 My name is Ellen Wood and I'm the regional coordinator and the chairperson of the coordinating committee for Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario Kairos. And I would just like to gather us together. And, and we are on treating one and treaty two territories. And this is the ancestral lands of the Cree, Dakota, Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, Ojibwe Cree, and the Denny nations, as well as the homeland of the native nation. I think Debbie is going to give the gift of tobacco and introduce our elder. Yes, March Roselli is our elder for all of our sessions and we're very grateful for that. This is from Sioux Valley, Dakota nation and has just retired so we want to congratulate her on on that. And Marge I just want to present you. I don't know if there it is with tobacco as a gift for you and recognition of your sharing your learnings with us and being with us tonight. It is available to anyone who feels a need to talk things over with someone during all four of our webinars. So if anything is of concern or triggers for you, you can chat Marge in the in the chat box and and she'll give you some support. And we thanks for being with us Marge. We have some elders joining us from Kenora, and if there are other elders who are joining us after Kenora introduces their elders, if you could just identify yourself. That would be helpful for us. So even or someone in Kenora, could you introduce your elders there. They seem to have gotten disconnected. I don't see her anymore. So maybe we'll try again after that. Okay. I will ask Marge to open our meeting with prayer or whatever she feels is appropriate for us. Yes, thank you. Welcome everybody to this session. And we're going to be talking about the food forest and we're storing the land and the land has always been very important to my people. All indigenous people we have a special connection to the land and I'm interested in hearing this presentation and I'm very pleased to be here and to hear, you know, the different presentations and to see the faces from all over and to welcome everybody to this session. And I'm very happy to be here. And I'd like to say a blessing because it is our belief that whenever we have a gathering of any type. I'll start with the presentation of the tobacco which I accepted and very thankful to have the medicine to to bless the meeting with but also I have some sweet grass here that we use to bless and bring good energy. In the session we had I use sage and sage is a cleansing that we use to to drive out the negative energy to cleanse. And so this time I'm using sweet grass to smudge, which is a blessing for everyone, a blessing for this gathering. I'm going to ask the creator to give us guidance and to give us understanding and to let us feel that connection to the land to all living things. When we say without the loss at the end of our prayers, it means that we are all related. And we grow up believing from the teachings of our elders and our parents, those that are important in our lives that we are all related and how one is affected affects the others. We need healing. We need good energy, you know, so that we can be healthy. Our old people always said that we wait for winter to bring the snow and the cold. And it says that if it's not there, then we have a Makoshi just means there's an illness upon the land. And so we pray and we smudge and we try and restore the balance. There's always a balance of of all things and all things are living the way we are taught because Sakushka means the things that move. They say everything, stones, you know, the rocks, the land, everything has a life to it and it moves. And so we grew up learning those teachings and everything we do like we pick tobacco, we offer, pick medicine, we offer tobacco. Where there's a gift, we return it with a gift. So I want to start with the prayer for guidance and for blessings and for the speaker and for the ears and the hearts of all to hear and understand. And I'd like to say that in my first language, the Dakota, some people call it Sue, we prefer to call ourselves Dakota, meaning a friend. So. I believe the elders from Kenora are online and if Yvonne could introduce them. Yes, hello, it's Kathy Lindsay. We're just heading now to the center so we'll be hopefully on on on joining you in the meeting fairly soon. My name is Kathy Lindsay. We have Tommy Hunter and Margaret Hunter. Tommy Hunter and we're from the Treaty 3 area. Thank you. Sorry about that, you guys. Welcome. Carrie, do you have anything to add around technical stuff? I noticed that we added a survey component if you just maybe highlight that. Yeah, I don't know if we're planning to use the survey or not. Maybe that's something we could talk about. But my name is Carrie. If you do have any tech concerns throughout at any point, I may be able to help. I may not, but feel free to chat with me privately and just to say also we'll be taking questions primarily through the chat. So if you have any questions throughout and want to just start putting them in and or comments, feel free to do that. And then we'll after the presentation then we'll take the questions that way. Yeah, and also let you know that we'll be recording this session, but it's not live. It's just be recording. But if you do have any concerns with that, feel free to let us know or to turn off your video. Thanks. So our speaker is going to have a time until 7 30. And then if there's comments or questions, we have about 15 minutes. So to quarter to eight. And then we have a very short annual meeting for our region, which will end at eight o'clock. So just to give you a feel of the land. I'm honored to be able to introduce David Barnes, who is going to speak about the Acinaboying Food Forest and restoring the land. David is an ecologist and a retired Brandon area school teacher. He is a founding member of the Acinaboying Food Forest and access chair of the board. David takes visitors on guided regular guided nature walks along the Acinaboying River trail system in Brandon's East End. And he keeps busy with the Acinaboying Food Forest Community Orchard and the Prairie Restoration Projects. David's passion include music, permaculture, and making maple syrup. And so I'm pleased to welcome David to our gathering. And it's the floor is yours, David. Oh, sorry, David, one more thing. I'll give you a hand signal that indicates 10 minutes until your closing time. I guess I can unmute myself, can't I, Kerry? It saw the mute show up and I thought I was muted and I didn't have a chance to talk. Very well. Thank you so much for that introduction, Elin. And Marge, thank you for the beautiful thoughts and the prayer at the opening. I love the sweet grass and I almost felt like I should be smudging myself. I did so non-physically. Well, you know, I'm going to ask Kerry if it's even possible. I'm going to talk, well, you've given me 45 minutes to talk. That's a long time. And you know, Kerry, I am a retired school teacher and I still do teach. So I'm going to say, I want to say to all the participants, get those questions coming. It becomes a more worthwhile experience when we share our thoughts. And I need to respond to your thoughts in order to build a rapport with you even through Zoom. I've not done a whole lot of Zooming, but I get the feeling that it can be rather impersonal. I've spanned through the views here and I've seen a few of my friends from Brandon, a couple of ex-students there, maybe. And so I feel like I'm being watched very carefully. So I'd better be on my best performance here. The Ascender Boine Food Forest is a charity. It's a federal charity and our our reason d'être, our purpose is to pursue permaculture on our landscape of 40 acres. I'll be showing you that landscape. And I've got PowerPoint slides that can carry us through a long conversation. So yes, I agree with you, Marge, there