TheNativeAmerican Organic Garden: Using Service Learning as a Site of Resistance

Abstract

As educators, we owe it to our students to enable them to transgress structural impediments and to create sustainable alternatives from the margins of the industrial agro-food system. Policies of assimilation, allotment, and enclosure of the Native American commons and ecosystems brought devastation to Native cultures. Dependence on government commodities replaced Native food sovereignty and contributed to malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes as diets responded to corporately produced and processed foods. Young people often feel disempowered and ask how they might confront such formidable forces as corporate control of our agro-food system, destruction of natural resources, and threats to human health. Service learning at a former Native American boarding school, now a university campus, empowered students to create a community of learning and practice that resulted in a Native American Organic Garden. Based on Native values, the garden serves the community's needs for healthy, locally produced food. [Native American organic garden, food sovereignty, service learning pedagogy, boarding schools, enclosure of indigenous commons, sustainable agriculture] Many scholars concur that changing our broken food system requires a paradigm shift (Altieri

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