Indigenous sea gardens fed communities, preserved ecosystems

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https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/08/indigenous-sea-gardens-fed-communities-preserved-ecosystems

Indigenous sea gardens fed communities, preserved ecosystems

Coastal gardens once saw harvests that rivaled today's commercial fisheries without exploiting the land. Some Native communities are now reviving the tradition.

by Ashley Braun Hakai Magazine / August 3, 2022

For those who know how to read them, the signs have long been there. Like the towering mound of 20 million oyster shells all but obscured by the lush greenery of central Florida’s Gulf Coast. Or the arcing lines of wave-weathered stone walls strung along British Columbia’s shores like a necklace. Such features, hidden in the landscape, tell a rich and varied story of Indigenous stewardship. They reveal how humans carefully transformed the world’s coasts into gardens of the sea—gardens that produced vibrant, varied communities of marine life that sustained Indigenous peoples for millennia. And in certain places, like on the west coast of North America in what is now Washington state and where the Swinomish are building a new sea garden, these ancient practices are poised to sustain them once again.

I see it as a way for our people to be reconnected to our place, to be reconnected to each other, and to have a purpose, to have a responsibility that goes beyond us,” says Alana Quintasket (siwəlcəʔ of the Swinomish Tribal Senate.

Across the planet, Indigenous communities, from the Heiltsuk in British Columbia, to the Powhatan on the Chesapeake Bay on the United States’ Atlantic Coast, to the Māori in New Zealand, have successfully stewarded the sea for thousands of years. These communities avoided diminishing their productive sea gardens despite, in some cases, seeing harvests that rival modern commercial fisheries.

The scale of historical Indigenous oyster gardening, for instance, cannot be overstated. On America’s southeastern Atlantic coast, in the modern states of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, Indigenous peoples whose descendants include the Muscogee built gargantuan monuments out of oyster shells. These structures could reach 30 meters high or more.

“These people are taking billions of oysters — literally billions of oysters — to form a single site,” says Torben Rick, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The monuments were deeply significant, serving as sites for human burial, feasting and other ceremonies and rituals

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