is, there is, how did you put an illness on the land? I know it, I see it, I've lived it. My life is testament to it. I've always lived on land and I'm very blessed today. That is, I've been, I lived in a city, the city of Winnipeg until I was 10 years old. And then I moved out of that city and I've been living in nature ever since. That's quite a blessing to have. And my home in Brandon right now is a beautiful place in nature. And anyone of you who is anywhere near Brandon should come and visit me and visit the food forest, which is right adjacent to my property. If you got a hankering for maple syrup, you know, I'll be topping next week and cooking by the last week of March. So if you're anywhere near Brandon, you ought to figure out how to come down there and we'll do some COVID safe sharing. Alrighty, well, here's a way for you to like, interrupt me and say, Hey, Dave, you got five questions. And I'd like to take a pause. When you get five questions, say, let's take a pause and then I'll deal with them. Alrighty. Here, I'm going to start sharing. Yeah, I'm going to start sharing screen. Correct. Yes. I'm going to share my screen. And that will be at a launch of this PowerPoint program explaining what the food forest is all about. Well, here is a here's a map. I'm going to start with a map. How impersonal is that? And it will just to show those in Western Manitoba where we are, it's a question, you know, how to find us is it's not the easiest thing. So here's where we are located on Rosser Avenue East. This is AFI, a Cinnabon Food Forest Incorporated. And so we are surrounded by industrial developments to the east. And there we go. Our parcel is bounded by the Cinnabon River on the north. Here's Barnes is personal property right beside it. And you might know the Greenspot Nursery, which is a well known nursery sales outlet and production outlet and Crow's General Store. Here in the east end of Brandon, the three of us at Crow's Barnes and Greenspot collaborate on a lot of things, including our food forest. We build nature trails. We conduct people in nature so we have a we have a beautiful relationship in the neighborhood. Well, I hope that helps you to find us. If you look at this piece of land that is a Cinnabon Food Forest, I want to point out that our the access to our project is right through Rosser Avenue here. So if you came down Rosser Avenue to the east, you passed the Greenspot. Here is a place that you can park right in there. That used to be a forest, as you can see five years ago, but it's parking a lot now. Isn't that the way it goes? And there's also more parking on the road outside here. But unfortunately, we, you know, and this road here is not open in winter. It's not really a permanent road. So it's our vehicle access is a bit of a challenge. But if you if you can find the Greenspot and you can find that parking space, you're you're you're you've made it. I'm going to point out a little bit of the lay of the land here. For example, our trail system, our nature trails begin at Crows. We have an interpretive booklet. This is Crows General Store right in there. And out of that location, you can wander your way down to the river side and go down the bank of the river to the start of my property. There's a creek flowing out here. And our trails wind through the forest like this and on that way. We have cut trails along the roadway here. And that trail continues on into the bush and around here and to the parking area. There are so many routes that a person can walk here. So there's a nice circular nature trail that we wrote an interpretive booklet for, which you can pick up at Crows General Store, that being a business. And have yourself a guided walk with with the booklet as your guide. Alrighty, well, there's the lay of the land. If you looked at these ecosystems on our parcel, just just to reflect what Marge was telling us, the land here is there are two, there are two huge different parcels of land we have. These pieces here are beautiful forest. Oh my, oh my, this is the most worthy forest. It's ancient oaks and stretches right along down the river here. This is why it's so lovely to walk here. These oak forests. Whereas the rest of this land out here is pretty much a degraded field with an invasive species. It's a difficult landscape to love by visually. It's not as beautiful as it will be. So our purpose in the food forest, well, let's go ahead and look at those. Let's see if I can get that. Permaculture is what we do, what we practice. Also known as eco forestry or agro ecology. So it's the science of regenerating natural ecosystems that also produce food while nurturing healthy soil and biodiversity. So we are in the business of growing habitat and putting food in it. That's not just for people but also for animals. All of the plantings that we want to do and are practicing are natural associations. This is not a tree farm. We don't believe in just taking a uniform species of trees and plunking them in the ground in a straight line and calling that a forest. Our system is meant to be self-sustaining and evolving. We want to plant it so that it can look after itself into the distant future. We will never use chemicals. Oh, I've got a pleasant story to tell you about that. And we don't believe in plowing and telling. We don't want to produce food by breaking mother nature's soil. We don't. That is just, you know, that's contrary to how we wish to practice. All right, so there we go. Here's our vision as a corporation. A healthy community and ecological balance with a thriving environment. Oh, wouldn't that be lovely? It would be lovely and we won't stop pursuing that vision. Our mission is in three branches. Habitat, we want to regenerate ecosystems and also conserve them. Second branch of our mission is food. We want to produce healthy food sustainably, both for humans and for wildlife. Oh, wait, you needn't take notes here because all of this is on our website. So much of this material can be found on our website, which I'll be pulling in a bit. And our third mission is education. We want to connect students with a thriving natural environment. And we don't mean necessarily just school kids, all students, everyone who's studying as a student. We're all students here tonight. There's our website, if you'd like to note that. So much more information is on the website about the physical realities of our landscape, et cetera. And we have a Facebook page and an Instagram under our primary name. Alrighty. So let's look at some of the activities that we typically pursue and we'll just tell it as a story. I've been hosting Sunday nature walks now for this is the third year. We go out at two o'clock on Sundays, giving people time to finish up with their their church activities if they do have them or their family lunches. And that nature walk is just me going for a walk. That's it. And if you want to come and join in, well, more is the fun. Sometimes we'll arrange to have skis or other means of propulsion. But normally it's just us going for a walk because that's what I like to do. And we depart from Crow's General Store. So those in Brandon, well, Crow's is becoming a destination that everybody knows. Well, those Sunday nature walks will soon be winding down. But here's just a few glimpses of nature walks. This was back in pre COVID January of 2020. Just checking out the riverbank and talking about winter survival. We visited the beaver lodge across the river there. And we saw the ice crystals. So and the steam of the breath of the beavers inside was kind of nice. And we did a little gentle stomping up and down just to show the kids that man alive, you're not ever going to break into a beaver lodge. You have no chance. But we we recognize where the beavers are and we like to visit them. We have a self guiding nature trail with an accompanying booklet. So, you know, you can make