Growing Seeds

Project Category: Enhancing Waterways

Project Description:

The Growing Seeds project is an ancestral and organic seed garden, led by Sam Whiteye (Xúwii Shoopéekal Enterprises). The garden will feature medicines and native plant species in the hopes of returning, revitalizing, and reclaiming knowledge and food sovereignty for the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown (of which Sam is from) and her relatives from the Munsee-Delaware Nation. Sam hopes that the native plants and medicines such as tobacco, sweet grass, and sage from the Growing Seeds garden can be distributed to urban Indigenous community members in London who need access to traditional medicines but cannot find means to get any.

Her project is called Alumiikun Waxkaniim which translates to "Growing Seeds" in the Lunaape language. This is because the seeds she is growing are ancestral heirloom seeds. Her passion centers around the reclamation of original vegetables, native medicines, and plant species that her nation, the Lunaapeewak, used as part of a traditional diet before contact. This journey also centers around identity and how these ancestral seeds are a piece of reclaiming her Indigenous heritage and asserting the Munsee-Delaware Nation's food sovereignty.

Tobacco seedlings