Narrator: Welcome to Great Plains Anywhere,
A Paul A. Olson, lecture from
the Center for Great Plains Studies
at the University of Nebraska.
Today's guest is Ted Hibbeler,
Tribal Extension educator at UNL,
and a member of the Iron Shell family
from the Rosebud Sioux Nation in South Dakota.
Through the Native American Coalition,
Hibbeler is working
with Nebraska Tribal Communities and schools
in the area of food sustainability, economic development,
career development, conservation, and leadership.
The University of Nebraska is a land-grant institution
with campuses and programs on the past, present,
and future homelands
of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria,
Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples,
as well as those of the relocated
Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.
-: We are in
the UNL
Indigenous Food Sovereignty Program garden.
We call it the UNL Indigenous Garden
on East Campus.
It's a Saturday morning.
Early on.
So we're looking at
harvesting a lot of what we've planted earlier on.
The students planted
these plants early on
in the spring,
and now
we're out here
going shopping, basically.
This program is
designed for
getting Native American high school students
here in Lincoln on the campus
of UNL here on the East campus.
And it's designed to do
a couple of things,
and that is to, of course,
to teach these young Native students,
high school students, how to grow their own food.
And then also to get them to reconnect
to their traditional relationships that we had
with our grandmother Earth, Unci Maka.
And with these
plant relatives
that we call teachers in our language.
They have always taken care of us,
and so we want to make sure
that we
go back to
how they're taking care of them.
And so, we have that reciprocal relationship with them.
So it's a really,
those two things that we had in mind.
And the other thing is to get these young Native
students to come on campus, get familiar
and comfortable with UNL,
so maybe they want to
come to school here after they graduate from high school.
So you can look at this as a college bridge program
for these young Native students
that will be graduating from high school
in one of the high schools
in Lincoln Public Schools, and then coming onto campus,
hopefully here in, on the East campus
with CASNR, College of Agricultural Natural Resources,
but just any program here at UNL.
So this is our first year, our pilot program,
and we were just awarded a grant
to continue this program for the next two years.
And so we'll be recruiting 20 new high school students
for this upcoming year to go through the program.
It's a full year program, and we bring in
College of Agricultural Natural Resource faculty,
on Saturday mornings to meet with the students
and to whatever their specialty is,
if it's entomology,
teaching them about insects
and how insects can help your garden,
or if it's horticulture as far as,
the different plants that you want to plant,
and then seed germination, and so forth and so on.
And we have agronomists come in,
crop planting and so forth and so on.
But we also have Indigenous elders come in
on Saturday mornings
to sit down and talk with these young people
about what I just said earlier
about our relationship, our traditional relationship
with this earth,
and with the plants
that cover this Earth, our Grandmother Earth.
You know we bring in both
perspectives, both worldviews,
as far as the Indigenous worldview,
and then the western science
horticultural worldview as well.
We have herbs over here.
We planted,
what we did was,
in the winter months, this last winter,
we had a class
where we taught
the traditional medicine wheel design,
and what that meant to the students.
And then we asked them to go ahead and design this garden.
So the next Saturday they came back
and they had their
garden designs.
And so all of them had a medicine wheel design.
And so, from there we asked them what kind
of plants that you wanted to plant.
And so they were the ones
that chose the different plants here.
Like for example, we talked to them about
our ceremonial plants,
such as sage here.
And so they wanted to plant some sage.
And with indigenous people,
this particular plant,
this teacher here, you can dry this plant out.
One way to utilize it is drying it out,
and then what we call smudging,
you just use some of the plant
and you burn it,
and then you bless yourself with it,
and you say a prayer.
So we taught them that.
And then the other thing is, you can use this as a tea.
it's really good regarding
certain illnesses that you can use for,
and so forth and so on.
They wanted to do some medicinal plants.
Sweet grass, sage, and so forth and so on.
So that's what this is.
So the garden is designed
and the medicine wheel designed,
And then we had little pathways here
that we put mulch down.
But within each little area is a specific type
of plant that the students wanted to plant.
And this is the herbal section of the garden.
And then we have a lot of tomatoes.
That was a popular crop with the students.
Everybody eats tomatoes,
and so we have little cherry tomatoes here,
and these these guys are ready to harvest.
And so that's what we're doing today,
is harvesting these little cherry tomatoes.
And so they wanted to do that here.
And then back here,
they have peppers,
and then we had squash here,
pumpkins all along here that have already been harvested,
and so forth and so on.
If you get a picture of this entryway here.
So the medicine wheel we're talking about,
it's an indigenous worldview of how we look at life.
Everything's circular, okay?
And everything is, we have four directions.
So when we pray, we go to those four directions, right?
We were talking about that with the students.
And so we wanted to make sure that
each entryway had
a trellis,
or an entryway marking there.
And we did a blessing ceremony.