MIT Reconciliation Garden

11.271 Final Report | MIT Reconciliation Garden (in collaboration with Grinding Stone Collective) | May 2023

Table of contents Introduction Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Land Back, & MIT Community Partnerships Land Assessment Framework Land Assessment Form / Catalog Plant Profile Catalog Collaboration in land management Transition Memo + Project Reflections Recommendations for Indigenous Environmental Planning Teaching Team Recommendations for Indigenous Environmental Planning student groups Recommendations for Grinding Stone Collective Recommendations for Community Partnerships Appendix A: Important Files/External Links Appendix B: Precedents for Native Gardens on University Campuses Appendix C: Land Assessment Databases

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Introduction Our group’s goal for this project is to seed an Indigenous-stewarded Agro-Biosphere on MIT’s campus in the form of a Reconciliation Garden. As part of their First Foods program, our partners at Grinding Stone Collective are currently building out a new Stewards initiative that will equip Tribes, Native communities, and Native individuals with funding and technical assistance toward traditional land rematriation, food culture acquisition and continuity, and preservation of Indigenous ecosystems and biodiversity. As a proof-of-concept of this new initiative, the Reconciliation Gardens Project aims to address the harm caused to Indigenous communities by land theft and forced removal by returning unused land to its natural state and creating native edible and medicinal plant gardens stewarded by local Indigenous communities. The Reconciliation Garden at MIT can become a space for cultivating knowledge and skills in growing, harvesting, prepping, and preserving traditional food and medicinal plants by restoring access to Native communities and Indigenous students.

Since submitting our interim project report, we’ve held or participated in a number of exciting and insightful conversations with potential project collaborators, stewards, or general supporters across the MIT community: namely, Aaron Slater and Jael Whitney on the MIT Solve team; Associate Provost

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Brent Ryan; a slate of faculty and members of the MIT administration with similar interest in adapting campus space for hands-on climate research and solutions; and members of MIT’s Native American Students Association (NASA) who can connect with future practicum groups—as well as Brooke and Alex at Grinding Stone Collective—to continue crafting a vision for the Reconciliation Garden.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Land Back1, & MIT One of our three core deliverables for initiating the Reconciliation Garden project this semester is a brief essay on the importance of restoring Indigenous stewardship on campus, given MIT’s particular institutional relationship to the United States’ history of Indigenous land dispossession and disruption of Native foodways. We submitted a draft of this deliverable with our interim report; after soliciting edits, additions, and comments from the Grinding Stone Collective and the teaching team, we have incorporated these into a revised written product (below). The aim for this brief history and the research provided herein is to ensure shared understanding and knowledge of the impetus for MIT’s reconciliation specifically among all potential project stewards, partners, and supporters.

I.

Indigenous food sovereignty Grinding Stone Collective’s programs and partnerships toward Indigenous food sovereignty,

including the Reconciliation Garden space at MIT, focus on the intersection of Indigenous food insecurity and land access. Almost one in four Native American and Alaska Native households in the United States are food insecure, compared to 15 percent of U.S. households overall.2 Food insecurity can broadly refer to having enough food to eat, or more specifically having enough nutritional, culturally-appropriate food to eat. In other words, even by the most “mild” or “moderate” definition, food insecurity implies being 1

Further context around and applications of Land Back can be explored in Pieratos et al., (2021). Land Back: A meta narrative to help Indigenous people show up as movement leaders. Leadership, 17(1), 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715020976204; and the NDN Collective’s Land Back Campaign at https://landback.org/.

2 First Nations Development Institute, “Food Deserts, Food Insecurity, and Poverty in Native Communities.” https://www.firstnations.org/wp-content/uploads/publication-attachments/8%20Fact%20Sheet%20Food%20Deserts %2C%20Food%20Insecurity%20and%20Poverty%20in%20Native%20Communities%20FNDI.pdf

