Teaching Seasonally-Based and Culturally-Centered Sustainable Agriculture Curriculum to Tribal Educators

Final report for ENC20-187

Project Type: Professional Development Program
Funds awarded in 2020: $90,000.00
Projected End Date: 09/30/2024
Grant Recipient: University of Wisconsin
Region: North Central
State: Wisconsin
Project Coordinator:
Richard Monette
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Project Information

Abstract:

The project is targeted toward Tribal agricultural, food, and cultural educators in the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest Regions.  These educators include Tribal program and non-profit staff, state extension staff, and other professionals providing education and support to Tribal communities, including community-based educators.

The outcomes of this project include:

  • Development and implementation of culturally-based education curriculum that will be available online but also hosted in-person when feasible
  • Building increased capacity for existing educators to effectively teach essential skills within community settings
  • Incorporation of appropriate cultural perspectives in educational curriculum.  Most standard curriculum is not structured from Tribal perspectives and therefore is not engaging to most Tribal members.
  • Creation of on online learning and networking platform allowing content creation from users.  This platform will continue beyond the grant period

The first year will focus on planning and curriculum development with monthly online trainings for Tribal educators beginning in fall 2020.  Given current challenges of in-person meetings, mosts work activity will be conducted remotely in the first year.  Years two and three will feature in-person seasonally-focused workshops with hands-on education that will be recorded and compiled into virtual content.

Project Objectives:

This project will create a virtual library of educational curriculum available to Tribal educators in the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest Region.  Much of that content will be new material developed through the hands-on workshops and other content-generation activities with partners, and some of the content will be compilations of existing resources developed for Tribal communities and the general public.  Development of this information clearinghouse will be an enormous asset to Tribal agricultural educators and their communities who often struggle to find culturally-relevant material.

Wisconsin is the designated host state, but this project is really a regional effort stretching across the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes Region that stretches from the Dakotas to New York.  Conservatively, this project aims to engage Tribal educators from 30 Tribes with an average of 2 educators from each Tribe.  Those 60 educators will in turn impact an average of 10 community members for a total reach of 600 directly impacted participants.  While these estimated numbers are high, the actual impact will likely be much larger because there is a huge demand for these type of resources, as illustrated by the 700 participants at last year's Great Lakes Intertribal Food Summit.

Existing partnerships will be strengthened through this project and new partnerships will be created as connections are expanded and the online learning and networking platform facilitates improved ability connect with one another.

Cooperators

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  • Erin Silva
  • Gary Besaw

Education

Educational approach:

This project has begun by expanding connections and hosting small workshops to help lay the foundation for expanding workshops as pandemic conditions now appear to allow.  While the number of participants has been limited for the initial workshops, content has been recorded and compiled to allow for more expansive on-demand content creation.

 

Education & Outreach Initiatives

In-Person Workshops
Objective:

Host 3-4 in-person workshops per year

Description:

In-person workshops are particularly important in Tribal communities where interpersonal relationships carry added importance.  These workshops are designed to focus on seasonal activities throughout the region

Outcomes and impacts:

Participants have been able to experience hands-on learning with processing a deer hide, cooking traditional foods, touring diversified farming operations employing a variety of organic methods at various scales of production, learning about making corn mortars from logs, tapping trees and learning about making maple syrup.  

2021 Workshop Summary 

  • Traditional Tool Workshop.  Two-dozen participants were able to make their own corn mortars from yellow birch logs before using them to process foods in a community celebration.
  • Virtual Food Sovereignty Symposium.  Due to rising pandemic numbers, this virtual event replaced the planned in-person event.  Two days of presentations culminated in keynotes from renowned Indigenous food leaders, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Sean Sherman.
  • Harvest Celebration and Field Day.  Featuring hands-on activities like corn harvesting and braiding, this event drew one hundred participants for a day of learning before a dinner from several chefs centered on Indigenous foods.
  • Fall Harvest - Keweenaw Bay Indian Community.  Hosted at Dynamite Hill Farms, this weekend of activities included multiple presentations, demonstrations, and activities including construction of a traditional wigwam frame, tanning deer hides, and making maple sugar.

