Native Communities Program's Spring 2009 Building Resilience Grantees

Project Support: The Good Heart Garden

Brave Heart Society’s Good Heart Garden is a community run garden on Inhanktonwan Dakota (Yankton Sioux) land where traditional Native foods and herbs are grown in the Native way. Volunteers are recruited as parent-child teams to engage in gardening activities that not only bring them closer to their culture but also bring them closer to one another. In this way, the garden not only puts the community on the path to sustainability through local foods but it also serves as a powerful tool for cultural revival and sharing.

Project Support: Wotab!
Wotab! (We All Eat!) renews traditional food systems to promote the health of the people. As part of Dakota Wicohan’s summer youth language and life ways camp, participants engage in gathering, planting, hunting, and preserving traditional foods while learning the language, encouraging an alternative to mainstream food economies.

Project Support: Youth Traditional Skills Training Project
The Grassy Narrows Youth Traditional Skills Training project is a grassroots initiative to restore community food security in a sustainable and traditional way. The youth learn traditional ways of sustenance, including hunting, fishing, wild rice harvesting, berry picking, and household gardening. By teaching the wisdom and values of Anishinaabe ways, the project works to break dependency on unhealthy and unsustainably produced foods that are trucked long distances into this remote community.

Indigenous Community Enterprise’s mission is to work directly with Indigenous communities to identify economic opportunities that foster responsible stewardship of the land and enhance self-reliance. Funds support an ongoing Straw Bale Project to design and build culturally appropriate homes, and a newly launched Native Food Project, to revitalize and promote traditional local food systems. 2010 funds will support ICE's work with the National Forest, using small diameter ponderosa logs to make traditional hogans for Navajo elders and is planning to expand this program to include young Navajo families.

Project Support: Three Sisters Garden/Natural resources assessment
IPNC promotes sustainable education programs for Native groups on their Native American Homestead at Crows Hill Farm, NY. Funds assisted in developing an organic Three Sisters garden and organizing a set of camps to teach traditional Indigenous food production and healthy living philosophies to youth.

Project Support: Solar Heat on the Apsaalooke Nation
Funds from Honor the Earth will be used to conduct a one-day solar energy workshop on the Crow Reservation in Montana, including the installation of a solar heating system on a local Crow family home. This project introduces the environmental and economic benefits of renewable energy to the Apsáalooke Nation, helping them to improve their lives by building energy resilience and adapting to climate change in a way that honors the Native cultural tradition.

Mvskoke Food Sovereignty Initiative (MFSI) works to reinvigorate the agricultural heritage of the Mvskoke people. The Mvskoke were excellent farmers in their original homelands (present day Southeast United States) and were able to sustain a vibrant and healthy civilization for millennium. Today there are precious few Mvskoke farmers and even home gardens are becoming rare. MFSI works to re-localize the food system, with a focus on traditional foods, through local farm and garden projects.

Project Support: Traditional Teachings and Language Project
The “Traditional Teachings and Language” project provides Penobscot people the opportunity to learn cultural skills and techniques that mirror how our Penobscot ancestors organized their life activities around a seasonal calendar. Workshops employ talented community members as traditional teachers, incorporate hands-on language learning with all activities, and provide multi-generational opportunities for cultural learning and relationship building. Funds will be used to provide stipends for traditional teachers and to assist with workshop related expenses.

Project Support: Protect Sacred Lands
Funds support SAGE Council’s work with the All Indian Pueblo Council's Natural Resources Committee to develop and initiate a strategic plan to address climate change through culturally restorative practices. SAGE will maintain a strong social, economic and environmental justice lens throughout the process.

Project Support: Penelakut Garden in community
The Society is working collaboratively with community members to revitalize traditional foods, plants and maintain ecosystems. Funds will support a community garden and the development of a hen house so that essential foods can be provided locally for this poverty stricken community.

Taos Pueblo's Education & Training Division’s Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) is working to revitalize the community-based agriculture of the Pueblo by developing agricultural and renewable energy infrastructure on 3.3 acres of prime farming land as part of a model teaching, production, and demonstration site. Funds would be used to complete two renewable energy projects and complementary energy efficiency improvements to heat 5,000 square feet of greenhouses.

Project Support: Traditional Agriculture/Permaculture Design Course: Fostering Equality between Women and Men in Agriculture
Funds support an intensive two-week training that includes theory and practice of ecological land-use planning, watershed restoration, home and commercial organic gardening, alternative building design, natural waste treatment systems, soil building, forest gardening, seed collecting, animal forage systems, native plant lore, and regenerative economics. This year's program is geared to include more women in the field of traditional agriculture by providing mentorship opportunities, gender specific trainings, and positive role models for women in agriculture.

Project Support: Fish and Poi
The Fish and Poi Project creates opportunities for sharing Indigenous wisdom between Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners and Native Hawaiian foster care families to facilitate the exchange, preservation and transmission of traditional food knowledge (traditions, cultivation, harvesting and preparation). In this way, traditional Native Hawaiian practices are passed on by Hawaiian cultural practitioners to Hawaiian children in foster care and their foster families.

Winter Center is preserving and propagating butternut & other nut orchards, wild leek beds, maple sugaring, & other subsistence food sources, and expanding ancient food growing ways (corn, beans, squash, sunflowers). Two language intensives out on the land are planned for this summer focused on subsistence and agricultural life. This work is part of a broader Health Project that encourages traditional ways of life, including diet, to increase health.