Healing through Harvest Festival at Signal Hill Elementary School

Um’nay’lhminas i núkwa sk’ul’tsám’s lhelti lepcáltensa.

 The one who grew a garden is sharing some of the harvest.

Signal Hill Elementary's beautiful "Healing Through Harvest" garden provides a "seed to table" educational journey for Signal Hill Elementary students (K to Grade 7), which aims to deeply engage the whole school community, with reconciliation at its heart. Students work with their teachers to start the seeds for the garden in their classrooms in the springtime, and when the time is right, they plant the sprouted seeds in the garden. Over the summer months, small groups of parent volunteers maintain the garden. Come fall, when the students return to the classroom, they work with their teachers to harvest the vegetables from the garden just in time for the annual Healing through Harvest Festival.

On October 27, Signal Hill Elementary School celebrated their annual Healing through Harvest Festival. Ordinarily, Pemberton's Healing through Harvest festival features pit-cooked garden vegetables and a traditional ceremony in October, and the event involves the entire community. Due to the pandemic, the last "pit-cook" was two years ago. This year, the school pivoted to follow public health guidelines and to celebrate the festival. Randy Jones from Mile One Eating House, worked with a small group of students in the days leading up to prepare the produce grown in the garden and volunteers from the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre worked with a small group of students to prepare bannock. The event on the 27th was a great success. Randy Jones boiled the prepared medley of vegetables over a fire pit out front of the school and pureed the vegetables to make a delicious vegetable soup inclusive of all dietary needs. Class by class, students lined up and were served soup made from carrots, potatoes, onions and squash grown from their very own garden, accompanied with a piece of of bannock that was also prepared by the students.

A big thank you to Randy Jones from Mile One, the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre and the Signal Hill PAC for making this event possible. 

The community garden is made possible through the care of community members, parents, educators, and students. Funding for the community garden came from a Civil Forfeiture Grant that the school's Parent Advisory Council obtained.