of you and being in a relationship with you, like, uh, we're able to take care of each other our lives. So, and that's really important to me. Speaker 5 00:36:39 I mean, social media is great so you guys can follow the ooi. They have a Facebook page and then also an Instagram as well, and PDOs regularly plugs, um, their links on there. It's, I think it's Saturday mornings typically, or Sundays, Sunday, Sundays, sorry, that, um, volunteers can go and can be a part of the garden depending on what is going on during that season. Um, but yeah, everyone is welcome. You can find us on Facebook oii, um, garden, um, and oh, Speaker 4 00:37:14 I mean, it's like the OII Garden Speaker 5 00:37:15 And People's Orchard people, and it's actually not too far from here. It's, it's fairly close. Speaker 7 00:37:23 Our acronym for the Utah Pacific Islander Health Coalition is u p ihc.org, and that's the best place to reach us. Um, and also to learn about all the other great programming that we have outside of the Healthy Roots program. But we do, um, especially in the springtime, um, as we're distributing these seedlings that students have grown around the valley, uh, to upwards of 50 families. Right? We always appreciate volunteers on, on that plant distribution day. We don't have a great name for that, but, um, and yeah, if you have experience or you know, any tips for backyard gardening or small scale gardening, um, we're always, uh, looking for folks to help consult with as well. Speaker 4 00:38:05 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, Speaker 2 00:38:08 I want to end this episode by sharing my own gardening story, which was the first story I ever wrote for the podcast format back in July, 2020 as Angela and I were learning how to create podcasts. I hope you hear the residents I do. Between my story and the themes that our planting good relations panelists spoke about, including gardens as healing and feeding, as spaces of processing intergenerational trauma and other forms of colonial violence. My mom was born in Hawaii when it was the territory. She was six years old when Hawaii became a state in 1959. Many Americans might think of Hawaii as only a beautiful vacation destination. However, the Hawaiian Kingdom was an internationally recognized independent country before a cadre of white American and British settlers overthrew the Hawaiian government in 1893. The US Federal Government, though they did not initially sanction, the overthrow officially annex Hawaii in 1898 and Hawaii became an official US territory in 1900, which is the same status Puerto Rico has today. My mother's grandmothers were fluent in the Hawaiian language, but especially after Hawaii became a state, they only spoke in Hawaiian to each other. My mother's father asked them not to speak to his children in Hawaiian so that they would grow up speaking good English Speaker 2 00:39:40 During the pandemic. Like many others, I have found solace in gardening. My daughter was six months old when the pandemic started, and the isolation and sleep deprivation of those early days with the newborn was compounded by the inability of any of our family to travel to see us and help you like the water. Now, it helped being able to take my daughter outside and sit her on a blanket in the shade while I weed the garden and checked for ripe tomatoes. Speaker 8 00:40:10 <laugh>, Speaker 2 00:40:12 Another solace of the pandemic has been taking Hawaiian language classes online from the University of Hawaii at Manoah. I live in Utah, so there are no Hawaiian language classes I can go to here often. Now I weed my garden while listening to an assigned Hawaiian language recording. I think about how learning a language is a practice, a constant practice that must be attended to again and again, just like gardening and weeding. There is some peace for me in trusting the need to practice to show up again and again, even or especially when it is hard and there are no guaranteed results. Maybe a bird will eat these strawberries. Maybe the squash plant won't grow. Maybe I will forget this word. Maybe my pronunciation is horrible today. All I can do is keep practicing, keep tending the plants that are here. One of my Hawaiian language recordings is about an elder Hawaiian woman talking about her first time going to school. She remembers her first day of school when the teacher calls her during roll call, but she doesn't answer because she doesn't recognize her English name when she doesn't answer, the teacher slaps her. She's shocked and turns around to another student, a Japanese girl. She asked her in Japanese, what does this teacher want? Speaker 2 00:41:41 The Japanese girl answers in Japanese and she too is slapped by the teacher. There are so many stories like this from Hawaiian, people who grew up in the territorial period. Hawaiian language was banned in all schools, essentially from the time of the overthrow and officially through the 1980s around the time that Hawaiian language immersion schools started. Speaker 2 00:42:20 My current research looks at the institutions that were called training schools or industrial schools, but were effectively prisons for Native Hawaiian and other children of color in Hawaii. During the territorial period, children were sent to these institutions officially for committing crimes. The most frequent charges for boys were petty theft and truancy for girls sexual immorality, which could mean anything from they were seen associating with boys to they were pregnant out of wedlock before their rival of Western missionaries. Native Hawaiians did not adhere to a monogamous legalized forms of marriage. My ancestors value gender complementarity rather than patriarchal hierarchy. These training schools then worked effectively to forcibly assimilate native Hawaiians into white American cultural norms, including norms around gender and sexuality. Children were often kept at these institutions for years at a time until they became adults or the girls. For the girls when they married. Social scientists blame native Hawaiian's, families, backwardness and stupidity for not being able to raise their children. Right. Speaker 2 00:43:41 At these training schools, which were located in rural spots distant from the perceived ills of urban Honolulu, the children were required to work in the gardens and dairies on the school grounds that provided most of the food for the institution. The boys additionally were hired out to nearby sugar and pineapple plantations effectively without pay. I wonder what they thought about this work of producing food either for themselves or for export, if it was ever a solace to them to carefully tend to a plant or if it just reminded them of how much they miss the care of their families. Speaker 2 00:44:25 Today the site of the Girls School in Kailua remains a Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, and perhaps fittingly, some of the ruins of the boys school at Wyle have been turned into an illicit skate park. The North Shoreland trust is also working to restore the low ecolo, the terraces where the terra was grown at the boys school kalo and its smashed fermented form. Poi was the traditional staple of the Hawaiian diet, so much so that our word forward to eat. I also means poi. My daughter and I were not able to visit Hawaii where my mom still lives this summer because of the ongoing pandemic, but has they work in her garden? I think about these intertwined practices of caring for plants, language, and children. My daughter is now two years old, almost three, and she does not have an English name already. Her daycare teachers want to call her something else. Sometimes I will always correct them. <unk> Her name is Lil Noy. Speaker 2 00:45:42 Our theme song is Lift Me Up by Haum. Special thanks to our panelist, Dene Shandin, Lucia Saini, Michelle Brown de Ero, and Jake Ptc. Manu Jr thanks to our hosts of the Tracy Aviary, Jordan River Nature Center, CEO Tim Brown, co-directors Marissa Beckstrom and Daniel Hernandez and other Nature Center staff. Our thanks also to Kaylen Vaughn Paul for and Lo life Pope for organizing this event with us. Also, we thank our sponsors, the Mellon Foundation, the University of Utah's School for Cultural and Social Transformation, and the University of Utah's College of Humanities. This has been relations of salt and stars with hosts Miley Artman and Angela Robinson. Follow the University of Utah Pacific Island Studies Program on Instagram at U of u. Pi. Scholars mak for listening. Join us next time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is Part 2 of our episode about gardens: what they teach us, the medicine they offer, and the connections they allow us to make between the lands we live on and our homelands.

# data[].attributes.body
"This episode (which is part 1 of 2) explores stories of gardens: what they teach us, the medicine they offer, and the connections they allow us to make between the lands we live on and our homelands. Angela shares her own story of gardening, and we also share some highlights of our recent event, Planting Good Relations, which featured a panel discussion with a number of Native American and Pacific Islander leaders who steward community gardens here in the Salt Lake City area."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Episode Transcript

