Progress report for YENC24-218
Project Information
We have five Indigenous and organic farms in the Crow Wing and White Earth reservation area which provide food to our villages, our cultural events, ceremonies, and markets. We wish to deepen the work on these farms with horses. We have a youth horsemanship program, our Green Riders Program, and now plan to integrate our youth horse programs with our farming programs through training in fish emulsion, manure spreading, various small and larger scale cultivating equipment, and seasoned farmers, including Amish farmers as neighbors. We understand that the carbon footprint of our horse farming is benevolent. FAll-Report-AAI.pages
l. Increase horse farming activities to five acres in 2024, on these farms.
2. Increase the youth farming experience of 8 youth, lead horse people, with training by Kara and others by 8 sessions on fields, with additional emerging youth horse riders, learning from this experience and understanding that horse power with horses is a viable farming system.
3. Produce food using these methods for our village, delivered by horse and wagon.
4. Develop a video and set of media on this amazing work to share in social media and with youth programs in tribal communities in our region.
Educational & Outreach Activities
Participation Summary:
We are restoring some very significant knowledge in our territory with horse farming. Kara brought the horses into the village about l0 times this past year, giving kids the chance to both ride and also work with the small carts. Five of our youth really grew out in the horse cultivating work- Giiwedin Buckanaga , Aandegoons Neeland, Sasaha Richards Josh Roy and Leroy Ross. These kids excelled in horse work, in cultivating some small fields. We put in potatoes, and harvested them with the horses. We were able to cultivate fields and put in corn with our horses. and this year will expand our work to larger fields. We purchased additional equipment for the work and repaired most of our equipment, but have new harnesses and essential equipment after last year. We had a lot of interns and researchers come see our work, and were able to produce about 2400 pounds of potatoes, and three different varieties of corn.
- Host webinar or in-person workshop
- Other
Learning Outcomes
Youth were able to work with most of the equipment we have - cultivators. seed drills. and planting equipment as well as harvesting equipment.
We see post petroleum agriculture and the restoration of horse agriculture as a healing journey for our community. We have a lot of youth who really engage well with horses, and are training horses and riding long distances developing the skills of other youth as riders. This program allows the youth to really engage in farming from a place which resonates more with culture and also is so important for the community- both young people and elders to see the resonance of the horses and the young people.
This was hands-on cultivation work. Kara Knowles did the teaching and instructing and the youth worked with Kara on this. We looked at horse cultivation books which are available, and this helped us identify and better use some of the equipment.
We are developing a curriculum and lesson plan with Elena Creef from Wellesley College, which reaffirms the cultural relationship to horses and the relationship to soil and plants.
Strength is hands on. Weakness is a written curriculum and lesson plan, which we hope to more fully develop in 2025.
Project Outcomes
We really did not fundraise a great deal this past year, as we have been restructuring- moving the hemp and larger agriculture work into a new hemp cooperative. We really had significant and increasing youth participation in our work however, and expect that we will be able to have some of these youth move into our horse logging program which was just funded. We have good interest in the community for this.
We increased gardening in the village substantially, and in 2025, we will build a stronger partnership with the Pine Point village to carry out youth and farming programs like a community garden.
We were able to grow potatoes on the Crow Wing Farm and had good production there. We trained ten youth in more of the equipment and cultivators. and had four of the youth really take to it and expand their skill set with a smaller team of horses. We have a core group of about ten kids who are really becoming adept at the horse farming and team work. These kids also have been going into the village for more interaction with youth and in 2025, we expect a much more elaborate community food program.
Sasha Richards and Leroy Ross have taken real leadership in the horse farming programs and in 2025 will grow out those programs and we will be able to farm 5 acres. In the upcoming year. we will shore up this work and expand to fields in Osage/Snellman, Round Lake on the Ponsford prairie and on our farm on Madeline Island. We expect to be able to carry out up to 5 acres of work between these farms.
In the fall of 2024, we began strengthening our curriculum in a collaboration with scholars at Wellesley College, with the intention of shoring up an Anishinaabe farming and horse program. We expanded this by meeting up with a farm program from Vermont which gives out badges/patches for a youth program and plan on developing a similar program here. coordinating with other tribal youth programs on the reservation and regionally. We need more of a youth program coordinator to be developed and will hope to hire that person in the upcoming month.
Thank you for the opportunity to do this work. The youth programs are really core to AAI as we intend to raise the next generation of farmers, and the horse programs are critical to this for youth and for our sustainability. We see the interest in farming with horses and by hand increasing dramatically in our village of Pine Point as a result of this project.