Cultivating Hope: Plants and Indigenous Knowledge, exhibit case 3

The Hiawatha belt tells the story of five nations joining together in peace to form the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

Indigenous communities across North America are engaging in a resurgence of their cultural identities and ways of life, which include teaching languages to younger generations, taking part in ceremonies, and reasserting their ancestral ways of understanding and interacting with the natural world.

These practices have strengthened communities and are healing intergenerational trauma from colonial policies aimed at erasing Indigenous cultures through language bans, land dispossession, and forced assimilation at boarding schools.

PRESERVING LANGUAGES, PRESERVING CULTURES With many Indigenous languages threatened, language revitalization is at the heart of these efforts. Each language carries unique insights into the world and relationships with the land—essential for passing down cultural knowledge to the next generation.

Gayogo̱ hó:nǫˀ (Cayuga) people have over ten thousand years of rich

history of living in and stewarding their traditional homelands, which also includes the location of Cornell University—a sovereignty and relationship severed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite continual systemic suppression of culture and language and historical displacement, Gayogo̱ hó:nǫˀ persist in sustaining their cultural and linguistic knowledges.

GAYOGO̱ HÓ:NǪˀ LEARNING PROJECT The Gayogo̱ hó:nǫˀ Learning Project, based in Ithaca, New York, supports the revitalization of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ language through a collaboration of Indigenous and nonIndigenous people working to promote the awareness and practice of Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ language and lifeways.

Gayogo̱ hó:nǫˀ Learning Project co-founder Stephen Henhawk teaching a class.

VISIT GAYOGO̱HÓ:NǪˀ HERITAGE PLANTS Visit the Pounder Vegetable Garden to explore heritage corn, beans, squash, sunflower and tobacco, which have sustained the Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ for thousands of years.

Growing these plants is one of many acts that uphold the values of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility to the land to future generations.