Gekinoomaadijig Mashkiki Gitigaaning Endazhi-Baakwaanaatigikaag: Restoring Land Relations Through Indigenous Leadership in an Urban Park
Members of the 440 Parkside Collective: Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, Ramona Reece, K. Jane Blake, Andrea Bastien, Gabrielle Ayotte, Alyson McMullen, Opal Sparks, Julie Blair, Benjamin Beauchemin, Georgina Remmick
Introduction
In Anishinaabemowin, Gekinoomaadijig Mashkiki Gitigaaning Endazhi-Baakwaanaatigikaag refers to animate beings who teach each other through reciprocal relationships in areas of planted medicines where there are many sumacs. This name describes ongoing collaborative land-based work which has been taking place in an overgrown lawn bowling field within a 400-acre public park in so-called Toronto, Ontario, Canada: territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Wendat with profound relations and active stewardship over thousands of years. This site, a former lawn bowling field and clubhouse now used as an outdoor classroom by the High Park Nature Centre, has become a critical place for urban Indigenous community members connected to the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle (2019) and Asemaa Circles (2023) projects – along with accomplices (Indigenous Action Media, 2014) – to come together to restore wellbeing in whole ecosystem relationships.
Together, over the past five years, we have collectively created space for Indigenous community gatherings, ceremonies, and events throughout the year. We follow the seasonal and lunar cycles to guide our work. But rather than approaching this work as community programming or as something that is facilitated for human people, this project centers a commitment to the wellbeing of lands and waters. Overall, our collective undertakes teaching, learning, and research activities as reparative community practices to support human communities to better live up to our responsibilities to our older relatives, and by extension then, also to one another. This project is a volunteer-driven initiative focused on restoring reciprocal land and water relationships in the context of ongoing settler colonialism and intensifying climate crisis.
Left: Image 1: Smoking deer hides at 440 Parkside (Credit: R. Beaulne-Stuebing); Right: Image: View from the entrance to the 440 Parkside growing space (Credit: R. Beaulne-Stuebing)
This photo essay will share a bit about the recent history and ongoing work of this project, as expressed through images shared by our collective members. This opportunity to share about our collaborative work is a reminder that we have been focused so intently on caring for our relatives, that we have not yet taken time to document and share about what we are learning. And so, this photo essay is a step for us towards that.
Since 2019, we have been gathering at the full moons, solstices, and equinoxes to feast the land and all of our relatives. We also gather in between these important occasions as a community, putting our hands to the work of building mounds, planting seeds and seedlings, adding mulch, watering, harvesting, processing and giving away medicines.
We additionally come together for the important behind-the-scenes work of planning, applying for and administering funds, as well as facilitating teaching sessions for our communities with Elders and traditional cultural-ecological knowledge keepers. We are especially grateful to the teachers of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge who provide guidance and instruction to support our collective understanding and capacity to practice land restoration that is grounded in Anishinaabe ceremony knowledge of this territory. We are also grateful to the urban Aunties, Uncles, and Grandmothers of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle who continue to share their leadership and perspectives with us, supporting our ongoing work in High Park.
Right: Image 2: Sumac, Asters, and Goldenrod (Credit: R. Reece); Left: Image 2: Wild columbine at 440 Parkside (Credit: J. Blake)
Context of the Site and So-Called “Invasive” Plants
High Park in Toronto is known for its remaining, globally-rare black oak savannah (Johnson, 2013), but this ecosystem is under significant threat due to climate crisis and other human impacts (see Becoming Sensor, n.d.). The Indigenous collaborators involved in this project understand this context as a crisis of relations, and therefore any and all solutions must be relational. Climate change exacerbates the proliferation of so-called invasive species, generally understood as “plants, animals, insects, and pathogens that are introduced to an area and cause harm to the environment, economy, or society” (Invasive Species Center, 2023). Perplexingly, this dominant understanding evades acknowledgement of the “invasive infrastructures” of settler colonialism (Spice, 2018), and the inexpressible harm of settler colonial land relations (Tuck & Yang, 2012) on all beings (Kimmerer, 2013).
The City of Toronto actively uses chemical and biological “controls” in attempts to “manage” populations of so-called invasive plants such as buckthorn, dog strangling vine, and garlic mustard. The City of Toronto follows what are known in mainstream conservation discourse as Best Management Practices (e.g., Anderson, 2012), but these practices, in attempts to control, are harmful to all life including other plants, water, insects, birds, and the structures of life in the soil.
Left: Image 3: Sumac / Baakwaanaatig (Credit: J. Blake); Right: Image 4: Building a Smoking Tent for Deer Hides out of Sumac (Credit: R. Beaulne-Stuebing)
“Beings from elsewhere”
These so-called invasive plants, as we have come to understand through teachings from our Elders and knowledge carriers, are still our relatives; they just happen to be from another place. As the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission has articulated through Anishinaabe knowledge, these so-called invasive plants can be more respectfully understood as “beings from elsewhere” (Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, 2020), or “bakaan ngoji gaa-ondaadag” in Anishinaabemowin (ibid.). Rather than being a problem in and of themselves, these beings are messengers. Their intensified proliferation comes as a symptom of greater relations of imbalance, rather than constituting the imbalance by themselves. These plants are not the source of the ecosystem crisis; instead, they are trying to tell us something (see Reo et al., 2017; Reo & Ogden, 2018; Whyte 2023). In the work of gekinoomaadijig mashkiki gitigaaning endazhi-baakwaanaatigikaag, the human people engaged in restorative land practices are seeking to listen to what is being told. We are able to listen and learn “through the land” (Simpson, 2014), through the daily, lived work of being in close relationship with lands and waters. In this way, we are co-creating better practices for land restoration, prioritizing rebalancing and reparative relationships.
