Finding Flowers <\/em>was initiated by artist, curator, and member of Chimnissing, Beausoleil First Nation Lisa Myers, and conservation scientist and bee specialist Sheila Colla, with collaborators including artists Dana Prieto, Tania Willard, and Laura Grier. The project locates pollinator gardens planted by the late Mi\u2019kmaq artist Mike MacDonald throughout the 1980s and 1990s across so-called Canada. By developing a map of MacDonald\u2019s gardens, many of which are overgrown or lost to time, the collaborators can then replant and remediate his work. The project has located over twenty-three of MacDonald\u2019s gardens, from the west coast territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh in Vancouver to Unama\u2019kik\/Cape Breton on the east coast. Composed of Indigenous and medicinal plant species that attract butterflies, the gardens are generally situated in public parks or on the lawns of public art galleries. MacDonald\u2019s engagement with pollinator species began after he visited old-growth forests on Wet\u2019suwet\u2019en territory during land disputes in the 1980s. His gardens encourage contemplation of, and connectivity with, local ecologies as a response to the threat of resource extraction and agro-capitalism to Indigenous land and life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another aspect of Finding Flowers<\/em> is the development of new gardens. The collaborators construct them in public sites, either taking over existing community gardens or building new ones at art galleries and artist-run centres. These gardens reintroduce native pollinator species to local ecologies, an act that reminds the soil of the biological relationships that preceded settler-colonialism and urban development. Both aspects of the project respond to a global decline in pollinator species largely attributed to corporate agriculture, complex ecosystem loss due to resource extraction, and environmental disasters and disturbances caused by climate change. The reparative and resurgent interventions of Finding Flowers<\/em> respond to the concurrent losses of gardens and pollinators, poetically echoed in the loss and restoration of MacDonald\u2019s gardens. Through ecological rehabilitation, Finding Flowers<\/em> engages with the living and historical consciousness of land, as gardening becomes an active memorialization and gesture of futurity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Through the introduction of native plant species, the Finding Flowers<\/em> gardens undertake the work of soil remediation. The addition of root systems and mycorrhizal networks creates more pathways for the soil to store toxins and excess nutrients. Although certain families of plants can uptake toxins and heavy metals through their roots, most uptake excess nutrients such as nitrogen and carbon from the earth. Plants that are Indigenous to the land they are planted on attract local pollinator species, serving a holistic function in the larger ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a practice of restoring land and ecosystems, soil remediation has distinctly decolonial implications. Soil, both a material and symbolic site, carries histories of colonialism through our material orientation toward it, as well as through allegorical interpretations of its excavation. From a materialist and scientific perspective, the re-fortification of soil is integral to habitation on earth, in part because most food systems are grown in it, but also because the living organisms in it regulate life-sustaining processes. In the introduction to Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory <\/em>(2022), the editors write, \u201cSoils are that vital layer, the so-called \u2018critical zone\u2019 that involves all the complex interactions connecting rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms that regulate life-sustaining resources\u2026. That soils are a non-renewable resource in human timescales makes the degradation of this \u2018life supporting system\u2019 even more alarming.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Juan Francisco Salazar et al., \u201cThinking-with Soils: An Introduction,\u201d in Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory<\/em>, eds. Juan Francisco Salazar et al. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 2.<\/span> Soil regulates the processes that sustain life. It accumulates on a timescale much slower than a human lifespan. Due to the near-catatonic temporality of its production, it is a non-renewable resource, even though it is often considered a form of refuse created by excavation and food growth. The editors of Thinking with Soils <\/em>go on to suggest that an ontological shift in our orientation is necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Soil must be thought of within its life-sustaining capacities\u200a\u2014\u200athe biota must be considered an animate being. In considering its animacy, political and cultural histories are brought to the surface. An allegorical mode emerges that situates soil remediation within a decolonial, ecological framework.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Poet and theorist \u00c9douard Glissant considers soil through an allegorical mode that connects memory, land, and culture. In considering the colonization of the Caribbean, Glissant \u201ccontends that Caribbean history is characterised by \u2018ruptures\u2019 and \u2018brutal dislocation,\u2019 where \u2018historical consciousness could not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment.\u2019 Here the soil is both material and a vital allegory for excavating the violence of the past.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey discussing Edouard Glissant\u2019s Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays<\/em> in \u201cGendering Earth: Excavating Plantation Soil,\u201d in her Allegories of the Anthropocene<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 37.