Wapato Table Unschool

Tending is the true Teacher

We are so excited to share in wisdom and community and can’t wait to meet the amazing group that feels called to walk this path with us. Thank you!

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We all come to the land in different states of relationship with it. Part of Ancestral Herbalism is remembering who we are when we interact with the world, and it begins in the soil, with our hands, and in our bodies. Describe your experience with cooking, plants, and herbal medicine, and include your view of your ancestral connection to land, plants, and medicine.

Working on the land can be a surprisingly difficult journey of processing and healing grief. One of the lessons that ancestral land-tending teaches us is fortitude and self-reliance, even as we grow and nourish connections. If we don’t show up and follow through, we don’t get to eat, on a basic level. We ask you to be mindful of this before applying and take time to consider how you foster resilience within yourself. Please be prepared to seek care from your existing support systems so you can show up in wholeness and support for the land and for our collective. Our staff and volunteers are not trained mental health professionals, and the plants deserve a relationship of care before we ask them to intercede for us. We encourage every member of our community to find the support, personal rituals, and healing practices that nourish them, so all of our offerings can be reciprocal rather than extractive. Describe your support system and how you take care of yourself during challenging times.

Our program is a year-long commitment, from four to two days per month. We will be in weather, will confront grief and joy, and will be in interpersonal spaces of relationship. Community comes in levels, and Wapato Table won’t replace yours but our group will become partners in seeing the world through new-old eyes. A learning and practicing relationship deserves care and respect. Please consider the reliability of your transportation, your ability to commit to our class meetings, and your capacity to hold grief and attend to your learning or make space for other people’s. There is always space for you to care for yourself at Wapato Table; at the same time we want to reiterate that attending our Ancestral Herbalism School is a time/space commitment that should be prioritized. Do you have any issues or concerns around participation, attendance, transportation, or anything else that we should discuss ahead of time?

We are honored to create a curriculum that honors the wisdom of the land. We know that all of us have had different paths to the soil, and from it. During class, we will try to hold very personal questions and requests for the end of the session. Your individual story is precious, and we want to honor it. So ahead of our meeting, in one page or less, go ahead and share. Tell us how you found out about Wapato Table, why you are interested in learning with us, and anything else you want us to know about your journey to this destination.

We are grateful to offer each community member a 10’x10’ plot of land to tend medicine on. Enrolling in the Unschool is a commitment to growing medicine and caring for a piece of earth. You’ll keep half of what you grow, and the other half will be donated to the community. You will most likely coordinate with each other to tend to the plants. We’ll collaborate with you to design the plots and pick plants that work with realistic watering, weeding, and tending agreements. We don’t expect you to know how to farm but we are interested in what experience you bring to the process. How does this commitment sit with you? What prior experience do you have growing plants?

Is there anything else you would like to share with us? Thank you for your application! We look forward to reading your careful responses.