Tribal farm grows souls as well

Things are growing at Fond du Lac's farm Gitigaaning, or place of the gardens, and it's not just vegetables. Health. Knowledge. Buildings. Resources. Confidence. Food security. Friendships. Community.

Of course, there are plenty of vegetables growing there, nurtured by individual growers on their own small lots: corn, beans, melon, sunflowers, pumpkins, zucchini, sweetgrass, borage, peppers, tobacco, ground cherries, squash, kale, broccoli, cauliflower; the list goes on.

It's all part of the plan by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa to further promote food sovereignty initiatives. Located on Cary Road, a 36-acre farm purchased by the band in 2017 is a big part of those efforts.

Most of the people growing food there are part of the Bimaaji'idiwin Producer Training program, a 10-month program developed by the 13 Moons Fond du Lac Tribal Extension Program to help train people who want to start their own organic vegetable farming business. A handful of acres are plowed for growing, with the average lot size being one-eighth to one-fourth of an acre. The lots are long and thin, and located adjacent to one another so people can share resources such as water buckets and implements.

Two weeks ago, most of the gardens were exploding with produce and greenery. Sunflowers towered while squash crept below. Tomato plants leaned on growing structures and melons vined across the ground. In many cases, the produce is of Native American seed stock.

Modeled after the Big River Farms organic farm training program, the Fond du Lac producer program made it their own. The program is free. They're producers, not farmers. Maple syrup and wild rice are also part of many producers' products.

The number of producers here is growing too. The first year, they were hoping to get between three and five people, and seven enrolled. Last year that number grew to 20 and now they're up to 33 producers, said Erika Legros, who works with both the producer training program and the Fond du Lac garden near the K-12 school. Many of them bring their food to local farmers markets on the reservation and across the region. Others keep or share their harvest.

The program guide promises a focus on agricultural enterprise planning, management and execution. Participants learn from guest speakers, tours to farms, and consultations with staff and farm mentors, such as John Fisher-Merritt, who founded the Food Farm in Wrenshall.

Growing resources

From the road, the farm doesn't look too different from any other farmstead.

Drive in and take a left at the old homestead, however, and a good-sized, brand-new building looms. While its green metal siding is nice, it's what's inside that really excites.

A huge commercial kitchen contains stainless steel stoves and ovens, tables for chopping and prepping or taking notes along with maple sugaring equipment, a vegetable dehydrator and sealer for packaging.

"There's anything you'd need to start a food business," said Kaitlyn Walsh. There are coolers, freezers, a root cellar (containing only garlic for now) for storage, a cannery and a wild game processing room. Lockers for producers, bathrooms and showers. Office space. Even a lactation room. "Breast milk is the first food," Walsh said. "That's an important part of food sovereignty, too."

There's also a special room for seed keeping. During the pandemic there was a seed shortage. "We saw how critical seeds were to our lives and we wanted to make sure there was space for that," Walsh said.

That's the practical side, but the seed room is also planted in the Ojibwe culture.

"Seeds hold a lot of our stories and have been passed down by our ancestors and kept safe by our ancestors," said Walsh, who grew up visiting her grandmother in Sawyer. "They are critical to our healing and preserving our culture."

She names a few of the seeds that came down through the generations. Bear Island Mandaamin (corn), sunflowers, squash. A Cherokee heirloom melon is green with many tiny yellow spots and usually a larger spot, which legend says represents the sun and moon.

Working on the farm feeds both her interests and her desire to get in touch with her culture and spend time with her grandmother, said Walsh, who moved here in 2020.

"I was feeling more called to come back here to learn and preserve our food ways," she said. "I was named after my great-grandmother; she was one of the last in our family to gather wild rice. The kettle she used to parch that rice was put in a museum."

She met Legros at a food justice summit in Duluth at the perfect time and now the two of them are employed by both the reservation's producer and garden programs, which share many resources. "I run the garden program my great-uncle Leland Debe started," Walsh said.

As the two women head from the new food prep building toward the fields, a family of turkeys scampers into the woods. Then the food plots and a largish "grow dome" come into view. Squirrels dart in and out of the gardens. They're big eaters, says Walsh.

Walsh offers a tour among the raised beds of kale, broccoli, carrots, purslane and more growing inside the grow dome. The dome extends the growing season, and will provide food for the students at the Fond du Lac Ojibwe school during the school year. Some of the plants that have gone to seed will provide seed for the future.

"This will really shine when it's cold outside and it's 20 degrees warmer in here," she said.

Walsh also has her own garden plot, which is a mixture of straight rows of plants, some "artistic plantings" and things planted in a more traditional Native American style. For example, the "three sisters" - corn, beans and squash - grow together. "The beans provide nitrogen for the corn and the squash, and the squash keeps the weeds away. The beans crawl up the corn. That's the indigenous way," she said.

Legros is in her element among the gardens, including the one she shares with her partner, Alex Kmett. It's the first year they've had their own plot, and Kmett has done a lot of the tending with their 2-year-old daughter, Waasebinesiikwe ("Waase," for short), Legros says.

"It's Alex's first year in the program and he's been so dedicated," she said, adding that he got a lot of his seeds from friends. There are three types of sunflowers, squash, beans, zucchini, corn, tomatillos and a huge variety of peppers. He grows milkweed for the butterflies too.

"I've been super blessed," Kmett said. "I'm not a landowner. I couldn't effectively grow on this scale. To have this opportunity is incredible, and pretty much unprecedented in Indian Country."

Legros said she never realized how lucky she was, growing up in a small town in Mexico where her grandparents had a farm and her grandmother made fresh tortillas every day.

"I moved here and the food didn't taste so good," she said. Although the plants that grow are different in northern Minnesota than in Mexico, she's learning and growing a lot of new plants.

Legros is passionate about the garden and producer programs. She said she will be working with high school students more this year, to get them more connected with how food grows.

"It doesn't have to be a big plot," she said. "It could be a bucket in the kitchen."

As a native of Mexico, she said she also cares a lot about issues related to food because a lot of immigrants work with unfair labor practices in places like California.

"That's why I'm really passionate about working with this program," she said. "It really feels great when people do well."

A few weeks ago, 13 Moons held a giant feast (Gitigaan Wiikondiwag, garden feast and tour) to celebrate and show people the new kitchen, canning and other food prep facilities. To be Covid-safe, the meal was held outside, under a giant tent.

Two Native American chefs - Vern DeFoe and Randy Cornelius - prepared the food with help from local youth. Delilah Savage served her wild rice cupcakes with maple syrup frosting.

The main goal of the event was to feed people food that was grown here, Legros said, "but I wanted to get people to eat more vegetables. I walked around with a tray of salad and I was shocked - a lot of them took seconds."

Next year they hope to have twice the food and twice the people.."It was a great way to support our food growers and gather people together to share the harvest," Walsh said.