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forced into a daily tradeoff between paying for food and paying for other essential needs—for oneself or one’s family—resulting in anxiety and an inability to access adequate nutrition; more “severe” food insecurity refers to ongoing hunger and extended periods of time without food. That heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death for Native people in the U.S. is inextricable from the cumulative effects of food insecurity across individual lifetimes and across generations: from land theft to commodity rations, restricting access to food has been the cornerstone of U.S. government policies to eliminate and assimilate Indigenous people and culture.3 From the 1880s to 1934, the federal government’s allotment policy transferred 90 million acres of land from Native stewardship and usership to non-Native ownership. This land expropriation directly interfered with Native foraging zones and systematically broke down traditional forms of ecological management and food cultivation, including by dispossession of traditional seeds, forcing people off of lands that had been home for thousands of years, and detribalizing communities so as to repress Traditional Ecological Knowledge-sharing networks. Many treaties and federal-Tribal trust relationships formed in this era also stipulated that the U.S. government supply Native nations with food (and/or provide agricultural supplies or livestock), which in turn has resulted in over 150 years of federal policies designed with the goal of ostensibly preventing starvation among Indigenous people rather than providing or enabling real nourishment and nutrition. This starvation prevention was (and arguably, continues to be) a matter of keeping Native people and communities within state control: a protracted form of genocide through cultural elimination, assimilation, and health degradation. In this context, Indigenous food sovereignty reclaims the power to govern food systems from growth, to harvest, to distribution.

II.

Indigenous food sovereignty & MIT The Institute’s third president, Francis Amasa Walker, played an instrumental role in the

destruction of Native foodways as Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: in The Indian Question,

3

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Leading Causes of Death — 2017.” https://www.cdc.gov/minorityhealth/lcod/men/2017/nonhispanic-native/index.htm

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his argument for using the reservation system to assimilate Indigenous peoples into industrial society, he stressed the importance of uprooting tribes from ancestral geographies that were fertile and rich with game—to enable settlers to access that land for their own use and gain—and forcing them to live on land that could not support them.4 The reservation system is directly antithetical to nomadic food systems that follow herd species like American bison: following this logic, the U.S. government systematically exterminated the bison to the brink of extinction in order to more effectively suppress Native American populations.5 Walker’s advocacy of confining Native Americans to reservations—and requiring them to farm or otherwise be subsumed into the U.S. formal wage-labor economy—also ran parallel to his case that the federal government should make good on its treaty obligations specifically because doing so would be cheaper in the long run than further military action: he noted that “expensive as is the Indian service as at present conducted in the interest of peace, it costs far less than fighting.” To be sure, such reservations were in no sense lands “won” through these treaties: given that most were subject to “shoot-to-kill” orders for any Native person caught off-reservation, and given that federal control over food and supply distribution on reservations coerced reservation communities to comply with policies or face deprivation of basic necessities, the reservation structure is more accurately a form of imprisonment and disenfranchisement. The forced removal of Native peoples to infertile lands (and subsequent crop failures and systematic starvation) was also a means of instigating conflict and violence, both among different Tribes and among Indigenous and settler communities. Displacement to agriculturally unsustainable areas was one manifestation of the overall neglect of the U.S. government to fulfill both its payments and adequate crop and food supply provision to entreatied Tribes.6 The Institute also continues to benefit from the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, legislation the federal government created from the 1860s onward toward the formation of universities and colleges on land

4

Garfinkel, Simon. 2021. “Walker and the “Indian Question.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/24/1030428/walker-and-the-indian-question/.

5 Lowndes, Coleman. 2021. “Why the U.S. Army Tried to Exterminate the Bison.” Vox. https://www.vox.com/2021/8/2/22605868/us-army-exterminate-bison-buffalo 6 To take the example, see “The U.S. Dakota War of 1862,” Lower Sioux Agency, https://www.mnhs.org/lowersioux/learn/us-dakota-war-1862.

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expropriated from tribes. MIT has reaped a $1.6 million profit from endowment returns on Indigenous land that the government purchased (and the University has since sold) across the nation.7 Former MIT President Reif convened an ad-hoc Indigenous working group of faculty, staff, and students to delineate specific uses for redistribution of some of these profits (as well as further investments in Indigenous community and scholarship at the Institute), which the working group finalized in their December 2022 report. The group recommended that MIT deposit said funds—a one-time investment of $50,000 and an ongoing annual commitment of $3,650—into an account that will be shared by AISES and NASA (and stewarded by the Student Organizations, Leadership, and Engagement Office). Our team is excited to support AISES, NASA, and local tribal partners in their overall priorities and through this particular project.

III.