your way to Crow's in East Brandon. You can have an experience in the food forest. Here we do. We have done and we will do again, lots of tours for groups. So education is part of our our mission. And we want people on the land enjoying interpreting. And this was the university group. I'm sorry, a college group from ACC in land and water management. And basically, my job is just take people out in the woods and spin them a tail. We put on a CD event every spring. It's coming right up. And I guess, yes, I have I've adapted this. There we go. So normally we hold it in a community center, like last year, the these, this picture is last year. But this year, we're hosting a virtual event. Seventh, we'll, we'll have a seed drop off. That's coming up, you know, right away this weekend, Saturday, Sunday at Crow's in the afternoon. So if you have seeds to share, that's where we'll be. And then two weeks later, we're going to encourage people to come and pick up seeds right at that same location after we've sorted them out and advertise what we have on Facebook. And then we'll also have a virtual event on the 20th and 21st. We'll have a series of videos available. All of that can be found on our Facebook page or on our website. So that's a bit of Seedy Sunday. As part of our work with the land, we, we harvest, we harvest and forage. And so here is our setup for harvesting maple sap. There's a couple of the boys that are about to place the tank up on the platform. And here we are tapping trees in late March. It's such a wonderful time. It's about to begin. So I should be out tapping within three or four days. We'll be out putting taps in the trees. And there's a, there's a setup of a pail with a lid on it. This is such wonderful knowledge, you know. I guess I should say, I don't tap trees for, for money or for profit. I, I believe that the trees provide me with a gift of their sap, what I call trees blood. And in that they give me a gift, I like to turn around and gift that syrup. I don't want to use it all for money. So there's a lot of gifting, a lot of sharing, a lot of trading. And, you know, a good percentage of the value of that syrup is donated to the food forest as well. We've had such wonderful times, uh, hosting people on the land for a syrup making. Here we even branch out into the city street a little bit. Get all this is taken right out the green spot. Uh, last year we tapped over there. I'll be putting out, let's say about 300 taps. I will tap pretty much 300 maple trees. And again, here's the crew having a breather during a day tapping last year. I'm going to speak just a little bit about our major projects. Um, those being, let's get a pin on this page, those being the orchard, a prairie restoration, and our dream to harvest water on the landscape. So you'll see more pictures of this orchard. There's a rectangular orchard fence here as you come along the trail in the woods and moving through the trees here. There's another branch trail coming out here to the orchard. It's a big deer fence and it'll keep, obviously it allows us to have fruit and trees. This spring we'll be decorating that orchard fence with, uh, with grapes and hoping to have, hoping to have grapes just climbing up the fence and decorating that. You'll see more about this prairie restoration going on right here. It's pretty much a circular plot and we have, um, we're ready to seed a prairie coming up this spring. It's been several years in the preparation, but this spring we will seed the prairie. And so that will be the first of our real permacultural activities where we actually try to create a native ecosystem there with all of the local native flowers and grasses, which we've spent a good time organizing and preparing. Now there is also an informal trail. I'm going to color that trail, see how my pen works. Here's a trail that the public has used on this land for probably 25 years. In the past it was always used by snowmobiles and quads, but we have asked those vehicles to not enter anymore and they've been pretty nice. So we have added on, um, and this is a trail that I mow every summer to keep it, keep it working for, for, um, visitors. The trail exits across there and we also have a branch of it that we just created last summer stretching along here and meeting up with that trail. So already, you know, I am going to, um, David, there's one question already. If you want to ask, are there native orchards at AFFI? It's a good idea. It's always good. People are going to fall asleep. I know they are. Um, let me see if I can find you. Sorry. The question is, are there native orchards there at the food forest? Yes, indeed. Let me speak to that. The native fruits that grow on their own and that can be harvested are Saskatoon's. Lovely things. And as you look at the landscape out here, we don't have raspberry, we do have Saskatoon. That's the only one that I've ever picked. Here's the, here's the deal with the Saskatoon's. All of these bushes out here. Oh, I'm doing this now. I want a pen. All of these bushes out here. Give me a pen there. Okay. All of this and these and these bushes here. It's actually all of this bush out here. That's all Saskatoon, like almost 100%. There's a bit of snowberry in there. But those poor Saskatoon bushes and all of this, there's actually, there's a huge population of Saskatoon. But the deer are so omnipresent and so out of control that really they browse it down every winter to, you know, a height of two feet, three feet. Those shrubs can never grow to be huge. In 2014, we had a, I'm practicing with my pen, we had a Saskatoon crop out of those shrubs. It was magic. You know, the conditions were just right and fruit was produced. So yes, we do have some native fruit. It's very hard. It's not reliable. What's going on in our orchard right now is that we are planting native fruits in amongst the apple trees. And so, and the plan certainly into the future, as we reforest this landscape, is to work native fruits into the plantings as well. We don't want to just plant trees. We want to plant shrubs in amongst them as well. All right. I hope I don't have that question. Actually, it was my fault because I misread their question. The actual question was, are there orchids, native orchids there, not orchards? Orchids, okay. Sorry. I don't believe that we have orchids. Not that I've seen. I've never spent my orchid and I have a good friend who's really mad, crazy for orchids. So she would know. I doubt that we have them. Well, it was fun answering that question incorrectly. I got to pretend I had one. Okay. I'm going to go back one page. And then I'm going to load this slide again because I want to show you the plan for the pond restoration. This is when this development comes true. This will be an actual fact, sort of a resurrection of the land. This will really bring it back to life. And that's what permaculture really wants to do, wants to restore thriving ecosystems. Job number one, in restoring land to thriving biodiversity, capture the water. Don't let any water escape all the precipitation that falls must be retained. I'm going to show you now an ancient, oh, come on, pen, give me a pen. There we go. This is the mouth of a creek right here that flowed across this landscape for probably the last 12,000 years. And if you're on, if you're visiting out here, you can see this. It's almost written on the land. It waivers a little bit as it goes down here, gets down to the end of the landscape, you know, and then it runs into industrial development. Of course, the upstream basin of that creek is completely obliterated. So it no longer runs water as a creek except in the first half of April, usually in the first week of April because the snowmelt puddles up on the landscape and then follows the drainage basin of the old creek right down to the river. I've got some films of it, which I'm going to share with