[The following transcript was automatically generated. We are working on correcting it but wanted to post it ASAP for best accessibility.]  Our ancestors traveled through salt and stars and so do contemporary Pacific Islander communities. Today in this podcast, we consider how to build good relations with the communities we come from in Oceania, the communities we live with here in the Salt Lake City area, and especially the indigenous communities whose lands we. As Pacific Islander people who live in Utah, we are nourished by the lands of the Ute, Goshute, Shoshone and Paiute peoples. We are far from the ocean, but close to the saltwater of the great Salt Lake. We are far from the night sky over our home islands, but can look up and see the same stars. Join us as we explore and build relations of salt and stars. Relations of Salt and Stars is a new podcast produced by the Pacific Island Studies Program at the University of Utah, and hosted by faculty members Dr. Angela L. Robinson, who is Chuukese, and myself, Dr. Maile Arvin. And I'm Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiian. With the name Relations of Salt and Stars, we invoke the ties historically forged between the Pacific Islands and Utah, as well as the ones still in formation. Welcome back. This episode split into two parts, explores stories of gardens, what they teach us, the medicine they offer, and the connections they allow us to make between the lands we live on and our homelands. Maile and I will each share our own stories of gardening. And we will also share some highlights of our recent event, planting Good Relations, which featured a panel discussion with a number of Native American and Pacific Islander leaders who steward community gardens here in the Salt Lake City area. This land is Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone Land. None of us are of these peoples. We all have homelands elsewhere. As we talk and think about gardening this land, we hope to come into better relation with these peoples and this. As you'll hear, many of our panelists are doing this work by offering medicine grown in these gardens to the community, and by creating space for indigenous youth and families to find healing nurturance or to just be. In this episode, we highlight and offer brief responses to some of our favorite insights panelists shared. The whole panel offered so much love and wisdom to everyone present that we had to separate this episode into two parts. So you're listening to the first part, which I, Angela am leading, and Maile will lead the second part. You can watch a video of this panel or listen to the full audio of the panel on our YouTube page, the Pasifika Archive with the handle, the Pasifika Archive 2650. Please check out the full bios and links to our panelists, organizations in the show notes of this episode to learn more about their work and how you can support it. You'll hear from Denae Shanidiin from the Carry the Water Garden, Dee Platero and Michelle Brown with the Pandos Three Sisters Garden at the Og Woi People's Orchard and Garden. Lusia Satini from the Utah Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Coalitions, Margarita Satini Mural and Garden, and Jake Fatisemanu Jr. With the Healthy Roots Program from the Utah Pacific Islander Health Coalition. Here the panelists introduce themselves and. That's gay. Everyone, my people, my relatives. It's beautiful to see so many faces. My name is Deshaun Dean. I am born to the Deni Nation, otherwise known as the Navajo Nation. And that lineage is through my mother on my father's side. For my clan, for my mother is Were the ones who walk around clan. And I'm also born to the Korean race. So I have that on my father's side. My grandfather, it's Clarine. It's Tini, and my father's father is the Launa White, the community. I started a garden called Carry the Water. It's located like a Rose Park area. It's about one less than one acre. The origin of the garden started with a black relative, a black queer relative who really, from their core, understands how to be in good relation. , based on all the traumas that we experience. Shared traumas, individual traumas. And then also she ha or they had a connection to a white woman who actually works at the u Libby Haslam. She did is on the board of the Design Build Buff program. So we know that Libby had connections with the indigenous communities, and I know that they built a lot down in Bluff, Utah. Working with Navajo students and trying to do like traditional building practices. So we really trusted, like when you're entering those relationships with white people, you're like, okay, how do I navigate this? But she had this plot of land that she's not using for quite some time and indefinitely, like the plan is to return that stewardship over that land to. community to the Bipo community, to the indigenous community. And so that is, that's still in the process. And I think that will take like years to come to see what like that actually turns into, whether we can actually reclaim that for ourselves if we have to buy it back for ourselves. But right now we are blessed to steward this land, get to know it and. right now, like the garden has started for about a year. We've run into some there's been so much support with community. I think that people are really starting to realize right now how important it's to support the indigenous communities, especially, the air that we're breathing right now. All the stuff that's going on and how it affects our bodies, these industrialized societies, it all reflects in our bodies, our minds, our spirits, the noise not having a safe space just for indigenous people. And so I think that's what we, those are our values to begin with. Hi all. I'm Dee Pitero. I am born for Edge of the Water clan and my mother is from Pioneer Settl. So my paternal side is from, I'm a tribal member of the Navajo Nation as well. So I'm I've lived in Utah for my whole life, so I like to say I've traveled around the state a little bit. Lived in southern Utah and northern Utah, and I've loved every bit of it. So I love the Red Rock and I love the mountain. and I just love being outside, enjoying the nature here. It's a very special place to me because it has a lot of familial or roots for myself on both sides of my family. . But I'm here from the PDOs organization and that has brought me a lot of community and also a chance to express interests through my indigenous like interests as well. Everyone. I am also Navajo from my father's side and Panamanian from my mother's side. My father was raised in two gray hills, New Mexico. I was lucky enough to live on that land for a short time and also visit as often as I possibly can. I work with Pandas as well, and I'm the current chair of Murdered and missing Indigenous relatives. and we work really closely with the Oii Garden here in Salt Lake City. The OII has been a wonderful place to be able to have the Three Sisters garden. What's really incredible about that and then working so closely with murder Missing Indigenous relatives as well. Is that what we do is ensure that like the medicine that is grown there is available to the community. We actually have founders of the Oak opioid here with us today in the audience. Tom and d they have put their life blood into the garden, and of course it's a community space. And having that designated plot to grow medicine and to access that and offer that to families has been insurmountable so much. And I know that we always have some bag of plants with us of whether it's sweet grass or sage or any other sacred medicine. And having that plot and having the relationships with the community has been really incredible. My name is Lucia Saini, and I am in connection. She mentioned Awe. So I'm bring that I was asked to be here on behalf of a family member. So we have a mural that sits at the awe garden. I love how she shared. about the mural and the event. So when I think about what kind of events or what kind of work we've done we do a lot of, she mentioned networking, collaborating healthy roots. When she talks about there's not space or land they've donated plot. where just with our j o youth program, the kids were able to learn about nourishment and nutrition and adding that part into just their lifestyle. And then as I mentioned before, margarita, she was one of the founders for yusak, which is the Utah Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Coalition, which. connected heavily with our, we're all connected with the health coalition and we don't grow in all four seasons, we're very tropical. . And so when you go to the garden, there's a raised garden bed, and you'll see some tropical flowers there. , And thank you for Healthy Roots bringing that. Thank you. everyone. I'm Jacob Jr. I'm here on behalf of the Utah Pacific Islander Health Coalition. And when we speak up we're born, we typically refer to the place where our umbilicus is buried. And so my umbilicus is buried on the island of Take Maui in a place called ua. More commonly known as New Zealand, but my mom's family is has roots in Hawaii as well as China and Korea. And my dad is from Samoa. So that's where this gorgeous mix comes . Very blessed, blessed and honored to be here with this with my sisters here on this amazing panel and I'm looking forward to learning. Healthy Roots is a program that we've been running through the Pacific Islander Coalition for almost six years now, and it started with a pretty selfish self-serving motive, which was our foods are sometimes hard to get here, and when they do get here, they've survived weeks on a ship and sometimes they're not that great or they're coated in wax. And they're expensive. And and which is why our people eat a lot of canned foods actually, and preserved foods. And that's not great for nutrition in the end. And that's not what our ancestors ate. That's not our indigenous food waste. And a few. Of us really wanted to just try it here. We knew the growing season was short, as was mentioned. We knew the soil was different than the composition, so we nerded out and we went out and said, who can help us? And we called into gardening shows. We got folks from Utah State Master Garden Program to help us. We went to our own elders in the community who know how to grow these things back home and started pretty small scale with about three families. And the next year that turned into. and the next year turned into 25 and the next year we had a commitment with or contract with Wasatch Community Gardens, which was now giving us space cuz a lot of our folks live in the urban areas or apartments and don't have that space. And then we started taking it to people's backyards. And long story short, this summer this year we had 52 families that were engaged in this. And they're not only growing tomatoes and corn and the great things that are meant to grow here or that have been growing here in this. But we're growing tarot. We're growing tapioca, we're growing turmeric, we're growing banana trees, we're growing hibiscus, we're growing lau tea, we're growing sweet potatoes. Things that our people will eat because we don't eat kale and we don't eat celery and, some of these other things, . And not because they're not good, but because we're not familiar and then we don't have recipes already with these things built in. At least once a week I FaceTime with my mom and it's a rare occurrence if she isn't working in her garden. What are you tenting today? Pulling up to our IEA Heights home in Oahu over 30 years ago, she saw the beautifully manicured shrubs, small pines, plumeria. And decorative rocks. The former Japanese owners had lovingly cared for since the 1950s. Today, the front and backyards are still lovingly cared for, but the trees, plants, flora, and animals have changed dramatically. The Pua Kenny Tree leans over the rock wall of the driveway, pregnant with its sunshine, orange, sweet smelling flowers. The gardenias wild roses and banana trees lined the other side of the driveway. The puma tree is still there, but has entangled its branches with the guava tree, the favorite front yard tree of my childhood. When I would gather its small brown fruits into the front of my shirt, spread like a bowl and climb into the big Norfolk pine to savor them while looking out over the view of Pearl Harbor. Enter the backyard and the first creature to greet you will be Oliver Mama's 400 pound KU mix pig whose presence as our domestic pet is always causing some kind of trouble, whether it be the noisy baby PAH or wild boar who gather at the fence, separating the backyard