The Original Agroforesters: In Conversation with Lindsey Crofoot, MNR

Pictured: Harvested and peeled Camas in a red and white woven basket.

Pictured: A hand holding picked mountain huckleberries in front of the berry bush.

Indigenous Educator, Lindsey Crofoot, enrolled member of the Tlingit and Haida Tribes of Alaska from the Xutznoowu tribe, Deisheetaan clan and Colville Okanogan descendant, had a direct tie to the land from an early age. However, the many hours she spent in the forest and on the water hunting and fishing with her father didn’t fit the commonly romanticized stereotype. Instead, Lindsey’s experience was emblematic of a painful reality for many Indigenous people. 

“I was accessing my traditional foods and medicine out of necessity, out of coming from a disadvantaged community stricken with poverty,” said Lindsey. “We weren’t doing it in the context of ‘practicing our tradition.’ We were doing it in the context of survival.”

While Lindsey’s time living on the land was embedded with trauma, she also carried the knowledge gained from those experiences into her studies in Native Environmental Science at Northwest Indian College. There she began to more fully understand the essential role of Indigenous people in maintaining ecological systems in the Pacific Northwest. 

“Our ancestors were advanced agroforesters,” said Lindsey. “Through our harvesting practices we were pruning the forests and influencing species distribution and diversity. They were shaping the land to meet the needs of the people and the needs of the land.”

For example, gatherers on a camas prairie weren’t just bringing home the edible roots to feed the community, they were also aerating the soil and creating open spaces for new species to move in and for others to spread. Hunters acted much like modern day silviculturists, regulating overgrazing and overbrowsing by keeping species such as deer and elk in check.

“Our tribe has a story where mountain goat teaches us how to dig up the huckleberry, a high-elevation species, and plant and care for it in the river bottoms near our longhouses, outside of its natural range,” said Lindsey. “So even in our oral traditions about our relationships with the plants, we were shaping the landscape.”

Lindsey went on to earn her Master of Natural Resources degree at the University of Idaho, focusing on the incorporation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge into modern restoration and land management. Eventually she became a professor at Northwest Indian College’s Tulalip campus, teaching cultural sovereignty topics and natural sciences. 

However, in the years that Lindsey spent deepening her understanding of Traditional Ecological Knowledge and sharing it with others, she found she’d lost much of her own direct tie to the land. It wasn't until Lindsey had a child with special needs that she found a way to start reclaiming and rebuilding that connection.

Pictured: Lindsey Crofoot crouching to gather nettle leaves

Pictured: Harvested nettle leaves piled on a table.

Called Home

When Lindsey’s daughter was born, she had a serious birth defect that caused her intestines to extend outside of her body.

“She had to have many, many surgeries,” said Lindsey. “She needed a clean diet and I realized I had a foundation from my childhood that I could build upon to increase the health within my family.” 

The first plant Lindsey reached for is one that Indigenous people have gathered for thousands of years.

“Stinging nettle is what really called me home to my traditional foods and medicines initially,” she said. “Once I realized the nutritional value, I started harvesting nettle very heavily and incorporating it into my family's diet. Food and medicine are 100 percent interchangeable in our tradition because they're the same thing.” 

Humans as Integral in the Ecosystem

Pictured: Lindsey Crofoot (right) teaching an outdoor class with Hugo Puerto , MA, MPH, Ph.D, Associate Faculty at Edmonds College. Both stand in a field.

Lindsey hopes to help others rebuild that connection, and not only in her work as a professor. She also consults on restoration projects as an Indigenous advisor and educator. 

Today, one of Lindsey’s consulting jobs includes a particularly unique site along the Skykomish River owned by the Tulalip Tribes. Snohomish Conservation District, along with a group of dedicated volunteers, is working with the Tulalip Tribes to go beyond native plant restoration and help restore the human and cultural relationships within those ecosystems, a practice known as biocultural restoration.

Rather than excluding humans, this project seeks to build a reciprocal relationship between people and the land that extends well past the installation of the restoration project. During regular camping weekends, referred to as field stations, volunteers spend time providing care through restoration and then also cultivate and collect food, medicine, or plant materials in return. (Read more about the project here.) 

“We in the Indigenous community believe that we cannot create healthy, thriving ecosystems without people,” said Lindsey. “We see ourselves as an important part of the diversity and function of an ecosystem. When that interconnectedness is severed, it causes a degradation of health on all sides.” 

