Warren Wilson College Receives Grant For Indigenous Stewardship
Alexandra Gore | October 23, 2024
Warren Wilson College (WWC) has been awarded a $3,000 Work College Consortium Grant for the 2024-2025 school year aimed at directing creative projects around campus. The grant will focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and storytelling with a team comprised of Jetta Ghosthorse, Scotti Norman, Siti Kusujiarti, Liesl Erb and Ivy Beach.
The collaborative project marks the first of its kind, bringing together professors and students across disciplines from social sciences, sciences and work crews. Siti Kusujiarti, the chair of the sociology department, describes it as a transcendence of borders.
“When we talk about disciplines, we tend to create certain borders,” Kusujiarti said. “What this project is for is transcending borders, creating communities, but at the same time, emphasizing history and culture. Instead of focusing on differences that create borders, that create gaps, I want those differences to create bridges.”
The bridges do not stop at students and staff; the project aims to connect WWC to the larger community as well. By inviting Indigenous speakers to campus and creating open community events, spreading traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous stories beyond the bubble of campus is possible. Kusujiari describes this act as “decolonizing.”
“Colonization creates divisions, colonization creates competitions, colonization creates conflict,” Kusujiarti said. “So, how can we decolonize so that, instead of divisions, instead of conflict and separations, we need to create more connections, more interactions, more community?”
Parallel to the work being done with the Work College Consortium Grant, projects have been initiated with the help of the Davidson Grant which was awarded last year.
Working at the intersection of material reuse, regenerative agriculture and social justice for almost a decade, Ivy Beach became the supervisor of The Climate and Sustainability Crew last year. She explains that after attempting a windrow composting project in what was formerly the horse paddock, they realized the waste was leaching out into the waterways. Transitioning away from that system, she and the crew began reimagining what the space could be.
“Being very new to this campus, getting a sense of what spaces and places we are lacking on campus and whose voices are not being centered and uplifted in places on campus, it became very apparent that there was an opportunity to uplift Indigenous voices here at Warren Wilson,” Beach said. “There really isn’t a lot of institutionalized infrastructure and organization around Indigenous history on campus – and their present and also their future here.”
Jetta Ghosthorse, a junior crew lead on The Climate and Sustainability Crew, has spent several months working on rehabilitating the abandoned space into a traditional Indigenous medicine wheel. Ghosthorse hopes to make the space a place to honor native seeds and bring people together in community.
“In the Cherokee language, each plant has its own name and story,” Ghosthorse said. “This place is meant to be a learning space as well—a social space where people can come together to learn about them actively. And in that, we’re also caring for them, because we’re taking the time to get to know them.”
Associate Professor of Conservation Biology and the Associate Chair of Environmental Studies, Liesl Erb, is excited to bring her expertise in plant identification and selection to the project.
“What’s fun about the collaboration is that we can all bring our expertise to it,” Erb said. “And so just helping out with things like plant identification and plant selection for what should be there, and thinking about how to actually establish garden space and how to maintain it. Those are things I think I can bring, and then just also bringing a way to amplify the stories of our Indigenous Student Association (ISA) and Indigenous people in our region.”
Ghosthorse emphasizes culture and the integration of different types of learning and perspectives. As an Indigenous student herself, she understands that a project this big requires a focus on holistic learning and teaching.
“We all care so much for our community, and so we as a community should decide how we want to integrate different types of learning and perspective,” Ghosthorse said. “For me, it’s my culture, but for other people, it may be honoring the plants and herbs that provide medicine for the people, or it’s playing Appalachian-centered music that brought people together in solidarity, so there are so many ways to go about that.”
While Kusujiarti played a critical role in making the project possible, she presses that it does not belong to her – or any of the other team members.
“I don’t want this to be somebody’s project,” Kusujiarti said. “Ownership — that is also colonial. We cannot own it if everybody doesn’t own it. I do not want to create a sense of individualistic ownership, it should be shared.”
Indigenous stewardship projects do not end here. Professor of Archaeology Scotti Norman explains that the Work College Consortium Grant is only the beginning, with hopes that it will get the ball rolling for WWC to be rewarded with future grants.
“This is a small grant in the scheme of things, but we’re hoping it’s like the seed grant for larger grants and also for many more activities,” Norman said. “It would be great if we could have a pillar dedicated to traditional ecological knowledge, right? So, things like that, where we’re kind of starting to infiltrate all this stuff across campus.”
In the realm of creating intentional spaces for native plants, Erb hopes to work with her crew to create proper signage for identification and labeling purposes. WWC’s Landscaping Crew is trained to know which plants to avoid, but Erb says she would love students to be able to recognize what is there.
As Ghosthorse describes it, storytelling is at the heart of each project they create, and hopes that it continues that way beyond their time at WWC.
“Stories are really how we relate to one another and how I think the world is going to change,” Ghosthorse said. “It reminds us that we are human and we connect with other people heart to heart in a space in time.”
"Full Sun Native Plant Border" by Ronald Douglas Frazier is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
