We’re firmly on a learning path to practice indigenous food and forest stewardship on SHO’s 1300 acres. This has become the main direction of our work: relearning old food and life ways, changing our fundamental relationship to the land and to our plant and animal relatives. Shawn is an Indigenous woman of the Americas with blended ancestry: Cherokee and Mexican American. She is also a land consultant specializing in conservation.
At SHO, we look to the forest for food and medicine, especially the abundant mushrooms and fungi in Vermont’s abundant forests. We share food and medicine with an extended community of supporters through our Liquid Forest CSA, bringing more people into a vital relationship with the land. We have much to examine and unlearn from our colonial mindset, grappling with the consequences of an extractive economy and a fractured relationship to life. We seek to redress the deep separation between people, the land, and her inhabitants in the coming decades and generations.