MIT Reconciliation Garden, 2022 Indigenous Working Group’s Recommendations, Next Steps Establishing the Reconciliation Garden is one concrete, material action that MIT can take against

its legacies of settler colonialism and its continued violent erasure and dispossession of the Massachusett Peoples and the Wampanoag Nation—whose traditional, unceded territories MIT occupies—as well as the 82 Nations affected by the MIT-Morrill Act land sales.8 As students and faculty on the Indigenous Community Planning Committee have also illustrated, this Reconciliation Garden would directly advance MIT’s values and strategic priorities: creating a space to foster long-term relationships with Indigenous communities and center Indigenous knowledge, technology, and science is essential to climate justice and MIT’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities in Computing (SERC) initiative.9 A Reconciliation Garden could also further the recommendations of the ad hoc Indigenous working group in supporting long-term partnership-building with local tribal membership toward an Indigenous Elders Council for the MIT administration; creating and sustaining Indigenous academic and extracurricular learning opportunities,

7

Lee, Robert and Ahtone, Tristan. 2020. “Land-grab universities: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” https://www.landgrabu.org/universities/massachusetts-institute-of-technology.

8 MIT Land Acknowledgment.

9 MIT Indigenous Community Planning Committee, “White Paper: MIT Indigenous Initiatives.” 5.

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for all students and community members, that centers Indigenous sovereignty, Nationhood, governance, and cultures; and serving as a living land acknowledgment that actively commits to the futurity of relationships with local Indigenous Nations and recognizes the continuous hard work required to build those relationships authentically.10 At its core, the Reconciliation Garden is a form of Land Back: re-indigenizing campus space and investing in Indigenous stewardship of this land, with an emphasis on community education around traditional food culture and Native planning methods in climate adaptation. One avenue for formalizing this land access could be pursuit of a Cultural Respect Easement designation, with the counsel of Solve fellow and Native Land Conservancy Vice-chairwoman Leslie Jonas. The Cultural Respect Easement framework goes beyond a standard conservation land trust model (often focused on recreation-based public access, which can be inherently exclusive and even detrimental to Indigenous lifeways and non-human species) and ensures full power to exercise spiritual and cultural practices tied to land.11 Our group is eager to discuss the possibility of the Cultural Respect Easement model in building the case for the Reconciliation Garden with Leslie—her expertise will be invaluable in how we approach MIT’s policies and procedures around use and access rights and capabilities for Indigenous partners engaging with the Garden.

Community Partnerships This section briefly documents key conversations held with different community members this semester (or points of contact established, with the potential for future conversations). Contact information for all those listed is available on our Airtable.

MIT Solve Aaron Slater and Jael Whitney 10

Ibid.

Jonas, Leslie, Ramona Peters, and Jon Leibowitz. “Northeast Wilderness Trust & Native Land Conservancy Announce Collaboration.” https://newildernesstrust.org/native-land-conservancy-partnership/ 11

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We met with MIT Solve team members Jael Whitney (Indigenous Communities Officer) and Aaron Slater (US Communities Lead) in April. Our conversation focused on how much Indigenous student interest we’ve gleaned so far; how governance and stewardship/maintenance responsibilities for the garden would be formalized; and the future process of forming other connections & relationships with Indigenous groups and Indigenous-led nonprofits in the area who would have buy-in as well (in particular, Aaron raised the possibility of connecting the project team with the American Indian House ofBoston and Native American Lifeline — he was excited about potential alignment with existing efforts to connect Indigenous youth in Greater Boston to university settings). We also discussed the importance of dialogue and guardrails around Western research into Indigenous knowledge systems, and the importance of recognizing that there are very specific traditional practices in caring for the land and particular species that would not necessarily be fully met in the Reconciliation Garden at scale. In terms of potential future project support, we discussed creating and amplifying written products advocating for the space (e.g., an op-ed in the Boston Globe, blog posts on MIT Solve’s website); co-crafting the pitch process to the MIT administration and other decision-makers; and further visioning together around what this space could grow to be beyond how we currently have framed it.

Leslie Jonas Elder member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, co-founder of the Native Land Conservancy (NLC), and MIT Solve Indigenous Communities Fellow Leslie Jonas joined us for a remote conversation in April about the scope of the project. We discussed the care and intentionality necessary for including Native and non-Native groups; the role of community education; and the ways this project aims to re-indigenize campus spaces with Indigenous governance, traditional land management, and Indigenous environmental practices and structures. Brooke and Alex affirmed that the project will move forward based on how Indigenous students on campus want to approach the space; as Brooke highlighted, we want to “make sure home is good, and then the guests can be there.” As also noted above, we hope future conversations with Leslie can continue around NLC’s experience building a Cultural Respect Easement agreement, and 7

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how that framework can aid in the process of determining policies of use, access, traditional cultural practices in this space, and right relationship for MIT and its Indigenous communities/this land.12 (We’re also excited to learn from the NLC project group’s case study on this topic!)

