Grantee Highlights: The Waterways Collective – Reseeding Our Roots

To highlight the work Creation Grantees are doing in their communities, the Creation Community Grants Team sends out Q&A forms so they can share their experiences creating and carrying out their projects. Today we are featuring responses from Quinn, Keegan (respondent), and Taylor of the The Waterways Collective – Reseeding Our Roots.

Community: Serpent River First Nation

Q : Tell us about your group and project!

A : The Waterways Collective is an Anishinaabe paddling collective whose interests are retracing their ancestral waterways. Through the amazing work from community partners, such as the Nimkii Youth Collective and Serpent River First Nation’s Culture Program, the Collective was able to reseed manoomin (wild rice) back into the community’s waters. Fast forward a year, and the manoomin that had been reseeded into our waters was starting to grow very abundantly. Teachings that we gained from our participation in manoomin gatherings were that a new manoomin bed should be reseeded and reseeded for many years upwards to 5 or 6 before it can be sustainably harvested. This was our first season, and we were very fortunate to have our first seeds take so well.

We were also very fortunate to be able to bring members of the community safely onto the water to teach them how to sustainably cultivate manoomin, and how and where to reseed to better our cultivation efforts. We were able to break down barriers for community members, giving them the tools to get safely on the water and the knowledge of how to sustainably cultivate manoomin back into our waterways. One day the harvesting will begin, after much more care and nurturing. We as the Waterways Collective are filled with excitement and joy as this program and our manoomin grows.

Q: As the youth running the project, what impact do you hope it will have?

A : As the youth running the project, we hope it will have profound impacts for our community and its members for generations to come. We hope it can grow to help improve our relationship with the land and water, and to better help our community strive to become more food sovereign. The manoomin will grow as we nurture and care for it for generations to come, and I believe the same can be said for our community. The community used to use the waterways for travel, hunting and fishing before the Mining settlement was established upriver. After Elliot Lakes Uranium Mines severely impacted the river, our community had steered clear of the river and for good reason.

We as a community lost a whole generation of that relationship to the river because of that. Now that the mines are closed, and treatment of the sites is underway, the river is rebounding. Our hope is that our community’s relationship to the river can rebound too. I believe it will. My nieces had joined us in our reseeding/cultivating efforts this past fall and to them it seemed it wasn’t anything new, just another day in the canoe and on the water. That is what I find so empowering that we as a community can be as resilient as our mother earth is. The more we get our community involved in the process the more they will care and nurture for each other as well as the manoomin and it can turn into a beautiful relationship re-connecting us to the water and land.

Q : What is something you have learned?

A : There is so much that we as a Collective have learned. Mostly it was learning about manoomin and how it grew, where it grew, and how and when to harvest. We also learned so much about the processing of manoomin and the cooking of it. Outside of the manoomin, we all learned a great deal about water safety and respect for mother nature. We learned that our efforts may seem small on the surface, but its impacts go way beyond a single paddle down the lake or river. With perseverance, we can come together to reseed our community’s relationship to the land and water.

Q: What is your favourite moment from running the project?

A : (Response from Keegan) I think my favorite moment for me personally was being able to help reseed manoomin in our river for the first time in many years, potentially for a generation. Being able to go back the following fall with my brother and nieces, paddling through abundant manoomin and teaching them what we were taught and re-introducing a new generation to a missing part of our history on the river which was manoomin. My nieces just thought it was another day in the canoe and that we do this thing all the time when, in actuality, it was our first time. That was my favorite part, realizing that we re-established that lost connection.

Everyone that came from our community had nothing but positive things to say about the experience and most, if not all, said they would be back next year to help in our cultivating efforts.