Inside Logan Canyon, hikers often walk past camas flowers, serviceberries, and balsamroot — plants that once sustained the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation.
“It was our grocery store,” said Darren Parry, former chair of the tribe and a professor of Indigenous studies, “it was our pharmacy.”
The Shoshone people viewed the canyons and valleys of this area — known to them as Sihiviogoi, meaning Willow Valley — as relatives to be cared for and respected, Parry said, rather than as resources to be exploited or commodities to be sold.
Over time, colonization and changing land management practices disrupted these traditional relationships to the land. But Parry and a few of his students are now working to revive and honor those values.
Behind the construction site of the soon-to-be-built Stokes Nature Center in Nibley, Parry and his students are planting an Indigenous garden, one that honors the land’s original stewards.
The garden, which will be called “Nuwuh Booheep” — Shoshone for “indigenous plants” — will feature varieties of beans, squash, berries, camas, willows, and medicinal herbs, many of which have been used for centuries by Indigenous people across the country.
The goal, Parry said, is to show the community what’s possible when traditional ecological knowledge is applied through gardening.
“We’ve tried to get seeds from all over the country,” he said. “And not just Shoshone plants, but indigenous plants, and show what the possibilities are, and show community members these are plants that you would have never thought to plant.”
All of the plants have been chosen with Cache Valley’s climate in mind, he added. Many are drought-tolerant and will require little to no irrigation once established.
A different way to look at the world
The idea for the garden sprouted from students in Parry’s Indigenous Land Stewardship course, taught at both Utah State University and the University of Utah. The course, he said, explores how Indigenous traditions of caring for the land offer a sustainable alternative to today’s resource-driven system.
He said he tried to implement “two-eyed seeing” into his students’ thought processes, explaining that it means looking through one eye with a Western lens shaped by Western education, and through the other eye with an Indigenous lens — allowing students to explore how these two perspectives can collaborate and be brought together.
“Most of the students, at the end of it are going, ‘We've gone to school all these years, and we haven't known this perspective,’” Parry said. “I think it really gives people a different way to look at the world, a more sustainable way to look at the world, and make our footprint a little lighter.”
His students wanted to take what they learned from the classroom into the real world — and Parry was fully on board.
So, he searched for land near the university to start a native garden but ran into dead ends.
“We’re an ag school, for heaven’s sake,” he said. “But I couldn’t find a space that anyone would be willing to let us use.”
Eventually, he remembered that Stokes Nature Center was working on a new educational site in Nibley, so he reached out to see if they might have a small corner of land available for a garden.
Not only did Stokes have a space, its director Kendra Pendry was enthralled by the idea. The center had long envisioned the new site as a place for immersive environmental education, and she said she saw the inclusion of an Indigenous garden as a natural and essential extension of that mission.
Now, the effort is being carried out by students like Sterling Brinkerhoff, a farmer who took Parry’s class and saw the garden’s potential.
“With a changing climate, a lot of these [plants] are going to be more important as time goes on,” Brinkerhoff said. “This is going to be hopefully a jumping-off point to educate the public about these varieties and crops and hopefully bring broader knowledge about them.”
This first year, the garden is planted with vegetables — including five heirloom bean varieties from several Indigenous nations — but Brinkerhoff said that’s just the beginning.
“We're going to be filling out this quarter-acre lot behind you with all permaculture stuff,” he said, looking out on empty agricultural land, “and long-term stuff that could be here for 100-plus years.”
Rivkah Haubner, another student working on the garden, said the vision goes beyond this single plot in Nibley.
As someone involved in several other community and backyard gardens through Cache Valley Mutual Aid, Haubner sees this project as part of a larger movement toward local food sovereignty and climate resilience.
“I would love to see there be gardens all over Cache Valley,” Haubner said. “Whenever I see plots of land, I'm like, ‘Garden. We need a garden there,’ which is not that simple. It's really incredible that Stokes let us use this space because land is not cheap.”
Connection through gardening
For Pendry, director of Stokes Nature Center, the project couldn’t be more aligned with the goals for the new site.
In 2003, a donor gifted the 11-acre parcel to the center, with a vision for protecting wildlife and inspiring stewardship. Since then, the center has worked toward building an outdoor education hub in Nibley.
The Indigenous garden, she said, fits seamlessly into that vision.
“We want the property to be exactly that,” Pendry said, “a space that is educational, that connects people, not only to the land itself, but to the history of our land, what was here before anyone settled here, what is native here. It is those very real, tangible connections that make people love nature.”
If all goes well, and construction on the center is completed by fall, Pendry hopes to celebrate with a community harvest. The event would invite Cache Valley residents to taste the food grown in the garden and explore the space.
“Finding different ways for people to connect to each other and to nature is essential,” she said, “and gardening is one of those.”
