Growing intergenerational resilience for Indigenous food sovereignty through home gardening

As a community-based participatory research project designed to promote health and wellbeing, Growing Resilience supports home gardens for 96 primarily Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho families in the Wind River Reservation, located in Wyoming. Through analysis of data from two years of qualitative fieldwork, including stories told by 53 gardeners and members of the project’s community advisory board in talking circles and through our novel sovereign storytelling method, we investigated if and how these participants employ relationships, knowledge, and practices across generations through home gardening. We find that participants describe home gardening within present, past, future, and cross-generational frames, rooted in family relationships and knowledge shared across generations. Our analysis of these themes suggests that gardening provides families a means to transmit resilience across generations or, as we call it here, intergenerational resilience. We conclude by discussing intergenerational resilience as a culturally specific mechanism of social-ecological community resilience that may be particularly relevant in Indigenous movements for food sovereignty.