February 6, 2025
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Kristina Buckley
On January 31st our friends and partners at Niweskok: From the Stars to Seeds closed on the purchase of a 245-acre farm in Swanville, providing a home base for Niweskok’s mission to restore the region as a Wabanaki food hub. Maine Farmland Trust is among several collaborators who have supported the organization in this endeavor. The purchase of the farm is a very exciting step for Wabanaki food sovereignty, land access and stewardship, and our broader local food system.
Since time immemorial, Wabanaki communities have harvested food in reciprocity with the land, but today, their access to practice these traditional lifeways is limited to small amounts of land that are often distant from one another and leased, borrowed, public, or in trust. With the acquisition of this farm and its proximity to the coast, Niweskok will be able to practice traditional crop cultivation, harvesting, and fishing in ways that sustain the land, Wabanaki people, and their culture – and increase the availability of local food, strengthening our regional food system as a whole.
In order to protect farmland so it can continue to sustain our communities for generations to come, we need viable pathways for farmers and Wabanaki producers to get on the land. Although agricultural conservation easements have historically been MFT’s primary tool for protecting farmland, farmland protection can be accomplished with other creative tools.
Indigenous communities have long shared a reciprocal relationship with the land, caring for it as it has cared for us over millennia. When we think about the values that underpin land protection, indigenous stewardship and guidance is crucial to the future we want to work towards together, with real opportunities for building meaningful relationships in community, working in step and in reciprocity with the land and its natural resources.
Earlier this winter, we had a chance to sit down with the co-directors of Niweskok Alivia Moore, Nicole Francis, and Tami Connolly to talk about how they came to this work, what their hopes are for the future of Niweskok, and what this land means for their community. The following is a condensed version of that conversation.
Tami Connolly (she / her) - Penobscot Nation citizen & co-director at Niweskok
Nicole Francis (she / her) - Mi'kmaq (Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick & Mi'kmaq Nation in Aroostook County) & co-director at Niweskok
Alivia Moore (she / they) - Penobscot Nation citizen & co-director at Niweskok
Could you give us a little context about how Niweskok came to be and what its purpose is?
(Alivia) - Niweskok: From the Stars to Seeds, is a 501c3 nonprofit collective. It’s a continuation of work that we were organizing under the grassroots formation, Eastern Woodlands Rematriation Collective, which we had been organizing with since the beginning of 2018 across the entire northeast tribal communities, and is reaching where a lot of us are really isolated in our work and in our disparate communities, and reinvigorating our food ways. Our work over that time was incredibly successful and our capacity here in Wabanaki, so-called Maine, grew tremendously. From that, incredible projects, leadership and relationships have developed, and broader food movements have flourished. So it made a lot of sense to separate into our own organization, Niweskok. For me, this work comes from being a collective of Wabanaki folks who were already leading food and medicine projects for the service of our tribal communities, the Earth, future generations, and working to embody our responsibilities. This entity (Niweskok) allows us to grow and to do more of those things. We really understand our relationship through our foods and medicines as a broader relationship to the earth that can be transformative not only for our food systems, but transformative for all systems that humans are creating on this earth. To restore Wabanaki foodways is to restore a healthful, balanced relationship with the Earth, which is also the blueprint for a healthier economy, healthier political systems and social structures. Food is a beautiful entry point, everybody can get down with food. Everybody eats food. Everybody finds joy around food. It is at the core of building the world that we need. We're really intentional in engaging that level of the work and depth of responsibility of what it means for Wabanaki in our territory to lead in a good way. Because the work that we're doing is not only for the benefit of Wabanaki, it's for all who are here sharing this territory.
(Tami) - Yes, Niweskok, for me, is so much bigger. We’re engaging with so much of what we need to go forward and understand how we stop living the way that we were, and move towards living in our ancestral way of being, taking care of each other and thinking about what our future holds and what we're passing down to the next generations.
(Nicole) - When I had an opportunity to come back to my territory, I was looking for other Mi'kmaq or Wabanaki folks that were doing the work and because of social media I was able to kind of pinpoint a few groups that I was really interested in and started following that work, some within my own nation and also some other folks from the Confederacy. It gave me a lot of hope to see like, wow, there's movement. There's stuff going on. Sometimes you feel alone in food sovereignty work and in this process, I was excited even online to be able to see the work that these folks were doing and I was able to plug in. One of those people I connected with was Alivia. We really bonded, most especially over wild rice. Some of the first really poignant memories I have of being with the work that's being nourished by Alivia, was around wild rice work. It was really pivotal for me. I was seeing that momentum, passion, community, and a way to connect me to my relatives over the border. Knowing about the collective of people that were already working across the Atlantic Woodlands, and then getting involved as a founding member of Niweskok, talking about the deepening of this mission and what it means to support our community and support ourselves as part of this community through Niweskok...one of the things that sticks out to me a lot as part of this mission is caring for ourselves as Indigenous people on stolen land and creating safe spaces.
