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University of Saskatchewan harvests first crop of ceremonial tobacco

Jordie Gagnon hopes the university’s first crop of ceremonial tobacco can serve as a learning tool about sacred medicines and their use.

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Something was out of place in Jordie Gagnon’s yard.

“Why’s there a tobacco plant growing in our garden?” Gagnon remembers asking. “My stepson was at Wanuskewin for school and they gave seeds to some of the kids. He knows that as a Metis person, these kinds of things are important to me, and he said, ‘I thought it would be pretty cool!’ ”

In his role as a senior strategic officer for Indigenous programs and partnerships with the University of Saskatchewan, Gagnon has seen the role tobacco can play in facilitating learning.

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He hopes the university’s first crop of ceremonial tobacco can serve as a learning tool about sacred medicines and their use.

Staff at the College of Agriculture and Bioresources have been growing ceremonial tobacco in the agriculture building’s rooftop garden and in the university’s fields. With a frost set to hit on Friday, they’re spending the week harvesting it to be used when working with Indigenous elders.

For the past three years, Grant Wood, an assistant professor in the department of plant sciences, has been growing smoking tobacco.

Aside from no longer having to abide by legal limits on smoking tobacco plant numbers, the turn toward using strictly ceremonial tobacco, which is typically returned to the earth by an elder, just felt like the right thing to do, he said.

Wood consulted an elder prior to and throughout the process of growing to ensure he was doing so correctly.

“I find it’s kind of weird that to show respect to an elder, you give him or her a pack of smokes,” Wood said. “It just doesn’t seem respectful to me versus ‘Here’s tobacco that we locally grew, we grew with respect for the plant and for the land itself, and we’re presenting that.’ I mean, we’re in the College of Agriculture and Bioresources, we grow things. This, I think, has far more respect.”

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Gagnon is setting up a workshop within the college to provide an overview of how tobacco is used in ceremony and how to create a tie pouch, essentially a small cloth bundle tied with ribbon or fabric with tobacco placed inside that can be used as an offering.

Aside from that, he hopes the plant’s use and presence in the college will serve as a conversation starter around incorporating Indigenous knowledge and respect for ceremony, he said.

“When people are in the rooftop garden, they could potentially ask about that plant. That sort of stems into a conversation that it’s ceremonial tobacco and this is the use — just to develop that understanding from somebody who might be outside of Indigenous culture.” 

The college has shared plants and seeds with a few First Nations and organizations that work with Indigenous populations so they can grow their own crops.

amshort@postmedia.com

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