Capstone students working in NAYA's Wapas Nah Née Shaku community garden (photo by Anmarie Trimble)
For 15 years, Portland State students in Anmarie Trimble’s Healing and Indigenous Education Senior Capstone have partnered with the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA) to tutor in its afterschool programs and serve as peer mentors in its college and career center. With tutoring and mentoring not possible during the pandemic, capstone students had the unique opportunity to help NAYA realize a dream of converting a baseball field into a community garden.
What started as a pandemic pivot has deepened connections between PSU students and NAYA and become a vital component of the capstone.
The pandemic wasn’t the first time Trimble has reimagined her course. When she was first approached by NAYA about a possible partnership 15 years ago, she pictured the role of her and her students in a traditional Western framework. Then she was introduced to the Relational Worldview model, a holistic approach to teaching that NAYA uses. This changed how she viewed the capstone.
“Very quickly my class went from thinking about how we’re going to help these kids and learn from doing it, to focusing on how to be in service to community and how to be in relationship,” says Trimble.
This focus on serving the community and honoring relationships helped the partnership weather the pandemic. When tutoring and mentoring weren’t options, Mick Rose, NAYA’s Culture, Education and Wellness Manager, came up with the idea that the capstone students could develop slides for K-12 teachers to use to teach about Tribal History/Shared History, a requirement of Senate Bill 13.
“That has been a really wonderful project,” says Rose. “Teachers have these slides that are ready for them to use to share this new curriculum. It is removing another barrier in an already really busy school year for teachers.”
During the pandemic, Trimble also changed the name of the capstone, which was originally called Mentoring & Empowerment, with input from capstone students and Josh Powell, program coordinator for PSU’s Indigenous Nations program.
When NAYA leaders asked if any students would be willing to help start a community garden, most students were eager to help with the project, even when it wasn’t a requirement for the capstone.
“From the beginning of the endeavor, my students have been out there every single term, digging up sod, planting, harvesting and watching the garden grow and grow and grow,” says Trimble.
The garden is named Wapas Nah Née Shaku, which means “Holding the Basket” in old Wasco. It was designed to be community oriented and led and to focus on building relationships between people, land, animals and water.
Turning a baseball field into a garden is hard work. NAYA uses biodynamic farming methods, which require removing grass from the field, digging at least 24 inches down into the soil and adding compost. Capstone students also planted and harvested vegetables—and continue to do so while learning Indigenous agricultural methods along the way.
For the capstone students, working on the garden is also a chance to get out of the house and spend some time in nature—something that was especially needed during the lockdown phase of the pandemic.
In the past two and half years, NAYA has transformed the garden into a lush space that helps nourish and feed Portland’s Indigenous community in body and spirit. The land now holds a vegetable garden, a First Foods garden, a medicinal garden and an intergenerational play space.
Beyond this community garden, NAYA recently received a $3.7 million grant from the Portland Clean Energy Fund to develop a farm and community gathering place as part of their Native Food Sovereignty project. NAYA will use the money to turn two other baseball fields into a farm and remediate the fourth baseball diamond to return the land to its original state.
“We’re creating a landscape of what this valley used to look like, which was a savanna oak prairie,” says Rose. “We’ll also be able to put up big greenhouses, hoop houses, and a geodesic dome for growing plants, having classes and just creating spaces of wellness in our community.”
Even with big changes underway at NAYA, Trimble anticipates that future students will continue to work at the community garden as part of their capstone experience.
“We thought this would be temporary but then we realized the garden has become integral to students understanding the connection between learning, relationships and healing," she says. "Growing a garden, supporting youth, advocating for indigenous curriculum—they're all deeply interrelated.”
Trimble is also looking for ways to connect students in her senior capstone course with those in her Health, Happiness and Human Rights Freshman Inquiry course so that the seniors can transfer knowledge to first year students about the garden and how they can serve the NAYA community.
“We're here to support the sovereignty of our community partners,” she says. “Sometimes students will come in, and they're like ‘I want to do this, I want to do that.’ Then you see the shift where they realize it's not about my accomplishments, it’s now ‘How can I be in relationship and support NAYA?’”
Rose says anyone in the PSU community—and beyond—is welcome to volunteer with the garden. Volunteer days are on Mondays and Saturdays from 10-1pm. NAYA will also host an Unthanksgiving on Nov. 24 and 25 from 11-2pm at 5135 NE Columbia Blvd (on the 75 bus line).