Through vibrant green leaves and upright stems reaching for the sun, indigenous varieties of beans, corn, and squash are growing in the Island Grown Initiative (IGI) community garden in Oak Bluffs this summer.
The plot and produce are an initiative by NaDaizja Bolling, in partnership with the Aquinnah Cultural Center (ACC), where Bolling works as the executive director. The ACC is a nonprofit organization that preserves, shares, and educates people about the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), its culture, and the endurance of indigenous practices.
For the Aquinnah tribe, this quarter-acre plot at the IGI community garden nourishes more than the body; it carries cultural and spiritual traditions and cultivates food and land sovereignty. Historically, beans, corn, and squash are known as the “three sisters,” and these have nourished indigenous communities across North and Central America for roughly 3,000 years.
“It’s definitely a pivotal moment for our community to be able to have that type of space to grow a traditional garden,” Bolling told The Times in an interview. She said the fact that the plot is in a community garden opens the door for more people to get involved.
“That’s how we share knowledge and retain it,” Bolling said. “A lot of our community members have so much other wisdom that they bring to the space that we might not have, so we’re sharing. That can only happen when we come together.”
In Indigenous traditions, these three vegetables are grown together because they have a symbiotic relationship and rely on one another for nourishment, physical support, and protection. Bolling explained that this practice is known as companion planting.
“The corn requires a lot of nitrogen to grow big, sturdy roots, but then the beans can climb up, so we don’t need to use poles because they’ll just use the cornstalk to climb. At the same time, [the beans] put nitrogen back into the soil to help keep it more balanced. And the squash provides good coverage to the ground with its really big, broad leaves that are lower to the ground and help to suppress weeds that might take over an area,” she said.
This summer is ACC’s second year planting indigenous produce on the Island. Last year’s crop was planted and harvested at the educational nonprofit Stillpoint in West Tisbury. This summer, the initiative is taking place at IGI, where the space provided is larger.
Because the traditional crops thrive in the native soil, at the height of the summer they offer a surplus of vegetables. Emily Armstrong, the community garden coordinator and educational director at IGI, told The Times that the corn is the most noticeable of the three types of produce.
“When you walk in [at the community garden], the corn is probably almost seven feet tall, so it just has this really amazing presence on the farm. It’s changing the landscape of the farm with its height,” she said.
Armstrong explained that the small plot symbolizes the beginning of a larger series in IGI’s efforts to serve the Wampanoag community beyond land acknowledgements. “It was a moment for us last year where we thought, ‘How can we go beyond just acknowledging that we’re on native land, and make actual relational commitments with members of the tribe?’”
From there, the idea sprouted into this modern revitalization program to support the tribe’s continuing food and land sovereignty efforts. For centuries, land displacement of tribal communities from their ancestral land and the introduction of invasive livestock and crops have disrupted native harvests.
“It’s very culturally significant to us, but also something that we don’t always have the opportunity to do just because of such great land loss within our tribal community. So, it just speaks to the need for people to have greater access to our traditional homelands,” Bolling said. “And when we’re at the garden, it’s just one small example of what can happen when we do have that access.”
Bolling also said that river herring fish would typically be used in traditional fertilizing practices. It’s become a less commonly used fertilizer due to a significant decrease in the Island’s herring population over the past few decades.
“We don’t do that much anymore for several reasons. First, we had access to some really rich soil at IGI, but also we do not have an abundance of herring anymore. And so we have a responsibility not to fish herring if we can help it,” she said. Since 2005, there’s been a state moratorium on harvesting river herring due to the declining population; only tribal members are allowed to harvest herring.
The soil in the community garden at IGI is “rich,” as Bolling said, because of practices that have become a standard over the past six years. Co-executive director of IGI, Noli Taylor, told The Times that they have introduced regenerative growing techniques, such as “reducing tillage (soil disturbance), maximizing diversity, keeping living roots in the ground as much of the year as possible, keeping animals in rotation on the land, and not using synthetic chemicals.”
After the harvest, which will run until October, the ACC hopes to share the vegetables with the wider tribal community as well as store seeds for future crops. Bolling said that this traditional variety of corn, which is not sweet corn but a hard-kerneled one called white flint corn, will require a few months of drying time before it is ready to be turned into cornmeal. White flint corn is a staple of Indigenous diets that go back thousands of years.
Another flint corn variety grown at the plot is “strawberry popcorn,” which, as the name gives away, is mostly used for popcorn, part of Indigenous cultures for thousands of years. The strawberry part of the name comes from the small, rounded ears that look just like the big, dark red fruit.
The plan is to store the peeled corn in a space for drying, then distribute it, Bolling said.
“Hopefully tribal families will be willing to take home some [corn] that they could store, and that’s just us really trying to get creative with how we do this, and also help share the opportunity to care for our food and our seeds with everybody in our community,” she said.
As the crops grow, Bolling said she hopes people harvest more than vegetables from their ancestral plot. “When they see our [garden], I hope it’s a reminder to the Wampanoag people on this Island: We’re still here in our homelands; we’re still caring for our communities by providing food to them. This is a way that we assert our presence on the Island, and we have some form of autonomy over what we take into our bodies,” she said.
Bolling said that food sovereignty is about the cultural integrity of farming, land use, and access, but also is spiritual, nutritional, and a way to honor their ancestry and the natural world: “When people see our garden, I want them to know that’s what this is for us.”
