Indigenous Permaculture

Those cultures among us who have learnt to live with and honor these ecological patterns and principals through their worldviews, traditions, customs, stories, and legends have been able to live harmoniously with ecology for thousands of years; participating in, working with, and adding to its rich complexity. With this in mind, I was asked to pair with Indigenous Elder Isabelle Kootenay from Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation to teach the Alberta Aboriginal Studies 30 curriculum through the study of permaculture design; a design science that seeks to apply ecological patterns and principals to human systems. We came to call this course, Indigenous Permaculture; an innovative approach to the first Aboriginal Studies class taught in the Edmonton Public School Board.
Who waters an ecosystem? Who fertilizes it? How is it that ecology doesn’t need tilling, weeding, or chemicals? Why it it that if you walk away from a forest and return a hundred or a thousand years later, it’s still thriving?
For billions of years, ecological systems have been refining the patterns and principals that give them their remarkable resiliency. With endless relationships, connections, and pathways, ecology has learnt to harvest, build, and reuse every available resource. With time, these ecological systems gather nutrients, build stability, and increase in complexity to the benefit of the Earth and to those who choose to embrace it.
Through the study of place and ecology, a small diverse group of students began studying curriculum through the researching, planting, growing, and caring of a large variety of plants that have a history of edible, medicinal, spiritual, and cultural use by indigenous people of the area, North America, and around the world. Through their interactions with these plants, students explored traditional uses, stories, and customs, passed down by indigenous cultures for thousands of years.
During a presentation by Chief Gordon Planes, of the T’Sou-ke Nation (home of the most solar intensive community in Canada), students were asked to consider how traditional indigenous customs and worldviews might be applied to contemporary society. As a result students of the Indigenous Permaculture course helped contribute to the creation of a food forest in the school’s central courtyard. Containing more than seventy species of edible perennial plants, many with a history of use by indigenous cultures, the food forest is designed to work with ecology; build soil, sequester carbon, encouraging and embracing biodiversity while simultaneously producing food; providing an ecological and educational model in balance with nature.
With a student success rate of over 95%, the Indigenous Permaculture program gathered interest from CBC radio and television and the Edmonton Journal. Though, on perhaps a more profound level, students began to explore the parallels between the patterns that build stable and resilient ecological communities and those that build heathy human ones; the importance of diversity, resourcefulness, the forming and nurturing of relationships, and how the strengths of each and every individual can come together in such a way that their weaknesses don’t matter.