you right away. It's a beautiful process, so motivating for me so that our desire is to put a dam across here. In fact, we've done the soil testing in the area and this is precisely, once you're on the on the landscape, you understand that's where beavers build dams. That's where beavers have built dams over the last millennia. It's such a beautiful spot to dam. And how do we know this? Well, because we have done soil testing. Now a beaver dam at that spot would create, would back up a pond of roughly that dimension. You can see it almost on the photograph here, but you can certainly see it on the landscape and the topographical lines agree. So this is where the pond will, if we put an earthen dam there, this is where the pond will form. And then we would want to very gently dig out this ditch. It's called a swale and that's not for draining water away from anywhere. It's from capturing water, a swale. Very well. So in big rainstorms, there is a culvert coming under the railway track there and the land to the south is much higher. So everything drains towards the river. This brings a lot of water in in big storms. A swale right here would capture that water and conduct it down to our pond. And there would be a recharge of water every spring from snowmelt. So there's our major project. We want to be super beavers and capture that water. This will nourish the water table. It will nourish all the forest that we're going to plant. Around it we want to plant forest on most of this landscape. We would love to have our final orchard growth, mixed orchards up in here. Anyway, that beautiful dream will hopefully come to be true sometime in the near future. We're working on it. Okay, what have we got next? Well here's the creek runoff. I'm going to show you 30 seconds. We won't play this whole tape. There's my sweetie pie. Here's some water now. Well, it's the 24th day of March 2020 and the water is flowing down the draw and into the Asiniboine River for the first time this spring. Just about ready to start cooking sugar, although we haven't got a sap run yet. There is the pond forming where we most decidedly want to create a pond. Following those orange streambed markers which mark the center of the old streambed, sure enough, the water has puddled up now today and it's formed right where we want to have a pond in wetland. It's coming on down here and flowing into the river. Let's have a look at that flow. Come on here a little bit closer. Oh yeah, that's a pretty nice flow. Five o'clock in the afternoon, basically six o'clock. You can see the water coming flowing by that ashtray. Right here in front of us. Follow that down to the river, sweetie pie. Come on, my dogs. Nothing yesterday. That's a good volume of water flowing there today. Sorry for the speed on this video. Let's follow it down the draw a little bit. A little better sense of how much water is moving. Whoa, that water is moving. Look at that go. Yeah, that's moving right along. The video gets just a little bit and I guess I'm not. See if I can. There it is. The land is certainly well flooded up there today and this old creek bit is carrying a lot of water. That's a lot of water moving in the creek. So beautiful. A single storm at the right timing can generate a lot of water on a drainage basin and once the drainage basin begins to hold water again it will reestablish age old patterns in the soil and forest will regrow quite vigorously from that existence of a pond up there. Wow. A lot of water moving. Well, there we go. Let's see if I can play this again. Okay, no, no, no. Go ahead. Well, I just checked the time so I think I've got about 15 minutes left. I better speed myself up a little bit. Here's the way the engineer's drawings look. A dam and a sculpted pond. There is a certain amount of excavation going on here. The overall depth of our pond we hope would be about 10 feet. Those are nesting islands for waterfowl. Such a wonderful development. We'll dream that one up to reality. And there was our maple syrup crop last year. Maple syrup is so much fun. Why don't you come on and visit? If people come from out of town, I always gift them syrup. I don't make them pay. We've always helped maple syrup tours and this year we won't. Glass in last year. It's a sad thing to not have family groups come and visit but there's the setup. There's the woodshed and the sugar shack and a pail on the tree. We do harvest nettle in the month of May and if you are around, I do invite you to come and check it out. Stinging nettle is not a native plant. It is a European plant but it's everywhere along the Ascending Boine Valley these days and it is indeed a very nutritious green. You should come and get some in the month of May. We host workshops all the time. This one was with the college in thermophilic compost production. So there were the students and myself in the back and here's the compost that we produced. And then the morning sun at another wrangler you can see the steam coming off the compost. That was a pretty nice little project. We have hosted a Treesblood Spring Festival for many years. 16 years here although it's not been hosted by the food forest for 16 years but and there we are decorating our shipping container which is our office and our storage site in 2019. We've hosted weddings on the landscape. There's one of our board members on her wedding day. Oh my goodness what a day it was but we won't do that this year not that I'm aware. We will be planting in that orchard so there will be opportunities that that is going to be coming up in May and June probably again in September. There you can see the deer fence in the orchard without that fence there wouldn't be orchard fruits but things are fruiting this year. We planted this in 2017 and we are now on the verge of collecting harvests. It'll be soon. Many school groups and adventure camps would come out. This was from Mennonite Brethren a church in Brandon and they host a week-long gathering every July. We missed them last year and I think we'll miss them again this year. If you walk the food forest trails you will see these tree tubes so this has been a very unique initiative for how to protect trees from deer. Each one of these tubes is placed upon a small sapling tree a natural tree not anything we planted. You can see all these trees down tubes down at the far end they're all along this trail we've got over 120 of them out and another 300 to go this year. What happens is that the trees grow protected inside the tubes and they get to the top here it is by September of last year the prior slide we put the tubes in place in September 2019 here they are in September of 2020 well that sapling tree got going and grew right up the top of the tube well later in September the deer munched this all off it's true but they only do their browsing in fall in May June July so that tree has got a bud right up near the top today and when the season growing season starts he'll have a sprint and he'll get himself going upwards and hopefully the tip gets up a couple feet beyond the reach of the deer and so we hope these things apparently work I mean they're designed in Europe and they've been tested all around the world. One of the things that we are very passionate and happy to be doing is elder storytelling and sharing with the local First Nations we had I think we had Dakota elders yes we had a Dakota elder we had Ojibwe elders telling tales about well just about life and what a beautiful day that one was we look forward to more of that we have put orchard bird boxes out and here was one of our most famous guests using the housing she rented or he rented for a summer and here are the babies that were inside such lovely things bluebirds are another regular activity is we tour around for doors open Brandon which is a day when or a weekend when people can visit anywhere almost that they like and we put on