Unveiling Naa'Waya'Sum Gardens: Revitalization of Space and Practice in Clayoquot Sound
By Makayla Lintott
Keywords: Designed Ecosystems, Knowledge Production, Healing, Movement
Summary
This case study explores the Naa’Waya’Sum Gardens, located in Tofino, British Columbia, as a designed ecosystem emergent from the intersecting principles of knowledge production, healing, and restoration. While still under construction, the site is poised to support and uphold Indigenous governance in the region, re-centering the Tla-o-qui-aht and surrounding nations in their traditional territories to revitalize place-based practice. This study seeks to explore and unpack the main drivers of the site, bridging agro-ecology and botany with modes of traditional knowledge bodies and social innovation through the land-use and land-ownership changes over the past decades. Situated amidst the coastal temperate rainforests of Clayoquot Sound, the gardens are contextualized by the shifting socio-cultural uses and mosaic of ecologies in the region, negotiating continued contestations over land. Accountability to place will be a critical point of engagement for the study, as well as the associated value-laden processes of movement that necessarily give them meaning. Challenging naturalized assumptions of human-nature relationships, this investigation will rework the understanding of nature as separate from human society, centering principles of inhabitance and reciprocity that underscore the legacies of the site itself.
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Figure 1: Clayoquot Campus (IISAAK OLAM, n.d.)
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Ecological Geneology
Tucked between Pacific Rim National Park and Tofino’s downtown core, the Naa’Waya’Sum Gardens are located on the western-most tip of Clayoquot Sound. Clayoquot Sound is characterized by 350,000 hectares of striking fjord-land mountains, glacially scoured ridges, and steepened valleys enshrouding expansive networks of lakes, channels, and inlets that drain into the estuaries of the eastern Pacific Ocean (Jakob, 2000). The region is situated amidst a large stretch of Vancouver Island’s coastal temperate rainforest, holding one of the last remaining pockets of undisturbed old growth forests in Canada (Mabee & Hoberg, 2006). While species diversity is relatively low compared to other rainforests found around the globe––barring the rich varieties of mosses, liverworts, herbs, and shrubs (Schoonmaker et al., 1997, as cited in Brown et al., 2006)––overall ecosystem productivity in the region stands exceptionally high (Shanley et al., 2015). Clayoquot’s ancient forests are mainly composed of western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) and western redcedar (Thuja plicata), as well as pockets of Pacific silver fir (Abies amabilis), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), and mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana) (Mychajlowycz, 2009).
The coastline of Clayoquot Sound encompasses the traditional territories of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations, including the Ditidaht, Hesquiaht, Ahousaht, Tla-o-qui-aht, Yuułuʔiłʔath, Toquaht, Huu-ay-aht, and Uchucklesaht First Nations (Curtis et al., 2023). The Nuu-chah-nulth peoples of this region maintained deeply intricate, indelible relationships to the land and its inhabitants, with intergenerational management practices being closely tied to their evolving social and political organization (Goetze, 2005). The principles of hishuk ish ts'awalk and hahuulhi,ll Hishuk ish ts'awalk (translated as "everything is one") guide Nuu-chah-nulth peoples stewardship of the land, centering respect for all life forms as well as the oneness between humans and the natural environment (Haiyupis, 1988, as cited in Goetze, 2005). An international array of settlers, diplomats, and traders began arriving on Nuu-chah-nulth shores between 1778-1811. Indigenous-European relationships were initially established alongside the Northwest Coast maritime fur trade (Carlson & Osmond, 2017). Spatial and resource competition continued as the province of British Columbia was proclaimed a British Crown Colony in 1858, as promises of the land’s potential were broadcast globally. Importing European notions of property rights as an indestructible and an immutable law of nature, the sectioning and settlement of the land into inhabitable, enclosed segments fundamentally restructured and restricted how people and wildlife could move around the rapidly developing landscape (Curtis et al., 2023). Processes of settlement were compounded by a resource economy contingent on capital gain from extractive industries such as mining and logging, erecting a constellation of violent, dispossessive forces that actively worked to remove surrounding Nations from their traditional territories. From 1950 to 