A Shinnecock Legacy Lives On Through A Garden

You might miss the public garden tucked next to the Shinnecock Community Center on the Shinnecock Indian Nation Territory, but its legacy is less concerned with maintaining acres of plant beds than with educating the tribe’s younger generations.“We consider ourselves people of the land and people of the water,” said Shavonne Smith. The director of the Shinnecock Environmental Department, Ms. Smith spearheads the Shinnecock Community Garden initiative, which was founded in 2011.

In the garden, tribal members cultivate traditional Shinnecock crops like cranberry beans, squash and corn—”The Three Sisters”—but they are quick to point out that they also grow non-traditional crops like eggplant or kale, which is a favorite among the kids at the Shinnecock Cultural Camp. Ms. Smith recalls making the campers kale smoothies last summer, noting that at first the kids were “skeptical,” but that they went on to ask all the time for the green smoothies.

“It was a good way for the kids to eat the vegetables,” she said. The Environmental Department works with the campers, ages 4 to 12, twice a week, to teach them about the environment. The teenage counselors, ages 14 to 16, also participate in the lessons, which range from how to reduce one's carbon footprint to why bugs are good for the garden.

“They will get out there and be like, ‘Oh there is a roly-poly. Oh, there is a spider.’ And sometimes they will scream, but they find it really fascinating,” said Shinnecock environmental assistant Viola Cause, who coordinates education outreach, of the campers. “We are definitely trying to educate toward food sovereignty. The education part has to come first.”

Despite the help of the campers, the garden is lagging thanks to deer and a lack of capital and labor.

“This year was a very slow year for us. There just seemed not to be enough hours in the day,” said Ms. Smith. “We are looking for not just donations of money but donations of time or possibly equipment.”

When the lack of tools comes up, members are unanimous as to the first priority: They need a rototiller. A rototiller would help them to aerate the soil, an essential component of Shinnecock farming methods, some of which were promoted by the late Lamont Smith.

Mr. Smith was an instrumental figure for Shinnecock agriculture and aquaculture. His legacy looms large in the community garden. His method of pulling up the soil—dubbed Lamont’s Way"—is taught to the children, as it was a traditional method to keep the soil alive. He also reconstructed a traditional Shinnecock garden, preserved heritage seeds and worked with Stony Brook University on soil research.

“Hopefully, the more kids we get involved, they will stay with it through the years,” Ms. Cause said. Last year, the children raised ladybugs for the community garden. “We do the sticks in the garden, the kids use the English words as well as the Algonquin words,” Ms. Cause explained, referring to the markers that identify plants.

Other educational components of the community garden include incorporating crushed shells into the compost and repurposing old cake and rotisserie chicken boxes into mini-greenhouses.

“I’ve got too many plastic things saved,” said Lisa Bowen, an active member of the community garden who is also the librarian at Southampton Elementary School. This past April, she led an Earth Day workshop, teaching youth how to build homemade pots out of old newspapers.

“It is the transfer of culture from the adults to the kids,” Ms. Smith explained. “It is a hands-on way for them to learn, not only the vocabulary but the different ways of doing things.”

Tribal members hope to start a wildflower garden nearby, where native plants like chicory and Queen Anne’s lace can grow.

Pointing out the adverse effect of the Asian honeysuckle on wildflowers like the common mullein, Ms. Cause is an advocate for controlling growth by weeding, rather than using pesticides, another concept that she teaches to the campers.

“Last year we gave a list of all the plants that were already here, so that before you started your landscaping, this is what you should try to use,” Ms. Smith said. The Shinnecock Indian Nation formed a relationship with the Long Island Native Plant Initiative and receives indigenous trees, which they then give to tribal members. “We got the red dogwood, the cedars, the cranberry tree. The first year, we had the white pine,” Ms. Smith said.

Tribal members also hope to expand their traditional trade with other tribes in New York State, already having traded with the Tuscarora tribe from upstate New York in the spring.

“We traded oysters and clams, and in exchange we got braided traditional corn in three different styles,” Ms. Smith said. “And we got maple syrup. That was a treat.”

Despite a challenging year in the community garden, tribal members hope to establish a community farm in the future, and they already have a large plot of reserved land. Their intent is to establish enough food sovereignty that they can provide elders with free fruit and vegetables. The biggest obstacle for the food sovereignty project is funding.

“Having volunteers implies that there are all these people that have all this free time that they can just give,” Ms. Smith said. “When the actuality is, we can try to create jobs so that we can have people who can work on the farm.”

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