Volunteers lined up at a truck outside the garden area, passing roughly 100 native plants hand to hand into the beds that will make up the Indigenous Garden at Fort Lewis College.
After years of student-led conversations about food sovereignty, water conservation, and creating a space where Indigenous students can connect more deeply with the land and plants of the region, the Indigenous Garden is finally taking shape. 
Earlier this month, more than 40 volunteers gathered to plant more than 30 species in the garden —including Sagebrush, Mountain Mahogany, Rubber Rabbitbrush, Yarrow, Native Chokecherry and Banana Yucca, to name a few— in the garden which includes a pollinator bed, a medicinal bed, and an edible bed, and an area where Indigenous community members can access and connect with plants and land. It also includes a desert bed featuring yucca, traditionally used in Diné culture for a multigenerational game. The space will also feature a large table for outdoor classes.
“This garden represents an opportunity to learn about the plants we have in the Four Corners region, whether it’s medicinal plants, plants with cultural significance, to learn the connection between human and non-human relatives that are so important to a lot of our Native and Indigenous communities,” said Rosalinda Linares-Gray, director of Reconciliation at FLC.
“And there’s an opportunity to experiment and to integrate what we learn in Western agricultural practices with Indigenous ways of knowing, that can be beneficial to all students.”
From learning circle to living garden
The planting marks a major milestone for the project, which was years in the making. Located on the south side of the Art Building, just north of Hesperus Peace Park, the garden is meant to be a place where students, faculty, staff, and the broader community can come together and learn from one another.
The idea began years ago, led by a group of mostly Indigenous students who wanted a more Indigenous-centered space on campus. They began to explore the idea with several FLC faculty and staff, including Kathy Hilimire, chair and professor of Environment & Sustainability; Keri Brandt Off, professor of Sociology & Gender and Sexuality Studies; Becky Clausen, professor of Sociology and Human Services; Deanne Grant, associate professor of Sociology and Native American & Indigenous Studies; Majel Boxer, professor of Native American & Indigenous Studies; and Joslynn Lee, associate professor of Chemistry.
As the pandemic hit in 2020, the group pivoted and started a learning circle to discuss what Indigenous food sovereignty really means.
Later, as part of their early research, the group traveled to Santa Fe to visit the Indigenous garden at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA).
“It was a really amazing field trip for us to see how they have done that, and since then, the project has taken on its own life,” Hilimire said. “One of the big takeaways from our learning circle was that Indigenous food sovereignty is about more than food — it’s about language, and history, and reconciliation, and culture.”
“They saw what was possible and what the IAIA had been doing, and it was really amazing,” Brandt Off said. “That got a lot of energy going.”
Built to last
One early lesson shaped the project’s pace: a successful garden needs staff and funding well before anything goes in the ground, said Clausen, who noted the group knew from the start the project would take time.
“That’s the right way to do it: to be really thoughtful and intentional,” she said.
After the Santa Fe trip, the group spent more than a year meeting, reading, and gathering ideas together.
While the original student cohort has since graduated, new students have carried the project forward, reshaping it along the way.
“The project itself has grown as students have moved through it,” Clausen said. “Students think about different aspects, and the idea has changed with them.”
Throughout, students insisted the garden’s connection to food needed to be visible and central to campus life.
“It had to be on campus — centered, visible, meaningful, accessible,” Clausen said. “That idea came from the bottom up. It’s always been driven by students: a space that’s about growing food, but also about nurturing each other.” 
Lori Cook, vice president for Advancement and CEO of the FLC Foundation, said the moment carries weight for the donors and community members who have supported the vision for years.
“We are so excited to see the vision that several donors invested in start to really come to life here,” Cook said. “There are a lot of folks who really believe in the impact of this space, not only for our students but for our broader campus community. It’s a special moment to start seeing the dirt move and the plants go in. I know it’s been years in the making, and we’re really excited to have it come to fruition.”
Rooted in reconciliation
Hilimire said she hopes the space becomes a place where students can gather and learn experientially.
“Maybe they would want to think about their relationship with language and land and plants and use that as a place to connect or just share language knowledge. I hope it’s a place where food traditions and other cultural traditions related to plants can be carried out,” she said. “And an outdoor place on campus that students can feel is theirs.”
“I’ve been working on this since 2020, and I know many others have been thinking about this and dreaming of this since well before then,” she added. “It’s so cool to see it actually happening. It’s very exciting.”
Majel Boxer said that, unlike the agricultural practices of the 19th- and early 20th-century boarding school era, the types of plants cultivated in the Indigenous Garden encourage and draw upon Indigenous plant knowledge and cultivation practices.
“The boarding school practices were about changes in gendered divisions of labor. Students had to cultivate crops that reflected the agricultural practices of the dominant society (producing food to sustain livestock, cultivating food to sustain the boarding students through their own student labor),” she said.
Students were happy to have the opportunity to work on the garden they and their previous generations envisioned.
FLC junior Lilliona Benally, an affiliated member of the Navajo and Ojibwe Nations, spent her summer internship working on the project.
“This is about reconciliation, about reciprocity, and about a reminder,” Benally said. “Given the history of this land, the (military) fort it’s named for, and how we occupy this land, I think it’s a due service to be able to offer this space. I hope it will encourage our traditional knowledge ways, specifically traditional ecological knowledge, and give students that connection and relationship with the land and the plants we’re growing here. I really do hope any Indigenous student coming here is able to reconnect with a garden and have it serve them that way.”
Steve D. Bradfield Jr., a junior and Native American Studies major at FLC, said the physical work of planting connects him to generations before him.
“This is what our ancestors used to do,” said Bradfield, an Afro-Indigenous student who’s Dakota, Santee, Yankton, and Diné. “This type of work —they had to do it every day to survive. I’m very grateful for what we’re doing here now. We’re planting seeds. We’re planting life.”
An official ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Indigenous Garden will take place on Friday, October 2, at 1 pm. The public is welcome and encouraged to attend.