If everything old is new again, the new Aboriginal garden at Douglas College is about as old as it gets.
The garden is being planted Tuesday by volunteers from Fortis BC following a traditional blessing ceremony by a Mohawk/Ojibwe First Nation’s elder. Two of the six plots at the college’s Sustainability, Outreach and Learning (Sol) garden will be sowed with ceremonial plants like sweetgrass and tobacco as well as food crops like blue camas, knotting onion and kinnikinnick - or bear berry. The plants are native to British Columbia and play an important role in First Nations’ culture, said Robert McGregor, the executive director of the college’s Institute of Urban Ecology.
Th garden will allow the 700 Aboriginal students who attend Douglas to connect with their ancestral ways as well as educate the entire student body, staff and faculty about agricultural practices that have been around for centuries.
“This is an outreach garden,” said McGregor.
The current climate of reconciliation for wrongs and exploitation foisted upon Indigenous communities by foreign settlers also make this the right time for such an initiative, said McGregor.
“All of us should be involved in trying to understand First Nations’ culture.”
The garden will be tended by volunteers and as the crops begin to grow, workshops will be conducted to explain their significance, and show how they are harvested and used.
McGregor said there is a lot to learn from crops and gardening techniques that sustained First Nations’ communities for hundreds of years.
“People are interested in sustainability and connecting to the natural world,” he said. “This was a culture that was connected to nature in a very real way.”
• The opening of the new Traditional Aboriginal Garden at Douglas College will be celebrated Tuesday, June 6, from 4 to 6 p.m. Everyone is welcome. The garden is located on the south lawn of the Coquitlam campus at 1250 Pinetree Way.
