Trent student creates opportunity for land-based learning where youth grow community and life skills through gardening
It started as a backyard garden project, but quickly turned into a project that is truly transformational for one student, her family, as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth in her Six Nations, Ontario community.
Denise Miller is a Trent student pursuing a joint major in Indigenous Studies and Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. When the pandemic struck last year, she worked with her father to tend a large garden on the family’s property, but she saw a bigger opportunity to grow community roots, and transformed the garden plot into Revitalizing Our Sustenance, an initiative that seeks to reclaim Haudenosaunee food systems through land-based learning.
“Food is a part of our identity,” Ms. Miller explains in a CBC news article. “I wanted to create a youth-oriented project so that kids have the option to be more outside and to learn where they come from and gain a sense of identity,"
Last summer, this initiative created a positive outlet for students to get active outside and to learn about tending to crops, harvesting vegetables and preserving them.
Learn more about the Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies at Trent University.
Garden project in Six Nations connects youth with land and each other
Oct. 3, 2020
Source: CBC