By Chandlee Begay, Swette Center student worker
Yá’át’ééh (Hello), My name is Chandlee Begay, and I am a student at Arizona State University, pursuing a double-major in Ocean Futures and Sustainability within the Rob Walton College of Global Futures. My academic and personal mission is rooted in a profound purpose: to integrate Indigenous philosophy and traditional ecological knowledge into community farming and gardening. By focusing on sustainable food systems and local food production, I aim to protect and revitalize Indigenous traditions in the face of our world’s growing environmental challenges.
My journey with the land began simply. As a child, I was fueled with an innate curiosity about the natural world, spending my time exploring the outdoors and experimenting with planting seeds in small pots. While my family shared an appreciation for plants, their sprouts rarely survived long, yet mine thrived. With consistent care and attention to whatever I planted, I quickly realized I have a green thumb.
While I gathered fragments of these agricultural practices throughout my youth, it wasn’t until college that I truly began to reconnect with my Navajo heritage. Through my coursework, particularly in Dr. Melissa Nelson’s class on Indigenous food systems, I began studying seed conservation and traditional agriculture deeply. It was during these studies that I discovered Zuni waffle gardens (named hek’ko:wo in the Zuni language). Used widely across the Colorado Plateau, this brilliant dry-farming practice uses raised clay berms and sunken basins to retain moisture and create a sheltered microclimate for plants. Superbly adapted to the arid desert through centuries of climate observation, the Zuni waffle garden relies on traditional seed varieties carefully selected to match the seasonal environment.
In March 2024, our Indigenous food systems class, led by Dr. Nelson, gathered early one morning at Maya’s Farm. Together, we prepared the soil and shaped the ground into distinct waffle squares, putting traditional dry-farming knowledge to the test. This hands-on project was driven by a shared, fundamental belief that food is medicine and community is essential to nourishment. My ultimate goal is to integrate this traditional agricultural wisdom into Western academic food system frameworks. This work transcends standard definitions of sustainability; it is directly centered on amplifying Indigenous voices, achieving food sovereignty, and honoring the sheer resilience of our native foodways.
Over the past three semesters, my role has expanded from student to advocate, seed-keeper, and land steward through leading agricultural demonstrations on campus. I love blending cultural teachings with hands-on techniques. From sowing seeds to harvesting crops, the land has taught me invaluable lessons in patience, observation, and care values that actively shape my approach to stewardship.
I built on this foundation by working directly with Maya’s Farm through the ASU Farm project, gaining an understanding of the fundamentals of manual farm labor and land maintenance. Soon after, I partnered with the ASU West Gardens to facilitate an educational workshop on “Three Sisters” gardening, introducing participants to traditional polyculture companion-planting methods.
Through all my work, I’m dedicated to inviting the broader ASU community to view food not merely as a commercial commodity, but as a reciprocal relationship. Today, my workshops have successfully expanded across multiple ASU campuses, including West, Tempe, and Polytechnic.
Driven to keep this momentum going, I also brought these teachings to the ASU Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems and joined their team as a student worker. In this role, I recently led a waffle gardening workshop with Tonatierra in central Phoenix. It was a great experience in sharing the Indigenous polyculture wisdom with the broader community outside of ASU.
These experiences have profoundly deepened my understanding of climate resilience and traditional ecological knowledge. The modern environmental and organizing hurdles are coordinating and leading the community participants in the workshops, adapting to the seasonal changes in seed varieties, and staying alert for outside factors, like animals foraging in the garden space. These challenges had sharpened my skills in teamwork and community problem-solving as we navigate planting cycles, traditional wisdom, and reciprocity.
Reclaiming native seeds is a powerful act of healing. It mends broken relationships, brings back cultural knowledge, and restores Indigenous control over our food systems. This work has shown me that true sustainability requires a cultural and social solution. It is not just about conserving natural resources; it is about restoring the vital connections between people, the land, and our traditions. We need to focus less on ourselves and more on the natural world around us.
These demonstrations are so much more than simple gardening lessons; they are active blueprints for seed preservation, climate adaptation, kinship, and responsibility of the Earth. Through my own journey of reconnecting to traditional foods, I am walking the paths of my ancestors who dug, tilled, sowed, and harvested before me. This is a movement of cultural renewal, keeping our traditions alive and ensuring the next generations endure as proud bearers of the seed.