shares stories about land tending, community healing and regeneration happening right here on the ancestral land of the Indigenous Anishinaabe, the area commonly referred to as Detroit.
Tlingit urban farmer, cultural food worker and seed keeper Kirsten Kirby Shoote has a new project taking shape in Highland Park. The work is just getting underway, but they’re already growing many different plants on the land there, including strawberries, raspberries, chokeberries and herbs like sage and bee balm, which is also known as wild bergamot.
Shoote starts out by explaining that this new location is just the latest iteration of their ongoing food sovereignty journey and mission. “I’ve always had a food sovereignty project in mind. And I was tending to a lot in Pontiac, and it just started as outgrowing my windowsill space … that project is called Leilú Gardens. The meaning of that word in Tlingit, which is my Indigenous language, is butterfly and it’s really about the transformative power of people and plants in our history and currently to really work together and have a relationship with each other,” they say.