… to the blog for Group 28, which will be developing a Digital Ethnobotany of Traditional Food Plants, at the Aboriginal Teaching and Research Garden at UBC Farm.
Our group will be working here for our Community Service Learning Project. We will be assisting in the creation of a digital ethnobotany of traditional food plants that are found in the garden. The members of our group are Jen, Laura, Ava, Saki, Hayley, Zineb and Nathan and we come from various backgrounds including APBI, Anthropology and GRS.
We have divided our tasks as follows: Jen is our liaison with the community partner, and is currently contacting them to find out more about our next move. Hayley is in charge of within-group communications (such as the creation of shared Google documents), as well as photography (for the blog and potentially for the ethnobotany database). Zineb and Nathan will be writing drafts of our blog posts, which will be discussed by everyone so we make sure to include all information and perspectives. Ava will administrate the blog, ensuring that posts are on time, fulfill criteria, and are well-presented. Saki and Laura will be in charge of our presentations throughout the term. The actual legwork of doing research and creating the digital ethnobotany collection will be shared amongst everyone.
We are each very interested in this particular project because we are eager to know more about the use of locally-native plants as food, medicine and preventative methods against common diseases. We are also interested in the social side of the project, which consists of interacting with the UBC Farm community and the Aboriginal community. We are looking forward to creating a platform for Aboriginal individuals to share their knowledge. We hope that our project will make a connection to things learned in LFS 250, which highlighted the differences between fast knowledge and slow knowledge, where our project consists of making the slow knowledge of the elders available to the public through fast knowledge.
Our group is very diverse and many of us have skills that will help us with this project. One of our members has a degree in anthropology and sociology, which can help us with the social and intercultural aspect of this project. A few of us have also taken a medicinal herbs class or independently studied edible west coast plants, which will help not only with the identification of plants, but also with the labeling and descriptions that we will be working with. One of our group members has also taken an Aboriginal Forestry class, in which one of the components was highlighting the importance of medicinal herbs in the lives of First Nations individuals in Canada.
We are very excited to have been assigned this project and are already exploring ways that we can create a database that will share the valuable knowledge of the Aboriginal community!
At the garden