Celebrating the Four Sisters Garden
Happy Indigenous People’s Day!
We’re celebrating today by highlighting a special project between Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, UM Environmental Studies Program, All Nations Health Center, and the People’s Food Sovereignty Program, that has grown at the PEAS Farm for the last three seasons: the Four Sisters Garden (and if you haven’t followed those folks, please do! They deserve your support!). The garden fosters a relationship between human and nonhuman communities, enacts tribal food sovereignty and grows culturally relevant foods, and provides educational experiences for Indigenous students at the University of Montana’s Environmental Studies program in food growing skill development, community building, and doing the work of tribal food sovereignty.
The Four Sisters elements include: corn that grows tall and fast, beans that climb the corn to find the sun and replenish the soil with nutrients, summer squash that grows low and lush and shades out the weeds, and giant sunflowers that feed our pollinators. While three and four sisters gardens are practiced by Indigenous tribes across Turtle Island, this Four Sisters Garden is grown in a particular arrangement practiced by the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples, as captured in the book Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden.
Food and seed from the garden is given to the tribal community in Missoula through All Nations and on the Flathead Indian Reservation through the People’s Food Sovereignty Program.
Each season, University of Montana’s Environmental Studies program students take on the planning and planting of this garden. One of this year’s students, May-Lyric Smith, had this to say about the experience:
“The Four Sisters garden gave me the space to grow food for the community rather than profit. Which was an opportunity I thought was a pipe dream prior to this experience. For some of our Indigenous community members who live far from home, this garden gives them access to culturally relevant foods and cultural practices. Western agriculture has been used as a form of assimilation and disenfranchisement since settler expansion. This space gave me a platform to incorporate my own tribal values, and learn MHA protocols in agriculture, reminding me to slow down, be mindful and un-do a lot of hard self talk I had picked up from my years of migrant work. From this space, I gained life long friendships, fed our communities, and was able to incorporate personal experience towards my degree. Our plant relatives, the four sisters, the geese and the land taught me so much this year.”