On a sunny Friday in September, kindergarteners encircled Charlie Hernandez ’26 outside the Onondaga Nation School in Nedrow, New York. He was describing a new medicinal garden he and other Cornell students were helping the community install at the school, which would include native plants with cultural significance to the Onondaga people: sweetgrass, common elderberry and wild plum trees, nodding onion, wild ginger and strawberries.

One of the children raised his hand and said, “I like strawberries.” And then another and another and another.

“As each student raised their hand, they took a step closer to me,” said Hernandez, a plant science major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and co-lead of the Sustainable Landscapes team, one of four teams comprising the Cornell Botanic Gardens’ Learning by Leading program. “Seeing their excitement and engagement and then seeing the children learn the process of planting – that was really rewarding.”

The Onondaga Nation School (ONS) serves Indigenous students in prekindergarten through eighth grade and incorporates the teaching of the Onondaga language and culture, one of only three such schools in New York state. The medicinal garden, the result of a year-long collaboration between the Nation, school and Cornell Botanic Gardens, aligns with the school’s goal of implementing more hands-on, project-based opportunities for students that both hit state standards and incorporate knowledge from and about their own culture.

Credit: Sreang Hok/Cornell University

“We wanted to have a more holistic, outdoor education space that will allow teachers to revitalize Indigenous education systems and form a bridge to Western education,” said Spencer Lyons, a chief on the Onondaga Nation Council. “It’s a big goal for the Onondaga Nation School, to make sure we can implement as much of our teachings and ideas and identity into our education system.”

Cornell students in the Learning by Leading program, established in 2021 to provide experience and mentorship in environmental leadership, engaged in extensive consultation with ONS, starting with a list of available native plants and design ideas that they presented to the school community. The resulting garden, installed on Sept. 27, currently includes 16 different species, all with culinary, medicinal and/or ceremonial uses for the Haudenosaunee, a confederacy of six Nations including Onondaga.

The garden design – spearheaded by Gracekelly Fulton ‘24, a civil engineering major in Cornell Engineering and team co-lead – has two distinct areas, one in the sun and one in the shade. The shade garden includes tree-stump seating for an outdoor classroom and leads to an existing boardwalk and path through a wetland. Signs in the Onondaga language for each plant will be added, and plans to incorporate the garden into the curriculum are already underway, as well as talks of a garden club for the students. ONS students from each grade also helped install the garden, working in shifts throughout the day.

“It was really rewarding to see how including them in the process of the installation helped them to feel invested,” Fulton said. “It just seemed like they were having so much fun.”

The collaboration was supported by the student-run Community Partnership Funding Board in the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement and also included a daylong trip to Cornell for ONS six, seventh and eighth graders, who toured Mundy Wildflower Garden; visited Akwe:kon, the nation’s first residential hall devoted to American Indian culture; met with student ambassadors from the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP); and sowed seeds at Kenneth Post Lab greenhouses.

“The students have benefited from widening their horizons. They’re seeing that there are agencies on the outside that care and that are connected to our families,” said John Gizzi, principal of ONS. “What stands out to me is the intellectual and emotional desire to have this project be community-based and the [Cornell] students’ and staff’s desire to be a respectful part of our community.”

“We hope this project helps facilitate additional Indigenous community partnerships and takes steps towards healing the land, healing the relationship that we have with Indigenous community members,” said Todd Bittner, director of natural areas for Cornell Botanic Gardens.

Sowing seeds

The idea for the medicinal garden at ONS had its start on Cornell’s campus – with another garden, installed outside Akwe:kon by students on the Sustainable Landscapes team and AIISP in 2023. At the time, Lyons was serving in the inaugural cohort of Sga:t ędwatahí:ne Fellows, a program in the Einhorn Center which aims to build relationships between the university and Haudenosaunee communities.

Lyons connected with Bittner and quickly found common ground.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘partnership’ but something more organic like ‘relationship.’ The relationship to people, to space, to the natural world – the fact that people like Todd and others at the Botanic Gardens care about the same things we care about,” Lyons said. “It has created a relationship built out of trust and mutual respect that makes it easy to work together.”

In talks with Bittner about how Cornell Botanic Gardens could support the Onondaga Nation, Lyons proposed a medicinal garden and eventually the school as a location, seeing how a garden would fit with ONS’s existing goals. Gizzi, who facilitated numerous community and school meetings for the project, agreed.

Credit: Sreang Hok/Cornell University

“It was fortuitous because one of the initiatives we are working on this year is project-based learning,” he said. “The garden is something the students can study by literally walking 80 or 90 yards northwest of our north door. They can experience the plants, study them, and at the same time, those plants are a part of their community and invite the community in.”

The project also resonated with students on the Sustainable Landscapes team – some of whom worked on the Akwe:kon garden in 2023, including Hernandez and Fulton, who both joined the Learning by Leading program after installing the Akwe:kon garden as members of AIISP.

“I can’t imagine Akwe:kon without the garden,” said Hernandez, who is of Ñuu Savi (Mixtec) descent and lives in Akwe:kon. “It’s a key component or extension of the house, and it’s been really nice for students to see outside the window or when they walk outside, or to sit and pick plants without asking whether they can. We feel like it’s ours, it’s there for us, and I hope that happens for the ONS students, taking ownership of the garden as theirs.”

Hernandez said some of the seeds he and others sowed at the greenhouses during the Akwe:kon garden project were planted in the ONS garden – and the seeds the ONS students sowed will be used in the next community project.

“There’s a continuity,” Hernandez said.

For Lyons, the ONS students’ engagement was deeply meaningful.

“To see them in the garden, to see that joy and how much some of them gravitated towards it – they didn’t want to stop,” Lyons said. “That the younger generation still feels like that – it gives me strength and courage that our work is meaningful and makes me think that our values and culture and who we are as Haudenosaunee will continue in the future generations.”