What is LongGreenHouse?

LongGreenHouse

LongGreenHouse is a cross-cultural partnership for deep sustainability involving Anikwom WholeLife Center, PermacultureMe, and UMaine Still Water Lab.

Weaving together Indigenous culture, Permaculture, and Digital Culture, the project develops a Living/Learning model for sustainable living in this bioregion based on the intersection of evolutionary wisdom, natural patterns, and social networking. 

We run a multi-age integrated homeschool, Wassookeag, based on an experiential and ecological curriculum; operate a Permaculture laboratory for UMaine graduate and undergrad courses; develop and implement protocol for Longhouse living in partnership with Wabanak elders, including Miigam’agan, Mi’maq clan mother, and gkisedtanamoogk, Wampanoag elder; and develop global social networks with state of the art network technologies. 

LongHouse

The Wabanaki(and Haudenosaunee) Longhouse is a deep technology for organizing life in a sustainable way by following the patterns and flows of the natural world rather than working against them. Similar to Indigenous European clan systems, and centered around the network model of natural motherhood, the Longhouse maintains sovereignty at the center of the family, with all larger social structures supporting and nurturing it. 

Unlike the power hierarchies at the center of Empire and globalization which bully all smaller or more local structures, the Longhouse is the original model of true working democracy which has fueled a dream of harmonious, non-violent living around the world, and was the original inspiration for the early models of US democracy.

The Longhouse may be one of the deep technologies for returning peace to this continent; peace between humans and the natural world; and peace between so-called “civilized” peoples and indigenous peoples. This peace will in turn ensure that the ‘civilized’ world can learn from and benefit from the hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary knowledge built into the wisdom of indigenous peoples worldwide who know how to live in their particular bioregions in deep sustainable ways.

GreenHouse

Greenhouse refers to our work of restoring and nurturing our natural ecosystem, and the healing of relations between humans and the land. Our technologies include Permaculture, organic farming, non-violent communication with all living beings, and Ceremony, the ancient local protocols that weave humans into the Web of Life.

Our lab on the south side of the UMaine campus in Orono features swales, cold frames, a four-season greenhouse, small orchard, herb gardens, and annual and perennial plants. We are slowly developing a food forest at the edge of the campus with the intention of ‘infecting’ the whole campus with beautiful, green, edible landscaping, and examples of natural beauty and harmony that can sustain our bellies and our hearts.

In cooperation with allies and neighbors, we also expand our network to local sites all over Maine (Humustacia Gardens, New Forest Institute, Bioneers, Aveena Botanicals, Green Etc, Rogers Farm), joining green arms in an expanding web of life.

Locally and in our extended network, we work with UMaine undergraduates, grad students, Upward Bound high school students, Wassookeag children, neighbors, and sustainability experts from our local bioregion. See our blog for upcoming workshops, courses, celebrations, and ongoing events!

Still Water

A research arm of the New Media Department of the University of Maine at Orono, Still Water was founded in 2002 by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito to study and build network art and culture.

Although the program’s title derives from the name of a river that flows alongside the physical facility, “still water” also connotes the values electronic and cultural networks need to thrive.

These include transparency, open access to ideas and code; variability, the capacity to morph into new configurations as the need arises; and stillness, a rare quality in today’s frenetic culture but one demanded by any creative endeavor. Still Water is not a center–for a successful network has none–but a medium primed for the transmission of multiple waves of culture. 

Still Water also recognizes the political use of the renaming of the Penobscot river to Stillwater–as a means of violating the treaties that establish all islands in the Penobscot River to the indigenous tribe of this area. We seek to honor those treaties by recognizing that our current ‘occupation’ is illegal, and that any peaceful co-existence depends on our development of trust and friendship with our hosts. We believe that the local networks–natural and social–need this peace-weaving in order to thrive, especially in the face of recent tensions in our state inflamed as a way for the hierarchies to maintain their power over the people–all people. We reject their hate-baiting, and offer the example, instead of peaceful co-existence, and real, local, sustainable democracy.

Wassookeag

Established in 1985, Wassookeag is a nondenominational, not-for-profit cooperative homeschool based on parent involvement, ecological curriculum, and experiential learning for grades 1 through 8.

We are a community of home school students, university students and faculty, families, elders and educators with a shared philosophy working to create a progressive learning environment based on Earth Community. We build community by nurturing each child’s individual strengths and accommodating their needs in a responsive and respectful environment.

Since fall 2007, Wassookeag makes its home in the green belt at the south edge of the UMaine campus, in alliance with the LongGreenHouse project of the University of Maine, a unique collaboration among Native American elders, international permaculture experts, and New Media faculty. Our goal is to create multi-age Living/Learning Nodes for Sustainability integrating Digital Culture, Permaculture and Indigenous Culture.

If you are interested in our work or are engaged in similar work, please let us know.

Website:
wassookeag.org

Contact info:
info AT wassookeag.org