MIT Students Alvin Harvey, Kathleen Julca, and Argen Smith We met with NASA members Alvin Harvey, Kathleen Julca, and Argen Smith in April to start discussing student interest in establishing outdoor space for gathering, ceremonies, and welcoming elders to campus, as well as expanding on the project concept of restoring Indigenous agro-biospheres and increasing Indigenous visibility on campus. Their ideal site proposals are the location of the old Saxon tennis courts adjacent to Building 50 (AKA Walker Memorial) or in front of Building W31 (location of the existing Indigenous student community space) (discussed further below in “Land Assessment Framework” section). Other toplines from this conversation include: ●

Alvin’s thoughts on starting with a pilot (e.g., raised garden beds) that can scale up to bigger research and agro-biosphere restoration practices over time, so as to give students an opportunity to train on traditional land stewardship methods and become successful at it with potential for including Indigenous faculty;

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Kathleen’s thoughts on working with the UA Sustainability Committee to secure funding and draw on their connections to the MIT administration to advance the project;

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Argen’s prior experience building out ideas and practices of gardening/agricultural research on campus, including 1) a suggestion of working through faculty partnership or grant processes (e.g., J-WAFS) to secure space and funding; 2) the challenges with cultivating the space next to W31 (large trees with shade, acidic soil (from pine needle drop), limited sunlight East-West); and 3)

12

Dennis Conservation Land Trust, “DCLT-NLC Cultural Respect Agreement,” https://dennisconservationlandtrust.org/dclt-nlc-cultural-respect-easement/.

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the appeal of selecting the Building 50-adjacent land, for symbolic purposes and for extending Indigenous-led spaces throughout campus.

Undergraduate Association (UA) Committee on Sustainability — Garden Working Group We emailed with the UA Garden Working Group and received an enthusiastic response from the previous Sustainability Committee chairs, establishing a good point of contact for getting in touch with their leaders and members in the future for collaboration.

MIT Faculty and Administration Associate Provost Brent Ryan A few student members of our team and Brooke and Alex from Grinding Stone Collective met with Brent — individually and among a number of the faculty/administration listed below (under the auspices of those interested in developing campus space for agricultural/climate-based research) — in April to discuss the project. In the context of the larger faculty “garden group” meeting, he noted that there’s currently no Institute consensus or procedure about how to understand the impetus, desire, and momentum for diversification of campus space; he hopes to use his capacity and meetings like the one we attended to institutionalize the rules and procedures for making new uses of campus spaces to help aid efforts like the Reconciliation Garden. The question of how a space like the Reconciliation Garden would contribute to educating non-Native communities at MIT about Traditional Ecological Knowledge and land management practices was especially salient in our one-on-one conversation with him.

MIT Office of Sustainability (Julie Newman & Susy Jones) Julie and Susy convened the above-mentioned meeting that our project group attended, and will be working with Brent to think about aligning the different ideas presented. The MIT Office of Sustainability does not have funding to offer these projects, but is eager to act as advocate and liaison for developing campus space alongside other relevant administrative actors (e.g., the Campus Planning and Grounds

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team). In addition to knowledge- and capacity-sharing, another possible advantage of that group is the capacity to coordinate applications for different funding streams (e.g., to resource soil mitigation efforts).

Kate Brown (Science, Technology and Society) Kate Brown is teaching a History of Food Production class in Spring 2024 and looking into an experimental garden lab to incorporate into the curriculum. In the group meeting, she outlined that such a garden would ideally entail 300-400 sq meters of sunny ground; that it would hopefully be developed in-ground (to better cultivate microbial life); a lockable tool shed and some basic garden tools; a table under an awning or pavilion for outdoor class projects; a hoop house (approximately 4 meters wide, 10 meters long) that could double as a meeting space; some water source or system for drip irrigation, as well as rain barrels under the pavilion; and a compost bin. Dr. Brown noted that the end of the spring semester is an especially great time to start gardening in Cambridge, and imagined this garden could advertise near year-round use of its plots among the broader MIT community from mid-May to mid-January. She also described years-long waiting lists for community garden spaces in Cambridge — one more key reason to focus on adapting campus space for agro-biosphere purposes.

