Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden

Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden

Author: Teresa Peterson

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024

224 pages; hard cover; 34 b/w photographs, $25.95

Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden highlights Dr. Teresa Peterson’s gifts as purveyor of rituals; canny, earthbound observations; and spiritual wisdom. The book seizes upon the basic, longstanding question: What is our relationship to the land? It invites us into a world of mundane, yet cyclical, domestic chores—planting, growing, harvesting food, and taking care of ourselves and each other. Within this carefully studied world, we discover time-honored truths about nature and ourselves. We’re also sure to find solace and guidance. I can simply describe this effort as a work of creative nonfiction about intimate, daily communion with the natural world and what it provisions.

Observing and intimately responding to seasonal cycles in her garden and surrounding rural fields in northern Minnesota, Peterson muses over the meaning of spiritual fulfillment aligned with Indigenous knowledge. Written over three years, this collection takes us through Peterson’s personal search for reconciliation with various aspects of her bicultural identity. Peterson is Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota, a member of the Upper Sioux Community, and biracial. For her, gardening offers space and opportunities to reclaim and reconnect with traditional Dakota food ways, including plant and animal identification, food gathering, food preservation, cooking, and land stewardship.

She writes presciently on a range of topics with grace, nuance, and honesty. She’s as equally comfortable discussing legacies of Indian boarding schools and negative consequences of increasing loss of prairie potholes as she is with shelling wamnaheza, an Indigenous variety of corn.

Writing from the heart of the Twin Cities, I’m reminded of the artifice of the built architecture around me—structures that never seem to foreclose on the allure and excesses of capitalism. Reading this book quickened an urge to reimagine simplicity over concrete and sewer belch. I reconsidered my own cumbersome, yet omnipresent nostalgia awakened by small things: a cedar branch weighed down by early snow; backyards shawled in peach skins by morning light. This book invests itself with place, place-making, and the flow of things brought together by a garden.

Yet, nostalgia is not what ignites nourishing aspects of this book. What does is Peterson’s call for food sovereignty. Recalling memories of food insecurity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, she asks readers to consider our relationship to food systems, post-pandemic: “Will we have changed society’s food systems? Will we continue to provide opportunities for families to adopt sustainable approaches that support local and family food sovereignty?”[1] Food sovereignty has no universal definition. But it loosely means the ability of local communities to determine how their food is produced and distributed, usually through socially just and sustainable methods. For Peterson, gardening seems the most direct means of doing so.

Too, it makes sense that she extols joys and possibilities of gardening, of taking tool in hand and working the land. “Working” is less adjacent to simple physical labor and more attenuated to making us aware of our responsibilities to reciprocity with nature proper and reclaiming connections between place and spirituality. She invites us to consider purposeful use of our abilities to awaken the senses, plan and prepare, and “draw on the wisdom of protocol”[2]—that is, understand how careful adherence to the steps of gathering and preparation improves waste reduction, efficiency, and conservation.

Peterson opens with this mantra: “Gardening is ceremony.”[3] I gather that ceremony is (re)enactment of daily activities (directed, in many ways, by seasonal change) that, as Peterson puts it, “. . . intersect[s] with the tenets of sacred rites, rituals, and observations.”[4] And the book’s formal qualities make plain this theme. Many vignettes in the narrative describe daily endeavors that resolve into insightful life lessons.

Poetry prefaces each of the book’s four chapters, titled Wetu (spring), Bdoketu (summer), Ptaŋyetu (fall), and Waniyetu (winter). Chapter subsections revolve around activities, observations, transformations, and celebrations enjoyed by Peterson and her family in growing and preparing their own food. Recipes conclude most of these sections with ingredient lists, handling and mixing instructions, notes on taste, and, at times, relevant personal and family anecdotes.

Obvious strengths of this book include Peterson’s transparency about lessons learned in the simple process of gardening and the sustainable practices required to ensure continued produce for the future. Her clear, dexterous prose is natural and unforced. Honest, transparent, and highly descriptive is perhaps more apt. I appreciated the inclusion of photographs; such visuals helped me glean more about Peterson’s persistent nod toward the senses. While the book includes a few pages of helpful reading and resources, it lacks an index. Also, a list of recipe pages would have been helpful.

Minnesota publishers have long since taken pride in publishing quality books on Native American life, history, and culture. Peterson’s Perennial Ceremony, published by the University of Minnesota Press, wholesomely continues this tradition. She and her uncle, Walter LaBatte Jr., previously coauthored Voices from Pejuhutazizi: Dakota Stories and Storytellers (2022. She also wrote the children’s book Grasshopper Girl (2019).

Perennial Ceremony shares with readers the author’s spiritual awareness and growth. The book reminds us, in uncompromising terms, that the land is a relative. It invites us to reclaim our common sense of savoring and discovery. This book is aimed at popular audiences, and those interested in food sovereignty and sustainability will find ample inspiration here.

Renoir Gaither is a poet and former academic librarian. He has held positions at the Shapiro Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan and Magrath Library at the University of Minnesota. He is a member of the Ramsey County Historical Society Editorial Board.

NOTES

[1] Teresa Peterson, Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024), 150.

[2] Peterson, 103.

[3] Peterson, 1.

[4] Peterson, 10.