Photo: gvsugarden on flickr
TRiO - Upward Bound Gathering at the SAP, June 2010

The "Embedding Values in the Land" class exercise involves two 75-minute visits to the GVSU Sustainable Agriculture Project site. It has been used in ENS 300, in Covid-limited circumstances, during Winter 2020 & 2021.

The aims of the exercise are to:

• • forefront the social-cultural dimension of sustainability, and

  • show students how to challenge the assumed frameworks we bring to our understanding of a landscape

Students explore the SAP site, then consider how it has changed across seven historical periods, when it has been:

1. 1. in a pre-human inhabited “state of nature” (mostly mythical & imagined)

   2. part of the land inhabited by the Hopewell Culture (ca. 200 BCE–500 CE)

   3. part of the land inhabited by the Anishinaabe, the People of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi (perhaps as early as 900 CE)

   4. a European settler family farm (farmhouse built 1919)

   5. an industrial corn and soybean field (mid- to late- 20th century)

   6. the site of the GVSU Sustainable Agriculture Project (Spring 2008 - )

   7. the site of the Three Fires Teaching Lodge (Summer 2022 - )

Central questions for consideration:

• • What values have been, and are, embedded in the land and the products of this place?

  • How are those values expressed or shown in the land and its products?

Prof. Kelly A Parker
November 2022

Photo: Levi Rickert

Rickert, Levi and Neely Bardwell, “Three Fires Teaching Lodge Constructed on Grand Valley State University Campus,” Native News Online, 27 June 2022.