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The two-eyed seeing garden

University of British Columbia

The Two-eyed Seeing Garden is an ethnobotanical garden that is a living description of the inter-relationships between land, plants and people that explicates two ways of seeing. The goal of the Two-eyed Seeing Garden is to combine two frameworks, one of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and one of Western Scientific Knowledge, in an attempt to create a bridge between the two knowledges in order for the inter-relationships between the two systems to be made visible. The Two-eyed Seeing Garden emphasizes the worldview of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge as an independent valid knowledge system that describes local knowledge in connection with other local knowledges, nearby and far away. These knowings can be thought of as layers that begin to intersect and eventually connect the same way as ripples do in a pond. Small and central, yet moving out. The physical garden is this too. It is a small place that is nested within a larger region. Although it may have walls and is distinct from it’s immediate surroundings, it can connect to the larger region. The Two-eyed Seeing Garden is an example of wholeness and connectivity from its most minute aspects to its situatedness in the larger context. The relationships make the invisible visible and describe the co-creation and co-existence of all those that inhabit this land now and since time immemorial.

Text

2010-01-18

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/18622

Landscape Architecture

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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