Chris Walley (Anthropology) Chris Walley is teaching a course about the anthropology of climate change in Spring 2024 called “Living Through Climate Change.” While she and her colleagues have no formal plan currently for a practical component of the class, Dr. Walley would really like to be involved in future projects in some capacity — potentially bringing in student interest, too.

Dave Des Marais (Civil and Environmental Engineering) Professor Des Marais’ primary focus of research is to understand the mechanisms of plant-environment interaction, and in Fall 2024 he is planning to teach a plant biology course. In the future, it would be

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exciting to draw on his expertise in cataloging and managing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous species at the garden site.

Miho Mazreeuw (Architecture and Urbanism) Through the MIT Urban Risk Lab, Miho Mazreeuw is developing a pilot for growing edible sunshades to mitigate heat effects across campus (for further interesting context on the Urban Risk Lab’s on-campus citizen science efforts, see this article). Our project group followed up with her about her team’s heat and sun modeling for campus spaces, to hopefully complement our land assessment framework.

Craig Wilder (History) Craig Wilder chatted with the team in March about the development of the Indigenous History at MIT course, which he taught for the 2022-2023 academic year. He was highly supportive of the development of the garden concept and offered insightful thoughts about the project’s framing. We discussed that this is an overture toward reconciliation – beginning of a conversation to rebuild and repair relationships with on- and off-campus Indigenous communities, and that there are many, many opportunities to make those decisions on campus, if those with the power to do so choose to seize them. He recounted how at MIT (and peer higher education institutions), Native American students often get drawn in to doing the uncompensated “social work” of the college, demonstrating the need to build programs and initiatives (such as the Reconciliation Garden) that are self-sustaining and properly compensate students for their time and energy in stewardship (or don’t wholly depend on their uncompensated labor). This is contingent on engaging decision-making bodies at MIT around Indigenous ways of knowing, and proactively incorporating that knowledge into institutional structure and design. He also noted that many projects at MIT are connected to Native lands and people, but there are not a lot of conversations about reciprocity, relationship, respect, obligations that come with our engagements. Finally, he suggested we reach out to Dr. Ari Epstein of MIT Terrascope to think about collaboration on this idea in the future.

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Alex Shalek (Chemistry) Our team met with Dr. Shalek to learn about his experiences on the ad-hoc Indigenous Working Group and glean his feedback on how to approach the MIT administration with this idea. He encouraged us to think about how this project fits in with broader goals that the Indigenous community at MIT has, and was cautious about the limited number of asks that MIT seems to be willing to commit to. Accordingly, he was interested in what Indigenous students at MIT would prioritize in both this project and its connections to other initiatives and needs. He advocated for clarity of how we’ll engage different communities at MIT around the idea, and learning more about how Indigenous students at MIT are approaching the new administration with the inauguration of Sally Kornbluth as MIT President this year.

Roles & Responsibilities Matrix: The matrix is a mapping of the relevant actors, that are/will be part and parcel of the project and/also others that can contribute in some meaningful and tangible way. It breaks out the groups in the core team, partners and MIT admin/staff. The table highlights each party’s concerns and their strengths they bring and/or the responsibilities they would take on during the course of project design and implementation.

Significance: This is a live document that will be modified as the Project Implementation Team (IEP) and GSC meet with various potential partners and identify their underlying motivations and what can possibly be areas of collaboration with these parties and what could cause the relationship to not materialize and

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the level of support we can expect. (Note: an editable version of this table is in a separate document).

The previous table in conjunction with the relationship matrix identifies the assumed status of relationships at the project planning stage between various parties at the current moment. The relationships are either positive, neutral or difficult. This identifies for the implementing team where the potential bottlenecks can be seen in terms of project implementation so that strategy/focus can be adjusted according to the mode of difficulty and asks that one might expect. These relationships will shift at different stages of the project from project conceptualization, planning, implementation and scale. (Note:

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an editable version of this table is in a separate document, and a shared Google document is linked in Appendix A).

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Land Assessment Framework Through engaging with various groups on campus, we have developed a preliminary land assessment framework that includes several different components: (1) a land assessment form with criteria for each location, (2) a draft plant profile catalog and template to be more fully populated in the future, and (3) suggestions on potential land management practices between MIT and the stewards of the future reconciliation garden. Our group has developed some of these components into a set of forms and catalogs to aid the framing, development, and implementation of future work toward establishing a reconciliation garden on MIT’s campus, through collecting and organizing land assessment information.

