Restoration, Sound and Sustainable

Restoring prairie can heal the land,
and the people it once sustained.

June 13, 2022

These days, modern cash crops have almost completely displaced the prairie flowers, grasses and roots that once sustained countless generations of Native peoples in the Inland Northwest. Nor do massive salmon runs fill the region’s rivers and streams.

For the past three years, Eastern students, staff and faculty members have been working with local experts to bring at least a simulacrum of this “landscape lost” back to life. (See our immersive story about the Prairie Restoration Project.) Among those participating is EWU alumna Melodi Wynne, ’07, a citizen of the Spokane Tribe who has become a leader in the movement to restore “food sovereignty” to the Native peoples of the Upper Columbia Plateau.

 

Melodie Wynne stands in front of indigenous plants at EWU.
Melodi Wynne, '07, PhD, head of the Spokane Tribal Network's Tribal Food Sovereignty project and collaborator with the Prairie Restoration Project.
"Our main motivation for this tribal food sovereignty project is to get our foods on the plates of our people on a daily basis, once again."

Food sovereignty is typically defined as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods.” For the tribes, this means, in part, reestablishing the lost flora of their ancestral lands. The expertise of Eastern’s restoration team has been useful in this effort, while EWU’s work has benefited from tribal input.

“We’ve been able to share resources such as native plant starts and knowledge about seed collecting and also about how we can be involved with the Prairie Restoration project. Our objectives are definitely aligned and having the cooperation between our two projects has been very rewarding and promising,” says Wynne.

At a recent EWU-sponsored gathering of scientists, scholars and advocates for sustainable living, the subjects of tribal heritage, food sovereignty and prairie restoration were front and center (visit Sovereignty Through Sustainability article to watch the recorded videos).

 

Melodie Wynne presenting at EWU in April 2022.
Melodi Wynne and Erin Ross at the EWU Greenhouse
Eastern biology students fill “plugs” for planting as part of the university’s Prairie Restoration Project. They are sharing lessons learned with local tribal leaders at work on their own restoration projects.
Left to right: The Restoration Ecology and Tribal Food Sovereignty panel. Left to right: Becky Brown (Biology, EWU), Robin Quinn (Environmental Sciences, EWU), Margo Hill (event organizer, EWU) and Melodi Wynne. Top right: Melodi Wynne and Erin Ross at the EWU greenhouse observing native plant starts. Bottom right: Eastern biology students fill “plugs” for planting as part of the university’s Prairie Restoration Project. They are sharing lessons learned with local tribal leaders at work on their own restoration projects.

Wynne spoke as part of a panel with two members of Eastern’s restoration team, Becky Brown, professor and chair of biology, and Robin O’Quinn, an EWU professor of biology who specializes in environmental science. Each described how formerly life-sustaining landscapes and waterways had been transformed by industrial-scale cultivation and resource extraction, and the challenges involved in reclaiming even a small portion of the “wild and untrammeled” Palouse prairie of old. 

Wynne, who earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Eastern and a doctorate in community and cultural psychology from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, summed up the stakes by recalling a particularly poignant insight from a member of her community.

It was during a meeting to discuss the ongoing legacy of the historical traumas inflicted on their people, Wynne recalled. After listening intently, a Spokane Tribal Elder spoke out: “She told us that our people will not be fully healed until the land is fully healed.”

“That really awakened us to the long-term importance of the projects we’re engaging in,” Wynne says. “It got us thinking also about how overwhelming that is. But we just decided, well, this is a good year to start.” 

“She told us that our people will not be fully healed until the land is fully healed.”

 

By Charles Reineke
Eastern Magazine, Spring 2022

 

Learn more

Spokane Tribal Network’s Tribal Food Sovereignty Project

Contact: Melodi Wynne, Ph.D
Community and Cultural Psychology
Spokane Tribal Network (STN) Community Wellness Initiative
email >

EWU Prairie Restoration Project

Contact: Erik Budsberg, PhD
Project Lead, Sustainability Coordinator
email >