OKLA HINA IKHISH HOLO
PEOPLE OF THE SACRED MEDICINE TRAIL
A network of Indigenous Farmers and Gardeners growing Climate Resilience, Food Sovereignty, and a Just Transition in the Gulf South
WECAN Okla Hina Ikhish Holo project member growing giant sunflowers. Photo Credit: WECAN
At the end of the Mississippi River, in the place the Chahta (Choctaw) call Bvlbancha, Okla Hina Ikhish Holo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail)— a network of women, non-binary, and two-spirit Indigenous farmers and gardeners— is working urgently to build a Just Transition and climate resilience.
As climate catastrophes worsen, and extreme droughts and flooding become the new normal, it is imperative that Indigenous communities lead as we develop renewed systems for climate justice and food sovereignty. Globally, 80% of biodiversity existing within Indigenous territories, and several studies confirm that Indigenous peoples are the best stewards of their homelands, with Indigenous women in all of their diversity providing the backbone of their communities and holding vast knowledge and skill gleaned through their traditional role as healers, culture shapers, and caretakers of water and land.
In the Mississippi River Delta, lndigenous territories are disappearing at one of the fastest rates on earth, due to a legacy of extractive practices and a changing climate. Developing and supporting local Indigenous food networks , mutual aid hubs, and emergency climate response centers is crucial for ensuring the continuation of sacred and long-standing cultural practices connected to food, medicine, and the land, as well as long-term community resilience in the face of climate impacts.
Initiated in 2020, Okla Hina Ikhish Holo’s mission is to reactivate ancient trade routes and forge new paths to advance decentralized systems and nurture circular economies to foster local biodiversity, exercise food sovereignty, and steward traditional territories, and build community around reciprocal relationships, the seasons and strategies for adaptation. Okla Hina Ikhish Holo works collectively to serve the community at large through projects of mutual aid, public education, providing food and traditional plant medicine security, and collaborations with surrounding farms and coalitions to build networks of support. Each site of Okla Hina Ikhish Holo can be seen as part of a unified ecosystem of farmers and lands bringing restoration and resilience to the region.
Learn more about the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Network in the video below!
This Indigenous-led WECAN project is focused on building a Just Transition through climate-resilient systems rooted in ancestral knowledge, land stewardship, and mutual aid. The Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Collective has built farms, gardens, greenhouses, earthen mounds, and community shelters – all supporting an agro-ecological movement that promotes biodiversity, community care, and food justice as key components of climate justice.
The network spans across the United States Gulf South, along old Native trade routes, within the traditional and contemporary territories of the Chata, the Mvskoke, the Biloxi, the Tunica, the Attakapas-Ishak, the United Houma Nation, the Chitimatcha, the Washa, the Chawasha, the Tchopitoulas, the Bayougoula, and upon the lands that were home to the ancestors of the Nations whose names were erased during the early years of European contact. Additionally, these are the adopted homelands of other Nations who found their way to the southeast in search of sovereignty.
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Ida Aronson (United Houma Nation) builds a new greenhouse at the Yekani Ekelanna Garden in Louisiana.
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Dr. Tammy Greer (United Houma Nation) shares some of the herbs and medicines from her garden in southern Mississippi.
Solar Energy, Climate Resilience, and Mutual Aid
The Gulf South region is a hotspot for devastating climate disasters from extreme heat, hurricanes, tornados, and more. The region also faces intensified threats of sea-level rise, leading to flooding and land loss. These threats are exacerbated by extractive industries and the current systems that rely on the fossil fuel industry. ‘Cancer Alley’ is an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, that contains over 200 petrochemical plants and refineries. This has led to toxic air quality, water and soil pollution, high cancer risks, and disproportionately affects low-income and Black, Brown and Indigenous communities who reside in the surrounding areas.
The Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Collective is working toward a Just Transition that shifts away from these harmful industries for community welfare and climate resilience. As part of this transition, multiple land sites within the collective have installed solar power and are testing earth batteries which create power by using moisture in the soil. Some of the farms have installed solar panels on their barns to power air conditioning and heat; power refrigerators and freezers that store animal products, such as eggs, goat milk and cheese for mutual aid; and provide lighting to support educational workshops and community events. Solar generators, providing 20,000kw per hour, are also being used at the land sites that are designated as community emergency hubs to support climate disaster preparedness. These generators provide dependable power when regional power-grids are disrupted to support communication, medical needs, and more.
