Cultivating Relationships
Rebecca Wong
See it On Campus: Level 2
I would love to have you visit my installation! Find my project on the east side of the building on level 2, the last table to the right along the row of tables, across from financial services.
Visitor Info
Cultivating Relationships is a guide for growing new relationships and deepening existing relationships through reciprocity, communication and understanding what your offerings are framed around your practice. Looking to plants and non-human relationships, this guide prompts ways on how to follow their guidance in caring for one another.
When we cultivate relationships, how might we practice responsibility to one another?
“The practice of observing the living world and taking inspiration for human ways of living from its model is an essential element of Indigenous science. It embraces the reality that there are intelligences other than our own, from whom we might learn. ”
Robin Wall Kimmerer in The Serviceberry
The Booklet
How to follow plant guidance in caring for one another
A guide for growing new relationships and deepening existing relationships within your practice by looking to plants and non-human relationships and learning about their systems of relationality, interdependence and reciprocity.
Grounding Your Practice Card Deck
Questions to understand our passions, processes, and practices
In the Pacific Northwest, you might find the Pacific Western Red Cedar, Red Huckleberry, and Salal Berry near each other as members of a plant guild, a relationship between a group of plants that support one another. Like plants within a plant guild, who know and share their unique gifts to nurture each other and mutually flourish, the deck asks questions to understand our passions, processes, and practices that make up our offerings and share our gifts with others.
Share the lessons you’ve learned from plants with me and the community <3
Share something that plants have taught you and add it to the community deck
The Lessons from Plants card features a Salmonberry flower, a plant that teaches us about interdependence as they feed insects, birds, deer, and squirrels. They shade streams and keep waters cool for spawning salmon. In return, these animals care for salmonberry through fertilizing the soil, pruning branches, pollination, and seed dispersal. Salmonberrries are an example of when we share our gifts with others, the whole community grows stronger.
Plant knowledge from Plant Teachings for Growing Social-Emotional Skills
Plant Walk with LoriAnn Bird
How to engage in reciprocity by learning about the interdependent and scared relationships between all living things
This framework is based off of my own interpretations and understandings of the knowledge that has been shared with me and is not universal and may not apply to everyone. It can be used to consider what reciprocal relationships might look like based on my lived experiences and research. As someone who is still learning, this is continuous work and a work that is in process. I’m always open to feedback and learning from your experiences.
This work gratefully takes place on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations in what is called Vancouver, BC. As a guest to these lands, I acknowledge that in practicing responsible and mutual relationships with each other, that these practices extend to relationships with the land. I’m grateful to learn what it means to be in mutual relationship with the land, through the Indigenous peoples who have relationships with these lands since time immemorial.
I want to acknowledge the tragedy that happened at the Lapu Lapu festival and extend care to the family, friends and communities affected. Please consider ways you could support.
While we graduate from ECU, I also want to acknowledge that there are no universities left in Gaza.