2022 Workshop Summary 

  • Traditional Tool Workshop.  Similar to the workshop in February 2021, in partnership with College of Menominee Nation, Nueta Hidatsa Tribal College, Ukwekwka, and others, a traditional tool workshop focusing on making corn mortars where participants were able to make their own tools.
  • Maple Workshop.  Nearly a dozen Tribal, along with a few non-Tribal, agricultural educators came together for a workshop at Dynamite Hill Farms in the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community where they learned about unique approaches to tapping trees on Tribal trust land where restrictions against permanent installation pose challenges.
  • Food Sovereignty Symposium & Festival. This three-day event drew over 300 participants in a broad partnership with many organizations.  Dozens of speakers and instructors presented in both formal settings and during hands-on workshops.
  • Regenerative Agriculture - Southern Wisconsin.  This two-day workshop visited research farms and the Meat Sciences Facility at UW-Madison, a non-profit commercial incubator kitchen, and private Indigenous farms.  Over 40 participants, predominantly agricultural educators, attended the event that included catering from Indigenous chefs.
  • Regenerative Agriculture Workshop - Northeast Wisconsin.  Visiting four Tribes over three days, this significant series of field day sessions covered a huge array of Tribal operations from both Tribal enterprises and individual producers.  Over 60 attendees participated and all food was prepared by Indigenous chefs.
  • Harvest Celebration. Turning the previous year's event into an annual occurrence, this Harvest Celebration convened 150 attendees for an afternoon and evening of learning, cooking, and eating with several activities featuring Indigenous foods and teachings.

2023 Workshop Summary

  • Maple Learning Exchanges.  Two workshops were held on maple syrup production at Tribal sites at Red Cliff and Fond du Lac.  Each location operated at different scales and approaches, with Red Cliff being a more community-oriented operation with shared equipment, harvest sites for individuals, and community education.  Fond du Lac was at Spirit Lake Native Farms, an independently-owned Tribal operation with a modern tubing collection system and high efficiency sap evaporator along with a bottling facility.
  • Seeding the Future.  Held in conjunction with numerous partners, this three-day event at Ukwekwa at Oneida included an assortment of hands-on learning and teaching opportunities with a major focus on traditional tools and growing strategies.
  • Harvest Celebration.  Building upon previous years' fall harvest events, this expanded celebration expanded into a full weekend  with numerous activities on harvesting, processing, and soils education.  The first day was designed as a family-oriented events, drawing nearly two-hundred attendees.  Workshops included wild rice processing, corn braiding and corn husk dolls, nixtamlizing corn for tortillas, using corn mortars to grind corn, and work stations making hundreds of tortillas for tacos.

2024 Workshop Summary

  • Indigenous Producer Academy.  This event drew 75 educators, producers, academics, and agricultural support professionals for two days of learning and networking.  The event began with a comprehensive field day at Forest County Potawatomi's Bodweadmi Ktëgan Farm where workshops included 1) rotational grazing, composting, beekeeping, aquaponics, and high tunnel management with a focus on pruning cucumbers and tomatoes.  Prior to these workshops, all attendees were able to join an overview tour that gave a sense of the multitude of activities on the farm, with some background on activities not covered in the workshops like maple syrup production, orchard management, and pastured poultry.  Menominee hosted dinner and evening cultural activities featuring corn husk flowers and cooking on the first evening before sessions on conservation planning and farm business development on the second day.  NRCS co-presented on implementation of grazing plans during a visit to one of the Tribe's farms.  The business planning training took a train-the-trainer approach by breaking participants into groups that developed FSA farm loan applications for Indigenous operations based on provided scenarios focused on Indigenous corn, livestock, maple syrup, and wild berries.
  • Fall Harvest Celebration.  Continuing the late September series of events from previous project years, this event expanded from two days to three with the addition of a field day that attracted numerous partners to learn about both production but also supply chain management focused on community-oriented local and regional food distribution.
  • Our Shared Waters. Bringing Tribal cultural educators to share stories of their construction of both wooden dugout and birchbark canoes, this event gave opportunity for participants to get onto the water in paddling the traditional and modern canoes.  The event also included hands-on workshops finishing wild rice and braiding corn on the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Union Terrace, right next to Lake Mendota.
  • Maple Sugar Cone Workshop.  Many people do not realize that maple syrup is not a traditional food, or at least not the primary final production.  Instead, maple sap was cooked beyond syrup to sugar or cakes that were easier to store and transport.  This workshop first covered how to make cones from birchbark.  These cones were then filled with syrup that had been cooked until most water was removed, allowing it to be poured into the cones where it set into hard cakes, as well as stirred to make maple sugar.
  • Indigenous Seasonal Harvest Calendar.  The foundation of the Indigenous seasonal harvest curriculum is the seasonal harvest calendar, which varies by community and family.  Biskakone Greg Johnson from Lac du Flambeau presented in this final session, giving an overview of highlights from his seasonal food cycles that included stories and both the challenges he and his community face from year-to-year and the value that such seasonal living brings.
Create Online Curriculum
Objective:

Develop a virtual, on-demand learning platform

Description:

Despite a proliferation of online content on nearly any topic imaginable, many agricultural educators struggle to find relevant curriculum presented in coherent, pedagogical formats.  This project has compiled information into several workshops on the MightyNetworks e-learning platform, creating the foundation of an educational library.  The platform will continue beyond this project as additional content continues to be created and added.

