Support Ancestral Guard
Ancestral Guard
The Ancestral Guard is an indigenous organizing network. Our programs combine traditional ecological knowledge, science and values of world renewal. Currently, Ancestral Guard is working on the Victorious Gardens Initiative to develop gardens, deliver fresh produce, and assist families with growing and preserving vegetables in Yurok tribal lands.
Projects
- Victorious Gardens Initiative
- Traditional canoe building
- Drum making
- Gathering and processing of local traditional foods
- Food Sovereignty
Why we do this work
We believe that the key to engaging a community to address cultural or environmental issues, is to connect them directly with the resource. If people get to taste the salmon, they understand the importance of protecting the resource so that they can sustain their families for generations to come.
This is why we take children on canoes to explore the river, it’s why we host workshops to learn how to find, harvest and process traditional foods and this is why we teach children how to make regalia so that they can feel like they are a part of something bigger.
Because our traditional food source, wild salmon from the Klamath River, are on the brink of extinction, our people have had to resort to other means to feed our families nutrient dense food in a place that has been deemed a food desert. The lower Yurok reservation and our home town at the mouth of the Klamath do not even have a supermarket, so to get fresh produce we would have to drive an hour. This is why we believe that it is increasingly important to strengthen food sovereignty programs in our region. We are focusing on the Victorious Gardens Initiative as part of a solution to provide families with healthy, fresh produce and the means and knowledge to grow, process and preserve their own vegetables for a healthy food supply throughout the year.