from the mountain forest, and attempts to find refuge with him or when he makes a mess. Digging up the tasty roots. Mama just planted. Or when the neighbor is attempt to evict him from our home by calling animal control. Thankfully, he's just too big for anyone to move, so he remains our cherished squatter of the neighborhood. Hand him a cookie. Betty's best chocolate chip Macadamian are his favorite thanks to being my favorite, and he'll happily make his way back to his muddy red dirt corner of the backyard with the white ginger and Bird of Paradise. Across the yard, you'll find the sweet potato pumpkins, tarot peppers, and the breadfruit tree she planted just for me, in the center of the yard is our or as Hawaiians call it, or Engan. Umu our underground oven, hand dug and lined with stones by my uncle, where mama cooks Turkey fish, tarot, and breadfruit on special occasion. On the other side of the fence leading down into the Kau Al Valley are the huge 50 foot mango and leche trees whose shade we sit in on hot days and weave lay with the garden flowers. Nestled between them is a small patch of my cousin's tobacco plants, which he dries himself, then rolls into homemade cigarettes. The newest residents of the garden include the two varieties of mountain apple. One that birds the short biting, spongy apples, and the other with the longer juicy sweet apples. A favorite back home inuk and the ice cream bean tree. The seeds of which travel to Oahu with us in a gently wrapped damp paper towel from a recent trip to Hilo in making this space more familiar to her home and caring for it in the way our ancestors. My mother has transformed an orderly unblemished suburban plot into a wild, abundant enclave of Oceania memory and relationality, which the land seems to embrace and celebrate with. Its enthusiastic nurturance of these leafy, flowering, fruiting and snorting beings. When listening to our panelists, I'm reminded of these various plant relatives my mama has cultivated in her yard, nato. My mother and I are daughters of the Whito clan. Our clan's origin story begins with a plant. It is sad that long ago a chief was banking his rounds through the dense brush of our island Piar when he witnessed a woman growing out of a large grassy. From her Theto Klan was born. As many of our panelists discussed, plants go beyond a mere food source. They are ancestors and relatives relations in and of themselves. Through these shared relations with our plant relatives, we can come into better relation with each other. I also been thinking about plants, the soil. Plants that we see nowadays especially maybe in these areas oh, this plant's interesting. It's not from here, but it's beautiful. We're gonna plant it here. And that's done some damage with, the whole landscape as in the bigger picture with like invasive species. But I had a. A relative, a sister from the Chenga los band in California, and she was talking, there's a lot of invasive plants in California that take over their traditional medicines. But when she was talking about it, she talked about it in a way of empathy. These plants are also so very much. From their homelands and look at them, thrive and survive. And when I think about what it means for displaced relatives, even being like a climate refugee, so many of us are climate refugees. So many of our homelands have been destroyed. The radium. Water contamination. Like that Gold King mine that was built into the San Juan that ruined farming for years for our relatives. And so I think bringing in the medicine that you need in your space is like reclaiming that and also healing that part of you, that connection to home that you don't have access to, and that. It's like it hurts for everybody and I think there's like a beautiful grace in that, in like thanking the land, like you provide something for my traditional foods to grow and like really thinking it, like thinking the land for doing that for you. So it's really fascinating. I have recently, like since moving to Utah, I went from Alaska to New York and I lived in New York for seven years in the city. And then when I moved here to Utah, I decided I was gonna start committing to having plants again cuz there was no way out of Manhattan apartment I was gonna start growing anything and then having to move or something like that. So I committed to having a tree in my house and. . I've been cultivating that tree for probably three and a half years now and it's amazing that it's still alive. But I've also found that technology has helped me a lot in terms of trying to figure out how to keep this alive and it's this huge bird of paradise tree and. I, it's almost like too big for my place now at this point, but I feel really accomplished having done that and having learned about this particular plant and developing this emotional relationship with it. It made me sad when I saw like the, like little parasites starting to come out and I'm like, oh my gosh, what are we gonna do? The leaves are starting to wilt. And so through the years I've had to repot replant, it's been teaching me how to take care of it. S I feel like its size itself was unignorable for me. So it like taught me. I'm like, okay, I can't let this huge thing like die. I need to figure out what it needs from me. What do I need to do for it to keep it going? Cuz I want to keep it with me. Which it's crazy to think that you have such an emotional tie back to. to plants, but really as indigenous peoples, we know that, our ancestors saw ourselves not so different from them. And as a part of them, and as you pointed out as our ancestors themselves, a space where we come from that we're derived from. So I've developed this relationship with this plant and it's taught me so much, and I'm so grateful for that. I like to garden at this point. I don't think it was something. I was super interested in back in my early twenties, but when I was a kid, I remember the magic of it all and I feel like that magic is coming back to me. That interest is reignited and connecting with others and figuring out new possibilities, new things to grow and new ways of doing. So I feel incredibly grateful to that. Tie back to community and the ability to. outside of that and to invite people to know that's available to them. And just to share like as much knowledge as possible. It's, I for my own like home space, like I don't have a garden plot to plant anything, probably kill it anyways if I was doing everything on my own. But that's what's the beauty of having a community to teach you that I'm not used to this type of soil, like I said. I grew up in Alaska mostly, and so you put a seed anywhere and it just blew up in the summer. Because we have such a short growing season, but the soil hill here is really different, so it's amazing to see how much I've learned just like from community events, even at the water carry, the water garden as well. The community events there have been really impactful and I've attended a couple and just being able to eat and gather in that space has been really magical for. and transformative. I've only been here for probably a little over four years now, and becoming involved and connecting more with my community through these types of like events and programs and through the garden itself has been really like transformative and beautiful for me personally, especially since that's not something like I have at my house at home. I don't only land technically, so it's a cool escape to go to and then also share that with other. . What's also been really great too is the former chair, Jen, she has moved to Seattle, but she also has connected with gardening communities there. We've been working with coalition there called Canoe Journey and they've also been supplying US medicines as well and that we've been able to share with individuals here too. So just like building networks and I think that's really beautiful and. very rare, I feel like, in everyday life just to, to have that space in those types of relationships, to talk about plants and how they nourish us and also how they develop like relationships like one-on-one within the community. Say, why garden? So the first thing that came to my mind was it's the Pacific Islander way really is , our attire, if you see the clothing we wear , to celebrate, it's, you'll see bark, you'll see feathers, you'll see leaves. We wear it. We eat it. Land is everything to us. It's a time for us to. Even if I, I've been to Jake's house and he'll tell me like, whatever he's growing and I get excited. That's, but I'm like, it's a time to connect. Even I tell Chi Molly who's here we had the Sea Lass, which is the Tong and Bikers Club. They came and helped out, set up the community chef. Who would've thought bikers, club and gardening, right? . So it's a time to. . So I think connection when you talk about gardening, but I think it's just our Pacific Islander way to just garden. It's part of us who we are. We, like I said, we wear, we eat it. It's everything. Yeah. So with gardening, I think it, a lot of you mentioned how it provides a resource for us as a community. and the importance of sharing that even with our younger age community members, because of course the more generations here in the us they'll forget. They forget what it is like to live in the island and to understand what our foods are. He talks about canned foods. We didn't have sugar and flour. Those things weren't as not a norm in the Pacific Islander Diet. But the healthier foods, the tarot, the, tarot plants, the bananas. And so I think to maybe have a greenhouse that, and I always, I'll text Jake and say, Hey, these guys have a greenhouse. Because I underst. That the season, the climate is not, friendly for the food that we grow. And that's a dream to be able to see that. And if I get add on that, we're such humble people, so much has been taken away from us. So anything that we are given, we're just like, thank you. But that is not too much to ask for. I want the tallest, biggest greenhouse bringer community. They're taking notes over there. Those are the bosses over there, . No, I'm serious. Yeah. If this can happen with that much money that can happen and should happen, like I know my partners Kanaka, having that abundance is doing something and sharing it. It's just, it's the way that you all operate. Yeah. And it's beautiful. And I want that for you guys here because you are such beautiful community members and you too take care of everyone. And you think about all the indigenous relatives here and you include them in that process. And I personally feel your gratitude and that respect and walking in a good way here. We all come from different places. This might not be my land or, but. We share this space together and yeah, I want good things for you guys that way. Thank you so much. I don't know for me, myself I think about how growing up I didn't necessarily have the education I wanted, outside or having teachers or elders to guide me, but I have an opportunity. . And so I think about the seventh generation, what can I do for, being a matriarch, I guess in my family? What can I do for my nieces and nephews? What can I do for their children? And it always comes back to gardening. I'm, I feel fortunate because my mother was a horticulture agent for the county growing up, and I wish I had all of her knowledge, but I definitely don't. My grandmother and grandfather. We're farmers and same on my fraternal side. So I just feel like no matter what I do with my life, as long as I am indigenous, wherever I am, I will leave a lasting impact on all of my relatives. And that's the kind of person I want to be. So through land and through that connection, like I hope I can lead a small little imprint here and wherever bright. Last year in an anti way writing retreat led by Yakima Scholar, Michelle Jacob. She asked us to meditate on a beloved place that brings feelings of warmth and peace. The first place that came to my mind was my mama's backyard surprised me. Our home has not always been a place of. I spent the majority of my adolescence looking out over the city, fantasizing about running away, or asking friends parents to drop me off on a side road. Too ashamed to let them see our overground yard busted, but still in Use outdoor furniture and garage turn makeshift kitchen where my cousins use the yard hose in the driveway to wash the dishes and kerosene stoves to make aala paua with a delicious sweet coconut dumpling. Or Alon p a Hardy pumpkin rice stew with coconut milk. But that morning I meditated on all of those things that brought me embarrassment