Richmond Hill's new Indigenous medicine gardens help community learn and feel seen

As an adoptee, Sarah Loretta Schuster wasn't able to participate in her Indigenous culture growing up. The Anishinaabe community organizer, with maternal ties to Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation, often travelled outside her Richmond Hill home to access Indigenous medicines and attend powwows.  

That's why she's appreciative of the new Indigenous medicine gardens set up throughout her hometown. 

"It's also about cultural visibility," she says. "A lot of people don't really know that there's Indigenous people still here. I know that when I was growing up, I didn't always feel like it was appropriate or safe to self identify as Indigenous."

The city of Richmond Hill, in partnership with Schuster's Miskwaadesi Studio, a community initiative aimed at providing culture workshops, has planted five medicine gardens in order to allow for better access to prairie sage and sweetgrass. The plants also act as pollinators. 

In many Indigenous cultures, sage is used to smudge during ceremonies to cleanse a space. Sweetgrass is used for ceremonial purposes and craft work, and it can also be used as a tea. 

"I've been growing these medicines in my backyard for 10 years and giving them away," Schuster says. "Once we started having workshops … the demand for the medicine really outgrew what I could produce. So the city really got on board with providing these wonderful spaces for us to grow medicines."

The gardens are located outside the central library in a red canoe, in Richmond Green children's garden, outside the Oak Ridges Community Centre in a canoe, and at Phyllis Rawlinson Park. The locations will also be used as cultural gathering spaces for prayer and ceremony, Schuster says.

The medicinal plants aren't used as medicine in a traditional sense. 

"For a lot of Indigenous people, medicine isn't necessarily a pill or medicine that you would see at a hospital or a medical clinic," Schuster says. "Medicine can be anything that really completes your wholeness. Medicine in the form of smudging is a spiritual cleansing process."

Schuster says the gardens represent hope and an appreciation of Indigenous culture. They also provide an opportunity to bring people in to learn. 

Gardens like these help with reconciliation, mayor says

Richmond Hill Mayor David West says creating space for these Indigenous medicines was about reconciliation and educating the public. 

"Our Indigenous roots … are incredibly important for people to understand," says West. "Once they understand it, then we can start moving forward with a number of the big things that we need to do and the heavy lifting that we need to do."

He says the medicines being placed in canoes, like those outside the central library, are meant to encourage residents to ask questions and learn.

"There's 94 recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A lot of them are very big things that need to be done on a national level. Some of them are on a provincial level, but you know, cities, everything hits the ground in cities and this is where people live." 

The plants will be maintained by the city and harvested by Schuster and other members of the community later this year. They'll be shared during public events, where Schuster says attendees can braid sweetgrass and create prairie sage bundles.