Land Assessment Form / Catalog The land assessment form contains a list of 10 possible areas on campus that could serve as the Reconciliation Garden. These are not the only possible locations, but they do give us both a good starting point and examples of information that needs to be considered. In a meeting with students from NASA, a few sites were brought to our attention as locations that they find particularly relevant to the existing Indigenous groups on campus. The site preferred by NASA is the location of the old Saxon tennis courts on the corner of Memorial Drive and Ames Street, adjacent to Walker Memorial. The NASA students find this location to be favorable for its proximity to the Walker Memorial, named for Francis Walker, who is responsible for many injustices to Indigenous people in what is now the United States, including the reservation system. Additionally, this location is central to campus and is a large space that could serve multiple uses to the Indigenous groups and stewards on campus. Another location is in front of building W31 on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street. This location is adjacent to the current NASA meeting space and a central crossroads on MIT campus, though the site is quite small, has limited sunlight due to large trees, and the soil is acidic due to pine needles drops. Another potential site is between Tang Hall and Next House – it is not central but it has sunlight and plenty of open space, this site was also the location of a previously proposed garden space. Several other sites are included in the database as well, a screenshot of which is in Appendix C. 15

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Regardless of which site the Reconciliation Garden is eventually located at, having multiple potential sites could help support the vision of a ongoing greening of MIT’s campus and the establishment of some form of an eventual foraging zone that could improve access to food and outdoor space for various indigenous groups and nations on and off campus. This “MIT Garden Corridor” may be made up of several of the potential sites listed above and within the location assessment database. Such a broader greening effort might establish a “Emerald Necklace” of MIT to enhance green space, food sovereignty, and climate resiliency across campus.

In addition to serving as a catalog of potential sites, this should function as an assessment form for analyzing and comparing sites. Further teams and partners will collect data to understand the location’s current state and possibilities for the future. In the current state of the form, this includes data on size, topography, lighting conditions, soil conditions, water conditions and access, existing flora and fauna, look and feel of the place, and other notable conditions.

Plant Profile Catalog To build a plant profile to support the final development and realization of the Reconciliation Garden, the team connected with people and groups across campus and in the local community who have similar interests in planting native plants to share the information. We have also begun collecting a catalog of plants native to the Cambridge area to serve as a guide for identifying existing flora in the sites and as a resource for assessing additional plants that could be introduced to the Reconciliation Garden depending on conditions, uses, and needs of the Indigenous community and partners. This document can be used as a field guide reference and as a collection of plant uses (foods, medicines, material, etc) that could illustrate Indigenous relationships to plants and the earth if it seems appropriate. It serves as a catalog, an assessment form, and also a graphic collection of relationships. An excerpt is included in Appendix C. The plant profile catalog includes different key pieces of information for each plant: common name, Indigenous name, latin name, family, Indigenous uses, insects that utilize plant, light requirements, 16

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and soil type needs. These plants span a variety of uses, including food, medicine, fiber (e.g., for weaving), ceremony, and others. Most of the plants currently included have partial information, but the database is intended to serve as a starting point. We believe these profiles should support the selection of a site for the Reconciliation Garden, but the choices of plants eventually planted in the garden must also be based on the needs and objectives of the various Indigenous communities who will utilize the space. This profile will also inform the flora/fauna profiles that we suggest should be developed for each potential site.

Moving forward, future cohorts can take these plant catalog entries and templates to further develop implementation plans and test planting in the garden once a site is chosen. The data is included in an Airtable database so that it is easy to sort, filter, edit, and transform into whatever format might be most helpful. We see this catalog as a living document that can constantly grow and be used for different purposes as the project and the community it serves sees fit. We hope to also illustrate this data with photos of the plants so that it can serve as a visual resource and source of inspiration for garden creation, as well as a manner of data collection.

Collaboration in land management Though the goal of this initiative is indigenous food sovereignty, as well as control of and access to land, the space will exist at MIT and as such will naturally require collaboration with the Institute over the management of the land. The example that we looked into here was pest management. According to MIT Ground Services, rodents cost the institute ground management thousands of dollars per year in replacement costs for plant material, and can spread diseases. Rabbits, rats, and squirrels are the primary animals of concern on campus. Currently, pests are managed through outsourcing to a third party company that sets traps and undertakes non-toxic pest removal.