Lindsey has several roles in the project, one of which is to help make sure that the restoration design includes culturally significant plants. 

“If we want to have harvesters and land tenders on site, we need to have a diversity of species that provide food, medicine, and materials,” said Lindsey.

Nourishing Connection

Central to the project site—physically and metaphorically—is an existing Western redcedar, one of the most critical cultural keystone species in the Salish territories. 

“There are particular species that we have such a deep reciprocal relationship with that if they were removed, not only would it impact the ecosystem in the way that a keystone species would, but we would have cultural collapse,” said Lindsey. 

Other existing native plants, including nettles, will be maintained on the site, while others such as nootka rose, lupine, and hazelnuts are being cultivated in place of invasive species. 

“We’re also hoping to create a space where Indigenous peoples can come out and harvest fireweed for their traditional foods and medicines,” said Lindsey. 

Pictured: Closeup of fireweed flower.

Pictured: Field with purple Fireweed.

In the early spring, young fireweed shoots were traditionally harvested and eaten much like asparagus. The roots were also pounded to release a nutritious juice and the flowers and leaves were used in teas.

“The biggest barrier that Indigenous people face in rebuilding these relationships is a lack of knowledge,” said Lindsey.  “We've been removed from our traditional landscapes and gone through the colonization and assimilation process which was meant to erase that knowledge and connection.” 

Fireweed’s significance in rebuilding those connections goes beyond reengaging in the act of harvesting. In Indigenous wisdom, the ecological role that a plant plays is often related to the properties held within the plant.

“After a large disturbance such as a wildfire, one of the first plants that comes in is fireweed. Its role is to grow in abundance and then lay down its foliage in the fall, rebuilding the soil,” said Lindsey. “Fireweed is a nourisher. When we use it, we’re accessing all of the vitamins and nutrients, but we’re also looking to it as a plant relative to provide us that nourishment so that healing can begin.”

Different Ways of Knowing

Pictured: Field station volunteers and staff gather around a map under a canopy

Another unique aspect of the Skykomish project is the diverse expertise of both the staff and volunteers. Participants include biologists, restoration ecologists, agroforesters, homemakers, educators, artists, writers, community organizers, and more. Many of those involved bring a scientific background to the table: some in Western science, others in Indigenous science. 

“Western science is centered around what can be counted and measured and replicated in a lab,” explained Lindsey. “Our Indigenous sciences are more concerned with data that we have collected through real world experiences over many generations.” 

Over the last several decades, Western science has studied water quality pollution, the impacts of our actions on habitat, and the resulting decline in Salmon populations. Restoration projects like the Skykomish site are part of a much larger effort to repair this damage. But our process of learning what Salmon need and making the changes required to enable their survival is something Indigenous people experienced long ago.  

“There was a time when the local native people had begun neglecting the rivers and they were not honoring reciprocity,” said Lindsey. “Because of that, the salmon were coming back sick. So the chief of the salmon made a deal with the local tribes that if they took care of their rivers and carried out a First Salmon Ceremony, then the salmon would come back healthy.” 

To this day, First Salmon Ceremonies are still held among tribes throughout the Salish Sea region. And while Western science was once considered by many to be a replacement for Indigenous science, Traditional Ecological Knowledge is more recently being recognized for its adaptability over thousands of years and its potential to inform the adaptations required in the face of climate change. 

Rather than considering the two sciences mutually exclusive, Lindsey views the Skykomish project as an opportunity to blend the two. 

“I see agroforestry and biocultural restoration as a beautiful bridge between Indigenous and Western science. It’s a place where we can figure out how they can complement each other.”

Healing Broken Relationships

Pictured: A view of the Skykomish River site in the winter. The Cascade mountains are visible in the distance.

Lindsey also hopes the project will benefit the relationship that both tribal people and the general community have with the natural world.

“We are all nature-based people, at the root of it. We are all indigenous to somewhere,” said Lindsey. “I do hope for a space where all peoples are reconnecting back to the land and learning from our ideology.”

While there’s still a long way to go, Lindsey is encouraged by progress in recent years.

“Each time I go to one of these restoration sites where we're working with program managers that are really working hard to be inclusive of our Traditional Ecological Knowledge, I feel empowered and excited to grow this work.”