Collaborators
This project has been collaborative from the very beginning. Christina Hill spent several years visiting Native gardeners in their home communities, discussing what a partnership with Iowa State University might look like.We currently have been consulting the Nebraska Indian Community College, which serves the Omaha, Santee Sioux, and Sioux City urban Native communities and also Dream of Wild Health, which serves the Minneapolis/St. Paul Native community as well as Native peoples throughout Minnesota, the Oneida nation of Wisconsin and the Menominee nation of Wisconsin. Part of this partnership involves hosting an advisory board meeting each spring at Iowa State to discuss plans for the upcoming year.
We hold an annual advisory board meeting each year composed of members from all the nations collaborating with us, which helps plan our research garden, and make sure we are acting in a culturally appropriate way with the traditional heritage seeds we are using. The advisory board also works with us in our seed rematriation efforts, helping us to select Indigenous seed that need to be grown out and ensuring that we get the seeds that we grow back to their home community. They also help guide our interactions with the broader community during ethnographic research, nutritional assessments, and on-farm workshops. Below is a picture from our meeting last year. People were able to travel to ISU, visit the Three Sisters plot here, tour the greenhouses, and visit the Plant Intro Station which holds Indigenous seed varieties. We asked Anthony Warrior, a Dakota chef, to prepare the meals using Indigenous foods. Sadly this year’s meeting will take place online. Face to face interaction and sharing meals is priceless to building truly collaborative work.
