Planting Connections, Planting Hope

Video supplied by the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation

Planting Connections, Planting Hope Opening Immersion Day at the Giving Garden - Duluth Hillside

Planting Connections, Planting Hope (PCPH) creates art, spirit and gardening experiences for and with members of the African Heritage and other historically excluded communities. The Program builds connections with the land, enhances health, deepens cultural identity, and empowers agency. It proclaims a birthright of connection with healthy land and food. It opens us to gardens within a cultural and historical context and infuses experiences with related story and arts. It provides healing experiences with food and plants and interaction with artists and caring community. 

Our apprenticeship mentoring program is a crucial piece of PCPH purpose.  We provide healing space and empowering teachings for young people of marginalized communities to deepen their own skills and health practices with the land.  They are also prepared to, and receive experience with, passing on this integrated way of farming and living.

Beginnings: Sharecropping to Sharing Connections 

Susie Ana Martin Laroche and Gilbert Charles Laroche - Regina’s parents - wove their sharecropping and Haitian political refugee life experiences into the fabric of home, small scale farming, and family. Song, prayer, remembrance-story, and laughter while planting, watering, weeding, harvesting were not unusual. Stories of hardship and loss were not unusual. Physical scars from torture and trauma were not unusual. The garden’s soothing of scarred spirits was not unusual. Nor a sense of connection and wholeness. Family influence nurtured Regina’s storytelling/dance/theatre/spiritual guidance work in many settings and eventually called her back to reclaim heritage and healing in the earth’s garden spaces. PCPH began with farm, arts, and spirit experiences with community children and adults.

Duluth arts organization Echoes of Peace led by singer-songwriter Sara Thomsen befriended, fellowshipped, and then partnered with PCPH. This generous support and companioning supported the seeding and growth of our program. Immersion Farm/Art/Culture Days began at Diaspora Gardens with youth and families of color. Those included Steve O'Neil Apartment (SONA) families in Duluth and at Diaspora Gardens, and partnering with school and tribal programs.  Some programming was rooted in the SONA family/playscape gardens and even online - with music, story, dance, feasting, and interactive play. Now, Diaspora Gardens is developing a new business model which reflects the values of our micro-farm and programs.

Current Priorities 

MENTORING THE NEXT GENERATIONS: Planting Connections, Planting Hope is emphasizing the empowerment and preparation of future growers/connectors/justice seeders/artists. This priority rose as young people came to Diaspora Gardens over the years. This became increasingly meaningful as we witnessed the healing transformative time they have with us. Now, we consider the legacy of leaving soil and souls more nourished for the generations to come. Our commitment to supporting the development of the guardians of our future has deep importance for us. Immersion and residence opportunities provide experiences and invitations to continue, renew, and deepen the work called for by this time for our present and future human - planetary story.

ANISHINABE- AFRICAN HERITAGE PARTNERSHIP - Mooningwanekaaning (Madeline Island): Diaspora Gardens and the neighboring farm Manitou Makoons Gitigaan are building pathways, connections, and programs. African Heritage history is entwined with Indigenous American History on the North American continent. Some of that shared history includes mutual loss of home, some is painful adversarial encounter, some is unified supportive partnering. It is a powerful time to continue building a healing empowering story together. Upcoming are Intercultural Healing Workshops and Community Art projects.

GIVING GARDEN - Duluth: Beginning four years ago, Planting Connections, Planting Hope has worked in a collaborative partnership creating and expanding an African Heritage communal garden and food access project in the Duluth Hillside Neighborhood. The Giving Garden is a project-ministry of Health Equity Northland and St. Mark AME Church as a culturally relevant response to historical and systemic racism. Regina’s PCPH leadership was part of the start-up. PCPH attention is now on the infusion of arts, healing, and historical connection into the garden - including engagement with our mentoring work. The first phase of the project developed and grew an 800 square foot garden in “Bertha’s Garden,” a Duluth Community Garden Program (DCGP) plot at 323 E. 7th Street. Community-wide visioning from that phase yielded design for phase II - a larger garden and community gathering space in the neighboring Hillside Sport Court   Read more in the Giving Garden Fall 2022 Newsletter.

Justice 

The history of land-based racialized violence, forced labor, land theft, homeland loss and more yield a legacy of disconnection from land, impoverishment, and diminished individual and communal health. PCPH addresses this by growing connections between healthy food, land, cultural identity, and community.

On the sacred grounds of Mooningwanekaaning/Madeline Island, Diaspora Gardens invites partners, apprentices, and guests to encounter and enter the stories of the gift of land, food, waters, air. We encounter and enter the stories of how we all belong to the land and the kinship between all, including more-than-humans. There is emphasis on the belonging and contributions of lives, people, cultures long overlooked and exploited. This brings redress of injustices to humans, as well as to land, environment and all inhabitants.

Specifically, around the Giving Garden many detrimental disparities between Duluth’s historically marginalized communities and the majority population are addressed by the “Giving Garden” Project. The Project uses a communal gardening model to increase access to healthy, culturally relevant foods. It improves well-being by targeting social determinants of health resulting from generations of systemic racism. Racial violence and systemic racism have disconnected communities of color from life-giving relationships with land, healthy food, and neighbors. Generations of these processes result in disproportionate levels of physical, mental, and spiritual health crises in historically excluded communities. 

These are health crises that cannot be easily resolved by treatment at a dominant healthcare facility. The medicine is within the community as it recovers, rediscovers, and regenerates itself within the cauldrons of cultural relevancy. The Giving Garden is a place that can heal many of the social determinants that are causing the dis-ease in the Hillside. 

In the garden settings of Diaspora Gardens and our partners, skill development with food and plant medicine empowers participants for employment and economic opportunities.

Arts 

Cultural identity, history, food sovereignty skills, community connection, traditional food and garden related arts provide empowerment and continued redress of historical and current injustices.  In Diaspora Gardens and in other settings, PCPH centers empowered creativity, voice, and connection related to arts and people rooted in soil, food and seed.

Historically and culturally, from an African Heritage context, the arts are not separate from farming, community, work, and policy. They are part and parcel of everyday activities. Planting seeds is complete only with the singing of relevant songs. Re-infusing the arts is repairing the impacts of systemic racism by restoring a traditional understanding of the arts. 

PCPH and the Giving Garden project are seeded out of the voice, dream, needs, and leadership of the African Heritage community with support from cross-racial partnerships.

Healing

Arts, culture, land and story when approached respectfully and reverently invite us into the spirit of our origins and birthright. This connectivity, deep remembrance, and reclamation salve the wounds of trauma and isolation. Scientists teach us that skin touching earth heals us. They teach us that art heals our hearts, souls, and neighborhoods. They teach us that awe heals our spirits and nervous systems. This begins and continues the composting and transformation of past history and experiences into fertile nourishing terrane for the flourishing of individuals and community.

In addition, growing food translates into better food access. This means better health.

Support

Like all actions - small or large - which become part of a stream of greater possibility, these efforts require support and partnerships of all kinds. To support these programs and Diaspora Gardens in general, consider joining our SEEDS of REPAIR community: https://www.diasporaonmadeline.com/seeds-of-repair (not tax deductible).