Growing Intergenerational Resilience for Indigenous Food Sovereignty through Home Gardening

Abstract

As a community-based participatory research pro­ject designed to promote health and wellbeing, Growing Resilience supports home gardens for 96 primarily Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho families in the Wind River Reservation, located in Wyoming. Through analysis of data from two years of qualitative fieldwork, including stories told by 53 gardeners and members of the project’s commu­nity advisory board in talking circles and through our novel sovereign storytelling method, we investigated if and how these participants employ rela­tionships, knowledge, and practices across gen­era­tions through home gardening. We find that partic­ipants describe home gardening within pre­sent, past, future, and cross-generational frames, rooted in family relationships and knowledge shared across generations. Our analysis of these themes suggests that gardening provides families a means to transmit resilience across generations or, as we call it here, intergenerational resilience. We con­clude by discussing intergenerational resilience as a culturally specific mechanism of social-ecological community resilience that may be particularly rele­vant in Indigenous movements for food sover­eignty.

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