as a teenager, all of those things that my mama had worked so hard to nurture and cultivate, all of those things that made me ch, and they brought me peace. My Mama's Garden teaches growing beyond borders, welcoming, unexpected. And finding relations among the various beings that call a place home, especially the original inhabitants of that place. As our panelists discussed, gardens, our powerful tools, teachers and bears of indigenous knowledges. I just wanna know, do anyone have indigenous teachers growing up, like K through. Yeah, me neither. Okay, so one person, I'm already jealous, , but I, what has been really impactful to me about the garden or, what Tom has provided us, where we have an opportunity to do this is learn and practice like indigenous teachings, which I didn't have the space before. And even if I had, my own space at home, it's not the same. It's bringing together as a. Braiding sweetgrass together and learning. How about just these plants that we're growing is really beautiful. That's my, actually, my favorite part about the gardening is that the plants teach us, the plants in our culture are, they have stories, they have genealogy. There are sorts and vegetables that are our ancestors that we descend from. And it's cool to work with these kids at the Granite School District and teach them not just about the nitrogen cycle and all these cool, biological photosynthesis but also remind them like, bro, we have an actual connection. Our genealogy links us to these plants and they nourish us, not just physically, but. And so we do have to work with greenhouses with the Granite School District. We have a contract with their GTI program where their young students in GTI are growing the seedlings in December, January, February, March, so that by the time we can plant them around Mother's Day. They're already big and strong. We can put 'em in the ground and they can last and we can harvest. Our old folks have been watching the stars this past this week, Wednesday, just a couple days ago. The mat, which is an important constellation that marks our harvest season rose for the first time this year at Sunset. Which means that next Thursday, which is the New Moon after the rising of mat, is our new year. This is our harvest and our bountiful season. It doesn't look like it here in Utah, but in Samoa and in Toga and other places in the Pacific. They're celebrating their first fruits festival next Thursday, and I'm really happy. And grateful for our partners here that we'll be doing the same in this very building and out here watching the New Moon and the Stars rise next Thursday or next Wednesday, and presenting those fruits. we present them to our families, to our chiefs, to our ancestors. don't even know if they were called gardens. Like when I go back to thinking about how my people grew food, I wasn't a garden. It was it. The connection to the season, the stars how we pray with our corn, Poland how we bless our young ones, how we communicate with the holy people and all these plants, relatives who like teach us things who really, when you're in pain or you're grieving, there is a certain medicine that has a certain teaching. that really eases like your heart and your spirit and it nourishes and you also can see it when, like you gift it to somebody else. When you minister that medicine to somebody else. I feel like from the earliest memory I have of actually like planting something and watching it grow, it's almost like it's teaching you about what's gonna happen to you itself, like the cycle of your own life. In a smaller, like more visible way. I think just the observation of it is really remarkable and fascinating, but just to a reminder that everything has its season and there are cycles to everything. I think you see some of the seeds that don't come up and do not grow and that fail. And I felt a lot of that failure because I am not super good at gardening. And so I feel grateful for those who have taught me better ways of doing. But I think, like I've seen a lot of seedling failure for me, and it reminds me about something about us as human beings that, some of us cannot. And some of us do, and we have our, our fruits that we bear and, eventually we will die as well. And so I think there's something really spiritual about that type of knowledge being taught to you in a non-verbal way. Yeah. As I mentioned, I stumbled across gardening quite accidentally not intentionally. And now I see it as y gardening. I see it as such a powerful. tool for pedagogy and learning. And now that I have little kids and I realize that I'm not getting younger, I feel this sense of urgency to pass on whatever I had gleaned from my parents and grandparents and what I continue to learn. And we learn in pedagogy, right? That there are folks who are visual learners and auditory learners and tactile learners. And the more of those different contexts we can present information. the better. Hopefully it will stick with students. And so with my kids and I, when I say my kids, I mean everybody's kids. , whoever's participating around us. I have learned that gardening like touches on everything because you're hearing the wind rustling through, you're seeing things grow. You're touching the soil and the seeds, and you're harvesting and you're tasting, right? You don't get that from flashcards. You can't taste well, you could taste the flashcards, , but you're using all the senses. And not only that to what my sisters have mentioned, there's a spiritual connection to it, right? And not in terms necessarily of religiou. Fervor. But I think that's one that as professional educators, we don't talk about a lot. We talk more about, the auditor, auditory and visual and tactile and interpersonal connections. But I think gardening touches on all of our senses and also connects us to the things that are not seen and are intangible. And for me, that's why I see gardening is working. We're passing on stories as well as scientific knowledge and a little bit of school stuff here. . But it's a way that presents that material to young folks and old folks and adults in a way that touches all the different senses and also touches the soul. There's so many cool ways to integrate indigenous knowledge and into the, into what we're trying to do with our little garden program. But I, for me, I think one of the coolest results I guess, of this. Reestablishing connections that are intergenerational. . And so having, really young kids learning from grandparents or great-grandparents who have living memory of growing these things in the islands that we don't necessarily have, and even though the context is different here, reestablishing, that connection to me has been really rewarding to see. Because the reality is, as immigrant peoples, when we come here we seek e. Outside of our community because we're new here. And so if we are looking for, to get into college or to get a home loan, or, if you're the first generation coming the people at your sides are asking the same questions. And so we go outside and then we almost put folks on a pedestal because we're grateful for the help that they've given us and the expertise that they have. And sometimes that comes at the detriment of acknowledg. and honoring the expertise and the intellect and the , the wonderful depth of knowledge that we have in our own families and in our own communities because we've, we've relied on that expertise from outside, so at least with gardening that's been a really cool thing to see. And CIA shared a story of one of Rose Park gardening sites, even that individuals who weren't even part of that group, of that was the formal. Notice these plants growing in the com, as they drive by and, they'd see people out there who weren't part of the group, but they wanted to help and they were watering, or they were just sitting in the shade and just admiring these, reminders of home and then being able to work with the youth and be like, OHS, why are you guys doing that? You need to do it like this. And those kinds of things. I think that integration has or that experience has been really, I've met so many young indigenous people who have been kept from their traditional beliefs and traditional ways, whether that be through colonization directly or through religious reasons and missing out on many traditions that they should be entitled. but being dissuaded by religion itself I've, I feel like a lot more indigenous youth are sharing those types of stories. And I think the gardens have been ways to reconnect with the ways of knowing and a path back to tradition in ways as an adult you can freely do and express, whereas a lot of. These youth or young adults had been suppressed from that, whether through a parent or whether through an adoptive system where they weren't able to really practice their traditional beliefs. I think that's been really powerful and that's been incredible to see. So I think like other indigenous gardeners showing the next generation the way forward has been really powerful and just new ways of doing things that it doesn't have to be a huge garden. It can. as simple as a single pot in your house. And start with that and start with that medicine. I think social media has been really incredible for indigenous peoples in terms of learning and how to learn from another, whether you're on the different side of the world has been really incredible. I know even just with experience with Jen and her working with. Collective called Canoe Journey in Seattle of Hey what is this? Like tea? How am I supposed to they sent it to us and I'm like, how am I supposed to make it into tea? Like how much water? Like how much this or that? Do you guys have seeds? I really like this, so I'd like to make it myself. So those types of things. So just reconnecting with our communities and learning about other indigenous communities that I wasn't so familiar with has been really incredible. I'm really grateful for that and just to be the ability to share what I do know, or, even just oral storytelling of things that I remember like off of my father's reservation. Being able to stop at the side of the road and pick up Indian tea, take it home, dry it for the amount of time that was right and then, make myself and my sisters a cup of tea To me is just such a, an incredible memory. Like the smell itself. Whenever I smell it now, I can see all those moments that have passed. So I really appreciate that and I think like working with other like elders and just those who already know the way, they're not gonna be here forever. So I think gaining that knowledge has been really incredible and I'm just grateful for that and continue to share as much knowledge as I have with anyone that I may connect with, but also with my son this idea of sovereignty and self-sufficiency. , and again, I know that our garden is still small, but those are the kinds of principles I think about. . Another big thing that's always in my mind is always climate change. And no matter what kind of avenue I seem to go down, whether it's, social justice, human rights, all these big kind of things that are coming, I always come back to gardening as the solution. And I think the experts in our gardening space are indigenous people cuz they've had the most experience over time and land and wisdom. Yours that they have that knowledge. So to me, it just makes sense that we need to remember or connect with however you see that in yourself. In part two of this episode, Milee will share her story of gardening and highlight the wisdom our panelists shared on healing, grief, medicine and home. In the meantime, what have you learned from Gardens? Our theme song is Lift Me Up by Hadum. Special thanks to our panelists, d Shandin, Michelle Brown De Platero, Lucia Sini, and Jake Fati Mono, Jr. Thanks to our hosts at the Tracy Aviary, Jordan River Nature Center, CEO O Tim Brown, co-directors Marissa Beckstrom and Daniel Hernandez and other Nature Center staff. Our thanks also to Kayani, Yvonne UA and Laura. For organizing this event with us. Finally, we thank our sponsors, the Mellon Foundation, the University of Utah's School for Cultural and Social Transformation, and the University of Utah's College of Humanities. This has been relations of salt and stars with hosts Miley Arvin and Angela L. Robinson for listening. Join us next time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This episode (which is part 1 of 2) explores stories of gardens: what they teach us, the medicine they offer, and the connections they allow us to make between the lands we live on and our homelands.

