As harvest season comes to an end and a light blanket of frost covers our gardens, I wanted to share these portraits of my dear friend Nicole Davies, of @sovereignseedsnetwork, in her garden this summer. Nicole is a Red River Métis, Saulteaux, and settler community organizer, seed keeper, and researcher. She is a loving and fierce advocate for Indigenous food sovereignty and travels between communities to facilitate knowledge sharing. In her words, "For Indigenous people, seed and garden stewardship is a site of decolonial governance. It is an act of mutual aid, keeping alive ancestral economies through the trading, sharing, and gifting of seeds, food, medicines, and teachings... It is a reminder of ways of life that predate police and prisons, pesticides and pipelines, and it is a promise that these worlds are possible again. It is a refusal of the homogeneity and hegemony of white supremacist food production. It is a meditative process of remembering and re-writing and re-rooting ourselves and our food relatives in a society that wants to displace us and erase us. It is a healing thread that connects us forward and backwards intergenerationally as we imagine our ancestors and descendants peeling back ears of the same flint corn and cracking open pods of the same speckled beans. It is a ceremonial practice of time-weaving futurisms: when we plant and harvest, we tend to something that we might not live to see flourish or benefit us, whether it be the offerings of that year’s yield or the years’ long improvements we’ve made to a seed variety’s genetic stability. It is a complex and loving act of intertribal decision-making….”
Read the full article by Davies here.
