The Land Weaves Relationships: centering Tribal people and partnerships at Vesper Meadow

A week after beginning my position at Vesper Meadow, Jeanine and I were on our way to the Grand Ronde Education Summit. On the drive up, we found ourselves reminiscing over the last few years. We shared bits of memory and history that have led to Tribal people and partnerships being centered at Vesper Meadow and to my position as Indigenous Partnerships Program Manager. 

In the late summer of 2018, I was a few years into my Board position with The Friends of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument and had also been spending as much time as I could traveling the forest roads of the Monument, and self-identifying plants and their uses. A friend mentioned a new non-profit situation on a property up near the mountain lakes above Ashland, whose purpose was the restoration of a meadow. I had heard about Jeanine’s work for a while, both through friends and through my work with the Friends. Jeanine sounded like a powerhouse, and I was both inspired to see how I could be supportive and excited at the opportunity of meeting with and learning from botanists and ecologists. Not long after, a volunteer event soon came to my attention; an opportunity to collect native seeds at Vesper Meadow. In looking back, my attendance at that volunteer event sowed the first seed to change the course of my life.

By the fall of 2018, I returned to my undergraduate studies at Southern Oregon University, with the intention of fulfilling the prerequisites for their Nursing program. By 2019 I had changed my major to Psychology and had become involved with the Native American Student Union (NASU) at SOU. I organized a volunteer day for NASU up at Vesper Meadow, where we moved pine and fir trees from a recently acquired addition to the property closer to Latgawa creek, to assist with the process-based restoration of the creek bed. There were some funny moments in the beginning as the barbed wire fences hadn’t been taken down yet, so we were tossing the trees over the fence, to then be dragged over to the creek. Some of the trees were bigger and took three of us to lift up over a fence and we weren’t always coordinated, which resulted in some laughter as it took us a few tries to get them over the fence. And once one of us started laughing, it just caused a cascade of giggles.

Around this time, I was also starting to be involved with the Indigenous Gardens Network (IGN), a project of Native American Programs at SOU that brought together Grand Ronde and Siletz Tribal members through an Oregon Cultural Trust Grant. Vesper Meadow was a founding partner of the IGN. I was impressed with the particular way the IGN was structured, with a Tribal steering committee, as well as the supporting Southwest Oregon Partners (SWO) group. The SWO partners include The Understory Initiative, Rogue Native Plant Partnership, the BLM, the Selberg Institute, Southern Oregon Land Conservancy, and more. These organizations intentionally make space for Tribal partners to gain meaningful access to their ancestral homelands, alleviate hardships and barriers to access, and support relationship building between Tribal people and First Foods. 

Through a grant from the Roundhouse Foundation, several visions of restoration are in motion to build on the initial achievements: deepening existing Indigenous Gardens Network partnerships, engaging in elderberry harvests and camas restoration, creating a film to tell the story of this land and this partnership, and this winter, a speaker series with IGN members from Grand Ronde and Siletz. Speakers' topics may include Tribal history in the past, current projects, and how to be a good ally to this work.

Over the last few years, Tribal partners have been able to travel down for several site visits, and one of the relationships that is the deepest is at Vesper Meadow. From listening sessions in 2020 to plant identification walks and mapping culturally important plants in 2022, it’s been a beautiful journey to witness and support Tribal partners being on the land and developing their relationship with the land. 

Although I have resided on these lands for most of my life, my people are Iñupiaq (Alaska Native), so while this is my home, I have come to honor and respect that this area is not my homeland. This area is the homeland for the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa people. They were forcibly removed in the 1850s to the reservations of Grand Ronde and Siletz. To provide their descendants with resources and access to their ancestral homelands and First Foods is a responsibility. To do our best to undo settler colonial harm is good work. I’ve seen, and experienced, how the work can bring up a wide range of emotions, but we experience them together, as a community. And inevitably, the over-arching experience is one of joy, peace, healing, relief, and camaraderie. The land heals us as we heal the land. 

To be good allies to those whose homelands we reside on, is to do the work of removing fences, the submission of invasive grasses, as well as planting willow stakes, alders, pollinator plants, and other native trees and shrubs. To be an ally and support the work at Vesper Meadow, join a volunteer day, attend an event, share our educational videos, and donate funds to Vesper Meadow or the Indigenous Gardens Network directly.