# data[].attributes.body
Leah Penniman talks about her community-based training farm and how they dealt with contaminated soil in urban farming before they built this current farm. She also talks about soil testing methods, indigenous knowledge, why and how Soul Fire Farm was created, the history of discrimination against Black and Indigenous farmers and regenerative farming practices.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Colleen: Since this episode aired, new research has highlighted the urgency of correcting a long history of discrimination against Black farmers in the US. A study by my colleagues at UCS assessed US farmland consolidation, the phenomenon in which big farms get bigger, from 1978 to 2017. They found that in counties experiencing faster consolidation, the share of new farmers and young farmers declined faster. In the states with faster rates of consolidation, Black farmers are literally losing ground.

Of course, farming these days is a tough business, and Black farmers are faced with the same economic pressures that drive consolidation for all farmers. But systemic racism has amplified these pressures through discriminatory policies and laws.

Recently, a team of researchers across multiple universities including Texas A&M and Harvard law school put a dollar value on Black land loss in the 20th century. They found that Black families lost at least 14 million acres after 1910. And they estimated that what was lost between 1920 and 1997, along with the lost income from that land, would be worth around $326 billion today.

To help rectify this situation, members of Congress have introduced the Justice for Black Farmers Act. Provisions of this bill would end discrimination within the US Department of Agriculture, restore the land base lost by Black farmers, protect remaining Black farmers from further land loss, and forgive the USDA debt of Black farmers who filed discrimination claims against the department. The Union of Concerned Scientists is working with allies and partners to support this important and long overdue legislation.

And now, our original podcast with Leah Penniman which aired on Jan. 5, 2021.

Colleen: In the 1920s, roughly 14% of all farms in the United States were owned by Black people. Today that number is only 1%. The decline in Black farm ownership happened after decades of systemic discrimination from the USDA, which gave more subsidies to White-owned farms than they did to Black-owned farms.

The oppression in our food system also means that Black households face food insecurity at double the rate of white households. And it's not only an issue of quantity, but also of quality. Only 8% of Black people have a grocery store nearby, making it extremely difficult to find fresh local produce.

These are the issues that today's guest, Leah Penniman, is working to solve. When she struggled to find fresh food to feed her family in Albany, New York, Leah decided to start her own family farm. What began as degraded, eroded land, later bloomed into Soul Fire Farm, a co-op and nonprofit dedicated to equitable access to land and power in the food system.

Leah shares how she and her team restored their farm, and explains the regenerative techniques that are key to farming equitably and sustainably. We also talk about how regenerative farming compares to industrial agriculture, in terms of productivity, resilience, and sustainability. And we take a fascinating yet heartbreaking look at the unjust history of our food systems, and what we can do to help.

Colleen: Leah, it's such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Welcome.

Leah: Thank you for having me. It's truly an honor.

Colleen: So, you're the co-founder of Soul Fire Farm and author of the book "Farming While Black." There's so much historical context in the book that clearly centers, sustainable farming practices in African wisdom. And there's practical information about the economics of starting a farm to the science of building rich soil, the cultural practices, and the book is really steeped in how to heal the wrongs of systemic racism. So, I want to hear the origin story of Soul Fire Farm and how you went from teaching science in Albany and raising two young children to starting a farm.

Leah: Wonderful. Well, as you know, big projects have many origin stories, but one of them was that my partner, Jonah, and I were living in the South End of Albany, which is a neighborhood under food apartheid, that insidious system of segregation that relegates certain people to food opulence and others to food scarcity. And we were challenged to find fresh vegetables and fruits and whole foods for our then newborn and two-year-olds, and when our neighbors found out that we had over a decade each of farming experience, they started peer pressuring us to create a farm for the people. You know, a farm that would pull forth the bouncy of the earth and make it available to those who'd previously been excluded from access to these fresh, healthy, you know, culturally appropriate foods. And so that was the immediate impetus. We took really seriously this charge and started finding lands that would welcome us to call her home, and building from there. So, I will say that I've been a science teacher simultaneous to being a farmer for the past 20 years. It's only this last year that I've been able to, you know, leave the four walls of a classroom and have only one full-time job.

Colleen: Okay. So you've been doing both?

Leah: Yes.

Colleen: Wow. That's amazing. Wow. So, describe the farmland that you had to work with when you first showed up and, you know, how you transformed it into a prosperous farm.

Leah: Soul Fire Farm is located on 80 acres of mountainside land that's traditionally Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican territory outside of Albany, New York. And because we didn't have a trust fund or, you know, a whole lot of savings, we purchased land that we could afford which meant that it was heavily logged. It was degraded and eroded. The limited amount of fields were overgrazed and also overrun with brambles and invasives. So, we had quite a project on our hands. You know, there was no barn or driveway septic electric house, you know, any of the human habitat or infrastructure that you would need to start a farm. So, we spent from 2006 until 2010, just making the place habitable for our vision. You know, our home is a timber frame, straw-bale, cob, adobe, solar house that we built by hand. We had to create our own driveway, dig our own well, you know, build all that basic infrastructure from scratch.

Colleen: Wow. So, you're doing this on weekends or vacations and how many people are working with you?

Leah: Well, Soul Fire Farm started out as a family farm. So, it was my partner Jonah and I. He was out here most of the time. He ran a small, natural building company and would build someone's house and save up the money from that project, and invested into our land. And then the children and I would come out after school every day and also on the weekends and summers and vacations. So, it was us and our friends, our beautiful friends, you know, would come and lend a hand from time to time. But it wasn't until much later in the maturation of the organization around 2016 that we formed a community organization, both a co-op and a non-profit organization, built out of staff and volunteer base, and really expanded beyond that vision of a family farm to a community-based training farm.

Colleen: So, it sounds like the soil that you had to deal with was not optimal for planting. I mean, what were your thoughts when you put that first shovel in and realized what you had to work with.

Leah: Well, we've always had a naive and stubborn optimism. So, while farmers in the valley below and USDA officials would come out and say, "Oh, there's no way you can have a farm here. Maybe sheep, maybe logging, but certainly not vegetables and fruits." You know, we had come from a background of both rural and urban farming, and in our urban farming experience, we were working with soils that had so much lead in them that they would be classified as super-fund sites, I mean, I'm talking about as high as 11,000 parts per million in some areas. And we had formed a youth co-op that dealt with remediating leaded soils, building community gardens and farms in Western Massachusetts. So, the idea of thin topsoils really was not that daunting compared to, you know, a hazardous waste site that you're trying to convert into a community resource. So, we used some of those same techniques, you know, building up high levels of organic matter, building terraces, raised beds, no-till, using animals and cover crops to enrich the soil. And sure enough, you know, within a few years, we were able to see major change. As I imagine, your listeners know industrial agriculture certainly has an inverse effect on the environment where in just one generation of European colonizers taking the plow to the Great Plains, they had destroyed 50% of the organic matter. You know, half of the carbon was stripped of the soil and emitted into the atmosphere. And we inherited those post-colonial carbon levels of just a few percentage points organic matter. And now, regularly, measure between 10% and 12% organic matter in our soils after about a decade of investment in these regenerative techniques.

Colleen: So, one thing that I've always been interested in is how sort of traditional ecological knowledge and science are so closely aligned, but we ascribe sort of more seriousness to science and from reading your book, it seems like you kind of blend the two perfectly. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the section on soil testing, because I found that really interesting. There's, you know, you can send your soil out to be tested, or you can use some of the Indigenous soil testing practices. Can you describe both of those methods?