The Collective is also building out autonomous, emergency communication systems that do not rely on the current internet systems as a way to support mutual aid and disaster relief. Through alternative systems of solar power and autonomous communication, the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Collective is leading the way toward a Just Transition that strengthens community and climate resilience.
Solar generators at the Prairie des Femmes Farm and Emergency Hub as part of the WECAN Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Project.
Photo Credit: Sophia Lovato / WECAN
WECAN OHIH Project Participant setting up the first solar powered community food fridge, called “The Giving Fridge,” in the Acadiana Region for mutual aid. Photo Credit: WECAN
Food Sovereignty
Food sovereignty is an essential strategy in supporting community resiliency, fighting the climate crisis, and building a Just Transition. As the dominant food system is grounded in fossil fuel usage and extreme energy consumption, it also ignores food cultures which in turn fails to alleviate food insecurity. Alternatively, food sovereignty addresses issues of food insecurity through sustainable agricultural systems that embrace the deeply embedded cultural knowledge, history, and values connected to food. It also addresses structural inequalities within gender and power disparities.
In the shift from industrial food production and the fossil fuel industry, The Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Collective is reclaiming and revitalizing Indigenous agricultural techniques and narratives, promoting native seed saving, conducting workshops, and medicine exchanges. Across seven land sites and using regenerative agricultural practices rooted in Traditional Ecological Knowledge, the Collective grows native and culturally significant food and medicine plants, including heirloom corn varieties, amaranth, squash, elderberries, Seminole pumpkins, passionflower, persimmon, and more. Many of the trees and crops they grow are climate-adaptive and help prevent land erosion.
To support network building, food access, and educational outreach, project participants trade seeds, grow plant starts, and donate native trees for local partners and schools as well. While food and medicine plants are a main focus, the Collective is also growing the food sovereignty program with animal products, such as goat milk and cheese, eggs from ducks and chickens, and processing goat and rabbit meat.
Pepper plant sprouts growing in a greenhouse as part of the WECAN Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Project. Photo Credit: WECAN
Community gathering at the Nanih Bvlbancha opening ceremony with educational sessions and stickball. Photo Credit: WECAN
Knowledge Exchanges & Community Engagement
To re-establish old trade routes and foster new communal networks, the WECAN Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Collective also focuses largely on partnerships and knowledge exchanges that promote generational education and ancestral wisdom. In January 2024, members of the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo, in collaboration with an Intertribal collective of Artists, Educators, Researchers, Gardeners, Herbalists, Water Protectors, Land Defenders and Culture Keepers are stewarding the communal earthen mound called, Nanih Bvlbancha. "Nanih" is a Chahta (Choctaw) word for hill or mountain, and is commonly used to describe Indigenous ancestral earthen mound architecture. As the first Indigenous earthwork built in Southern Louisiana in hundreds of years, Nanih Bvlbancha is a communal land site for building pathways to health and healing, as well as an educational site for contemporary Indigenous lifeways and communal gatherings. This project is a part of Prospect New Orleans Artist of Public Memory modern monument initiative. Please learn more about Nanih Bvlbancha here.
MONIQUE VERDIN
WECAN Gulf South Coordinator
Monique Verdin is a daughter of southeast Louisiana’s Houma Nation. The complex interconnectedness of environment, economics, culture, climate and change have inspired her to intimately document Houma relatives and their lifeways at the ends of the bayous, as they endure the realities of restoration and adaptation in the heart of America’s Mississippi River Delta. Monique is the subject/co-writer/co-producer of the award-winning documentary My Louisiana Love (2012). Her interdisciplinary work has been included in an assortment of environmentally inspired projects, including the multiplatform/ performance/ ecoexperience Cry You One (2012-2017) as well as the publication Unfathomable City : A New Orleans Atlas (2013). Monique is a member of the United Houma Nation Tribal Council; member of Another Gulf is Possible; and is director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange; an experiential project engaged in building a community record through cultural happenings, strategic installations and as a digital archive, sharing stories, native seeds and local knowledge.
