DENVER — The AmeriCorps members of City Year Denver spent Indigenous Peoples Day helping the underserved as part of their service.
The group, which supports educational equity, usually spends service days tutoring and mentoring students in under-sourced Denver-area classrooms. For Indigenous Peoples Day, their range of service included rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. They spent the morning working with Spirit of the Sun, a local Indigenous farming nonprofit that empowers Native communities through their food share program.
“We’re harvesting amaranth, we’re harvesting corn and then we’re also doing some de-weeding today,” said Caleb Zuniga, City Year Denver’s managing director of people and operations. “Today, we are serving the lands that we inhabit and so we’ll have a day of reflection after this just to think about what this meant.”
City Year Denver along with members of the Credit Union of Colorado lent a helping hand harvesting fruits and vegetables for Spirit of the Sun. Evalina Kirkpatrick is an Indigenous agriculture team member for the group and said the community-based support is important to help move forward from the painful memories of the past.
“We need each other to develop an ecosystem not just with the land but with each other,” Kirkpatrick said. “The more folks who have knowledge of Indigenous foodways and ways of cultivating the land in a way that is supportive of both the earth and ourselves, it’s how we are going to build a movement that is sustainable and supports the land and ourselves as community.”
Spirit of the Sun holds a food program every Friday and Sunday with Denver Food Rescue and Food Bank of the Rockies with the goal of feeding Indigenous elders and families in need in Colorado. Kirkpatrick said she hopes the support goes beyond their gardens.
“Today they planted a seed in their hearts that’s going to continue to grow,” she said. “[We] encourage them to continue doing this work with the land and with their communities as well.”
City Year Denver student success coach Rynn Parrack volunteered her time to help with the harvest. She said she feels it’s important to give back to those who have been disenfranchised or oppressed.
“Just because of what has happened in the past doesn’t mean that we are necessarily required to follow those same regulations or examples,” Parrack said. “I feel very proud to serve with an organization like City Year who is willing to build partnerships with outside organizations so that way when we say we want to create equity, we’re actually putting in the work to create that equity.”
After the morning harvesting, the members of City Year Denver spent the afternoon listening to guest Indigenous speakers and reflecting, hoping all the hard work pays off.
“At City Year, we believe in educational equity,” Zuniga said. “Today we’re serving the land that we are actually on, and we couldn’t think of a better way to do that than to do that here for Indigenous Peoples Day.”
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