... I have seen that in any great undertaking it is not enough for a man to depend simply upon himself.
~Lone Man (Isna-la-wica) Teton Sioux
The Great Spirit is in all things, he is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us, that which we put into the ground she returns to us....
~Big Thunder (Bedagi) Wabanaki Algonquin
"When the Earth is sick, the animals will begin to disappear, when that happens, The Warriors of the Rainbow will come to save them."
~Chief Seattle
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As an organic gardening business owner in the midst of a progressive community of green thinking folks in south Minneapolis, I’m privileged to get to meet some pretty amazing thinkers. One of these forward thinking types of people who I’ve been lucky to get to know is Ryan Broden (a.k.a.) Brody, Academic Enrichment Coordinator at Little Earth of United Tribes, an American Indian community in south Minneapolis. Brody works with the youth who live at Little Earth, tutoring, organizing activities, and developing positive relationships with the kids who stop by the Ed Center to hang out.
When I decided that I’d like to begin working on building food justice here in Minneapolis, Brody opened the door for me to come in and get directly involved with his program and the youth clients he serves. I’m convinced that working with kids is the best way to get sweeping societal improvements implemented. Together we began planning and planting gardens with the kids.
I’m always telling grown ups that gardening is supposed to be fun, but these kids needed no coaching to find the fun in getting their hands dirty and planting gardens that could feed themselves, their families, and their environments. We planted 3 gardens together throughout the growing season. First we planted a traditional native food garden consisting of what are known as the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash. Next we added compost and butterfly attracting native prairie plants to the grassy garden growing in front of the Little Earth Ed Center. By the time our third garden was ready to go in the ground, our work had suddenly become a part of a larger movement within the Little Earth community.
As food justice awareness was spreading independent of our efforts throughout the Little Earth community and staff, a group made up of residents, staff, and volunteers from the Women’s Environmental Institute, an organization with close ties to Little Earth, took a bus ride all the way out to Milwaukee to visit Growing Power, an urban farm serving low income neighborhoods. When this group returned from Growing Power, they came back full of excitement about urban farming. The group’s energy quickly translated into a steering committee stocked with heavy hitting community members, including resident activists, local business owners, dedicated staff, volunteers from the Women’s Environmental Institute, and the local legislative heroine Representative Karen Clark. I joined this committee to give them the full backing of everything that Giving Tree Gardens has to offer, and to add the momentum of our garden projects to the growing power of the food justice movement within Little Earth.
As this committee came to life, so too did the excellent beginnings of our urban farming project. Will Allen, and his daughter Erika Allen, directors of Growing Power enjoyed the energy of the folks they met from Minneapolis so well that they each came to town to teach even more folks here their successful methods for urban farming. I attended these empowering trainings, and listened closely as they taught us that our first step would be to grow soil through composting. They taught us the importance of working with kids, and community partners, and they taught us that our own elbow grease was our most powerful tool. Soon after the first of these training sessions, members of the committee organized a composting project with donations of food waste and wood chips from local businesses. We made compost bins with the kids, and when it started to rain we went inside to cook up a healthy stew.
The staff at Little Earth has worked diligently over the past few months not only on the potential for growing good food, but a strong contingent of impassioned employees including Lucy Arias, Sasha Brown, and Colin Cureton have busily organized to grow awareness of the impact of diet on health within Little Earth. The work of this team of healthy eating activists has begun to drive up the demand for healthy food choices within the community. A higher demand for healthy food translates to more hands to help create and maintain an urban farm. While those of us with gardening skills grow healthy food, the healthy eating advocates help grow more healthy gardeners, thus creating a self-perpetuating cycle of community health.
With all of this energy infused into the process, the final garden project of the season took on a new life as our largest group of kids yet came out to turn compost into the earth, and plant seeds in the ground for next year’s harvest. Watching these kids dig in and happily sow the seeds of health for their community has been inspiring to me this garden season. This work of growing food justice for the community at Little Earth of United Tribes has been among the most important work that Giving Tree Gardens has been involved with, and I am honored to be working with such noble, intelligent, and energized folks. With a little luck, and a whole bunch of organizing and elbow grease, I’ll have many more food justice gardening stories to share with the world in the years to come. If you’d like to get your hands dirty and make your world a little healthier, become involved with growing food justice!
