The hopeful possibility of Oaks. Annual Report. Happy Makwa Giizis (Bear Moon) - 25 Feb 2024

Makwa Giizis: Bear Moon narrated by Grandmother Kim Wheatley/Youtube

Happy Makwa Giizis (Bear Moon), a good month to begin eating more Mskodiismin!

“This is the time when bears begin to awaken from hibernation as western science calls it. Anishinaabe people call it fasting. During fasting, the bear gives our Earth Mother a rest for a few months and reminds us humans to do the same thing... Maybe you will sing a song for the Bears. Or at the very least, give them thanks for all of their special lessons.”

Kim Wheatley, Anishinaabe Cultural Consultant, and Faith Rivers, Cultural Coordinator for the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN) Cultural Committee and  Chair of the Indigenous Programs Committee for Heritage Mississauga

Our 2023 Annual Report

Deep gratitude to all of the incredible people who've been part of growing Kingston's City in a Forest in 2023, we've had an amazing year! We’re excited to share our 2023 Annual Report… beautifully designed and written by our Chair, Robert Macleod. Learn more about our impact in 2023, the symbiosis growing across the city, and our dreams for 2024.

Read Robert’s highlights or the full report.

Restorative relationships with Land

Maureen Buchanan, a co-founder of All Our Relations Land Trust and Little Forests Kingston, will be speaking at the inaugural People’s Symposium. The theme this year is Restorative Relationships with Land, Community and Archives.

“We begin this first symposium by gathering as an urban community in this special place which was once known as Mississauga Point, a former Anishinaabe village. Today, we come together in partnership with the Great Lakes Museum to sit at the village site and share stories about the ancestors who lived here before us while imagining healthy futures for the next seven generations. We are living in the time of restoration and of transformation. Embedded in the words restoration and restorative is the word rest. Our Mother Earth is tired and working overtime to restore balance in our out of balance home.

What good lessons and teachings can we (re)visit and (re)learn from within the archives of natural law, our bodies, communities, and spirits?”

Curated by Sebastian De Line, Associate Curator, Care and Relations, Agnes Etherington Art Centre. The Symposium runs from 9 am to 4:30 pm at the Great Lakes Museum.

The hopeful possibility of Oaks

“I am enamored to see all the hopeful possibility underfoot. The ancestors of these plump black oak acorns have been here far longer than any human alive today. Inside the very heart of these seeds is stored an intergenerational memory from the times when fires moved in medicine ways across the land, opening up oak savannah and forest and revitalizing the land which kept the oak trees healthy and nourished many.

…The Acorn is intimately intertwined with seasonal fires, the cultural burning that upheld these agreements with the kincentric world around us.  The original people of this land, the Nisenan, they are Acorn people, their lives intimately intertwined with this beautiful vibrant tree nut crop. Dances and prayers and ceremonies are made for these benevolent ones, who offer up such nourishment so generously. It's amazing to think the potential of countless whole trees are stored inside these acorns. I bow in awe to listen to the cosmogenealogy held inside this handful of seeds…

The land is my teacher, the ancestors of countless beings show up to teach us how to be of place.”

Rowen White, Seed Keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and founder of Sierra Seeds

You’ve probably heard about Food Forests. But did you know that Oak Savannas are Food Forests? Mkomosé (Dr. Andrew Judge) writes that while today we have gardens, before we designed… entire landscapes.

“Sometime around 1,200 years ago, this whole region was gradually converted to an Oak Savannah food forest, accented by prairie grasses and wetlands, by design. A food forest is essentially what it sounds like. It is a strategically designed habitat that focuses on building up several layers of the ecosystem to ensure food for all parts of that ecosystem throughout each of the seasons, with a long-term vision for generational thriving.”

I’ve been thinking about the meaning of Urban Resilience, which led me to SFEI’s Landscape Resilience Framework whose goal is to facilitate the integration of resilience science into urban design, green infrastructure, conservation planning and ecological restoration. They define landscape resilience as:

“the ability of a place to sustain desired ecosystem functions over time and under changing conditions. A resilient landscape supports the recovery and persistence of native species and natural communities, yet also allows for ecological transformation and adaptation.”

They recognize that resilient landscapes are also cultural landscapes.

Before colonization, Oak Savannas and Oak Woodlands stewarded by First Nations, covered California’s inland valley floors. Now there’s an effort to revive these stewardship practices. And through their landscape resilience work, SFEI is working towards Re-Oaking North Bay and Re-Oaking Silicon Valley. They define re-Oaking as:

“an approach to integrating oaks and other associated native trees and vegetation within developed California landscapes to provide valuable functions for wildlife and people. We emphasize re-establishing the composition, structure, and configuration that allow oak woodlands to support ecological functions given changes caused by development and expected shifts in climate.”

Because they take a landscape-scale approach, re-Oaking includes neighbourhood nodes… the node where we’ve been working with little forests.

Node features include Oaks, understory vegetation, leaf litter and downed logs (including in the public rights-of-way). I find their spacing suggestions for maximizing biodiversity super interesting, though these would have to be translated to the Kingston context.

Wasl Bakowsky, in A survey of the prairies and savannas of Southern Ontario, writes that in the Midwest, savannas are dominated by Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) whereas in Southern Ontario, Black Oak (Quercus velutina) and White Oak (Quercus alba) dominate. However, one of the largest remaining Oak Savannas is Alderville Black Oak Savanna stewarded by Alderville First Nation.

I’ve added Pinery Provincial Park, at the edge of the Carolinian zone, to my must-visit list as their Oak Savanna has seven species of Oaks (counterclockwise starting at top left): Black Oak (Quercus velutina), Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa), White Oak (Quercus alba), Swamp White Oak (Quercus bicolor), Chinquapin Oak (Quercus muehlenbergii), Red Oak (Quercus rubra), Dwarf Chinquapin Oak (Quercus prinoides).

Black Oak (Quercus velutina) is relatively uncommon in Ontario, with Southwestern Ontario their northernmost range. While it doesn’t look like we have any Black Oaks in Kingston, if you’re in Toronto you can visit the Black Oak Savanna in High Park.

Oaks, as documented by Douglas Tallamy, are a power keystone tree. Charles Kinsley, a Toronto-based native plant expert, adapted Tallamy’s list for the Ontario context and compiled a fabulous spreadsheet of Toronto Region Native Woody Plants. I wish I’d discovered this back in 2021, but it’ll be amazingly handy as we add in the number of Lepidoptera supported by each of the tree species in our little forests.

Not sure about the difference between an Oak Savanna, Oak Woodland and Oak Forest? These sketches, which I found in Restoring tallgrass Oak woodlands in Southern Ontario, are super helpful.

Visit us at Seedy Saturday

Want to learn more about Oaks, Pocket Forests for your yard or Little Forests? We’ll be at Seedy Saturday on March 9, hosted by KASSI, to celebrate local seeds!

Envisioning relationships in an ecosystem

I just discovered this amazing Oak Woodland learning activity for envisioning relationships in an ecosystem. While the learning activity is designed around a California Oak woodland (an Oak Savanna), many elements are equally relevant to Ontario’s Oak Savannas.

“The oak woodland is an ideal ecosystem for illustrating the complex interactions that go largely unnoticed by humans, but that drive the survival of hundreds of species. By looking at the oak woodland as a whole system, many of its invisible attributes are revealed, giving us a richer sense of how nature sustains life over time.”

Here’s an excerpt for one of the 15 panels. I’d encourage you to explore this incredible learning activity… then visit an elder Oak near you and open your senses to see who else is part of that Oak’s ecosystem!