Growing into Right Relationship

stmattsunited
Oct 3
2 min read

Elder Catherine Brooks in the Noojimo'iwewin Gitigaan garden.

Six years ago, at the height of Covid 19, we welcomed Dr. Catherine Brooks as Elder-in-Residence, and offered an Anishinaabemowin Naming Ceremony as part of Toronto Urban Agriculture Week. At the time, Dr. Brooks wrote that we would “celebrate the giving of this name—Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan—to the garden, the home for the medicines, and for the benefit of the spirits of the people seeking and bringing healing through their actions and intentions.”

The Four Sacred Medicines—Tobacco, Sweetgrass, Sage, and Cedar—continue to be the centre of a greenspace that now includes all the unpaved areas around St. Matthew’s United Church. A quiet rewilding by indigenous Carolinian plants as well as food plants from the ancient trade routes of the Americas means what was once turfgrass is now teeming with insect and other life.

Yes, there are pigeons everywhere, and signs of the world’s most numerous and well-travelled mammal, the Norway rat. But a Redtail Hawk hunts from the communications towers on the apartment building on the opposite corner, and a variety of birds, butterflies, bees, and other creatures making a living here offer their own medicine.

The harvest of Sacred Medicines is one of our largest, enough for year-round Ceremonial use in events that we host, as well as gifts for Indigenous collaborators. The Cedar has grown strong and healthy, offering trimmings for Cedar Tea throughout the fall. Every week, we take a basket of produce into Chef Ana in The Stop Wychwood Open Door kitchen.

We have learned something of the “honourable harvest,” of gratitude to the plants and of giving back. We ask the plants for permission to harvest, offer the first fruit to the earth, and gift Tobacco to honour the non-human lives we are taking for human use. But those of us who are settlers are still learning to slow down enough to remember these honourable principles. We are grateful that Elder Catherine, in her kindness, reminds us that none of us are perfect.