Can you speak to kinship, what that means to you and how this gathering place, this farm, will build a safe space for Wabanaki community?
(Tami) - When I look at plants and trees, I look at them as our root relatives. I feel like they're much more sacred than even I am, because they grow out of the earth and we walk on the earth. It is our responsibility to take care of that earth and be sure that they survive so that we can survive – because we don't, without them. That is my connection (kinship) with Earth, having a place for us to be able to nurture that together and having the same respect for the land. It's almost overwhelming that we're going to be able to do this. Our ancestors always lived in villages together and worked collaboratively to maintain the whole village. Now we're able to share and do that work where we always have.
How will this particular farm operate in and engage with the surrounding community and how is Niweskok planning to utilize this land?
(Alivia) - Returning to this farm and our piece of territory there, is not only a critical ethical social justice issue, but it's also a return for us to be in a position to lead again, to support healthier food systems, economies, and political systems in this part of our homeland. The farm is going to be the center, the seat of supporting the mission of Niweskok, community food production, with food we gift and share out into the community, and with education and rematriation of Wabanaki food and medicine ways. There will also be an element of collective Wabanaki living on the farm for folks involved in this work.
We're going to continue our work in some of our traditional agriculture production of traditional foods, seed production, and continue some small scale nursery plant tree, traditional medicine– we’ll be able to do more around the woodland botanical nursery set up in the forest, which I’m really excited for. We'll be able to do so much more sharing of those plants and trees with other Wabanaki-led land projects and even Wabanaki families for their homes. We're initially talking about sheep as a form of livestock and will see what develops, including silvopasture. We will be establishing more orchards, fruit and nut trees, and maintaining some grazing space between those for livestock. We'll also be doing wetland restoration work. But we still need to get input and guidance and let the land show us a lot of what this will be.
(Tami) - For me, my passion is with plants and I see plants as medicine that takes care of our bodies. It matters how we are taking care of our plant relatives. And you're not always able to have control of that unless it's in your own space or in a space that's safe for them. It's just something that we needed to help us go to the next step.
(Nicole) - Yes, at one of our respite gatherings that we held to nourish ourselves, our work, nurture our community, we were talking on the steps about dreams we had. Tami talked about how having a farm, land to do this work on, would be one of her greatest dreams. There's this idea of land and land return in all of our hearts because we are living in our territories without a lot of safe access to most of these places. From that conversation the idea was born to look for this piece of land. It’s hard to do the work that we're doing when we're so separate from each other, when we don't have that centralized point. Now we have this place of meeting, of kinship, of safety, a place where we can practice our relationship with the plants and animals. Having a specific land base, we can also practice being a good neighbor and a relative to other farmers in the area that are doing really good work and support each other in all of our missions. For me it means stability and safety. It means that we're better poised to really provide some nourishing work for our community.
We use the phrase “farmland protection” at MFT; what does a forever relationship with the land and land stewardship look like in the Wabanaki community?
(Nicole) - I think a lot about being a good relative, you know, walking my talk. My personal talk. We all have these places and these passions where we excel and when we have the space to practice our passions, then our gifts come out, the gifts that we have to share. That's part of that kinship that we were talking with earlier. I think we have to bring these skills of how to be in union and balance with the land, because the world is not always going to look the way it does right now. We need a place to build these skills up. And I think historically, as Indigenous people all over the world, we’ve been discluded from anything that has to do with our say on the land, because as soon as our voices are heard, that gives context for people to realize that they are on stolen land, and that can bring a lot of fear for people. Our origin stories have been birthed from these places and creating land access and land return to Wabanaki, without an easement, allows us to practice that kinship that we've always had in our DNA. Those maps are there, in my cells, in my blood, they're there whether I like it or not, and they're speaking to me and that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's in our DNA. Up until now, I haven't had an opportunity to bring those maps out onto land that I can access, you know, 24/7, with a group of people who we're making those kinds of decisions together. When I'm thinking of conservation and preservation, those words are containers for ways of life that white people have made and we've never been included in them. I feel like that balance and union and being on the land have always been my map and my compass.
Thank you to Alivia, Nicole, and Tami for taking the time to sit down with us and share Niweskok’s vision. Please consider making a donation to further their work at https://www.niweskok.org/donate. If you’d like to be updated about Niweskok’s ongoing community events and stories, you can stay connected by joining their email list or following them on Instagram at @niweskok.