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The Seed Vol. 31 October 20, 2009 A Giving Tree Gardens Newsletter
Photos by Russ Henry, Ryan Broden, and Shaunna McBride ©2009 ,Text by Russ Henry ©2009 by Giving Tree Gardens, all rights reserved.
When we give our bodies good food, we feel good. When we feel good inside it shows on the outside, and the decisions we make in our community stem from a place of internal health. Folks who feel healthy have less stress and more freedom.
Without good food, our bodies suffer. Near term problems like belly aches and low energy become long term health threats such as diabetes and heart disease after years of eating nutritionally valueless foods on a regular basis.
When whole neighborhoods are starved of decent, healthy food, the entire community is damaged in an ongoing and self-perpetuating way. Parents who themselves were raised on convenience store food in-turn feed their kids the same processed foods. Communities routinely loose wealth due to health care costs that are crushing to the personal finances of their under-nourished unhealthy residents. These communities get caught in a downward spiral of community destruction, after all if you and your neighbor can’t afford your health care bills, how could either of you possibly afford healthy food, and without healthy food, how could you possibly avoid health care costs?
Looking at my hometown of Minneapolis through a lens focused on food justice, I am regularly dismayed at what I find. Walking through the convenience store isles in any low-income neighborhood in the city will quickly prove the point. Folks in these neighborhoods have easy access to processed foods that have little health or nutritional value. Rarely are fresh vegetables to be found in these types of stores, and the bulk of the products on the shelf contain artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. When taken into account the fact that for many low-income families the neighborhood convenience store is the only accessible or affordable food source, a vast injustice becomes obvious. The low-income folks in Minneapolis and St. Paul have a severe lack of access to something that should be the right of all folks everywhere, the human right to healthy food.
In this modern life where we find ourselves with an economy crumbled due to mismanagement, a health care system that would rather profit from our illnesses then cure our diseases, and a food system based on high fructose corn syrup, it’s time we take matters into our own hands.
This growing season, we at Giving Tree Gardens have been honored to be a part of an expanding group of folks dedicated in word and deed to the notion that every community everywhere deserves health. Read below to find out how much fun we’ve had getting to know, and garden with residents, staff, and volunteers at Little Earth Of United Tribes in Phillips Neighborhood of South Minneapolis, a community that is actively demanding it’s collective right to a healthy future!
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Plant Profile: Sweet Grass Hierochloe odorata
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Along with cedar, tobacco, and sage, one of the four basic medicines in many Native American traditions is sweet grass. Burning braids of sweet grass for use as a "smudge", clears away bad energies, and invites good spirits. This practice is still widely used today throughout American Indian communities. The significance of sweet grass is highlighted by the fact that gifts and prayers are given when harvesting this plant.
Good food is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to community empowerment. Most cultures have plants that are spiritually relevant. When folks have easy access to the plants that are part of their spiritual practices, a higher level of personal and communal health is achievable. Part of our plan to empower the folks at Little Earth is to grow these types of plants that lift the human spirit.
Sweet grass is very easy to grow at home. Thriving in full sun or part shade, this strong willed plant can readily spread throughout wet or dry conditions. I love to use sweet grass in rain gardens where it spreads out to hold the sloping sides of the garden bed.
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The knowledge, wisdom, customs, and teachings we give our children will be their tools to build the future with. When we teach our kids to grow healthy food we empower our families and communities for generations to come.
Grow Food Grow Justice!
These kids love to garden, and it's always a pleasure to work with folks who love what they're doing. The energy that a group of kids can muster is an unstoppable force when well focused. The staff at Little Earth have an excellent and easy going rapport with the kids they serve, which in turn creates an atmosphere where lots good work and learning can happen.
This season's garden activities gave these kids the opportunity to demonstrate and practice skills that will be useful, and empowering for them throughout their lives.
Gardens Grow Stong Kids!
Teaching kids to garden is the most important work that I can imagine myself being involved with! Thanks to all the kids who got their hands dirty, and learned how to make a healthy future for themselves, and their communities.