Leah: Absolutely. You know, I do think it takes western science some time to catch up to indigenous knowledge, but the seeds of that knowledge have been here a long time. So, one example is, you know, a very popular way that we analyze soil quickly in the field is something called the texture by feel test, where you pick up a ball of soil and you roll it around in your hand, you try to make a ribbon, you listen to it, and that determines the particle size of the mineral component of your soil. And in turn, its water-holding capacity, it's nutrient-holding capacity, how easy it is to work in the wet early spring, and so forth. Well, this idea of texture by feel actually originated amongst the Yoruba people in what is now Nigeria, West Africa. And they had a very sophisticated way of differentiating between the iyanrin, the sandier soils and the bullae, the more clay soils. And if you dig a little bit across West Africa and these indigenous soil testing methods, you find examples of people actually determining pH by taste. You know, how sour or sweet the soil taste can correlate to its level of acidity, which is very, very important in terms of how available nutrients are. Similarly, by color, folks were able to analyze the levels of organic matter. So, these technologies, you know, while Western scientists have gone and studied these ways that indigenous people analyze the soil and are shocked and surprised to see how 'accurate' it is, you know, as if Western scientists had a monopoly on accuracy. But I mention that because sometimes especially new and beginning farmers will get really intimidated by the idea of, you know, having to interpret all these numbers and letters and graphs on a soil test and remembering that most of what you need to know about your soil, you can do by digging a hole, counting the earthworms, checking how easy it is to spade doing an infiltration test. And so, alongside teaching folks how to analyze your cation exchange capacity, we also say be intimate with your soil, you know, and within five minutes of our soils class, you know, these beginners are able to tell us, you know, which of 10 soil samples would be best to grow vegetables just by looking, feeling, tasting, touching. And I think it's very important that we don't forget how to use our senses as we interact with the environment.

Colleen: Right. I liked the part where you were describing the class where you have sort of the three samples of soil. One was soil from when you first arrived at Soul Fire Farm, and then two other samples that were along the way, I believe. And, you know, it was very easy for students to tell right away that the soil that you started with was very depleted just by looking at it and touching it. And I think you even mentioned that a few of the brave students tasted the soil.

Leah: Yeah. Exactly. Well, we told them it was safe to taste and not all soils are safe to taste, but out here, you know, we've measured the lead levels and all of that are infinitesimal. But yeah, the soil, it was subsoil on top when we got here. And so, really light in color you know, fused together like a clay brick, no friability you know, no life really that you can see with your eye inside the soil. And so, you know, an amateur can pick that up just using their five senses.

Colleen: Yeah. I'm definitely not going to taste my soil here, right? I live on an old...it used to be a military site, so I don't think I'll be tasting my soil.

Leah: I agree with that intuition.

Colleen: Yes. So, tell me a little bit about some of the ways that you actually restore degraded soil. You talked about cover crops and other methods. So, what are some of the methods that you're using?

Leah: Oh, well, I feel like we cannot talk about restoring degraded soils without giving a major shout out to George Washington Carver of Tuskegee University in the late 1800s and early 1900s, who was one of the founders of regenerative agriculture. And he had this, you know, amazing foresight generations ahead of his time where he was noticing that monocropping of cotton was completely destroying the soils of the South and economic collapse wouldn't be far behind. And so, he got folks, you know, planting cover crops of legumes because as you know, legumes have this almost magical alchemy property where they collaborate with bacteria to trap atmospheric nitrogen in an organic form you know, making available this limited nutrient. But he also had people, you know, mucking out the swamps to build their compost piles, grazing their pigs on acorns in the forest. You know, a lot of things that sound familiar to us in the organic farming toolkit today. So many of these technologies that we use on the farm really mirror what Dr. Carver set in motion in the late 1800s. So, we certainly do use cover crops, which are you know, plants that you plant not to eat, but to feed the soil. So, our soil is always covered with something growing, whether that's a lovely nitrogen fixer, like clover or a pollinator attractor, like buckwheat or a biomass generator like sorghum-sudangrass. And then we don't till very much if at all, we've moved almost entirely to no-till, which means that instead of turning up the soil with heavy equipment and releasing a whole bunch of carbon into the atmosphere and turning the homes of this soil biology upside down, we're letting that soil structure stay intact and the carbon build over time in the soil.

We also do polycultures, which is this amazing idea that instead of just growing one crop at a time in a section or in a row, you actually plant crops that help each other out. The most famous example, probably being corn, beans, and squash or the three sisters, which is a Turtle Island indigenous technology, where the corn provides support for the beans, the beans fix nitrogen, and the squash provides a cover that suppresses weeds. But there are many other polycultures. In fact, there are dozens among the Yoruba people alone that we, to the extent that we're able, mimic and supplement those types of polycultures.

Colleen: So, you mentioned no-till, and to me, it's so counter-intuitive, and it's something that I've really struggled with just growing vegetables in my own garden. It's just so hard to get away from the idea that you have to plunge your shovel in and turn over the earth and break it all up.

Leah: It's true. It's true. I mean, breaking the ground is almost the metaphor for what it means to be a farmer, but the really cool thing...so something that has helped me with this, instead of saying no-till, you can say biological tillage because the worms and other soil biota actually do the work of mixing the soil, of aerating the soil, of creating soil structure. And it's not that you can never take a fork to your soil, but the impact of a spading fork is really different than a shovel in that you're creating these air channels, but you're not actually turning the whole house upside down. And the main way that we control weeds is through heavy mulching, not through rototilling. And so, you can use a giant silage tarp. You can use a biodegradable mulch like paper, straw, leaves. You can use temporary covers like landscape fabric, but that's the technique that we use to kind of smother from above rather than churning everything up as a way of removing the competitive volunteer plants.

Colleen: So, when you're covering from above, then you're kind of building your soil up rather than digging down into it.

Leah: Exactly.

Colleen: Interesting.
[Break]
Colleen: You mentioned in the book about when Hurricane Sandy hit and you feared that you were gonna lose all of your crops with the rain. So, can you tell that story because it was just really an interesting story about how these types of farming practices really offer more opportunity to be resilient when you have something like a massive storm?

Leah: Absolutely. So, Hurricane Sandy, this must have been, was that 2013? We got so much rain like everybody. And I remember this moment in the middle of the night when we heard, you know, what sounded like a truck crashing through the forest, and it wasn't a truck, of course. It was this wall of water just coming down through the woods straight towards our farm. So, we woke up our young children, you know, we all went outside with shovels to start digging trenches to divert the water away from the crop fields. You know, one of our most valuable crops is our garlic and there it was ripening and getting ready to harvest and we just knew that would be the end of it. So, luckily, we were able to divert to some extent, and we went back to sleep and waited for the morning to see the extent of the damage. And something that was so powerful is that because of the high levels of organic matter, because of the way that we had built beds on contour, so meaning that they slow the water down. There's these essentially ridges or trenches that are against the grade. And because we have raised beds and water is channelized, we saw very little damage to our crops, and not that we would celebrate in any way anyone else's losses, but it was really powerful that in our area, in our county, you know, farmers had lost all their topsoil. They had lost all their crops just washed into the river because, you know, they didn't have raised beds, they didn't have these high levels of organic matter, these protective forest cover all around. So, if we had any doubt at that time that this was, you know, a good way to go, that doubt was erased, and we kind of doubled down and started to do even better at implementing these regenerative and ancestral practices.

Colleen: From your experience working the land, is it realistic for larger-scale farms to use these practices? And I mean, I'm thinking again about the no-till practice.

Leah: Oh, absolutely. So, a couple of things just to step back on this question of scale, because I think that's one of the places where we really get stuck of, you know, can regenerative truly feed the world, and you know, what about yields, and how do you scale this up? What's the labor cost? And you know, I had the opportunity to work with a couple of researchers at the new school on this very question. And one of their most powerful findings among many was that if you look at yields within just the season, as you would imagine, conventional industrial, highly mechanized agriculture is going to outperform organic regenerative. However, as soon as they stretch the timescale to four or five years or more, time enough for climate chaos events like hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires, pest outbreaks, they started to see that that gap diminished over time because regenerative agricultural systems are much more resilient. They're biodiverse. They're able to respond to these uncertainties in weather and climate and ecology. They start to outperform.

Colleen: So, as you're teaching young farmers about the land and the traditions, the science, do you also talk about climate change?