1993, approximately 27,000 hectares of the region’s forests were clearcut for timber, profoundly shifting the composition of entire ecosystems and their environmental processes (Mychajlowycz, 2009). Centuries of territorial disputes and diverging values between the diverse communities settled in Clayoquot Sound led to massive conflicts over the appropriate use of the region’s rainforests. From the mid 1980s through to the early 1990s, these conflicts came to a head and became known as “the War in the Woods”––the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, spearheaded by members of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations. Ultimately, resolution was achieved in 1993 when the BC government made the Clayoquot Land Use Decision, implementing comprehensive land-use policies for industry stakeholders and the increase of protected areas to include 33% of the region’s land base (Mabee & Hoberg, 2004). The 4-hectare lands of the Naa’Waya’Sum Gardens were originally bought by George Patterson in 1997 to protect the site from being developed, as it fell outside of the region designated under the Clayoquot Land Use Decision and the Pacific Rim National Park. First named the Tofino Botanical Gardens, the site included the construction of an ecolodge, cafe, walking paths, and garden beds. In concert with the growing environmentally-conscious attitudes of residents and visitors to the surrounding area, the site reflected the triumph of conservation. Coming by way of Costa Rica, where he worked with Wilson Botanical Garden and Las Cruces Research Station to establish an arboretum, Patterson’s initial intentions were for the gardens to host an array of species found in both the surrounding region as well as similar climatic zones from around the world. These international ecologies included the construction of a separate cultural-oriented portion, consisting of four sections representing the former inhabitants of the region: First Nations; European settlers; Japanese fishermen; and the 1970’s wave of self-proclaimed hippies (Collins, 2007). Sparking dialogue surrounding the legacies of transitory movement of people and decades of contestations over land, the garden provided a space to hold and portray the complicated memories of Clayoquot Sound. |
Figure 2: Coastal Temperate Rainforest (IISAAK OLAM, n.d.)
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Present tense
While initial land use decisions in Clayoquot Sound reduced the encroachment of extractive industries through the creation of the Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, these decisions also gave rise to the rapid expansion of tourism and associated development. Now home to approximately 2,000 full-time residents, Tofino sees an influx of close to 4,000 seasonal workers and neo-nomads in the summer months (Mara, 2022). Filling cramped staff accommodations or parking lots and backroads with their live-in, camperized vans and school buses, these transient––and, many of whom, international––visitors come to the region for its expansive natural beauty, slower pace of life, and world-class surf. As a globally-renowned destination, the region attracts between 600,000 to 750,000 tourists a year––which has likely increased since the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (Dodds, 2012). The region’s complex legacies of competition over land and space have now taken on a new configuration as the mass movements of people throughout the reserves and nearby towns cause novel pressures on the local community, Nations, and ecosystems.
In 2021, the Naa’Waya’Sum Gardens were bought by the IISAAK OLAM Foundation (IOF) in partnership with MakeWay Canada’s Indigenous Protected and Conservation Areas (IPCA) Innovation Program. The IOF is an Indigenous-led organization that seeks to foster relational, cross-cultural collaboration between Indigenous leadership, Elders, youth, and students, with a variety of academic and community organizations, businesses, government bodies, and industry stakeholders through knowledge sharing and mobilization, operating with the understanding that all systems of knowing are of equal value and merit (IISAAK OLAM, n.d.). The educational and cultural mandate of the IOF supports the rising formation of IPCAs, which function as spatio-temporal entities that work to conserve the land and its inhabitants while actively building internal and network-level socio-ecological resilience (Plotkin, 2018). The transfer of ownership from George Patterson, who now holds a seat with the current board of directors, has allowed the site to take on a new life that fosters the IOF’s mission and reciprocally engages the surrounding community. The Naa’Waya’Sum Gardens and the IISAAK Learning Lodge (originally the eco-lodge) are the first inaugural satellite campus of the IOF’s aspiring network of Pacific IPCA Innovation Centres. The