What Garden Education Can Learn from Indigenous Knowledge Systems

• In Event: Refiguring Presences in Garden-Based Education

Abstract

Purpose. This paper makes a case for intentionally presencing Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in garden-based education and challenges common conceptions of gardens and garden education. We animate garden education that is carefully designed with goals of carrying forward IKS and supporting Indigenous sovereignty.

Perspectives. IKS encompasses Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and valuing. IKS are diverse, but one common facet is a relationality with lands/waters that is deeply caring and familial. Thus, respectfully embedding IKS in pedagogies and curricula can cultivate respectful youth-nature relationships while facilitating effective learning (Authors, 2023b). This is consequential in our current era, which is wrought with settler-colonial-caused environmental problems.

Mainstream educational institutions are built from and, perhaps unintentionally, promulgate settler colonial notions of nature-human relationships where humans are superior to and separate from the rest of nature – this can alienate Indigenous students as well as students from other marginalized backgrounds (Brayboy & Lomawaima, 2018). IKS refuses human supremacy and asserts that humans are not entitled to turn more-than-human life into “natural resources” for human consumption.

Garden-based education is sometimes positioned as a way to make education spaces sites of cross-cultural understanding (Hauk et al, 2018). However, Indigenous scholars have also pointed out how garden education can promulgate the same problems as indoor education where IKS are often absent from or misrepresented in educational settings, including gardens (Authors, 2016b). For educators in gardens and elsewhere, enacting IKS requires a substantial shift in the dynamics between teacher, student, and family as well as the dynamics between humans and more-than-humans; it is a shift away from a transactional dynamic to a relational one (Authors, 2023c).

Methods and Modes of Inquiry: This is a data-informed theory mode of inquiry. The paper argues for shifts in the knowledge systems undergirding garden education in the present to secure a better future for Indigenous peoples, lands, waters, and for us all. To animate this, we present a longitudinal case study of the relationship of Stinging Nettle (a plant) and three Indigenous siblings situated in nine years of attending an Indigenous STEAM-focused educational program. This case study utilizes data from interviews with the focal children as well as over 500 hours of video and audio data analyzed through an a priori and emergent coding process for content analysis, roles and relations analysis, and time order analysis.

Substantiated Conclusions. Engagement with Indigenous notions of gardening throughout nine years of attending an Indigenous STEAM program created helped to 1) build relationships between Stinging Nettle and three Indigenous youth and 2) support the wellbeing of these youth. Furthermore, it engaged youth in land-based practices that carry forward Indigenous lifeways while enacting Indigenous sovereignty.

Scholarly Significance. Educational scholars and practitioners working in garden and outdoor spaces can take from this paper the importance of making visible the knowledge systems embedded in garden design, pedagogy, and curriculum. This paper also helps scholars and practitioners to reimagine conceptions of gardens and gardening in order to support Indigenous youth, Indigenous sovereignty, and caring nature-human relationships for us all.

Authors

• Nicole Barry, University of California - Los Angeles

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University