"I have this compulsion to make an impact; I feel the need to change things and make waves."
Kjelti Anderson's description of herself is certainly the reason she has been chosen as one of Saskatchewan's 40 under-40s to watch in a recent CBC Saskatchewan initiative. At 24, she is the second youngest in the group of young people making a difference.
Nominated by one of the Battlefords Citizens of the Year, Rob Rongve, Anderson says it's an honour to be named one of the 40, but adds it's a great opportunity to promote the Battlefords.
"I'm glad there's at least one person nominated in the Battlefords because it sheds a positive light on the community."
Anderson's passion is permaculture. She describes it as a design system for creating sustainable human habitat, meeting our own needs for food, water, shelter and clothing without degrading the ecosystem. The concept fills a spectrum from ultra-technology to pure philosophy. Anderson sees herself as somewhere in the middle.
"I am fascinated by the theory and I like the hands on, so I like to merge them in the most practical way," she says.
"It's a positive way of doing things, an opportunity to increase our resilience to climate change, the decreasing availability of inexpensive energy and the repercussions of an unstable food system and energy system," says Anderson.
Attending university in Sweden, Anderson was finishing up a thesis on the way to achieving a Bachelor of Arts in language and cultural studies, with a minor in environmental studies, when she was introduced to permaculture.
"Wow! That's what I want to do," was her reaction. The Battlefords, she decided, would be an ideal place to start the journey in her chosen field.
Having grown up in Edmonton, she had visited the Battlefords often to visit her grandparents. When she finished high school, she saved money for six months and moved to Berlin for a half year, where she studied German.
"I left home at 18, and basically I've been full on ever since."
She decided to go to university and found a program at a Swedish university that included a half-year semester in Istanbul, Turkey, and a two-month internship, which she decided to do with the Battlefords Tribal Council in North Battleford.
"I wanted to be in Canada and, with my interest in aboriginal people, here was a good place to do [my internship]." She also thought, "Hey, it will be cool to live with my grandma!"
Anderson says it wasn't until later that she realized how very formative a time that two-month internship was.
"I have such strong, vivid memories of that time," she says.
Once she finished her degree, she decided to come back to the Battlefords.
"I'd been all over the world and there were so many places I could have decided to move," she says.
There were plenty of opportunities in the places she'd travelled and her professors in Sweden were encouraging her to apply for positions there, but she said, "Nope, I'm going to the prairies."
While her permaculture eureka moment was only a few years ago, her enthusiasm has carried her into a position of expert in a short time. She has helped establish a "forest garden" in the Ness Creek boreal forest area, has been a board member of the Boreal Forest Learning Centre for a year and a half and has established numerous connections with a community of like-minded individuals, from organic farmers to professional permaculturists. She is also passionate about culture and has become involved in arts, drama and dance locally as well as the Feed the Artist initiative, which just launched its second arts and culture magazine. She also serves on the Battleford Opera House Gallery steering committee.
And that's all outside her three paying jobs.
For the last several years Anderson has been working at the City of North Battleford's galleries, both the Allen Sapp Gallery and the Chapel Gallery. At the Allen Sapp Gallery, she has established a healing garden featuring native plant species with traditional medicinal, spiritual or ceremonial qualities. It has also drawn local residents into its sphere as volunteers and harvesters, fitting into Anderson's vision of the community-building social aspect of permaculture.
Anderson feels fortunate to be working with the City of North Battleford. Permaculturists elsewhere have not always found the kind of support she has had in permaculture related initiatives such as the healing garden, she says.
In addition to her work with the City of North Battleford, Anderson also recently accepted a position as project co-ordinator with Midwest Food Resources, a community-based organization that supports local action to help make healthy eating easier. Among her projects with that organization is cooking classes in local schools.
Her third paying job is one she instigated by applying for funding, at the suggestion of a friend, to teach a weekly permaculture class at Sakewew High School, the First Nations high school in North Battleford. In working with Sakewew teacher Saras Naidoo while establishing the healing garden, Anderson realized a permaculture program would fit well into the curriculum there.
