I love that the climb trail built in 2017 was blessed by the Lil’wat Nation and give the name Skwenkwin, wild potato.

But I don’t know what a wild potato is. So when I saw this article from the Smithsonian referencing a wetland potato gardened by the q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie) people of the Fraser Valley delta, for 700 years, 3800 years ago, I wondered if they were related?

I will have to ask Kwikws, whose beautiful Food Security project, shared this image.

In the meantime, it felt like a reminder to me, when I get on my bike, now the snow has melted, and put my head down to grind up the hills and expose my lungs to their first real gasps of the year, to be curious and reverent about the trail names. Naming is powerful. Naming is a blessing. Naming is map-making. Naming is identifying and calling out special features. Naming is not “tokenism.” Naming matters. (As any of us who have laboured over what to call a kid, before we’ve even met them, know.) Life is built around food. Life is sustained by food. A place that grew edible roots was a place that could sustain a community. Our security derives from such things.

I just saw a deep buried headline (I would guess the newspaper didn’t want to alarm us, but then, all the headlines were alarming… just not in quite such an existential fashion) about the final IPCC report. Finding it now, I discover that they changed the headline to make it more optimistic, which seems weird and makes me question myself. Sigh. Either way, it brings to the word “security” a whole new meaning. Understanding that our food, that sustains us, comes directly from the earth around us, and requires our attendance, our reciprocity, our care and our stewardship, is more important than ever.

So here’s to the wild potatoes. Here’s to the learning that many Indigenous people were vastly sophisticated food and land managers. And here’s to remembering our way back to being true stewards of place.

Archaeological site DhRp-52 is a long-lived multi-component residential site situated in the Fraser River Delta, about 50 km upriver from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The wetland wapato (also known as Indian potato, x̌ʷəq̓ʷə́l̕s in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, and Sagittaria latifolia in Latin) garden at this site was built 3800 years ago, and for the following 700 years residents of DhRp-52 managed the garden to mass produce the wapato’s wild tubers. The discovery of this garden is challenging conventional notions of Northwest Coast peoples as developing politically, ritually, and socioeconomically complex societies in the absence of farming. This paper tells the story about a time before memory when ancestors of contemporary Coast Salish q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie) people fell into a deep and mutual love with the wapato, building a life to accommodate their collective desires and needs. Katzie ancestors sustained their knowledge and appreciation of wapato through hundreds of generations. Today, this knowledge is being applied through experimental research and ecological restoration in Katzie territory.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323879350_Katzie_the_Wapato_An_Archaeological_Love_Story

via The Smithsonian:

When we talk about early gardening in North America, most people think about the “three sisters” system of farming, in which indigenous people interplanted corn, beans and squash. But there were other systems of agriculture as well, including the cultivation of wild, non-domesticated plants. Researchers in British Columbia recently found the first evidence of a wild “wapato garden” tended by the ancestors of the Katzie First Nation.

In the Pacific Northwest, wapato tubers from Sagittaria latifolia, otherwise known as arrowroot, arrowleaf or arrowhead, were a staple crop. Growing on river banks and in wetlands, native communities dug them up, roasting them whole or drying them and pounding them into a meal for storage. Meriwether Lewis, during the Corps of Discoveries expeditions across the west, noted that the chestnut-like water potatoes were an important trading commodity and stopped to observe women collecting the tubers in 1806, writing:

“by getting into the water, Sometimes to their necks holding by a Small canoe and with their feet loosen the wappato or bulb of the root from the bottom from the Fibers, and it imedeately rises to the top of the water, they Collect & throw them into the Canoe, those deep roots are the largest and best roots.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/northwests-earliest-garden-discovered-british-columbia-180961560/?fbclid=IwAR1pHgDK4YImHYUro-G2H73bAMx7SYNmvORhUvsuSCzjWWmaLWlpX1VqpUg

According to Geordon Omand of the Canadian Press, road building crews near Pitt Meadows, about 20 miles from Vancouver, came upon a 450-square-foot platform made of flat stones packed tightly into single and double layers. Archeologists called in to assess the site determined that it was a wetland wapato garden. In the past, the area was covered in shallow water and silt. The stone platform was constructed to prevent the tubers from rooting too deep, making it easier to pull them out of the muck.

Lizzie Wade at Science reports that researchers pulled up 4,000 wapato tubers from the platform, as well as pieces of 150 wooden digging tools, carved into shapes similar to a trowel. Those materials were dated to around 1,800 BC making the site roughly 3,800 years old and the oldest evidence of people cultivating wild foods in that area of North America.

“This is as important to us as the Egyptian pyramids, or the temples in Thailand, or Machu Picchu,” Debbie Miller, who works with the Katzie Development Limited Parternship, the tribally owned archeological firm that excavated the site, tells Omand.

Miller says that their excavations show that the gardening technique actually improved the health of the wetland ecosystem. Sedimentary analysis showed that soon after the site was abandoned, it acidified and dried up.

Despite its importance to the Katzie, the site was filled in after the excavation and covered by a public road. But tribal members—and anyone willing to dig in the muck—are able to get a taste of the ancestral staple. Edible species of Sagittaria exist in almost all wetlands in North America, and some tribes in the Pacific Northwest even host community harvests of the plant. In fact, in 2011, reports Courtney Flatt at OPM Radio, the Yakama Nation in Washington State was surprised when they restored some wheat fields into wetlands and wapato tubers that had lain dormant for decades sprang back to life, allowing tribal elders to munch on the traditional water potato for the first time in 70 years.