In West Braintree, Vermont, a community garden has been growing since 2010 with a powerful purpose: food sovereignty for the Koasek Abenaki people. At the Abenaki Tribal Garden, traditional crops like the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash, are more than food. They are connection, memory, and medicine.
For more than 12 years, the Abenaki Tribal Garden has been the center of efforts to rebuild food sovereignty and community connection. The goal is bigger than a garden. It is about health, culture, and self-determination in a community working to overcome food insecurity and chronic illness. Families work together to plant Abenaki vegetables, herbs, and ceremonial plants from seeds preserved for decades and kept pure from cross-pollination. The methods used follow ancestral practices, passed down and protected through time. Each season brings shared work in the soil, from early spring planting to summer harvests and fall preservation.
The garden is the only place where many citizens have been able to gather, located on the private property of tribal leaders because the community owns no tribal land. Fifteen volunteers keep the garden going with no paid staff. Families learn together how to grow, cook, and preserve traditional foods, passing knowledge across generations.
The group has received grants from the Grassroots Fund since 2021, including a Seed grant to support the development of their youth gardening program following COVID shutdowns. Most recently, they received a Grow grant for garden materials and supplies after readers and the Grantmaking Committee found that the application was strongly aligned with all of the Guiding Practices. The project they received funding for seeks to achieve food sovereignty and self-sufficiency by teaching Abenaki citizens of all ages how to organically grow foods from seed to harvest, cook and preserve them, and recognize the importance of food as medicine.
Learn more about this group: grassrootsfund.org/groups/koasek-traditional-band-of-the-koas-abenaki-nation