tours I don't think we're planning them this summer we'll see I want to tell you just a little bit of a tale about our prairie restoration project it's been a summer of extremely busy activity this was all this last summer 2020 first we brought the brand and fire department in and they performed a burn on May 21st there is the prairie or there's all the invasive grass burning up here's what it looked like when that was done we did a bit of mowing for a couple of weeks and then we brought a friend in organic farmers um Pat and Larry Pollock brought their disker well if if you're a farmer you can see the discs and discers basically chop up the top seven inches of turf and flip over on itself essentially really ripping it and turning it over here's what it looked like two weeks later and then we set about gathering up all those dried out rhizomes of invasive grass we want this path completely black in order to plant it with native species so the first thing we tried was dragging a small harrow that proved to be quite crazy it simply clogged up the harrows so instead we set about doing it with pitchforks and wheelbarrows here's my dog and four grandchildren slaving away oh they slaved on that patch and here's another one here Jose and well tell you look at him with that pitchfork that's a man who knows how to do country work well after a week we had most of the rhizomes off here you can see the piles of them got me a pin look at these piles of rhizomes over here I swear there are oh probably a hundred oh hundreds of pounds of rhizomes that we have taken off and we just dumped them in piles to compost so the next method we used was the quad and harrow so so after that we dragged the harrows regularly across that uh here's my buddy Stephen doing that with some weight on the harrows and week by week that landscape just got blacker and blacker you can see in this picture here that there are certainly uh thistles that are still threatening to bother you know and we had to go around and dig out those thistles with pitchfork with um garden forks and thistlebusters and it was lots of work lots of work but at the end of the summer I'm happy to stay with one last touch of this cultivating rig owned by my friend Wayne Chupka we I think polished off the weeds we have actually turned the patch black and we don't believe there's a weed in it let's see how much time we got 22 I'm going to carry right on moving so next summer is planting we'll be planting this in May or June early June or late May and boy there will be opportunities to integrate with us so if you're keen on volunteering this is going to be the finest butterfly garden in Brandon that's an acre and it's going to be magic we will have a bergamot these are some of the seeds that we've collected ourselves this is local flowers we'll have bergamot in it we'll certainly have yarrow in it these are medicinal native plants as well the echinacea that's grown on the trails we'll have that in it also the galardia every one of these seeds we have we've harvested ourselves and the narrowleaf sunflower that produces in in one year so it should give us color this summer we also have a legacy tree program which when people wish to gift us trees we accept the gift of a tree and we'll look after it and and tag it and and here's one of our tree planting crews happy people with dirty hands with dirty fingernails okay a quick summary of what's going to be going on in the future we will be operating nature trails we definitely will we are going to be planting trees this is a handsome patch of oaks at my neighbors but we don't plant them that big but we'll get them growing that big we'll be doing sunday nature walks and these are very impromptu and so there are no two walks are ever the same we've got a lot of orchard work to do this summer so that's going to be advertised and it's going to be giving us a lot of pleasure this community orchard by the way it's not for us it's not for profit it's for the community and every fruit that we make is going to be given not so and at the end of the of the show i'm just leaving some openings for possible possibilities astronomy evenings or something that we've tried we've given it the first test and we're going to be happy to go forward with that into the future so i think i'm going to stop sharing there the 724 look at how many i put to sleep let's have a look no sleeping i can see sleepers out there oh yes i can oh there's britney oh my goodness i should have been more you we do have a few questions david that came in if you have a time to take a few questions how about it sure so the first one you might have already answered because it was came early on and i think you did talk about this but it's it asks are your seeds for prairie all indigenous to the land of the sea yep well the answer is yes and they have been hard some of them have been harvested a little bit further out than our plot so we have a pat we have a gift of seed from from shiloh from the shiloh ranges which is a big mixed wild grass prairie we have a gift of seed that was harvested along highway two and it's mostly a big blue stem um you know and we have but for the most part the seeds have have well they've all been collected in manitoba and pretty near to us yep yeah that's local indigenous yeah good thanks yeah there's also a couple questions that came in about the pond um one of them has to do with whether you would would you dig the out the pond area to make it deeper is that part of the plan um and the other question was what is holding the process up regarding the pond i'm assuming meaning what is what's keeping you from doing it but julie you can just there would be excavation involved the construction of a mud wall which you know a bunch of friends could do in a weekend we could just go take trucks and dump soil on there we just mounted up a soil across the opening we would get five feet of water just for doing that and so we in our studies and then we've actually spent over 17 000 engaging environmental engineers to study this and so if you do a gentle excavation so therefore the pond itself would have gently excavated another five down for a total of about 10 feet deep in the pond yes so there's a bit of excavation all of this is based on a permaculture science um which was originated by an austrian man by the name of sep holzer there the fellow you should look up sep holzer h o l z e r um i actually studied lake building with sep on his last north american tour it actually took our course with this guy and how to build lakes so he's a he's a magician that one the final question is what's holding us up well i guess you'd say the thing that's holding us up is that it's not our land so we need to proceed in in community with our administrative team and so i don't know that's not blaming or that's not saying there's you know that somebody has has a ill intentions but you know i think and it's been very easy to understand that the that administration both city and province that have things to say about our projects they they're necessarily cautious this is a reasonable thing you don't want to go handing off your landscape to some bunch of wackos and have things go blind and wrong so you know we we we really dream that this summer's the summer that we're going to be allowed to go fundraise that's what we hope to do just go fundraising and let the details work themselves out makes sense um that answers that's a couple of last about so who owns the land um and our land use permits required yes the city owns the land okay and manager of a habitat heritage corporation owns a holds a conservation easement on the land so there is a mhc authority and a civic authority we are given a lease so we we have a lease on the land which allows us to manage things and of course pay the insurance too we get the money on the insurance i'll tell you but um you know are we going