Left: Image 5: Keeping a fire while smoking deer hides (Credit: R. Beaulne-Stuebing); Right: Image: Mushroom growing out of mulch (Credit: J. Blake)
We do not rush
Each year we have new opportunities to learn. We learn by doing, we learn through practice, but we are also careful to not approach this work as an experiment. We do not experiment with or on our relatives; we are actually taking our time to get to know them, and allowing them to get to know us. Earth-based work is long and wide: while we can receive many benefits and teachings over the course of a season or year, the truth and test of this learning can only be experienced over time. And, importantly, the work we are doing is not just for us. It is also for all of our relatives, in this moment and for at least seven generations forward.
It was not until our fourth year of tending to the space at 440 Parkside that we felt ready to begin expanding our harvesting responsibilities in the growing space. When we harvest, we take only as much as is needed, and we are thorough in our communication. The extension of our harvesting came through critical, close learning about the imbalances in the space, and the impacts of this imbalance on the medicines and food sources enjoyed by our relatives like the birds, rabbits, and deer. In year four, we specifically focused on learning about and engaging with buckthorn, dog strangling vine and garlic mustard in order to understand them more in a relational sense. These beings from elsewhere have been identified as harmful due to the abundant ways in which they grow, while also there being no local relations who can digest and benefit from their gifts. While these ones are all medicines, and where they are originally from, they are abundant foods; here, they can upset the digestion of birds and other beings. And so, we have not rushed when it comes to taking care of the spirit or the physical life in the space we are tending to.
Left: Image: Building mounds for new plantings, where buckthorn was harvested (Credit: R. Beaulne-Stuebing); Right: Image 6: Ceremonial tobacco / Asemaa (Credit: R. Beaulne-Stuebing)
Components of our harvesting approach
Our harvesting plan has been created and implemented through the course of the past five years of learning and working at 440 Parkside. First, we learn and understand the life stages of each relative, to know when the best time is to harvest. We also learn about the dynamic relationships that each plant has with the life in the space (including birds, other plant beings, bugs, soil biota, etc.). We gather regularly in accordance with lunar and seasonal cycles to offer tobacco in ceremony, as well as singing and speaking with the plant relations when we are preparing and working with them. We emphasize close relationships to ensure there is familiarity and care in the energies we bring and receive.
We understand that by harvesting these “beings from elsewhere,” we are also making commitments to them to continue this work through future years, in the growing seasons to come. By focusing on what is known as “mechanical removal” (that is, physical harvesting without the use of chemical or biological controls), we are communicating with the plant beings that we are committed, in the long term, to continue to carry out these responsibilities, year after year. If we neglect to continue to follow through on what we have committed, then the plant beings “from elsewhere” will continue to proliferate especially with increasing impacts of the climate crisis; and with intensifying resilience to the chemical and biological controls applied in other parts of the park and city.
Where we harvest the beings from elsewhere, we tend to that place with great care because we have caused a disruption. We bring in locally prepared soil and mulch, we replant in their place. The beings we prioritize replanting in the space are ‘native’ species, intended to restore and establish abundant local habitat and food sources for our relatives. As our harvesting and relationship work continues in the space, our responses, our growing and harvesting plans will continue to adapt, guided by the responses of life in the space we are tending to.
Image: Newly planted mounds, where buckthorn was harvested (Credit: R. Beaulne-Stuebing)
Works Cited
Anderson, H. 2012. Invasive Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) Best Management Practices in Ontario. Ontario Invasive Plant Council. Peterborough, ON.
Asemaa Circles. (2023). The Asemaa Circles Project: Supporting Community Medicines Sovereignty. https://www.asemaa.org/
Becoming Sensor. (2020). High Park’s Oak Savannahs. https://becomingsensor.com/high-parks-oak-savannahs/
Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. (2019). Dibaginjigaadeg Anishinaabe Ezhitwaad: A Tribal Climate Adaptation Menu. Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, Odanah, Wisconsin. 54 p.
Indigenous Action. (2014). Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex. Indigenous Action. https://www.indigenousaction.org/accomplices-not-allies-abolishing-the-ally-industrial-complex/
Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle. (2019). What is Indigenous Land Stewardship?. https://indigenouslandstewardshipto.wordpress.com/indigenousstewardship-vschemical-management/
Invasive Species Centre. (2022, October 12). Learn about invasive Species. https://www.invasivespeciescentre.ca/learn/
Johnson, J. (2013). The Indigenous Environmental History of Toronto, ‘The Meeting Place’. In L.A. Sandberg, S. Bocking, & K. Cruikshank (Eds.), Urban Explorations: Environmental Histories of the Toronto Region (pp. 59-71). Ontario: Wilson Institute for Canadian History.
Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
Montano, M. & Panek, B. (2023). Bakaan ingoji gaa-ondaadag: A tribal climate adaptation menu’s perspective on invasive species. Presentation at Invasive Species Centre Annual Forum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPLJyTp43PE&list=PLdxRdOLT-h0h9tJY8DT32yYpNS3RO1SwM&index=11
Reo, N.J., Ogden, L.A. (2018). Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species. Sustainable Sciences. 13, 1443–1452. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0571-4
The 440 Parkside Collective is an Indigenous-led land restoration project based in High Park in Toronto. Together, we care for a 10,000 square foot growing space in the 400-acre park, in addition to organizing learning opportunities and ceremonies to tend to our responsibilities with lands, waters, and all relatives in this urban context. The 440 Parkside Collective developed out of relationships formed through the work of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle and Asemaa Circles projects since 2019. In 2023 the 440 Parkside site was recognized as a National Healing Forest by the David Suzuki Foundation.