Lucy Racehorse Suppah stands in the middle of a traditional medicine plant garden laid out in a circle.

“We’re looking at some prairie white sage, and then we also have our sweet grass in our stock tanks,” she said, pointing to a water stock tank repurposed into a garden bed. “Sweet grass really likes its feet wet, so they have a little different bed for themselves.”

The garden is now on what used to be a baseball field. The dug out and a scoreboard is still visible some yards away, and vines are now climbing up the backstop.

“We have grapes back there,” she said. “So we’re also repurposing some of the infrastructure that was in place when we purchased this area.”

The garden, called Wapas Nah Née Shaku — which means “Holding the basket” in Wasco — is just behind the Native American Youth and Family Center, or NAYA, campus, which used to be a middle school in the Cully neighborhood of Northeast Portland.

Suppah, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and half Shoshone Bannock, is the Indigenous food sovereignty coordinator at NAYA.

The nonprofit runs programming and services for Native American families, youth and elders in Portland, a city that has one of the largest urban Native communities in the nation, representing nearly 400 tribal affiliations, according to the NAYA’s estimates.

The community garden, which got a $3.6 million boost in 2022 from the Portland Clean Energy Fund — as part of that program’s agriculture and green infrastructure investment priorities — is meant to make space for people in and also outside those communities to learn and reclaim traditional agricultural practices.

“There’s been a long history of disconnection or an attempt to disconnect us from our identity and our culture,” Suppah said. “And my role is to create that access so that that reconnection can happen.”

Suppah said this space is about Indigenous food sovereignty and self-determination. Though the garden is small in its footprint — at least for now — it’s part of a much bigger movement across the U.S. to reclaim aspects of Indigenous food and culture that, as Suppah said, were not lost, but rather, hindered.

Many Indigenous people lost access to hunting and gathering grounds when they were forcibly removed at the hands of settlers from their ancestral lands, promises of land elsewhere were broken and Native American children forcibly placed in government-funded boarding schools in an effort to assimilate.

This garden is meant to reclaim the connection to the land, through traditional foods grown from ancestral seeds or knowledge shared among tribes. The garden also centers foods and ceremonial plants like tobacco back in their Indigenous context, said NAYA’s Ben Sanford, and a member of the Sappony Tribe from North Carolina.

“You really have this great reset point for people that can connect with that knowledge that existed that was nearly wiped out,” he said.

Sanford helps educate people about the difference between commercial and traditional tobacco. Traditional tobacco is medicinal and ceremonial, not just a nicotine fix, he said.

“I think as much of this plant as I do my mom, my grandmothers, my aunties, my cousins. It is relative to me, and I want to create connection and communication with this plant,” Sanford said. “That’s what it’s always been used for.”

At the NAYA garden, native community members can come to harvest food. There are beds of the usual produce like tomatoes, kale, collard greens and peppers, what Suppah refers to as their market garden.

But there’s also hedgerows of chokecherry bushes, Inchelium Red garlic, amaranth and corn nearly 20 feet tall, as well as all sorts of roots — like sunchokes, wild carrots, camas and medicinal plants used for teas or illnesses. All are Indigenous First Foods.

“When people talk about First Foods we’re talking about the food that we sustained ourselves off of prior to settler colonization — any of the foods that are included in our tribal and cultural history as far as our creation stories, the ones that have sacrificed themselves for our people, and that we have a really deep connection with,” Suppah said.

The site is especially important, Suppah said, because people in urban areas might not have easy access to land to get the foods they need.

“That access to go out and gather these materials, gather our foods, gather our medicines isn’t something that urban native populations can do,” Suppah said. “It’s a lot easier for them to just come out here.”

NAYA’s site itself, at a middle school campus on the Columbia Slough, is culturally significant too.

“It’s well documented there used to be a tribal fishing village here called Neerchokikoo,” said Paul Lumley, the chief advancement officer at NAYA, and a citizen of the Yakima Nation.

The village was a Chinook Tribe finishing encampment, Lumley said. Many Pacific Northwest tribes came through this site, or traded nearby at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers.

“There’s these really gorgeous lakes out there, Whittaker Ponds with turtles and the bird life is just amazing out there,” he said, while speaking from a location that many Portlanders know for its industrial businesses. And so to be able to have that connection here and really be the last spot on this whole Columbia Boulevard where it is really almost like a nature preserve.

Because of that history, it’s only fitting the site reflects the culture and foods of multiple tribes, even beyond the Pacific Northwest.

That diversity means Suppah often has to make adaptations to her workshops. Not all tribes call the same root by the same name, or use herbs or medicines in the same way, and some traditions and oral histories are just different, Suppah said.

“We are not a monoculture as Native Americans. As Indigenous people, we are a highly diverse people, and so to honor that and to respect it is really important that we represent a multitude of cultures,” she said.

The NAYA garden is a space for everyone, even if they’re not Native, Lumley said.

“You don’t have to be Native to come here and participate as a volunteer or to partake in some of the food that we’re growing or the medicines,” Lumley said. “We’re happy to share that with many other cultures.”

That work of sharing foods and medicines has already started. But reclaiming Indigenous ancestral knowledge will take time, Suppah said.

“It’s taken hundreds of years to get us to this point where we’re at as far as the hindrance of our culture and our identity and not being allowed to be ourselves,” she said. “It’s gonna take just as much to reverse it.”

It might take a long time. But something that gives her a glimmer of hope: The knowledge being planted today could yield fruits for generations to come.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/18/portland-baseball-field-indigenous-led-community-garden/