EASTERN NEWSROOM

Restoration, Sound and Sustainable

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

Restoration, Sound and Sustainable

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

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 member 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."

Wynne’s relationships at Eastern from her undergrad lead to her being a consultant on the project from its early days of planning. “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.”

Food sovereignty is typically defined as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods.” Because the first peoples of the Palouse were exemplars of this concept for upwards of 10,000 years, organizers of Eastern’s prairie restoration project say tribal input and participation is essential.

At a recent EWU-sponsored gathering of scientists, scholars and advocates for sustainable living, the intersection of tribal heritage, food sovereignty and prairie restoration activities were front and center.

 

Melodie Wynne presenting at EWU in April 2022.
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.

Wynne spoke as part of a panel with two members of Eastern’s restoration team, Becky Brown, professor and chair of biology, and Robin Quinn, an EWU professor of biology who specializes in environmental science. Each described how formally 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 of old.

Wynne, who earned a BS in psychology at Eastern and a doctorate in community and cultural psychology from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 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 around the environment,” 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