to do this we have to convince people so we're on it excellent thanks um someone asked also about the funding um where's the funding coming from for the work that you're doing on the site well thank you for that question i want to start off by saying our very first seed funding you know who it came from david susuki of all things it was twenty three thirteen thirteen oh when was david susuki in town in brandon in fact he was brought to winnebake for a special date it was a fall of an election year federal election thirteen or fourteen yeah fourteen and um so david susuki was speaking in winnebake we scored him we just scored him in brandon he came out and gave a motivational speech to the community and gave us all the fees so that was like a five thousand dollar gift but our money is given we get it in memberships we get it in donations we get it in syrup sales um you know we we tend to be reasonably attractive to donors and so we're surviving on donations um another person asks will the uh will this area still flood if the river overflows and flood conditions yes yes of course yes this area will flood it has flooded uh twice in this decade in eleven and fourteen yes it'll flood and you know pretend you were beavers and that was your dam now what would a flood to cause you to abandon the landscape and have everything ruined when not at all in fact um although floods are famous in brandon for having aggressive tendencies and they certainly do that at the river bank discovery center you know it comes underneath the 18th street bridge and just attacks city buildings it's awful but in our in our position the river is more tangential to us the massive currents don't attack our dam so it's really more like as the state of a calm lake where this development is and so the water comes up and then the water goes down we see it see it as a very beautiful possibility that a lot of the biota out of the ascent of wind river is going to come and try and habitat the pond so we'll make it crayfish in there we could have stickleback in there it's uh it's lovely to think of the of what a flood will bring so really as as an ecologist i've got to say that floods by and large are gifts they're natural gifts they're not they're not necessarily tragedy the tragedy of the modern flood is because we live an industrial life which is causing climate change and then we also you know voraciously attack wetlands so that we have no natural sponges who have poured flood water anymore but floods are ecological gifts there's no doubt about that yeah thanks David there's um uh one person asked a bit about uh how are you recognizing the original people on the land um are there plans to gift the land to the indigenous people or anything related any thoughts on that such an important question we wrestle with it we are collaborating with uh with jason gobay and the frank tashon local authorities christa charlie of the college we are having speakers regularly we always ask for blessings but it's something that we need to well if we could only have uh an indigenous person on our board of governance that would be pretty that would be pretty sweet but we are mindful and um we seek guidance we need guidance it feels like a natural pursuit for us to to collaborate with first nations and wouldn't it be lovely to gift the land it's just our art to gift you know it would be magic there's another question about what other animals have you seen on the land besides deer and beaver yeah oh there's a tail well we see we see the uh the jack rabbit uh daily we see lots of uh red squirrels we've got porcupine and skunk and we've got oh weasel and mink galore we have otter beaver um marmots um woodchucks badger coyote and fox lots of coyote and fox that's because i have dogs i know this because my dogs cannot ignore the smell of coyote or a fox they go crazy for them and of course then we have to run around after them and yes indeed large ungulates do pay a visit once in a while we see a moose once a summer i swear a moose comes through once a summer he's always heading east down the river valley now that'll be you know a young animal out of riding mountain likely uh seen actually we have so many deer we've actually saw a mule deer a mule deer one time which is a little bit out of range so some lovely wildlife lots of birds of course many birds that's all the um questions that have come in unless someone else says um wants to add something else in the chat or we can also just text and unmute if you want to Tommy wants to make a comment hello hello yeah go ahead first of all when i first seen your face i asked A1 you know i know that person for some place and then while he kept talking then it came to my mind it's a retired doctor that came to grassy and worked for grassy for a period of five years i think and he passed away again and why we had him work for grassy is because he knew quite a bit about pollution you know that military thing and he did a lot of work he uh he used to walk across the lake to go and see people that were sick you know i see doctors do that anymore what you've seen well i'm happy to have such a doppelganger right i uh you know i thought you might proceed to say that you came from sighing first nation because i i taught out sighing first nation for three years in the 70s so i still i still think very fondly of my time up there i once also met in chat with uh chinese you know a japanese friend was he chinese david tazuki japanese japanese yeah i think he did a reserve a few times oh well he he said his corporation was he there for grassy if they needed money to uh are you from grassy yes but i wasn't raised and born there i lived in kinora called just for niggum it's uh rat for it it's just going yeah it was just going i wasn't too good of a father i guess or a husband so my wife kicked me out of the house with the kids so i the kids stayed here and i stayed behind with the kids and i'm still there but we still talk to each other and stuff like that but anyways what i wanted to ask you you got quite a quite a place there and i get kind of confused because you shoot quite a bit of land and where you're where you're a owner of one land and what gets me is that the first when the when we heard the open about 3d one and 3d two land that was preoccupied by the so's and the jibways and whatever crease you know i still feel kind of left out by having you shown us the the maps in the area that's quite a land that's been already occupied by houses and but not you know there's not really too much a growth for any uh future creation what the creator made for us to live by and what's something that when we're showing about the water that run away to truly your place and i was telling the rest of the uh and it's not the people that we have here wouldn't that be nice you know if he gets some help and cultivate that area a little more to make it maybe about in some some places maybe six feet to about three feet something like that and you know it's with the help of native people that Dakota cream the jibway even decimal people you know for plans for you to grow because we live off the land and we have a lot of knowledge of medicine plants and we're thinking maybe if we can somehow get enough people that are interested like you are and we have a lot of wonder of our old people especially young people that are coming on they want to go back because there's a lot of work to be done to regenerate what we seem to have lost already true pollution and i guess economically called yeah habitat destruction yes the thing that i believe we agreed agreed upon right here is to see whether you can start growing what we call we care now i don't know how that the whole cause because that it's a medicine that is good for your stomach a medicine that's good for your brain your hearing eyesight and also your immune system it gives it gives the heart what's more