Indian Rock
Students at Indian
Rock/Native Garden

Indian Rock

Restoration

Students at Indian Rock Native Garden
Text by Bonnie Bade and Deborah Small
Images by Cheryl Eng, Dave Fleishman, Deborah Small, Jessica Walker, Josh Walker

At the garden, we witness and participate firsthand in ceremonies that honor the San Luis Rey Band’s intimate connections with the natural world and with the plants and land that sustains, nurtures, and inspires them.

SLR Tribal Council member Al Cerda, for example, conducts a blessing/saging ceremony before we begin to remove the nonnative plants from the site.

On our field trips to the Indian Rock Native Garden, we who previously had been working at computer monitors or writing in our field notebooks suddenly transform into axe heavers . . . plant uprooters . . . weed wackers . . . hole diggers . . .

San Luis Rey elders participate in the work sessions at the rocks, and are always available to answer the students’ many questions and to tell stories.

The children of Band members and students are welcome to join the hard-working crews as well.

You can generally distinguish the anthropology students from the art students by their tools. The anthropology students wield note books.

Students in Bonnie Bade’s Community Ethnobotany class learn anthropological methods—participant observation, field research, interviewing, ethnographic writing, field notebook keeping, and literature research—all while conducting ethnographic research with members of the SLR and other Luiseño bands.

Bade’s students also focus on ethnobotanical methods— documentation of plant uses, plant history, plant processing, harvest and cultivation requirements, geographic distribution of the plants, as well as plant lore and plant stories.

Deborah Small’s art students wield sketch books as well as their ever present digital still and video cameras. Students who have no difficulty navigating cyberspace—searching databases, downloading MP3’s, one-click shopping, or signing online petitions against global wars, are learning to navigate the local habitat as well, complementing their computer literacy with a profoundly important ecological literacy.

Together, we are learning ways in which a CSUSM’s technological infrastructure can be used to benefit communities such as the San Luis Rey Band committed to cultural preservation and biological restoration, but with less access to new media.

Ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin has written that each time an elder dies, it is as if a library burned down. By assisting in the documentation and dissemination of Luiseño knowledge in ways that are respectful and compelling, our entire community benefits.

Garden restoration is extremely labor-intensive, as most restoration projects are. At the end of an exhausting day ripping out exotic plants with axe, hoe, pitchfork, machete, shovel and bare hands, we plant the first natives: sapling coast live oak trees.

We sourround the oak saplings with mulch and rocks, then water deeply. We work until the setting sun elongates our shadows, then pause to reflect on all we have accomplished . . .

What has impressed us about many of our students is their commitment to exploring socially engaged new media practices, their openness to cultures other than their own, their unstinting willingness to learn, and their generous and helpful spirits, so necessary in collaborative work.

Their work beautifully reflects how the anonymity of the landscape has been irrevocably altered.

Click on excerpt from graduate application letter from an Indian Rock Native Garden student.