Royal Roads University recently unveiled its new Indigenous medicine garden – a project designed to give students and community members a chance to learn about plants that the Lekwungen-speaking peoples have used since time immemorial.
“What we see is an opportunity at Royal Roads to establish spaces and environments where there are opportunities to learn, grow and recentre Indigenous knowledge," said the university's director of Indigenous education Russell Johnston.
He added that the university is developing a new Indigenous studies program, for which the medicine garden will serve as a classroom.
Solara Goldwynn, Royal Roads' farm and food systems lead, and Kenneth Elliot, ethno-botanist and Cowichan Elder, chose the garden’s colourful mix of plants, most of which grow naturally in the traditional territories of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples (southern Vancouver Island and the San Juan and Gulf Islands).
For example, goldenrod can be used to treat burns, woolly sunflower leaves can be used to make poultices and yarrow and brownwort have anti-inflammatory properties.
The garden offers an array of non-medicinal plants, too.
Basket sedge and beaked hazelnut can be woven into baskets, and lowbush blueberries and serviceberries produce edible fruit. Silverweed roots taste like sweet potatoes, and sea plantain shrubs produce salty leaves that can be eaten raw or pickled.
Johnston said the project will help the Colwood-based institution promote an understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing and being – one of the university's commitments to Indigenous peoples.
“We understand that we’re visitors on the lands of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples, and one of the things that we think about within our frameworks and within the work that we do is how can we be good visitors,” he said. “One of those things is creating opportunities for education, for reciprocal relationships and looking at ways that we can further a relationship that’s going to last as long as Royal Roads is an institution.”