power and strength to pump medicine down to your feet and pump it back up again and you know older people like myself and a few others that were that's where we seem to start losing our our youth and our energies to our feet because we're stepping on our vital organs it's it's at the bottom of our feet i can show you a few few and that's where your your heart is your your kidneys everything all your major organs are there and we feel that is why the older the person gets regardless whether it's a white man or indian or i don't like using the word indian i like using the word anishinaabe because the word one one of my friends good friends of my white people say i see that you really don't like the word indian why and i said well it's a rejection from society as in they don't like they don't like the word indian and the character that is embedded in the anishinaabe because of that it's really uh no no for our people but this is the thing that that could happen if you we can we can you know like you mentioned that he said he would he would help us with you know some money like that if we can get together and and make a plan out and we can get some some uh we get to be uh kind of in your area because right now where we live pollution is getting so bad that our medicine plants you know they don't they don't seem to be as as uh potential i guess i i i would say you're not as strong as as it would be well i think um i think collaborating um is what what we need to do all over the world in this group the more that we collaborate together the more that we find opportunities to be together and share the better we get so i certainly uh would welcome having visitors come to my place and this food forest land and touring folks around there is kind of that's kind of like what i do day by day so please do come and visit it and um and learn from the land just to say also um david that there's a lot of uh comments coming in front of the chat about appreciation for what you shared and um that was very fascinating and uh that the hope they'll be able to visit sometime so yes okay so thanks so much 26 comments on the chat oh yeah oh nice i also wanted to add my thank you for the presentation i certainly enjoyed what you shared with us and you're doing a really wonderful job and i hope you get your your pond set up soon and uh get your orchard growing and i'd like to come by and see your your maple cooking maple sometime i look close to brandon i know and well you were introduced as dakota su valley so you saw you got to come merge yes i will take some home yeah because it's after all it's your it's the people of the land that that taught you know the colonials all that kind of stuff yes yes the collaboration and the in assisting each other to survive and yes now we can go back to sharing and i know and we have so many collaborating again challenges for people now so many challenges yes yes i want to thank dav uh very much we i really appreciated the information and i have had a 40 tree uh apple tree orchard when i was on the farm in in uh saskatchewan and used 51 varieties of apple trees from the university of saskatchewan which you made that are yes region yeah that's a good fruit center u of s oh boy a lot comes out of there yeah but i'll uh i have to move us into our annual meeting i'm sorry because we're having a very good discussion and hope to have you back again okay thank you so much yeah all right um i just would officially like to open the annual meeting for the manitoba and northwestern Ontario kairos region and i do think that ellen bross our our treasurer is trying to phone in is there no i have i have phoned in oh good okay very good i've been i've been listening so i want to welcome everybody to the annual meeting and our our agenda is very quick and uh so we have minutes from 2019 now we have a financial report we have a nominations report and we have comments or questions um uh and adjournment so we're going to try and do that all in 50 minutes if we can excuse me ellen excuse me ellen do you have someone taking minutes no i don't it's just gonna ask if somebody would take it i can't volunteer but i know that you would want that yeah linda where are you i think she's had to leave i think that is not cooperating so kerry do you want to take oh debbie i i thought if you like okay that would be great um kerry did we circulate any of the minutes or the financial statement or did you find a way to do that or um well i i didn't find a way easily to do that but i couldn't i can post them i can uh share the screen so people could see them that would work so i do um if you want to put the i can put the um minutes the minutes up yeah did you want to say anything about them uh i was wondering if we wanted to read them or just highlight some stuff um feel free okay um these are minutes from our annual meeting on october 18th and 19th 2019 um we held our uh fall gathering at st john's presbyterian church and uh we were walking softly uh and talking about the doctrine of discovery impacts on land food and relations on friday evening we had a uh a blanket exercise on on um indigenous food sovereignty with uh allison cox and her family members which was quite a intensive blanket exercise but also very very informative talked about the free first nations family advocate as well as migrant workers and the land and also environment and the care of the land so you can tell from our our interest as a regional group a lot of discussion around how the doctrine of discovery has impacted indigenous people as well as white people and people of color uh and the long-term effect of that and the fact that we're still in colonization mode we uh had a brief report from myself ellen gross presented a financial report for september first 2018 to the august 2019 that's our financial year and that financial report was presented and carried and also a proposed budget for 2019 and 2020 was approved Karen curl presented nomination reports um the present members of the coordinating committee remain in place uh ellen wood will continue as regional rep and chairperson for one year and ellen gross will continue as treasurer for one year mary lemontree will continue as communication liaison and at the time we were looking for a vice chairperson and a secretary we did open nominations to the four none came forward and we use that nominations report um there was a thank you for members of kyros and those who were visiting us at the meeting and uh just uh leading into today uh 2020 as you know has been an unusual year for all of us and uh so our coordinating committee and some of our groups uh were kind of late in starting in 2020 but we um through the thick and thin of it we've continued uh many campaigns throughout 2020 and uh leading into 2021 and we've uh mastered the art of webinars in zoom and uh so i i think 2021 will be a really interesting year and thank all the members of the coordinating committee members of the various groups across our region as well as the national staff from kyros um and volunteers at events that we have donations of money um just uh it's amazing organization to be part of and as we spend more time together and and invite more people into the into the group uh and invite and partner with other like-minded groups um we're we're moving along into our presence in the in the region um so being said that i'll ask ellen if she would uh present the financial statement for um august 31st 2019 to august 31st 2020 okay does do people have the financial statement in front of them or should i just read it out i don't don't have it in front of us okay well our income for the year what we got a thousand dollars from national kyros national and we had 475 dollars coming in from the agm the expenses for the agm were 3,270 no yeah 3,278 88 and then we made a donation and i can't uh i have the check number but unfortunately there's