NIBLEY, Cache County — When Darren Parry was a child, he would walk Antelope Island with his grandmother, who was a Shoshone tribal elder. He recalled the lush landscape surrounded by water and the many indigenous plants that helped sustain life for his ancestral tribe, which is native to the surrounding areas.
That was back in the 1960s and ’70s, and today, Parry is a Shoshone tribal elder himself. He is also a professor at Utah State University and the University of Utah, making it his professional and life goal to teach others much of what his grandmother taught him when he was younger.
“I grew up at the feet of my grandmother, a tribal elder who was our knowledge-holder,” Parry said. “We’d go on plant walks at Antelope Island, and she’d talk about the plants and whether they were used as food and medicine. She’d talk about the healing properties in the Great Salt Lake. I grew up looking at land, not as a commodity, but as a relative that needs to be nurtured and cared for, and all of these plants that she talked about are still here.”
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Parry said he teaches his students about the plants with the hope they will see a world that once existed, while empowering them with the knowledge that it can still exist. It was during one of these lessons that some students posed the idea of creating a garden that grew only Indigenous plants.
“In my classes, I talk about food sovereignty and how these food systems are still here, but they’re not recognized as food,” he said. “Many of the plants are just growing wild in the mountains and on the foothills and sometimes down on the ditch banks and by the ponds. During class, my students were wondering how cool it would be if we planted a garden with only Indigenous plants.”
One of those students is Sterling Brinkerhoff, a senior in the plant science program at Utah State. Brinkerhoff grew up on his family’s farm in Benjamin, in south Utah County, specializing in heirloom and artisan vegetables. He said taking Parry’s Indigenous land stewardship class opened his eyes to a new, yet old, way of gardening.
“I’ve lived in rural Utah my entire life, and I was taught a more conventional way of farming,” Brinkerhoff said. “Taking Darren’s class has shown me that there are ways we can adapt and utilize a lot of stuff that’s already here. … Because of this, we decided as a class to develop this Indigenous foods garden and try to utilize some of the native plants in it to help showcase to the broader community what’s here and what can be done with it.”
Deciding to create an Indigenous garden is one thing, but having the space to do it is another. That’s where the soon-to-be-open Stokes Nature Center, an 11-acre nature reserve in Cache County, came in.
“The Nature Center has a property in Nibley (a town south of Logan) that we were gifted over 20 years ago with a conservation easement on it for wildlife,” executive director Kendra Penry said. “We have been working for quite a few years now to turn it into an educational facility that encourages people to get outside, walk around and enjoy nature. More than that, we want to connect each person to the natural world in a way that inspires them to care for it. When Darren asked if we had space for an indigenous garden, we offered it right away. The indigenous garden fits perfectly with our goals for the center, and we’re really excited about it.”
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The garden was allotted 3 acres from the center to use, though the garden currently occupies about a half-acre. In the garden, Parry said, there are plants from tribes native to Utah, as well as many from tribes from all over the country.
“We were going to do just plants that are more friendly to Cache Valley, but my class decided instead to find some Indigenous plants from around the country as well,” Parry explained. “They wanted to find plants that different tribes have used that aren’t genetically modified in any way, that are found in these Indigenous communities. We planted some 1500-year-old bush beans that were found in a cave; some Iroquois cornbread beans; Zuni gold beans; and Hidatsa Shield beans.”
Parry went on to talk about a wide variety of corn, popcorn, squash and melons, including Santo Domingo native melons and Cherokee moon and star watermelons. And while the garden has yet to produce many of those things, Parry said that the timing is perfect.
“We’re hoping that the nature center is done toward mid-to-late September and what we want to do in conjunction with that is to have a community celebration where people can come and enjoy the new nature center, and also come and enjoy a meal,” Parry said. “We want to harvest everything we’ve grown and show the community what’s possible.”
He said that during this whole process, he has had the voice of his grandmother in his head, reminding him why this work is so important.
“My grandmother taught me that we had a responsibility to live in reciprocity with the world and the Earth,” Parry said. “This made me realize that Indigenous wisdom can save the world if we listen to it.”
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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