Outcomes and impacts:

Participants have been able to learn through presenters and hands-on opportunities, which often facilitates the highest impact learning outcomes, but making select content available through the online learning platform allows expanded reach throughout the year and for those unable to attend in-person trainings.

Progress continues on developing content to launch this platform, balancing some appropriate traditional foods content with more general agricultural education materials.  Determining appropriate traditional content is complex because some knowledge needs to be kept within communities with protocols for sharing.  However, basic information on many foods may be shared.  Content has been recorded from each of the in-person workshops, with additional material developed during standalone sessions.

Educational & Outreach Activities

4 Consultations
3 Curricula, factsheets or educational tools
4 On-farm demonstrations
3 Online trainings
4 Tours
8 Webinars / talks / presentations
4 Workshop field days

Participation Summary:

50 Extension
15 NRCS
80 Researchers
20 Nonprofit
20 Agency
15 Ag service providers (other or unspecified)
50 Farmers/ranchers
200 Others
50 Farmers participated

Learning Outcomes

75 Participants gained or increased knowledge, skills and/or attitudes about sustainable agriculture topics, practices, strategies, approaches
15 Ag professionals intend to use knowledge, attitudes, skills and/or awareness learned

Project Outcomes

10 Grants received that built upon this project
15 New working collaborations
Project outcomes:

This project provided essential support at a time of significant transition at the local, national, and global levels given its initiation during the height of the covid pandemic.  That essential support helped support programming, staffing, and networking that contributed to major regional initiatives with lasting positive impact, including the Tribal Elder Food Box Program and an assortment of small and large projects that all connect to work at the center of this project.  Those large projects include Native participation in the Great Lakes Midwest Regional Food Business Center; an Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access (ILA) Project led by the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin; a Rural Partnerships Institute project and NIFA SAS project through UW-Madison, both focusing on Indigenous foods; and many smaller grants and projects that have emerged at least in part due to the collaborations connected to this project.

Providing effective agricultural education and support requires understanding the basic elements of targeted agricultural production.  Decades and even centuries of curriculum and support have gone into conventional agricultural production, yet comparatively minimal focus has gone into Native American food and agricultural training, which does have many unique aspects.  This project's support has not only enabled a remarkable slate of events, but it has helped refine curricular approaches that not only help in Native agricultural education, but also thinking about strategies to engage and support other small, rural agricultural and food entrepreneurs who face similar challenges in lack of access to processing and distribution infrastructure compared to larger, more conventional producers.  The work from this project has helped provide a foundation for continued efforts supporting strengthened local and regional food systems and corresponding rural economic development. 

25 Agricultural service provider participants who used knowledge and skills learned through this project (or incorporated project materials) in their educational activities, services, information products and/or tools for farmers
50 Farmers reached through participant's programs
Success stories:

The Indigenous Producer Academy was one of this project's major successes, as it built upon previous events and trainings while placing a heightened focus on training agricultural educators to better understand basics of conservation and farm business planning.  As was discussed in the summary, a portion of this training included assign participants were to groups where they worked to develop business plans as part of drafting a USDA Farm Service Agency youth farm loan application.  Each group was also given the full FSA farm loan application for reference, but the exercise was really intended to encourage each group to think about the essential income, expenses, and required capacity necessary to sustain an agricultural operation in one of four provided scenarios (Indigenous corn, livestock, maple syrup, and wild berries).  Some participants had participated in previous events and trainings under this project, and they were all able to use background from the previous day's farm field day at Forest County Potawatomi.  However, this business training required thinking outside the box in developing that business plan.  While traditional Indigenous foods are not all about business, providing effective projectional support does require understanding the basics of these operations, which this exercise sought to reinforce.  This business planning module is now being refined and expanded as part of new training efforts under the Increasing Land Access project referenced in the outcomes section.

Recommendations:

Effectively delivering any curriculum and training requires making the content and approach relevant to its participants.  That relevancy will vary based on the constituents, but sometimes having flexibility to structure events in formats and locations that aren't conventional conference centers makes a huge difference.  Of course, field days are common in the agricultural sector, but combining more hands-on activities helps reinforce the learning and deepen the relevancy.  Reflecting back, this project was able to accomplish that relevancy in a number of different formats and sub-topics.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. Government determination or policy.