a gardener. Growing up on a reservation in the Pacific Northwest, I never had to be. My backyard was lush with old growth. Towering cedars, moss-covered nurse logs, and sword ferns took up the space where flower beds might have been. My Coast Salish ancestors were not gardeners either. They fished the rivers, picked wild huckleberries, and harvested cedar. Beautifying a space by planting flowers wasn’t something we practiced. To say growing up on the reservation was a privilege feels wrong, but the landscape of my childhood remarkable. It may have been the reservation, a community founded