However, this method of “pest control” is not the only option. An example of further indigenizing the space could be bringing back habitats for birds of prey who naturally control the populations of rodents and small mammals. Already, many such species are on campus, and supporting their success and 17

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livelihood on campus can make natural “pest management” a more viable solution for this space. Going forward, however, we believe that the local Indigenous groups and students who will access the site should be involved as decision makers in establishing what the management of land and space in and around this Reconciliation Garden will look like.

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Transition Memo + Project Reflections The following set of recommendations are focused on what our project team feels are the most important ideas and questions to consider for future project leaders to build sustainably on the process that we have started these past few months. We hope these lessons learned can inform next semester’s scope of work in the near/medium-term as well as the long-term life of the Reconciliation Garden (beyond even the most expansive ideas for this project today!). And we are also happy, of course, to provide further detail or insight into any of these points.

Recommendations for Indigenous Environmental Planning Teaching Team Invite NASA, AISES, and other Native constituencies on campus to share their existing priorities and aims for re-indigenizing campus space with future classes. Our group only just started getting to build a relationship with Native student groups, and it’s imperative to invite them in early and often in the next phase of the project. Brooke and Alex have formed relationships with folks, too, but having the teaching team help foster as many direct connections as possible early on in the next semester’s project design stage (e.g., to collaborate with Native students early on next semester’s scope of work) would be great.

Invite students and faculty of 21H.283, The Indigenous History of MIT, to collaborate with the next student group (and/or share their interests and learnings with 11.271 as a whole).

Co-strategizing around funding opportunities. As the project develops toward site design, feasibility, and eventually implementation, having the teaching team’s insight into potential sources of funding (both internal and external to MIT) and financial management best practices will be key. Conferring with the faculty and administration aligned with the climate/agricultural garden research about funding could also be fruitful, as noted above. This is especially crucial for consideration of how to properly compensate future Garden Stewards for their governance over and maintenance of the space.

Contact with interim Institute Community and Equity Officer (ICEO) Dan Hastings. Outgoing ICEO John Dozier expressed interest in the future of this project in conversation with our group, and 19

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sustaining buy-in from the ICEO’s office would be a great point of leverage for forthcoming project leaders. We held a brief discussion with John Dozier and expressed to him concerns about how perhaps some may say a project focused on the indigenous community would mean that there need to be similar projects for all communities. We stand firm that this is not a multicultural center, and that indigenous needs are at the center of this project. Further, we are not an outdoor space project with indigenous people, we are an indigenous project with a necessary outdoor component. In that brief interaction, John Dozier expressed that he agreed with us completely and that a project of our kind would be more than reasonable when discussing issues of equity. Though that was initially reassuring about how our project could be accepted by administrators in relation to the broader needs of the community, it needs to be followed with whoever the next ICEO is going to be.

Recommendations for Indigenous Environmental Planning student groups Build partnership with the UA Sustainability Committee. As noted above, the MIT Undergraduate Association is well-funded and well-versed in building cross-campus initiatives and instituting new and creatives uses for campus space (e.g., Sustainability Committee’s Garden working group).

Research into Cultural Respect Easement model, in collaboration with Leslie Jonas/Native Land Conservancy. Native Land Conservancy’s historic Cultural Respect Easement for land rematriation is a crucial lesson in Land Back that could have great potential for how to approach access and use rights of the Reconciliation Garden.

Initiate conversations with MIT IS&T, Facilities, Office of Campus Planning, and other relevant offices around policies of use and entry on campus that would be most pertinent to the Reconciliation Garden. While all of MIT’s outdoor space is ostensibly publicly-accessible, inviting local tribal membership and actually creating the conditions necessary for full and equitable Indigenous stewardship of the land (e.g., how stewards will be able to access buildings, how ceremonial practices will be respected, how privacy rights will be treated, and more) will require more specific conversations across the aforementioned bodies of the MIT administration. Ensuring that Indigenous partners’ needs, priorities, 20

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and practices are centered in the conception and agreements around how this space will be used is paramount.

Create a Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) report specific to the Reconciliation Garden concept, and gather resources focused on setting guardrails around this TEK and the practices/rights of Indigenous Garden Stewards. Toward the end of the semester we discussed the usefulness of a living document for principles and protocols around “right relationship” with Brooke and Alex. For inspiration of a TEK report, future groups can look to Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission’s Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment (see link in Appendix), a solid precedent of effective environmental reporting that integrates scientific analysis and TEK. Another great resource that Brooke highlighted for this purpose is the Native BioData Consortium.

