Photograph by Andrew Doench
When Briana Mazzolini-Blanchard tends to the plants growing on her property in Price Hill, her mind sometimes wanders to her great grandmother Ana, who once collected plants in the jungles of Guåhan. Their people, the CHamoru, called the Pacific Ocean island home long before explorers claimed it for Spain in the 1500s and ushered in 300 years of foreign rule. The island was ceded to the U.S. after the Spanish-American War in 1898 and became known as Guam.
Photograph courtesy
While some of her relatives still live in her great grandmother’s village, Mazzolini-Blanchard built a life in Ohio. But in her garden, she says, she can connect with her ancestors and pass down traditions to her 9-year-old son. “I come from a matrilineal line of medicine women, healers who knew how to use plant medicine and, in reciprocity with the land, how to respectfully take and give.”
The land itself is a relative, she says, not a resource, and certainly not something to be exploited. She doesn’t refer to what she’s doing as homesteading but as indigenous growing.
Three years ago, Mazzolini-Blanchard and her husband James (of the Monacan People, indigenous to Virginia) tilled up their entire front lawn to plant food and medicine—yarrow to combat inflammation and broad plantain, usually considered a weed, to be chewed up and applied to heal a burn, cut, or eczema. Last season, she became obsessed with sunchokes, and now swaps the highly nutritious tubers with potatoes in as many recipes as she can. “Call it a plant sanctuary, a life sanctuary,” she says. “We see so many different animal relatives and bugs and birds that now find their home in our large front lawn.”
Photograph by Andrew Doench
Mazzolini-Blanchard is executive director of the Urban Native Collective, the region’s only nonprofit organization focused on supporting an estimated 98,000 indigenous people here. The coalition hosts community events, houses a lending library, and advocates and educates for indigenous causes like cultural land protection, treaty rights, and climate justice from the Native Sovereignty Center in Northside. The coalition also builds and honors indigenous ways of growing with its Urban Garden Project, currently growing on two sites (CAIN in Northside and Gorman Heritage Farm in Evendale). They’re always welcoming volunteers. “Our ways of growing, planting, and living have really measurable impacts on the improvements in soil health and positive improvements to our ecosystems,” says Mazzolini-Blanchard.
She says it’s possible for people to wake up and acknowledge the damage we have been doing to the Earth. “I believe the answers are right in front of us, knowledge that’s been carried down for thousands and thousands of years. We have to have radical hope to believe there is a better tomorrow.”
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