"It's coming along," she says. "It's definitely a pilot project."
As soon as the weather warms up, they will be able to start applying some of the theory they've been learning, she says.
Permaculture, says Anderson, is a global movement, a design system, a set of principles for living in the world.
It can be applied to a balcony, a backyard, a community garden, a forest garden like the one in the boreal forest at Ness Creek, or more.
The Ness Creek forest garden is a good example of a commonly used device to establish permaculture, says Anderson. It's a conscious placement of the different elements of the garden that allows those elements to support each other in the way a forest does.
It's also about capturing as much energy as possible, including water. The team who established the garden, Anderson among them, dug a pond where water would naturally pool on its own, established a compost pile and instituted practices that would build soil and store energy. It's a very dense garden, with more than 20 fruit trees, 80 berry bushes and 100 herbaceous species on a quarter acre.
One of the aspects of permaculture is working with and learning from nature by observing, says Anderson, "allowing nature to do its thing and us benefiting from that."
It was through the forest garden that Anderson got involved with the Saskatchewan Boreal Forest Learning Centre, a not-for-profit organization that provides nature-oriented classroom workshops in high schools throughout the province, and holds programs at the Ness Creek Cultural/Ecological Site, a shared 320-acre retreat site, 20 kilometres northeast of Big River.
Anderson has a deep interest in the boreal forest, but also in the prairies. The Allen Sapp Gallery healing garden features plants from both habitats.
"We live in between the prairie and boreal forest and so here we can comfortably grow species from the far north and far south," says Anderson.
The healing garden was started last year, just behind Allen Sapp Gallery. A tipi sits in the centre, and the garden is in the shape of a medicine wheel. The permaculture concepts of increasing biodiversity, storing water and energy will eventually see a reduction in the amount of work needing to be done, and planning for the future by planting saskatoon trees and hawthorn will eventually provide shade and another growing habitat.
It's primary goal is to grow native medicinal plants, says Anderson, and there are now more than 30 species in place. She was surprised, she says, at the harvest.
"Last year we harvested over 50 braids of sweetgrass."
She held weekly work bees every Wednesday throughout the summer. Anyone interested in the project was welcome to attend and then help when the time came to harvest.
"Right now it's leaves for teas, one of the number one ways plant medicines are used," she says.
There are also sacred ceremonial plants, such as sweetgrass, sage, tobacco and cedar.
Anderson rolls her interest in permaculture into her overall interest in the role of aboriginal culture in Canadian history.
"I was studying in Turkey, and had an awesome teacher doing a sociology course, and we started reading post colonial history of the Netherlands and Indonesia," says Anderson. "That was when I really started getting interested in Canada from a post-colonial perspective, looking at it throughout that lens of post-colonial theory."
She gathered data during her internship at Battlefords Tribal Council and also got involved with the Allen Sapp Gallery, eventually writing her thesis on aboriginal culture and its place in Canadian history.
With a background in history, she looks to the future. What she sees is that no one really knows what it's going to look like, with greenhouse gases rising and on a level completely unprecedented.
"With our car culture, the way cities are organized, the way we meet our basic needs for food and shelter, we are ultimately extremely vulnerable to climate change and other crises we are faced with in the media," says Anderson.
"In and amongst all these big daunting problems, permaculture is something, at least in my life, to turn to and learn more about, experiment with and have fun with, and educate people with the limited amount I know about it - and we'll see what happens."
For now, she plans to make her life in the Battlefords.
"I don't know about permanently, but it astounds me the number of opportunities I've been given and created for myself here, and I feel like I'm elbows deep in projects I wouldn't dream of abandoning," says Anderson. "I can foresee a day when I might want to move somewhere else and try something different, but not in the near future."
As for the CBC 40 to watch, "It's not all about me, it's about the things I am related to. Permaculture is all about connection, and I'm just one little link."
