Healing Circle and Fire Pit Opening

On a rainy morning in late November, students in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership gathered with staff from the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment and staff from the SUNY ESF – Lafayette Experimental Station and the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project to ceremonially inaugurate the newly created Healing Circle and Fire pit. CNPE Assistant Director Neil Patterson opened the gathering with the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, and CNPE Director Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer shared several Anishinaabe songs while all in attendance shared traditional offerings with the fire. Sloan scholars Jade Morning Sky Little (MS Candidate in Conservation Biology) and Susannah Howard (MS Candidates in GPES), who envisioned this space along with classmate Dineh Judd (MS Candidate in GPES) shared their reflections on the meaning of the space. Dr. Kimmerer then thanked Dr. William Powell and the Lafayette Experimental Station staff who physically created the space and presented each of them with a sweetgrass basket made by Mohawk basketmakers affiliated with the Akwesanse Cultural Center Museum.

In the words of Jade Morning Sky Little, Susannah Howard, and Dineh Judd: “We have designed a permanent space for Indigenous students, away from the main Syracuse campus though still on ESF property, at the nearby Lafayette Road Experiment Station. In this space, we can engage in cultural practices, ceremonies, and relationship building activities around a fire circle with our ESF community, with Indigenous students at Syracuse University and other local campuses, with our friends at the Onondaga Nation, and with other Sloan Indigenous Scholars going forward. Around this fire and away from the busy urban campus, we can rekindle our sense of community and that groundedness we are missing, through a space dedicated to Indigenous cultural practice.”