IOF intends to expand these campuses along the Pacific coast, bridging learning communities from Alaska all the way to Chile. Paralleling the movement of people through Clayoquot Sound, the site will become a locus for the movement of ideas, practices, languages, and governance systems. "Naa'waya'sum" translates to "the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next" in the Nuu-chah-nulth language. As a mode of healing and restoration, knowledge transfer will be the guiding principle in both the physical and functional form the gardens take on through time. According to Eli Enns, founder and CEO of the IOF, the transformation of the gardens will re-orient ecologies according to how people interact with them, cultivating abundance in a way that reflects Nuu-chah-nulth land-centered values (Dobbins, n.d.). As a publicly-accessible space, the gardens will in turn be enlivened by visiting residents, academics, and working professionals who bring their own experiences and expertise from their respective communities and educational fields. Users of the garden will be able to grow, harvest, and process an array of species, some of which will be relevant to the intergenerational practices and teachings of the surrounding Nations––such as native, medicinal, and culturally-important plants. In addition to providing a site for processes such as language production, educational practice, and food security, these plants will emerge as material manifestations of resurging relationship to place. While the site is spatially-bound by property lines and the Pacific Rim Highway, the gardens' domain reaches far beyond its geographical limits. In other words, the gardens are not a static, isolated entity to be passively observed, but rather a productive translation of vast historical socio-ecological and cultural legacies and enduring, diverse relationships to land. While the campus is still under construction, the IISAAK Learning Lodge continues to host private retreats and workshops for organizations, businesses, and school groups. Programming is tailored to each individual group, engaging them in relational frameworks of knowledge production. The retreats follow an ethical space protocol, which involves a dialogic process of active, intentional reflection guiding visitors to locate the responsibilities they hold to the respective spaces they occupy (Laurila, 2019; Bannister, 2018). This approach brings outside entities and companies into an active dialogue surrounding human-nature and place-based relations (IISAAK OLAM, n.d.; Nikolakis & Hotte, 2022). Working directly with Elders and knowledge keepers in the region, retreats function to pose visitors in direct conversation with the land they are learning with––which shifts the greater processes of movement in the region into a paradigm that holds visitors accountable to place. |
Figure 3: Naa' Waya 'Sum Gardens (ISAAK OLAM, n.d.)
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Future trajectory
Intended to solve identified problems in the built environment, designed ecosystems use ecological principles to inform explicit engineered or architectural designs that produce fully functional systems (Higgs, 2017). As a designed ecosystem, the Naa’Waya’Sum Gardens hold a multitude of potentialities for both historical continuity and socio-cultural innovation, filling gaps in the capacity of Nations in the region by cultivating a space tailored to the needs of Elders, artists, ethnobotanists, teachers, and Indigenous-owned businesses and organizations. Many Indigenous peoples’ relationships with plants are an enduring and integral part of the socio-cultural fabric weaving together entire Nations’ practices and knowledge bodies (Kimmerer, 2013, as cited in Fuller, 2013). Plants hold the capacity to teach about individual and collective identity, revealing how people have co-evolved and developed interdependent relationships with themselves and their surrounding kin (Joseph, 2022). The garden's design will play the functional role of re-connecting people with the land and their plant relatives, reinstating traditional practices of cultivation, harvesting, and processing. This will also hold a potentiality for negotiating community resilience through food sovereignty, centering the greater community in the production, consumption, and distribution of nutritious and culturally appropriate food (Desmarais & Wittman, 2014). This avenue of sovereignty foregrounds conscientious relationships between people, food systems, ecosystems, and the land at multiple scales, building on the relational ethic that the IOF seeks to foster (Iles & Montenegro de Wit, 2015). Other proposed changes to the site include geothermal and solar-based energy upgrades to minimize the campus’s environmental impact and the construction of a carving facility intended for use by local artists (IISAAK OLAM, 2023).
