Abenaki Land Link Project Plants Seeds of Food Sovereignty
At Seven Days by Jordan Barry
Published Oct. 13, 2020
On an early October day at the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps' Farm in Richmond, an empty greenhouse was quickly filling with the year's harvest.
"It's really tangible today, to see all the food come in," said Livy Bulger, education and engagement manager at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont. She was unloading an armload of Algonquin squash. Hundreds of pounds of the hefty oblong squash lined the length of the greenhouse, forming a gradient from zucchini-like dark green to vivid orange.
Squash was one of the crops grown in the pilot year of the Abenaki Land Link Project, a partnership of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk-Abenaki Nation, NOFA-VT and the Vermont Farm to Plate Network's Rooted in Vermont program.
More than a dozen farmers, gardeners and homesteaders around the state received Indigenous seeds provided by the Nulhegan Band — for Algonquin squash; cranberry, skunk and Mohawk dry beans; Calais flint corn; and a Koasek/Calais corn mix — to grow and harvest for Abenaki citizens.