The past school year has seen the beginning of a new and promising trend among some First Nations schools in Manitoba. A number of schools have begun planning for, or have already started implementing gardening programs. An integrated school/community gardening program offers potential benefits too numerous to list in a single brief article, such as this. However, some highlights will be explored herein. Development and implementation of a school/community gardening program can help to address a wide range of issues facing schools and communities. Here are a few common questions and concerns for which a good gardening program can help provide answers.

The fact that students become most engaged in learning when it is hands on is understood by most educators. While this program can include integrated academic skill and content from elementary plant and nutrition science through scientific research and experimentation in agrology, to advanced chemistry and biology, at every level it is built upon students’ active engagement with their hands as well as their minds. Studying the human body, nutrition, and health sciences is something that everyone can relate to. Food is the first step and central link to all of these, and is something that every person is in contact with and mindful of several times a day. Curriculum could not get more relevant than this.

Curriculum should also be about the real life of students and their communities. As such it should be designed to develop skills and knowledge of importance to both the individual student and the community in which he/she lives. No one can deny that one of the greatest challenges facing our communities today is declining health, largely related to a diet, which we have been quietly manipulated and marched into by the corporations that control the food system. Freedom from this situation requires education plus food security and food sovereignty at the local level. A good community and school gardening program can provide both the foundation of this transformation, and the glue that holds it together.

Not only is it relatively inexpensive to start and maintain a gardening program and plant science curriculum, but there are a number of additional funding sources through which a school or community can access money for this program, such as Food Matters Manitoba, Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Initiatives, the Northern Healthy Food Initiative, and Heifer International, among others; and a comprehensive community school gardening program can produce between ten and fifty times the amount invested, in healthy food for the community. The main resource required by a program such as this is people power.

The type of program being discussed herein provides an opportunity for parents, students, and teachers to work together on constructive tasks, where they function as partners learning from, teaching, and supporting, each other. In virtually every community which I have visited I have met a handful of elders who are skilled at cultivating foods and harvesting natural foods from the wild. Invariably they note that these are dying arts within our communities and would welcome the opportunity to work with and teach the youth these skills. Bringing students together with elders from whom they can learn these valuable skills will also situate them in a context in which the elders can also pass on many other traditional teachings and help to develop character and values in students.

 

On the contrary, many of the foods that we take for granted, and that are eaten all over the world, were first developed by indigenous Americans, north and south. Consider corn, today the most widely grown crop on the planet, used not only in its raw form, but to produce high fructose corn syrup, which provides both the calories and the ‘glue’ in over 60% of the processed and pre-packaged foods you eat every day; as well as providing more than half of all animal feed used on the planet. First domesticated and developed from a wild grass called teosinte by indigenous people of what is now Mexico 7000 years ago, spread both north and south across the continent, and was grown as far north as southern Canada 1000 years before the arrival of Europeans, who then adopted it and transported it back to Europe, and on to the rest of the globe.
In the same way, Indigenous north, south, and central Americans developed and cultivated, over several millennia, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, melons, sunflowers, peas, avocados, pineapple, and many other foods unknown to the rest of the world before the arrival of the Europeans. Imagine what a contribution to the world all of this was. Imagine, for example Italian food without pasta sauce – that is what it would have been before the Spanish took back tomato plants from here in 1519, and it reached Italy nearly 100 years later.

Today, over 60% of all the food consumed on the planet is derived from plants given to the world by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Recognized as one of the four major traditions of herbal healing which evolved on the planet over thousands of years, and which gave rise to and continues to inform modern medicine, along with Chinese, Ayurvedic (India), and Egyptian medicine, Native American medicinal plants and healing practices have contributed immensely to the modern pharmaceutical industry which only developed over the past 130 years into what we know it as today. Imagine the light in your students’ eyes, the pride in their chests, and the deep interest in their minds, as they research and discover the wealth of history, plant technology, health, healing, and nutrition science developed by their own ancestors over thousands of years and given to the rest of the people of the planet. Imagine the rich curriculum that your staff could explore, develop, and implement, beginning with these ideas.

Each school and community is invited and encouraged to consider beginning a gardening program. Such a program can enhance and provide a living context for the integration of nutrition, plant, soil, chemistry, and human biological sciences, as well as history, geography, and native studies. At the same time it provides a context for the school and community to work together on a concrete project. The four questions covered in this article is just “the tip of the iceberg”.

 

For further information or help starting a program such as this, please contact the project leader, Rudy Subedar at rudys@ mfnerc.com or Research and Development Coordinator, Florence Paynter at florencep@ mfnerc.com.

To begin a program which results in actual planting this growing season it is recommended that schools / communities get started early, at least in January, with the planning.