Indigenous Garden Launch

Shé:kon sewakwé:kon, Greetings one and all, the First Peoples Studies warmly invites you to join in celebrating the Opening Ceremony of the Indigenous Garden at Loyola Campus at Concordia University.

What began in Fall 2025 as a student-led vision has grown into a living project of care, collaboration, and community. Since its beginnings, students in the First Peoples Studies (FPST) program have been working collectively to bring this garden to life—grounding it in Indigenous values, land-based learning, and the teachings of reciprocity.

The garden will serve as a learning and gathering space for students, staff, and community members, while offering Indigenous students a safe(r) and grounded space to reconnect with their roots through planting, tending, and harvesting traditional foods and medicines. The garden will also continue to support Indigenous students in two ways: by allowing future students to carry forward the responsibility of caring for the garden and the Otsenhákta Student Centre (OSC) and for past students to pass down the valuable land-based life skills they learned in the garden to their future families and relations.

Looking ahead, we envision a thriving and abundant garden filled with vegetables and medicines that will yield harvests for dishes at our student gatherings, weekly soup and bannock kitchens, and be shared with local shelters when harvests are plentiful.

It will also be a space for education, healing, and ceremony; and a place to strengthen relationships with the Kanien’kehá:ka communities of Kahnawà:ke & Kanehsatà:ke.

This project is also part of a larger commitment to Land Back and reconciliation, by creating tangible pathways for universities like Concordia University to build meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities through action, stewardship, and accountability.

Date: Friday, May 22
Time: 10AM – 2PM
Location: 7075 Rue Terrebonne, Loyola Campus, Concordia University