By Rose High Bear
(Deg Hit’an Dine, Inupiaq)
Founding Director
In December, the team at Elderberry Wisdom Farm produced a short film which we titled our 2024 Elderberry Wisdom Farm Annual Report. We have been sharing it with our Founding Donors, and our partners, the board of directors and growing team of staff members. Today, we’d like to share it with our greater community through this newsletter.
Special thanks to our film producer, Sam Forencich, who came out with the drone on a sunny day in December and shot some overhead footage of the original two-acre farm plus our new two-acre Native American Plant Nursery. It was such a beautiful day to film the property. It looks so quiet and peaceful from the bird’s view.
It was no small feat to construct four or five 16’ recessed garden beds. Because our property is in the south Salem Hills, the volcanic soil makes the water drain quickly, making it a risk in these days of emerging weather incidents like drought and heat waves. So instead of having raised beds, we have recessed beds and we have now installed a smart-irrigation system to protect the new plant starts. Under all these beds we installed wire mesh to prevent some of our hungry relatives from coming up from under the soil to munch on the roots of the Oregon white grape pollinators species that are now safely growing. We also stapled wire mesh at the top of the beds temporarily to stop the hungry mice from eating them up before we can establish the plant communities. So far so good! Lupine and other species are starting to emerge from the soil in several beds.
Then we walked down to our TEK classroom where we have welcomed nine past cohorts of Native American and other Interns of color in the past several years. Sam set up the camera and lighting and filmed me as I briefly shared my annual update to the community. The film production discusses our projects, our partners, multiple cohorts of interns as transparent as possible, so you might visualize the progress we made this past year.
In the background you can see part of our classroom with its green walls and ceiling, all the posters and Native art, and all the white cabinets that hold our supplies and training materials. It was once an oversized double garage almost ready for demolition before we decided to transform it into our TEK classroom. You can see some of the windows to the south that warm us with solar energy in the cold months of the year. And beneath them is our growing library of over 200 books on native trees and other plant species, horticulture, native pollinators, traditional ecological knowledge and other Native elder wisdom, native plant nursery establishment and maintenance, food sovereignty, herbology and medicinals, Native cook books, Martin’s biography, The Seven Commandment of the Sacred Buffalo Calf Woman, and etc. that we like to share with our staff and interns and guests.
This film is titled our Elderberry Wisdom Farm 2024 Annual Report, click here to watch or see below!
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