Like many activities at Seattle’s Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, the forest garden land and community tending event began with a ceremony.
With a small group of volunteers huddled around her, the facility’s land cultural steward manager, Shameka Gagnier, burned a stick of sage in an abalone shell.
Gagnier explained that plants joined the salmon, water, and animals in offering themselves as sustenance for the arriving humans. This included the sage that was burning away in the shell next to the group, cleansing everyone's souls with the smoke.
Gagnier has been involved with the center’s gardens since 2019, and has vested her energies into learning and sharing all she can about the different plants and trees on the center’s campus. Daybreak’s founding and mission were even founded on the spiritual theme of a plant, based on a vision the famed Oglala Lakota medicine man Nicholas Black Elk had as a young boy:
“Two men were coming from the east, head first like arrows flying, and between them rose the daybreak star,” goes the account quoted on the center’s website. “They came and gave a herb to me and said ‘With this on earth you shall undertake anything and do it.’ It was the daybreak star herb, the herb of understanding, and they told me to drop it on the earth. I saw it falling far, and when it struck the earth it rooted and grew and flowered, four blossoms on one stem, a blue, a white, a scarlet, and a yellow; and the rays from these streamed upward to the heavens so that all creatures saw it and in no place was there darkness.”
Several times a month, Gagnier holds the community tending event. She draws in as few as two — and as many as 70 — volunteers at a time, who eagerly grab shovels, hoes, rakes and other tools to get the day’s work done. Together with Green Seattle Partnership, Gagnier helps people cultivate traditional native plants including camas, tule, cedar and salmonberry. These have all been historically used for food, medicine and materials for tribes across the Pacific Northwest region and beyond.
Building on the past
“This whole area was previously Fort Lawton,” said Daybreak Star facilities director Tony Monroe, Yakima, as we followed Gagnier and her volunteers down the Wolf Tree trail. “This was clear cut so there were no trees here 50 years ago. Other than a few Western Cedars, most of this is all pretty new stuff, especially in our forest garden area.”
Monroe said the center gets about $180,000 annually in grants for the tending and plant work, including some from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and King County. In the past, grants came from the Washington State Department of Commerce and the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department. While aware of disruptions in federal funding under the second Trump administration, Monroe says so far they’ve not had any indications of any grants “being restricted or going away.”
“We’re building an area back here called Lance and Shield, it has a medicine wheel and some benches around it,” said Monroe, as we navigated the earthen path. He said over the past five years, the center has spent about $8 million on upgrades and improvements including solar panels and a new HVAC system. “We’re spending a lot of money here and doing some really good things for our community.”
Native empowerment has been the theme of Daybreak since it was founded by activists in the early 1970s. Led by Bernie Whitebear, a large group occupied the decommissioned Fort Lawton military installation as part of a larger, coordinated movement to reoccupy spaces once inhabited by Native people before colonization. The occupation ultimately led to the creation of the Daybreak Star facility, which broke ground in 1976 and opened a year later as a cultural center with social and education services for the local Indigenous population. Whitebear served as director of the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation in the center until 2000 when he died from colon cancer.
“All of the tribes that are here are relocated by the Relocation Act of the 1950s,” said Monroe, of the many nations that have come to settle in the Seattle area. He said another improvement coming soon is a series of basalt columns that will bear the names of Columbia River basin tribes as well as all federally-recognized ones across the U.S. “That’s our shining star of civil rights in Seattle.”
Beavers among the ducks
Later that day, Gagnier gently shushed the volunteers and pointed towards a pond overgrown with duckweed.
“That’s where the beaver lives,” she explained, a thin smile emerging across her face. “They’re not in there right now, they’re probably watching us from over there, somewhere.”
Gagnier said there could well be two beavers in this pond. One of her volunteers, Zachary Pacleb, used a skimmer to remove the dense duckweed from its surface as several ducks floated by, cutting rippling trails behind them.
“To be honest, I’m really tempted to taste it,” said Pacleb, as he pulled a clump of the plant from the skimmer’s mesh. “It’s coarse and granular.”
Pacleb is a chef by trade, so he explained that understanding the culinary and medicinal applications of plants is important to him. He’s Filipino, Croatian and Norwegian, and said his mother always emphasized the importance of appreciating and caring for the land. He’s used nettles, cattails, and huckleberries in his cooking, and is looking forward to learning more from his tending experience at Daybreak.
“I’ve always tried to do my best to honor the plants and thank them for their contribution to our lives and our energy,” said Pacleb. “I’ve spent a lot of time in this park, but it’s nice to be able to find an opportunity to give back.”
Another volunteer, Beck Luke, Tlingit, was born and raised in the Seattle area. She’s doing a 12-week internship with Gagnier, and was helping weed a section of garden with several others.
“We’re just mostly helping restore the land, learning about food sovereignty and everything,” she said. “It’s been really nice to reconnect with my culture.”
Luke is fond of willow trees and alder woods, and simply getting her hands dirty.
“Getting to connect with the people here and the land, just seeing all the beautiful things. It’s been really special to be able to do that.”
In the wide expanse of the gardens and center, it’s easy to forget that this is part of a major city in the Pacific Northwest, at least until a jet flies overhead or a distant car honks. But the diversity of traditional plants, the sweat lodges for men and women, and the culturally-specific design of the Daybreak Star center provides an immersive space for Natives and allies to learn how nature connects with everything.
Gagnier said this year she and her volunteers will probably put in close to 10,000 to 15,000 plants across the grounds. She said for all of the centuries of colonization, this space provides her with hope.
“Our foods and medicines have been suppressed or completely taken out of our urban settings,” said Gagnier. “And so with climate change happening, with these wars constantly emitting so much carbon, I feel like the plants are really the ones that are going to knit us back to our place in the circle of things. They're the ones that are going to bring us back home.”
Volunteers of all experience levels are welcome to participate at Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. Tools and food are provided, people are advised to arrive with gloves, water bottle, and a “good heart and mind.” More information can be provided by contacting Shameka Gagnier at Shameka.Gagnier@gmail.com or (720)212-7113.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to retract where Gagnier misspoke when retelling a creation story.
This article first appeared on Underscore Native News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
