Cultural Seeds beaded strawberry heart medallion

The same work, in your hands

Seeds, plants & goods

Seed volume is deliberately small right now — most of the year goes to teaching and advising. What is available goes out by sale or by trade, by season rather than from a shelf. Shirts and goods carry the work further than a seed packet can.

A seed table laid out on a red and grey blanket: jars of beans in many colours, cobs of multicoloured corn, tobacco seed pods, a black ash basket and a seed identification board. — The travelling seed table — beans by the jar, corn in every colour, tobacco gone to pod, and a seed-to-seed board for anyone who wanted to know what they were looking at.

A single grain of manoomin held in an open palm, with a tarp of harvested rice behind. — Manoomin — wild rice — being parched and winnowed at the Mamaw Kimiciminan gathering in Thunder Bay. Birchbark baskets, a wooden pole, and one grain at a time.

Birchbark baskets holding parched and unparched manoomin beside a winnowing pole and a tarp of drying rice. — Manoomin — wild rice — being parched and winnowed at the Mamaw Kimiciminan gathering in Thunder Bay. Birchbark baskets, a wooden pole, and one grain at a time.

A group standing together on the land at Kagawong on a cold clear day, bare trees and bush behind them. — On the land at Kagawong.

Celeste Smith holding a jar of black corn in a community seed bank in Oaxaca, shelves of labelled accessions behind her. — Invited into the Banco de Semillas Sur Sureste in Oaxaca — holding maíz corto negro from Santiago Textitlán, grown at 2,339 metres.

Black ash and sweetgrass baskets, pottery, dried corn husks, a feather and a seedling, on a shelf above books on Haudenosaunee food preparation and useful plants. — Baskets, husks, pottery, a seedling. The books underneath are the same subject in another form.

Sale or trade

Heritage seeds & plants

Available on request through the season. Trade is a real option, not a courtesy — if you are holding something worth growing on, say so.

Request by season

No charge

Rematriation

If you are holding a variety with Indigenous origins and you want it to get back where it belongs, get in touch. That work is free.

Always open

Taught, not sold

The Seven Sisters garden

How the varieties work together in one planting rather than as separate crops. Taught for farms, schools and groups — the teaching Celeste has brought to EFAO conferences.

Book a session

Wearable

Shirts & goods

T-shirts and other goods carrying the work. Every sale puts something back into the sanctuary at Kagawong.

Ask what is in stock

Ga Gitigemi Gamik

The seed sanctuary

The land-based side, at Kagawong since 2020 — an Indigenous seed sanctuary and land-based learning centre, running on solar since the 2024 build. Its own site lives at wewillplantlodge.com.

Manitoulin Island

Goods

Food Sovereignty Now!

Buttons, shirts and other goods carrying the work of Ga Gitigemi Gamik and Cultural Seeds. Wearable, cheap to post, and they start the conversation for you.

Ask what is in stock — runs are small and seasonal.

Ask about goods

Where the seed knowledge comes from

Seed keeping is taught, not looked up.

Alongside her family’s agricultural traditions and thirty years of growing, Celeste is in the Seed Seva seasonal distance mentorship with Rowen White at Sierra Seeds — eight modules that follow the growing year from spring through to seed harvest.

Rowen White is a seedkeeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, founder and director of Sierra Seeds, national coordinator of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, and chair of the board of Seed Savers Exchange. Seed Seva teaches seed stewardship as a whole culture — practical skills, cultural context and memory together, rather than technique on its own.

Which is also why seed leaves here through relationship rather than through a shopping cart.

Short documentary

Ga Gitigemi Gamik on film.

The National Farmers Union and the documentary makers at March Forth Creative filmed forty farms across Canada for Depth of Field: Films About Farming, funded through Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Nine were in Ontario. Ga Gitigemi Gamik was one of them, and the series went on to screen at close to forty community events nationwide.

The film follows the work of building an ecological centre on permanently Indigenous-stewarded land on Manitoulin Island, and the effort to bring back agricultural knowledge that colonization interrupted.

Directed by Sarah Douglas and Tamer Soliman, March Forth Creative, for the National Farmers Union. Now distributed as a classroom resource through Magic Lantern Media.

Watch the film The full series