Indigenous researchers plant seeds of hope for health and climate

Header image: Three sisters (winter squash, maize and climbing beans) summer garden at the University of Guelph. (Hannah Tait Neufeld), Author provided

Hannah Tait Neufeld, University of Guelph; Brittany Luby, University of Guelph, and Kim Anderson, University of Guelph

As we learn more about climate change, this knowledge can be paralyzing, especially for young people who are contemplating life pathways.

Indigenous land-based learning offers an avenue for hope, embedded in action. This approach has been taken up in recent years by a number of post-secondary institutions in Canada and internationally.

This is the focus of our work — as mixed ancestry (Hannah), Anishinaabe (Brittany) and Metis (Kim) scholars at the University of Guelph in Ontario. According to Indigenous ways of knowing, we are only as healthy as our environments. And so our research addresses sustainable food practices that feed the well-being of “all our relations:” human, land, spirit.

Using food as a starting point for action, we have launched a community-based research program — to promote conversations and opportunities across geographic and social spaces that forge and rekindle relationships focused on traditional foodways.

This work starts with relationships, and it involves labour — both of which are critical to Indigenous pedagogy. With Indigenous community partners, we engage social science, nutrition and engineering students in hands-on work in Indigenous food and medicine gardens and in manomin (wild rice) fields.

This enables us to focus on time-honoured relationships in our homelands and university lands while preparing for the future.

The relationship that Indigenous peoples have with the land encourages practices and traditions that