Rather than seek to simply evoke a feeling of the surrounding environment, the Naa’Waya’Sum Gardens will uphold ecologies as active testaments to Clayoquot Sound’s past, present, and futurities through their direct relationship with the people cultivating them––including the legacies of relationality that emanate from the lands themselves. The complex histories of the region have shaped and pervaded how Indigenous reclamation of place is resolved in conversation with the other inhabitants of Clayoquot Sound, complicating how the township of Tofino and transient visitors negotiate space. The gardens provide a site by which these tangled conversations could potentially uncoil, producing principles for design that accommodate the varying needs of the community while centering intergenerational, inter-disciplinary knowledge production and sharing. In other words, the Naa’Waya’SumGardens become a designed place of potentiality; an ecosystem with a functional construction that necessarily rests on its ability to foster productive dialogues between people and the land on which they learn, work, play, and grow. |
Figure 4: Tla-o-qui-aht Master Carver Joe Martin (IISAAK OLAM, n.d.)
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Summery
Bannister, K. (2018). From ethical codes to ethics as praxis: An invitation. Ethnobiology Letters, 9 (1), 30-43.
Brown, K. J., Fitton, R. J., Schoups, G., Allen, G. B., Wahl, K. A., & Hebda, R. J. (2006).
Holocene precipitation in the coastal temperate rainforest complex of southern British Columbia, Canada. Quaternary Science Reviews, 25(21), 2762-2779. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/.guascirev.2006.02.020
Carlson, K. T., & Osmond, C. M. (2017). Clash at Clayoquot: Manifestations of Colonial and Indigenous Power in Pre-Settler Colonial Canada. The Western Historical Quarterly, 48(2), 159-188. https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whx00.
Collins, J. (2007). Tofino Botanical Gardens. In Canadian gardening (Vol. 18, Issue 7, pp. 38-). Transcontinental Media.
Curtis, M. J., Bulkan, J., & Soma, T. (2023). Sovereign at heart: photovoice, food mapping and giving back in Alberni-Clayoquot. Food, Culture, & Society, 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2023.2284048
Desmarais, A. A., & Wittman, H. (2014). Farmers, foodies and First Nations: getting to food sovereignty in Canada. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 1153-1173. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876623
Dobbins, C. (n.d.) Healing Wounds: Indigenous Land Reparations. https:// healinggardens.tv/seasonl
Dodds, R. (2023). Sustainable Tourism: A Hope or a Necessity? The Case of Tofino, British Columbia, Canada. Journal of Sustainable Development, 5(5), 54-54. https://doi.org/10.5539/jsd.v5n5p54
Fuller, R. J. M. (2013). Ethnobotany: major developments of a discipline abroad, reflected in New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Botany, 51(2), 116-138. doi: 10.1080/0028825X.2013.778298
Brown, K. J., Fitton, R. J., Schoups, G., Allen, G. B., Wahl, K. A., & Hebda, R. J. (2006).
Holocene precipitation in the coastal temperate rainforest complex of southern British Columbia, Canada. Quaternary Science Reviews, 25(21), 2762-2779. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/.guascirev.2006.02.020
Carlson, K. T., & Osmond, C. M. (2017). Clash at Clayoquot: Manifestations of Colonial and Indigenous Power in Pre-Settler Colonial Canada. The Western Historical Quarterly, 48(2), 159-188. https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whx00.
Collins, J. (2007). Tofino Botanical Gardens. In Canadian gardening (Vol. 18, Issue 7, pp. 38-). Transcontinental Media.
Curtis, M. J., Bulkan, J., & Soma, T. (2023). Sovereign at heart: photovoice, food mapping and giving back in Alberni-Clayoquot. Food, Culture, & Society, 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2023.2284048
Desmarais, A. A., & Wittman, H. (2014). Farmers, foodies and First Nations: getting to food sovereignty in Canada. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 1153-1173. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.876623
Dobbins, C. (n.d.) Healing Wounds: Indigenous Land Reparations. https:// healinggardens.tv/seasonl
Dodds, R. (2023). Sustainable Tourism: A Hope or a Necessity? The Case of Tofino, British Columbia, Canada. Journal of Sustainable Development, 5(5), 54-54. https://doi.org/10.5539/jsd.v5n5p54
Fuller, R. J. M. (2013). Ethnobotany: major developments of a discipline abroad, reflected in New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Botany, 51(2), 116-138. doi: 10.1080/0028825X.2013.778298