I first met Jennifer Marie Serna, a Latina folk herbalist, when she agreed to talk to me about a book I was researching on vibrant communities. Jennifer owns Wapato Island Farm on Sauvie Island, just 10 miles northwest of downtown Portland, Oregon. Half of the island's twenty four thousand acres is a protected wildlife area, and the rest is used primarily for farming. On the farm, Jennifer and her community practice folk traditions to cultivate plant medicine and food.
Wapato Island Farm is a place of convergence for several communities committed to honoring the earth and learning about its healing power. Indigenous practices, though labor intensive, are preferred to modern farming methods because they are more respectful of the land. For example, farm areas are intentionally left uncultivated to restore habitat, and there is a preference for native plants over annual ones. Rituals are an integral part of farming practices; they honor and commemorate the plants, the ancestors, and the unseen.
Since our first meeting, Jenny and I have continued to connect over coffee and walks, catching up on each other's lives, sharing ideas, and reflecting on how our views have evolved. During the past couple of years, she has developed a vision for extending the spirit and gifts of the farm to others. She and her colleagues have been working on a curriculum to teach the foundations of ancestral herbalism, in which participants would receive a land-based experience on the farm.
Her vision is to offer more intensive training at a school (tentatively called The Unschool) located at Wapato Island Farm. Those who participate, fifteen at a time, will be asked to commit to at least a two to three year program. They will each work their small plot of land and learn to grow medicine. One student, for example, might become intimate with just three types of plants. The school would be seasonal, and they would meet for an entire week twice yearly.
*Note: For brevity's sake, I refer to The Unschool as Jennifer's dream. While she birthed the initial vision, members of the farm community have frequent conversations about it, and its evolution is now a collective effort.
The curriculum will be deeply rooted in earth-based practices and promote relationship building with the land, the self, and broader systems. For example, participants will learn to witness and listen to the land. They will learn through storytelling and be encouraged to ask questions such as, "What do the plants want to say and teach us?" The curriculum will guide students through an immersive experience to facilitate a deeper connection to their own intuition, which is the foundation for a medicine-making path with integrity.
Jennifer said, "There will be initiations and not just about plants and plant knowledge; there are many others to serve." By this, she means learning how to be of service to plants, to people, to pollinators, to what is growing under the ground, and to the unseen.
Jennifer recognizes that she needs to do less physical labor to make this dream a reality. She says, "I've been managing a greenhouse, two high tunnels [a type of greenhouse where the sides roll up], the farm, the volunteers, the medicine making, and selling products." Jenny recognizes that to make the next phase of the farm a reality, she must let go of oversight of the day-to-day details. She sees herself shifting to a role analogous to mycelium, the connective tissue to a growing network.
The human curriculum teachers (the plants being honored teachers), will be from Wapato Island Farm and other nearby communities. She said, "There's going to be about 13 of us. We will bring in people who are good at their skill." For example, Jenny would teach plant medicine and cleaning (e.g., energy healing or limpias). Someone else might teach tanning leather and another fermenting.
Jennifer wants more people to learn to bring medicine into themselves, to heal themselves. She says, "That includes healthy food and [plant] medicine. But if you don't have access to healthy food, you can bless your food and bring [those blessings] into it. [You can say, for example:] 'I'm so grateful for this apple that, you know, has been in the cooler for three months, but I still get to eat it.'"
Recently, the farm received a grant from the Meyer Memorial Trust, a foundation whose mission is to accelerate racial, social, and economic justice. This grant will help make The Unschool a reality, with the first cohort starting in the spring of 2024. They can now hire some of the farm's committed volunteers. She hopes to find someone to oversee some of the land work so that she can immerse herself in The Unschool’s launch.
I asked her what kind of students she envisioned. "It will be BIPOC-centered but not exclusive – there will be space for everyone. The type of people we seek have a sense of eldership, humility, curiosity, dedication, devotion, and love. We are putting out first what kind of person we want, so people respond who are of that heart, or it pulls that out of them."
Jennifer and her community are also looking for ways to fund a brick-and-mortar tea house and apothecary in nearby Portland so that people can gather. In it, they will sell what is produced on the farm and through the school. "We can have a tea house where we are serving people from the medicines [e.g., herbs and mushrooms] that we are growing. We could serve our community, people that don't have access to go to the farm. And maybe someday," she continues, "there might be space to practice different forms of traditional healing and even a place where people can sweat."
With an eye toward the future, Jennifer envisions creating versions of The Unschool elsewhere. She said, "We have dreams of purchasing farms in other countries [where the farmers have roots] and having them become land-back projects," which return the land to the stewardship of Indigenous people. In each location, relationship-building, working together while folding in ritual, learning, and sharing skills and knowledge will create a new, generative, and vibrant community.