Seed Stories: Strengthening our Ancient Roots

Join Lucy Grignon of Ancient Roots Homestead and Ancestral Rebel as she shares about Indigenous gardening, traditional seed relatives, an act of returning home to her ancestral homelands, and recipes infused with Indigenous ingredients. This is a virtual event. Click here to register for this program!(Please enter the Newton Free Library in the home library category.) About the presenter: Lucy Grignon is an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Nation and a direct descendant of the Menominee Nation, Muh-he-con-ne-ok being of the People of the Waters that are never still, and Menominee being of the Ancient movers. Her work centers Indigenous foodways, cultural revitalization, community education, storytelling, and relational approaches to land stewardship and healing. A community-taught chef, educator, artist, photographer, writer, and advocate, Grignon brings an interdisciplinary and deeply place-based approach to cultural practice rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems, collective care, and intergenerational learning. Her family owns an Indigenous Homestead called Ancient Roots in Bowler, Wisconsin, where they research traditional gardening practices from their Ancestors dating back from ages ago to present day. They use a combination of ancestral methods to learn, preserve, grow, seed save, reconnect, and share. Grignon is the co-creator of AncestralRebel, a collaborative public humanities and culinary initiative that bridges Indigenous and South Asian food traditions, histories, and storytelling practices. Through feasts, workshops, talks, and participatory gatherings, AncestralRebel explores how food, kinship, migration, and shared cultural practice can function as tools for decolonial dialogue, community-building, and cultural memory. Her approach to food, education, and writing, is inspired by her Ancestors, long line of lineage, Community, and learning from observing her older than human relatives. She is a former Forge Project Fellow, a fellowship program supporting Indigenous artists, cultural practitioners, organizers, and researchers engaged in community-rooted and relational cultural work. She is additionally a recipient of the 2026 Create Wisconsin State Artist Award. This program is hosted by theBerkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield in collaboration with other Massachusetts Libraries.