Teaching Garden

The Teaching Garden located at Blair Outdoor Education Centre was built in a collaborative effort by White Owl Native Ancestry Association (WONAA) and the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) to serve as a space of learning for Indigenous Land-based programming and education for students in grades four through twelve. The garden officially began at the 2019 Earth Day Reconciliation Tree Plant, seeing more than 200 individuals place their hands in the soil and witness the unfolding of the garden's design. In the garden’s first year of growth, Garrison McCleary (former Coordinator of Land-based Education and Programming at WONAA) and Nathan Mantey (Outdoor Educator for the WRDSB at Blair Outdoor Education Centre) spent countless hours with students sowing, watering, singing, and relating to the large variety of local Indigenous foods planted there. The garden welcomed over 2000 students from school across the Waterloo region in its first year.

Since the Spring of 2019, the Blair Teaching Garden has almost tripled in size, not only continuing to provide experiential learning opportunities and relationship building between students and the Land, but by providing much needed food assistance to community members who attend the local schools. Much of the produce from the Teaching Garden is contributes to the food basket program, alongside the foods and medicines grown at the other Wisahkotewinowak gardens.