no name beside it and i haven't been able to find it but i have a feeling it was uh donation to um the migrant workers yeah i think it was temporary foreign workers what's that my temporary um foreign workers uh yeah uh so we had a total of income of 1475 total expenses of 3,478 88 which left us with a minus position of 2,388 but we had a forward balance from august 31st 2019 for 29,5627 which left uh 952 dollars and 39 cents in our checking account and we have still have money in a savings account which is getting very little interest but is 372.61 so we have funds totaling 1325 dollars would you like to move that report illa yes i'll move the acceptance of that report of the financial report and is there a seconder a second okay any discussion karen no no i'm fine thank you any discussion from anyone all those in favor receiving the financial report i'm not sure how we're going to do this but anyway well i can't see anything so i don't know i'll suggest i'm just on the phone it might be easier to ask if there's any objections okay are there any objections uh hearing none i'll say that that motion is carried then um where's my agenda here nominations from karen scroll can't hear you karen okay hi this is karen am i coming through yep okay hi everyone um it's been my pleasure to again uh be the person to find people who are wanting to provide their assistance to to kairos as you can see here is the dominating committee i'm going to very briefly tell you that um and and ask i think for two motions uh for the communications person mary lematra and for ellen gross they are have both served on kairos cloco for a few years and are willing to let their names stand again i would ask them that is is there anyone uh that was would like to uh add their name to that or will we accept their names as uh as communications and treasurer are there any nominations uh for the position of treasurer or communications liaison hearing none i would declare that that has been approved right and then moving on then to uh to our elected position and that being one of secretary is uh pastor jennifer marlowe uh and vice chair cary harvey stays in our harvey and uh chair uh dominion is three wall gross and i'm going to very quickly tell you that i'm so we're so very pleased that we have our secretaries come on board uh she's an evangelical evangelical Luther minister and she's coming on board to to be a secretary and that's a thankless job but she is willing to do it uh moving on to kairos or to uh to cary he's a settler amendment elected work to winnipeg is a guest and treaty one territory he works as a coordinator at the indigenous neighbors program of the amendment central committee and he is an individual village between indigenous and then indigenous people cary has worked with kairos uh for a few years now and has been just an exemplary person to be a part of our koko group gree who has agreed to let her names down for chair is a writer facilitator and community organizer who's been active in kairos news magazine world's student christian federation and other faith-based social justice organizations for over a decade she is passionate about social equity and then creating a world-based community injustice i would like to make a motion then that we accept the three unless there is any further nominations from the floor or from the wherever it's coming from let's let's ask if there's further nominations for the position of chair vice chair and secretary i will just say that there are two people that raised their hands mary mcnary and katherine did you want to say something other of you no i was just voting yay okay let's make sure you are nominating somebody i move nominations close okay uh we will accept the that the nominations are closed and accept the chair vice chair entrance and secretary position as being gray kerry and jennifer thank you for your help with this and moving on to of course ellen wood will be the past chair and speaking of ellen wood she's not going to get away real fast because i've got a few words to say about this lady so ellen emerged onto the kairos scene about six years ago she spent two years as co-co-vice chair and has served almost three years as chair she's committed to kairos and has shown great leadership and strength and tactfulness where they're going sometimes get challenging she's been a steady hand on the teller i'm a i'm a sailor so i can say that and has encouraged and guided the work of mounted to the marth rest ontario kairos ellen we know you won't be far away when we need to call on you but we'll give you a break for a couple of months so in the meantime we hope that you will enjoy this yeah what i'll be bringing out it out to you in stone wall and and from all of us we wish you well and we thank you all for part of our hearts as co-co-members and kairos members of this region for all the hard work you have done you've you've been a wonderful chairperson thank you thank you i very much appreciate uh enjoyed the uh and appreciated the people i've worked with uh not only within the kairos organization and especially within our region and i've enjoyed meeting other groups and and working with them on various campaigns that kairos has been involved in and sometimes not even involved in so i'm looking forward to a break and i do wish brie and kerry and ellen and jennifer mary and karen good work in 2021 and we'll all still be available as karen says so thank you very much really appreciate it are there any other comments that people would like to ask or questions i would like to just say to you that if i can uh i am going to offer you sweetgrass ellen this is a gift from me to you and sweetgrass as you know cannot be purchased it has to be gifted and i give this to you thank you yeah i've enjoyed working with karen she's been a steady hand and as well as the community representatives on the coordinating committee and also people who are part of our groups and uh i have just really enjoyed working with so many people so thank you um i'll ask again if if there's any uh comments or questions is that the end of the business agenda if i was just going to ask for a motion to adjourn karen when you finished with the nominating committee you were finished yeah that was or approved actually just consensus janin did you want to say something i did i just uh would add my thanks and appreciation for your years of service ellen in that chair role and also uh to brie who's stepping up i'm looking forward to getting to know you a bit more and working together and i guess for those on the call who don't know i'm shannon newfelt and i'm the staff li is on to the regional groups and so i work quite closely with the regional representatives or the chairs of the coordinating committees and i i just want to express my appreciation to the planners of this year's annual gathering these four events and uh for all of you for coming out and being part of this just add my my personal gratitude thanks very much everyone thanks janin um do i have a motion for adjournment of this annual meeting i'll move adjournment okay and i don't think that's all right karen uh is that carried any any opposed okay uh i want to thank marge our elder and i also want to thank uh elders who have joined us from canora and uh thank you for taking the time to be part of discussion and and the and the presentation um just to remind people that march 11th next next thursday um our speakers are going to talk about investigating unmarked grave sites and burial grounds at the brandon residential school site and uh speakers who will speak to that and we're looking forward to that so um until next week we'll see you soon thank you thank you thanks anyone thanks everybody good night thank you thank you excellent excellent who's the speaker next week ellen it'd be kathryn nickles and uh davin kennedy thank you night everyone and i good night