Nisqually Community Garden, promoting food sovereignty

Jill Severn

About a week ago, Chantay Anderson and her staff at the Nisqually Community Garden picked 70 pounds of cucumbers. Three days before, they picked 70 pounds of green beans, and one of the garden’s staff members taught the youth crew how to pickle them.

The next day, that crew was out planting fall crops, including Brussels sprout, cabbage, and purple sprouting broccoli.

The gardens – there are two of them – are a project of the Nisqually Tribe that promotes food sovereignty, an idea that includes local control, sustainable food production, and healthy food for the community – in this case, primarily the tribal community.

The term “food sovereignty” was coined in 1993 by La Via Campesina, a multinational group that coordinates organizations of small-scale farmers, farm workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe.

Among American tribal communities, the term has special resonance, because many tribes lost access to the food and medicinal plants that had been a big part of their diets before they were moved onto reservations. Then they were forced to depend on distribution of federal commodity foods, including white flour, lard and other refined products. That change in Native diets is a big factor in today’s sad fact that Native Americans are more likely than any other racial group to suffer and to die from diabetes.

The two gardens that Chantay Anderson manages produced about 15,000 pounds of food and herbs last year. This year it’s likely to be even more.

Volunteer-driven tribal gardens have come and gone since the 1970s. But in 2009, the tribal government began investing in paid staff and other expenses, which brought stability and growth. That year a garden was planted on five acres at the old Braget Farm. It includes a 100-year-old orchard, more recently added fruit trees, blueberries, vegetables, and a traditional herb garden. The second garden, at a different site, was planted for the first time in 2022.

Both culinary and medicinal herbs are a part of the Nisqually Community Garden's produce.

The herbs include both culinary and medicinal varieties. Some are prescribed by a traditional herbalist who is now employed at the tribal health clinic.

There is also an effort to revive and reclaim native plants, some of which have been extirpated by development. Camas, whose roasted bulb was a staple of the Native diet, is an example. Tribal members get permits to harvest camas on the tribe’s traditional prairie areas on JBLM. Other native food plants to be brought back into the local diet include wild carrot, biscuit root, and chocolate lily bulb. The roster of cultivated herbs is growing too, both for food and medicine.

A weekly box of fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs from these gardens is delivered to the homes of tribal elders once a week.  There’s also a weekly garden stand that distributes food at no cost to tribal members, all people who live on the reservation, and tribal staff.

Anderson has even bigger plans. Soon, she says, she would like to have a bigger teaching kitchen, more capacity for drying food and herbs, and medicine-making classes. She would also like to turn the barn into an event space. And she would like to expand the number of days the food stand is open.

She is already proud of the latest measure of progress: a large garage, now nicely renovated and with big coolers and furnishings designed to make it a bigger, better farmstand.

“One day at the farmstand a young single mom told me how much this food meant to her as she tried to make ends meet. She was so grateful.” Anderson was moved and gratified by that conversation; her life goal is to give back to the community and to the Nisqually Indian Tribe, which paid for her college education.

She also feels a deep satisfaction in the renaissance of tribal sovereignty that continues to evolve since the Boldt Decision of 1974, which revived tribal rights spelled out in the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek.

“There’s no federal government agency or corporation telling us this isn’t good enough, or that it has to be done in a certain way,” Anderson says.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com