<\/span> It holds the memory of dispossession and cultural expropriation. The natural accumulation of sediment over time and the slow breaking down of matter become an allegory for the operation of a historical consciousness and the sedimentation of cultural memory. In Glissant\u2019s framing, to be dispossessed from land is to be dispossessed from the materiality of memory. The work of soil remediation then poses a counterpoint to the land dispossession experienced by colonized subjects in the Caribbean and across the colonized territories of so-called Canada. Through the construction and growth of medicine and pollinator gardens, this work acts as a re-embodiment of cultural memory, a resurgent, decolonial practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The gardens of Finding Flowers<\/em> are sites of cultural sovereignty. Seeds and transplants of echinacea, nettle, oxeye daisy, mullein, and tobacco are reintroduced to local ecologies. The gardens are animated over time through collaboration, language learning, and seed saving. Collaborators on the project learn and teach the Indigenous names and uses of plants, engaging the public in cross-generational knowledges that address the environmental crisis of pollinator habitat loss and demonstrate the reparative possibility of seed saving and garden growing. Though a garden may not last forever, the learnings and teachings of the plants collapse time; futurity, the possibility of linguistic and epistemological resurgence, is held in the seed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seed saving is an ecological and agricultural practice integral to Indigenous cultural sovereignty. The act of saving seeds, especially those of Indigenous and medicinal plants, ensures the longevity of plant species that fulfil niches in local ecologies, including by attracting pollinators. It carries cultural significance through the knowledges and languages associated with these plants and through traditional forms of land and food management. The First Nations Development Institute in Colorado writes, \u201cMany indigenous communities developed highly-evolved systems of seed saving that often included optimal season times for seed saving, seed-saving rotations, containers and storage units that lasted for hundreds of years, processes that considered pollination patterns and systems, and associated cultural meaning to the different stages of the seed-saving process.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - \u201cSeed Saving & Seed Sovereignty,\u201d First Nations Development Institute (website), 2015, accessible online.<\/span> The practice is part of a larger tradition of Indigenous land management and agroecology rooted in sustenance through a multi-generational approach. Indigenous food systems vary across peoples and geographies but maintain a regenerative and holistic approach to agriculture wherein native flora and fauna, as well as seasonal pollination patterns, are core mechanisms of land management. Over hundreds of years, saving seeds invests in the futurity of peoples several generations ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through the reintroduction of Indigenous species, these gardens create ecosystems that align with the language of the land. Indigenous ethnobotanist Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks about her process of learning Potawatomi, an Anishinaabe language spoken on Dish With One Spoon territory, where many of the new Finding Flowers<\/em> gardens grow. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants <\/em>(2015), Kimmerer notes the difficulty of learning Potawatomi because the language is populated almost entirely with verbs rather than nouns. As a verb-based language, Potawatomi is animate. Beings that might be considered objects in English\u200a\u2014\u200arocks, colours, water, seeds\u200a\u2014\u200aare alive and breathing. Kimmerer inscribes the \u201canimacy of grammar\u201d with an ethical implication, noting that when we say \u201cit\u201d to speak about a living being, \u201cwe put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it<\/em> makes a living land into \u2018natural resources.\u2019\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Robin Wall Kimmerer, \u201cLearning the Grammar of Animacy,\u201d in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants<\/em> (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015), 57.<\/span> Seeds, soil, and words are animate, just as the tide rising in the bay is animate. These natural entities are living and, when thought of as such, resist settler-colonial justifications for extraction. Embodying the language of the land requires an ontological shift toward animacy and a reciprocity toward natural beings as animate beings. Acknowledging the land as living might aid in the resistance to extractive land-use practices characteristic of settler-colonialism, which sees nature as a resource to be consumed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Butterfly gardens make possible a mode of cultural teaching and learning that reinstates the interconnectivity and relationality of plants, seeds, culture, and language. By teaching the Indigenous names and uses of native plants, Finding Flowers<\/em> animates the gardens as a practice of cultural sovereignty and resurgence. Seed saving across generations imbues the garden with a futurity and temporality aligned with the cycles of pollinators and seasons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A writer and curator living as a settler between Toronto and rural British Columbia, greta hamilton researches social and environmental art practices through auto-theoretical and poetic approaches.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"Lisa-Myers\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_hamilton_Lisa-Myers_WCC-2019-ByDana_05.jpg\")
Medecine and Butterfly Garden<\/em>, installation view, Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford, 2019.
Photo: Dana Prieto, courtesy of Finding Flowers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nSoil Memory<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
Seed Song<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Lisa-Myers\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_hamilton_Lisa-Myers_KWAG_Garden_2019_04.jpg\")
Planting One Another<\/em>, installation view, Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener, 2019.
Photo: Dana Prieto, courtesy of Finding Flowers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Lisa-Myers\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/110_DO_hamilton_Lisa-Myers_WCC-2019-ByDana_08.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n