FPIC explained
Free, Prior and Informed Consent in plain language — what it actually requires, and where it comes from in UNDRIP. One page.
Resources & talks
Take what is useful.
Some of this work is meant to be handed out. The exercises and explainers below are free to download, use in your own classroom or farm group, and pass on. The talks further down are the sessions Celeste comes and delivers in person.
Start here
Which treaty is your farm on?
A land acknowledgement names the nations whose territory you are on. It does not tell you what was agreed, or what that agreement asks of you. That second part is the treaty — and if you farm in Ontario, you are almost certainly farming under one.
Six steps, about twenty minutes. Written for EFAO members, useful to anyone farming on treaty land.
- 1Find your coordinates
- 2Look up the territory
- 3Get the name and number
- 4Read the treaty text
- 5Find the other account
- 6Meet your neighbours
New · free download
The Seedkeepers — Cultural Seeds Resource Guide
Four pages of where to look next: books, articles, documentaries, podcasts, and the Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations working on seed and food sovereignty here and internationally.
Cajete on Native Science, Kimmerer, Diane Wilson, Gilbert Wilson. The Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, the Kenhteke Seed Sanctuary, Seed Savers Exchange. La Via Campesina, the Nyéléni movement, the CSIPM at the UN Committee on World Food Security.
Made for people who have just found this work and want somewhere to start. Take it, print it, hand it round.
Free to take
Explainers and maps
Use these in class, at a farm meeting, in a board packet. Credit is welcome but not required — a link back to culturalseeds.ca is enough.
FPIC and social movements
The questions that come up when organizations try to apply FPIC in practice, answered. For unions, NGOs and farm groups working alongside Indigenous communities.
The global food sovereignty movement
Who is who across the international food sovereignty movement — La Via Campesina, the CSIPM, the CFS — and how the pieces connect.
Our work and the UN Sustainable Development Goals
How the work at Ga Gitigemi Gamik maps onto eight of the SDGs — hunger, health, education, gender equality, inequality, sustainable communities, climate and life on land. Useful as a template if you need to make the same case to a funder.
Find your own treaty
The four sources the exercise sends you to: native-land.ca, whose.land, the Ontario treaties map, and the Crown–Indigenous Relations treaty texts.
Bring Celeste in
Talks & sessions
Delivered live, not downloaded. Each has been given to farm organizations, conferences, school boards and universities, and each can be cut to an hour or opened out to a full day. This is not a fixed menu — sessions can also be written for your audience and your problem.
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The problem with land acknowledgements
Why the acknowledgement became a ritual, what it leaves out, and how to move a room from naming territory to understanding the agreement that covers it. The session most groups should start with.
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Building treaty relationships
What the treaties actually promised, whether those promises were kept, and what an ongoing relationship looks like for a farm, a board or an institution sitting on treaty land.
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The Seven Sisters: Indigenous science explained
The Seven Sisters garden as a working agricultural system rather than a symbol — how the plantings hold each other up, and what that says about how knowledge is built and tested.
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Spiritual and cultural connection to land
Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a system with its own methods and obligations, and what changes for people who farm once they take that seriously.
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Indigenous science for science teachers
A PD day for science and environment departments. How to teach TEK as a knowledge system with its own methods and standing, so it sits in the curriculum as science rather than as culture bolted on beside it.
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FPIC in practice
Free, Prior and Informed Consent past the definition and into the room where decisions get made — what consent requires, where consultation quietly substitutes for it, and how to build protocols that flush out power before the grant is written.
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Indigenous climate leadership
Climate work that starts from Indigenous knowledge rather than adding it at the end — and what it would take to actually let Indigenous people lead the response instead of consulting them about it. From the La Via Campesina Climate Action Committee and COP28.
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Food sovereignty from the field to the UN
How the work connects — a seed saved on Manitoulin Island, a policy negotiated in Rome. Drawn from the CSIPM at the UN Committee on World Food Security, La Via Campesina and the National Farmers Union.
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Built for your room
Nothing on this list is a limit. Bring the audience and the problem and the session gets written for it. Commissioned talks carry a development fee alongside delivery.
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Facilitated workshops
KAIROS Blanket Exercise, Faceless Dolls, and restorative justice circles — all formally certified, and run for groups that want to do rather than listen.
Before you call it done
Get in touch
You should be able to say five things.
The name and date of the treaty covering your land. Which nation or nations signed it. Three things the Crown promised. Whether those promises were kept. And how that nation describes the agreement.
Want the session behind the handout?
The free material is the short version. The full sessions run from an hour to a full day, in person or remote.