Leah: Oh, of course. I mean, how can we not talk about climate change? I feel like, you know, to figure out how to stabilize the climate, it is the challenge of our generation. So, our goal is to inspire, equip, train the next generation of Black and Brown farmers who are practicing regenerative ag. And the way we quantify the success of regenerative ag is two-fold. One is how much carbon are we taking out of the atmosphere and putting back into the soil where it belongs and how much are we increasing biodiversity, both of native and cultivated species. So, that's the metric, right? The metric is how are we farming as well as who is farming? And this generation is so passionate about climate healing and climate justice, and very, very interested in these questions of, you know, if I add compost tea in June instead of July, how does that impact the biological life in my soil and increase the potential for sequestering carbon and so forth? You know, how do we reduce food miles? How do we reduce food waste? Which animals do we choose to put on our farm that have the least impact in terms of methane emissions and the least imported feeds? So, it is a conversation thread that just underpins everything that we do here at Soul Fire Farm.

Colleen: One of the programs that I found inspiring is the youth justice program. Can you tell me about that program?

Leah: Absolutely. So, we are really committed to inspiring that next generation of farmers, including the very young ones. And one of our most cherished programs is this week-long immersion for young people called LOL, which stands for Liberation On Land. And that's when young folks ages 13 to 16 come and learn the basics of farming, of cooking, of how to take leadership in their communities to make positive change. And it's infused with, you know, dancing, singing, art-making, getting connected to our ancestors and our spiritual traditions that maybe have been demonized or obscured. And one of the fun things about the LOL program is that we envisioned a new cohort, you know, each year. And after we finish the first year, you know, now four or five years ago, the young people looked at us and said, "Oh, we're not going anywhere. We're all going to be back here next year." So, we changed the model of the program so that we work with a cohort over three years, and then we kind of start fresh with another cohort and with the alumni being in a leadership role. And then, of course...

Colleen: That's great.

Leah: Yeah.

Colleen: It's kind of a fun problem to have, right?

Leah: It's a wonderful problem that the young folks are, you know, so excited about being part of the farm and being connected to this beloved community that they don't want to leave.

Colleen: What are some of the barriers to Black and Brown people in farming?

Leah: There are many barriers to Black and Brown people in farming as the entire food system in this nation is really built on a bedrock of theft of land and theft of labor. So, without going into all of those details, you know, essentially we're in a situation today where almost 98% of the rural agricultural land is white-owned, which is an all-time high in terms of racial concentration of ownership. And, you know, of course, we can trace that back to the theft of land from indigenous people, but also the theft of land and exclusion of other people of color. You know, as an example, in 1910, despite the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule black farmers had purchased almost 16 million acres of land and that was 14% of the nation's farms. Yet today, black farmers only own about 1% of the nation's farms, and that is not because of choice, that's because the U.S. Department of Agriculture systematically discriminated against black farmers and their lending practices. It's because the Klu Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups targeted black farmers with lynchings, for the audacity of leaving the plantation and because of really tricky inheritance laws that make it very easy for retirement companies and developers to take land from black families who disproportionately don't leave wills behind. So I would say land ownership is obviously a major, major barrier. And we've been excited to collaborate with Senator Cory Booker and Senator Elizabeth Warren and Kristen Gillibrand on the Justice for Black Farmers Act of 2020, which actually creates land grants for beginning black farmers to correct this injustice.

I would say another major barrier to Black and Brown folks becoming farmers in the sense of farm managers is that currently, over 85% of the labor that is done on farms is actually done by people of color, mostly Latinx and Hispanic, but also incarcerated Black men, Asian folks, and other people of color. And yet farm management is only a few percentage points of folks of color. And so, that huge racial disparity is especially pronounced in the food and farming sector. And the obvious solution would be to provide pathways to ownership, management, and leadership for those farm employees who are experts in their craft, but who are trapped in a cycle of low wages, a cycle of really being exploited in their work. And the challenge there is that what allows farmworker exploitation is that the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and our draconian immigration policies make it so that those farmers don't even have equal protection under the law, like no right to unionize, no right to overtime pay, no right to a day off in seven, etc. And so, equalizing labor laws and creating healthy pathways to leadership for farm laborers is going to be really essential in making sure that we have producers of food who reflect the beautiful diversity of this country.

Colleen: What are some things that individuals like our listeners or me, for example, what are some things that we can do?

Leah: Well, my daughter Anashima, who's no longer a toddler, she's almost 18, you know, says the food system is everything it takes to get sunshine onto your plate. So, it includes the way that land is shared, the way labor's treated, the access to capital, the access to food, and, of course, the earth herself. And the good news about this wide arc of the food system is that there's so many points of intervention and so many right answers for how to help. And for folks who are interested, you can go to soulfirefarm.org, and we've created an action guide for how to heal and repair the food system to make it just for everyone. And some examples of things included in that guide are the reparations map, which is this cool interactive map that helps you find Black and Brown farmers near you and see what kind of support they might need, or what products you can purchase. There's also a list of policies and regulations that need to be updated, passed, or repealed to support farmers and a number of educational resources to learn more and to help you fortify, you know, your own commitment and drive to make a change. Because I really believe that everybody who eats food and everybody who lives on land has a role to play in improving the food system.

Colleen: Well, Leah, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. This has been a really inspiring conversation.

Leah: Thank you. And thank you for your insightful and warm questions. This has been a pleasure.
Return to top

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Colleen: Since this episode aired, new research has highlighted the urgency of correcting a long history of discrimination against Black farmers in the US. A study by my colleagues at UCS assessed US farmland consolidation, the phenomenon in which big farms get bigger, from 1978 to 2017.

# data[].attributes.body
The mission of Wasatch Community Gardens is to empower people to grow and eat healthy, organic, local food. Since 1989, we have provided children, adults, and families in Salt Lake County with access to land and education for growing and eating fresh produce, while building and nurturing community connections through gardening and healthy food. We accomplish this through four main programs: Community Garden, Community Education, Youth and School Garden, and Job Training Programs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wasatch Community Gardens | Salt Lake City, Utah - Home

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wasatch Community Gardens is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization that has served residents along the Wasatch Front since 1989. We are committed to building community and providing opportunities to learn and grow through gardening.

# data[].attributes.body
TreeUtah’s EcoGarden is a community resource that demonstrates how we can utilize trees in urban landscapes and gardening, which not only provides food but also benefits our social and natural environments.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Located along the Jordan River in Rose Park next door to the Day Riverside Library at 1575 West 1000 North, TreeUtah's EcoGarden is a community resource that demonstrates how we can utilize trees in urban landscapes and gardening, which not only provides food but also benefits our social and natural environments.

Projects for volunteers in the EcoGarden include watering, weeding, mulching, composting, maintaining the guilds, and picking up trash. If you are interested in being part of the EcoGarden community, please contact us.

We also schedule EcoGarden workdays that are open to the public. These opportunities will be posted on our events calendar.

EcoGarden History

The EcoGarden is a permaculture demonstration space, situated on the grounds of the Day-Riverside Library in the Rose Park neighborhood of Salt Lake City. It fills the space between the library itself and the Jordan River, providing an inviting link between the building and the riverside trails that connect the surrounding community.

This ever-evolving EcoGarden was first laid out in 2005, under the direction of the late Toby Hemenway, renowned permaculture expert and author, and Vaughn Lovejoy, former TreeUtah director. They first considered putting it at Bend in the River Park along the Provo-Jordan River Parkway Trail, however, the mercury and lead in the land at this location made it too toxic to grow anything edible. After some more searching, they found the plot by the Day-Riverside library and it was perfect. Since then, it has been sustained by dedicated volunteers, neighbors, and TreeUtah staff.

The land the garden sits on was originally an overflow retention basin for the Jordan River, but is now home to 14 guilds (or smaller plant communities), each centered around a fruit or nut tree. Around each tree is a mix of shrubs, flowers, grasses, herbs, and native plants that complement one another through their unique characteristics. Some fix nitrogen in the soil, some attract pollinators, and others discourage pests. The guiding principle of permaculture is to cultivate food, medicine, and other useful plants in harmony with the surrounding ecosystem. Traditional farming techniques prioritize annual plants and require a continual input of nutrients, pesticides, and new plants. Permaculture relies on a thoughtful mix of perennials to create a closed, self-regulating, and sustainable system.

Additionally, the guilds are designed to maximize water retention by slowing evaporation and runoff using dugout swales. Swales are ditches dug along the contour of the land; as water runs downward, it is caught on the formation and moisture is more effectively contained. Many of the plants are also drought-resistant, meaning the garden can survive (and even thrive) with minimal watering and go long periods without any surface water. Further helping us save water is the installed drip system that delivers water directly to the plants' roots.

The EcoGarden also serves as a community gathering space. The area is not fenced off from the neighborhood, making it a publicly-accessible, inviting space with benches, picnic tables, and a shade structure covered with grapevines. We encourage residents of the neighborhood to utilize the space for gatherings, quiet contemplation, and as a source of food.

On occasion, the Day-Riverside Library brings children into the garden for story time and nearby elementary schools bring students for outdoor lunches.

