In Alert Bay, a community garden is not only feeding the community, but empowering youth.
By Josh Kozelj, a freelance journalist and was the inaugural Hummingbird fellow with The Tyee.
The boy had never used a rake, planted a seed or combed through mushy, brown dirt with his hands to pick a carrot when he pulled up to the plot of land on a hot July day.
But none of that mattered to Verna Ambers, who told the 15-year-old that he was going to help her plant and grow 20 apple trees on the nearly three-acre garden run by Nawalakw on the ʼNa̱mǥis First Nation traditional territory.
“We’re going to work side by side,” said Ambers, a ʼNa̱mǥis member and food security manager at the Nawalakw community garden.
Nawalakw is a charitable organization that runs language and cultural programming within Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw territory in Alert Bay and Hada, located off the eastern coast of Vancouver Island. Nawalakw means “supernatural” in Kwak̓wala.
Ambers, 71, walked the boy over to the orchard, carrying a shovel and a pot that held a small apple tree. She told him to dig a hole in the ground. The boy stared back at her.
“I’ve never used a shovel before,” he said.
“Ah, you’re working with me all day today,” Ambers said. “And he did. After we put that first apple tree in the ground, he wanted to be the guy that was digging all the holes for the apple tree. He took great pride in doing that.”
It was far from the first time that the Nawalakw community garden has given a young person a green thumb, Ambers says. That same year, a high school student helped Ambers deliver soil and make garden boxes for residents interested in starting their own garden.
“He said he’s going to graduate high school, go to university and do a program in horticulture,” she explained. “He just came back here and did his six-week practicum in the garden.”
Momentum to form the Nawalakw community garden began at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. As travel restrictions took hold across the province in March 2020, it was difficult for local communities to secure fresh fruit and vegetables.
