The Cultural Conservancy Hosts a Powerful Gathering

In August 2019, we were honored to host a powerful gathering of Elders, Traditional Knowledge Holders, Native youth, farmers and community allies to come together and listen to the land. Our goal was to bring together circles of California Native community, Bay Area intertribal community, partners from Hawai’i, and farmers and land tending allies in order to sit in good circle and together vision the future of the new land space that we now steward in the Green Valley watershed of Sonoma County, in the traditional territories of the Coast Miwok and Pomo peoples of Northern California. A full three-days of connection, relation building and the rich exchange of stories, songs, knowledge, seeds, good food and good laughter, the gathering quickly became a space rich with the revitalization of language, traditional knowledge systems, Native sciences and land relationships.

For this event, we were able to invite and host a Native youth (Hawai’i) from one of our Mino Niibi Fund partners, Hālau Ka’eaikahelelani, a school of Hawaiian Culture, rooted in the foundation of aloha where students learn the fundamental cultural teachings through the lifestyle of hula, language, music, arts, land stewardship and ancestral connection. Agricultural science is being taught through traditional Hawaiian farming practices on their six-acre campus on the Big Island, and we were excited to be able to bring one of their Youth to this event (with our Hawaiian board member) to learn, share and connect. Together with other Native youth from the intertribal Bay Area, she was able to see a reflection of the work of her community – as we all came together to share land-tending practices, growing traditional foods, maintaining orchards and building compost piles – and she was able to step forward as an emerging young leader to share her experiences with other young Native land stewards and seed relationships that can nourish the ongoing connections and exchanges between our communities into the future.