In addition to volunteer workdays, TreeUtah also holds regular workshops on topics ranging from tree pruning, to mason bees, to uses of medicinal herbs. A healthy ecosystem includes the people who live in it - join us in our work in creating sustainable communities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Located along the Jordan River in Rose Park next door to the Day Riverside Library at 1575 West 1000 North, TreeUtah's EcoGarden is a community resource that demonstrates how we can utilize trees in urban landscapes and gardening, which not only provides food but also benefits our social and natural...

# data[].attributes.headline
There are numerous models of community gardening that benefit the communities where they reside.  

# data[].attributes.subject
There are numerous models of community gardening that benefit the communities where they reside.  

# data[].attributes.body
This community collective project is an example model of how food can be free and accessible. It involves helping a fruit orchard and associated vegetable gardens thrive, with the intent of providing the produce grown by the plants to the people in the community. It is also a place to give to the overall health of the environment and to learn and teach community resiliency and caring. #forthepeople #foralllife #disruptivehumanity #climateaction #communityresilience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This community collective project is an example model of how food can be free and accessible. It involves helping a fruit orchard and associated vegetable gardens thrive, with the intent of providing the produce grown by the plants to the people in the community. It is also a place to give to the overall health of the environment and to learn and teach community resiliency and caring. #forthepeople #foralllife #disruptivehumanity #climateaction #communityresilience

Anyone who has the interest can join in the planting and care taking of the project, those who do mostly see the labor as a gift to the community that brings them joy in the giving. We mainly have work sessions, or collaboration sessions on Sunday mornings at the project site. The land upon which the project sits is the ancestral homelands of the Ute and Shoshone tribes. "Og-woi" is the Shoshone word for River, chosen because the project is next to the Jordan River in Salt Lake City. We must therefore give back to the land what was taken and create a way of providing nourishment - for the soul and body - to all who wish to be nourished.

This project is 100% powered and managed by a collective of many volunteer partners.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This community collective project is an example model of how food can be free and accessible. It involves helping a fruit orchard and associated vegetable gardens thrive, with the intent of providing the produce grown by the plants to the people in the community.

# data[].attributes.body
A little outdated, but lots of good videos and resources for urban gardening.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Urban Farming Guys | Sharing Knowledge Feeding Nations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
TODAY WE CANCEL OURSELVES TODAY in PROTEST, our BRAND "The Urban Farming Guys" officially CANCELS Facebook FOREVER for Crimes Against Humanity, for Manipulating the People toward Division and WAR with algorithms feeding 2 OPPOSITE narratives and pitting the people against one another. FB FOR e....

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
TODAY WE CANCEL OURSELVES TODAY in PROTEST, our BRAND "The Urban Farming Guys" officially CANCELS Facebook FOREVER for Crimes Against Humanity, for Manipulating the People toward Division and WAR with algorithms feeding 2 OPPOSITE narratives and pitting the people against one another. FB FOR e....

# data[].attributes.headline
Urban Agriculture: Natural Resources Conservation Service

# data[].attributes.subject
Urban Agriculture: Natural Resources Conservation Service

# data[].attributes.body
Are you farming or gardening in a city or suburb? Urban agriculture provides critical access to healthy food for local communities, as well as jobs, increased green spaces, and closer community ties.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Skip to main content

The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site.

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Are you farming or gardening in a city or suburb? Urban agriculture provides critical access to healthy food for local communities, as well as jobs, increased green spaces, and closer community ties.

How to Get Assistance
Do you farm or ranch and want to make improvements to the land that you own or lease?
Natural Resources Conservation Service offers technical and financial assistance to help farmers, ranchers and forest landowners.

Step 2: Start an Application

Step 3: Check your eligibility

Step 4: Rank your application

Step 5: Implement your plan

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
| Natural Resources Conservation Service

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Skip to main content The .gov means it's official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site. The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

# data[].attributes.body
In 2014, an estimated 54% of the world's population resides in urban areas – up from 34% in 1960. As a result, fewer and fewer people around the globe are living close to where their food is produced, meaning produce needs to be preserved, stored and transported before it gets to your plate. The financial and economic effects of this massive industry are stacking up – and so more and more people have decided to do something about it, by getting into urban farming and turning traditional food supply systems upside down. Innovative, fresh and fun, these seven initiatives will inspire the gardener in you – and maybe even get your mouth watering for some delicious locally-grown food.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Urban Farming Initiatives to Inspire Your Inner Gardener - Goodnet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There’s no need to suppress your green thumb just because you live in a buzzing metropolis.

# data[].attributes.body
The Urban Farming Initiative exists to turn unused commercial properties into thriving urban farms and community hubs. Our reproducible model for successful urban farms allows anyone, anywhere to start a successful urban farm. We're growing momentum for change and making impact at scale.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
2020 was a warning sign that systemic changes are needed

# data[].attributes.body
The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative is based in Detroit's North End community. Our mission is to use urban agriculture as a platform to promote education, sustainability, and community in an effort to empower urban communities, solve many social problems facing Detroit, and potentially develop a broader model for redevelopment for other urban communities.

# data[].attributes.body
Comments:
'Salt Lake City communicated through the 2022 Parks Master Plan that their first goal is “Environmental Health and Sustainability”. The 2 related “Transformative Projects” that were communicated through the Master plan are to “Put Environment First” and to “Grow our Urban Forest”.
This Orchard and the 30+ trees contained within clearly contribute to Growing our Urban Forest, more importantly, a food forest that provides perennially fresh, nutritionally dense food to our community with absolutely no cost or prerequisites to or from the recipient.'

'The Og-woi aligns with the city’s transformative project “Reimagine Neighborhood Parks” in that it sits on a once neglected lot, transformed into a welcoming, inclusive space for all to enjoy, learn about healthy food and biodiversity, create and enjoy community art, and become a steward of the land through community engagement. The current plan and long-term vision for the Og-woi contains community assets such as raised vegetable garden beds (including wheelchair accessible beds), pollinator gardens, an outdoor classroom for experiential learning, self-guided educational tours of the orchard, and local artwork.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Status

Closeout

Full Project Scope

The Reimagine Nature Public Lands Master Plan establishes an inspirational framework to guide how Public Lands will care for, grow and prioritize investments for the next 10-20 years. The plan proposes big ideas to transform and sustain quality outdoor spaces that are save, welcoming and walkable, ensuring people, wildlife and ecosystems benefit from fair investment of SLC resources over the next 20 years.

What's New

Background

Text Here

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Status Closeout Full Project Scope The Reimagine Nature Public Lands Master Plan establishes an inspirational framework to guide how Public Lands will care for, grow and prioritize investments for the next 10-20 years. The plan proposes big ideas to transform and sustain quality outdoor spaces that are save, welcoming and walkable, ensuring people, wildlife and [...]

# data[].attributes.body
A summary report of the 2020 – 2021 Salt Lake City Resident Food Equity Advisors Pilot Program process, key ideas, and recommendations.The Og-woi project’s mission to provide free, accessible food aligns well with aspects of the city’s food equity recommendations for future success, such as:
The inclusion of cultivating food and medicine plants that are culturally relevant to the Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Community agency by way of a diverse planning collective of partners from various neighborhoods and other organizations.
Connecting with schools to enhance and strengthen education regarding food growing and healthy eating.

# data[].attributes.headline
Unsheltered Homelessness on the Jordan River

# data[].attributes.subject
Unsheltered Homelessness on the Jordan River

# data[].attributes.body
A report based on research commissioned for the Jordan River Commission regarding unsheltered homelessness, which demonstrates that found that homeless individuals lived along the river because abatements elsewhere in the city had driven them there and because the river offered a degree of both privacy and access to nearby daily amenities like food, clean water and convenience stores.The purpose of this project was to better understand the social and environmental complexities associated with unsheltered homelessness along the Jordan River corridor, in Salt Lake County, Utah. This research sought to contextualize the drivers that lead people experiencing homelessness
(PEH) to reside along the Jordan River, as well as to identify mitigation strategies (i.e. access to services and facilities) that might assist in human survivorship and well-being, in addition to supporting conservation of the Jordan River corridor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jordan River homelessness report - FINAL[5]

# data[].attributes.body
An Analysis of The Og-Woi People’s Garden and Orchard
in the Context of Salt Lake City and County Planning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Urban Ag on the Jordan River SPARC Lab Report

# data[].attributes.body
Recognizing that urban agriculture has an important role to play in food equity and community resilience, this report describes a community-based research project in which residents, urban farmers, food access advocates, seed-saving groups, refugee resettlement agencies, and city government representatives describe the challenges and opportunities of Salt Lake City’s local food system. Og-Woi is mentioned by farmers as a place they’d like to see funds invested.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Increasing Food Sovereignty - Insights from SLC Farmers and Food Advocates