Consider how to leverage potential alumni support. Alumni aligned with the Reconciliation Garden project can be a useful point of influence for the MIT administration, and future project group members could conduct a deeper research dive into potential fundraising strategies for this network.

Recommendations for Grinding Stone Collective Consider further research on/outreach to contacts at other universities with Native garden precedents, for case studies, seeking best practices, and more (See Appendix B). Grinding Stone Collective could bring all of these gardens together in a more formal network through its Stewardship program.

A “Garden Corridor” / “Emerald Necklace” at MIT. We attended meetings with other groups desiring outdoor campus space and to say the least – there are a lot of ideas out there. We restate, that it is important that our idea is not mixed into those of others, and that the future groups continue tactfully pushing for a centering of indigenous needs in our project. In any case, we can use the fact there are so many other groups to our advantage by pitching a chain of connected green spaces on campus. This “Emerald Necklace” idea links us to an existing and compelling local outdoor project in Boston.

Emulating the Emerald Necklace project in Boston brings legitimacy to our project, adds value to the 21

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vision for campus, benefits from gimmick, and provides a stage where an outdoor project can be guaranteed for us by guaranteeing it for everyone. In the next iteration of the project, we highly recommend piggybacking on the Emerald Necklace framing and all the viability it brings.

Recommendations for Community Partnerships Based on our last semester of meetings with various potential project partners and supporters discussing the viability, points of consensus, and necessary considerations, we make the following recommendations for the next cohort in regard to tangible action items, social currents to observe and keep mind, as well as favorable framing for future talking points and presentations: MIT Administration. As so far as we’ve been involved with the project, it has been in a constant state of evolution. Due to the ambiguity about the overall acceptance for a campus project of this kind by MIT administration, much of the work of the Community Partnership team has been to confirm with MIT administrators what the project can look like. Through our discussions, we’ve finally reached a more steady state for the vision of the project, having uncovered where there is opportunity for project delivery.

The nature of our participation in the project and needing to locate our path forward requires for the next group to continue making ground on the relationships we’ve already formed, and through those relationships leveraging to meet more important community members and form more relationships. We highly recommend continuing to work hand-in-hand with the Indigenous MIT students, as we’re here to serve their needs and push for their initiatives. Their voice in our projects empowers us all.

Local Indigenous Communities. Our work this semester focused on the ecosystem here at MIT about the viability of our project, and future iterations of the project can expand into outreach to local indigenous tribes. We highly recommend as the project progresses to more deeply research and outline the major indigenous community audiences, such as the Wampanoag Tribe and Massachusetts Tribe. Create an action plan for contacting local indigenous community leaders and make sure that the next phase of the project centers around more substantially developing the network of local indigenous people. These 22

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alliances are necessary for legitimacy in any mission and vision for the Reconciliation Garden.

New Landscape for MIT Campus Planning. Our conversation with Brent Ryan, new Associate Provost, revealed to us new waves within MIT campus planning seeking to be more ambitious and forward-looking. These dialogues affirm there is a desire for this project and understanding about why it both makes sense and is the correct path for MIT as we seek to mend the institutional harms wrought on Indigenous communities around the United States.

Appendix A: Important Files/External Links ● ● ● ●

MIT Reconciliation Garden Concept Memo MIT Reconciliation Garden Community Partnerships Relationship Matrix 11.271 Spring 2023 Interim Report 11.271 Spring 2023 Scope of Work

Appendix B: Precedents for Native Gardens on University Campuses ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

San Diego State University – “SDSU Breaking Ground on Native and Indigenous Healing Garden.” (January 2020) University of California, Berkeley – “Berkeley’s new Indigenous Community Learning Garden takes root.” (October 2021) University of Washington – “Cultivating community and tradition among the crops at the Native Garden.” (April 2022) Belmont University – “Belmont Fosters Hope and Belonging through Dedication of New On-Campus Indigenous Garden.” (October 2022) Stanford University – “Cultivating community through a California native plants garden.”

(November 2022) University of California, Riverside – “Native American Landscape Garden.” (Winter 2022/Spring 2023) Rutgers University, “Native American Acknowledgment Gardens Honor Local Indigenous Communities.” (November 2022) University of California, Davis – “Native American Contemplative Garden.” (November 2011) University of San Diego – “Kumeyaay Garden.” (September 2017)

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Appendix C: Land Assessment Databases Plant Profiles (draft of working catalog)

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Land Assessment Form (draft of working catalog)

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