Visiting Naapi’s Garden and Katoyiss Seed Bank (est. 2021)
July 11, 2025
Participants: Wednesday Lupypciw, Mia + Eric, Justin Seiji Waddell and Bomi Yook from the Public Art for Sustainable Futures Residency
We zipped along on the highway, past flat swatches of bright yellow canola fields, then green, then yellow, the morning sun shining high above us. And so we went, heading south, the paved road eventually turning to gravel, until a mischief of magpies ushered us towards the gate of Naapi’s Garden on the land of Kainai Nation.
Naapi’s Garden and Katoyiss Seed Bank are projects of the Blackfoot artist and land-based educator Api’soomaahka (Running Coyote), which began as a project to regenerate native grasslands and restore the presence of Blackfoot plants on Kainai Traditional Territory. Known as “Old Man,” Naapi is a shapeshifting “trickster” from the Blackfoot creation story, a demigod who shaped the land, and whose stories teach important lessons. Katoyiss (“bloodclot” in Blackfoot) — a superhero who followed thousands of years later — was later entrusted to take good care of the land, water and its inhabitants.
Hopping out of the van, we unpacked our lunch, some soup and snacks onto a picnic table, their manufactured presence a stark contrast to the surrounding lands. While our soup heated up, Api’soomaahka brought out a sleek, silver suitcase emblazoned with stickers. Like a travelling musician’s road case, it was packed with the essentials for the job: dried specimens picked locally including sticks of aahsowa (wild licorice), okonoki (Saskatoon berry) and one big root of ponokaki (arrowleaf balsamroot), which relieves respiratory congestion and, when made into a tea, helps to soothe joint and muscle pains. He also brought out some dried prairie parsley and pretty-in-pink petals of maanikapi (wild bergamot) to sprinkle on our soup, and a mountain of blueberries and cherries that he had just bought from a farm in British Columbia.
After lunch, we tasted some more of the dried plants, including tiny Niistsikapa’s double root/yampa (wild carrot) that were sweet and more carrot-y than its cultivated relations. As we poked and prodded around, two omahkokata (meaning “the big snared one” for prairie dogs) scampered around, calling out and playing hide-and-seek from a hole in the ground at the front of the house.
We then looked at many, many more things. We looked at tools like a scoop made of buffalo horn, two buffalo skulls perched atop a shipping container, a stone used for sharpening. We looked at a planter bed of sipatsimo (sweetgrass), ka’kitsimo (wild mint) and lamb’s quarters as Api’soomaahka showed us how to identify sipatsimo by its purple roots.
Prairie grasses rustle, crunching underfoot as Prairie winds blow over the Prairie plains.
We transplanted ka’kitsimo from the garden beds to the wider land next to aohtoksooki (common yarrow), doing our tiny part. As a parting gift, Api’soomaahka invited us to take home wild strawberry and mint from the garden, and containers stuffed with blueberries and cherries — his kitchen stacked to the gills with crates of the fruit.
It has been a month since that trip to Naapi’s Garden, and I have been doing some thinking.
We have been reading in our work for the residency, including essays in The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation edited by the Métis artist and writer Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and scholar Sophie McCall. Texts in this publication are reminders that only when we root ourselves in the learnings and collaboration between Indigenous and settler groups will we participate in the ongoing process of reconciliation. Our collective responsibility is to practice sustainability beyond environmental ecology:
to connect to the land and its ancestors
to repair and strengthen relations across communities
to take care of ourselves, each another and future generations.
This field trip was part of the Public Art for Sustainable Futures Residency. Learn more about the residency, the participants and the mentors here.
