Update: Our move to Homer, Alaska
After deep dialogues with friends, elders, the land, and ourselves, we’ve decided to move to Homer, Alaska, Sugpiaq & Dena’ina land, in the spring of 2023.
Flagstaff and the surrounding region will always be a dear home, the place where the three of us farmers began growing into the people we are today. And yet we deeply feel the weight of the climate, ecological, and economic, and housing crises push us northward to practice new and old ways of being in relation with land, together.
We’re working with a small group of friends to move up together, share resources and land, do community-oriented work, and co-create spaces of refuge, reciprocity, and resilience. In our new farm and our shared life, we aim to invite people to imagine and practice kinship-oriented ecological ways of being.
In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about our long-term work—as a farm and a community—while we walk our communal path forward. We hope to invite others to support and participate online and in-person as we share this alternative path through creative work and storytelling during this transition. In the meantime, visit the Refugia Collective website, follow us on Instagram and Facebook, subscribe to our newsletter below to receive updates.
Our Work
We tend kinship between land and people by growing and gathering bioregional crops and by creating thriving refuges for human and other-than-human communities.
Refugia are unique places of relative stability where species can flourish during immense ecological change. Amid upheavals in the social, ecological, political, and economic realities of our time, the word refugia informs our praxis: together, making refuge and taking refuge—for humans and others. We are dedicated to cultivating food-focused refuges that thrive through the present and coming storms of climate change, capitalism, colonialism, and ecological devastation. As we take on the obligations of kinship with the land, so too does the land take care of us.
Place
Our main farm at the eastern base of the San Francisco Peaks (Timberline neighborhood).
To mitigate the spread of COVID-19, please know that we’ve paused our public events, programming, and volunteering.
As of September 26, we are no longer at the Flagstaff Community Market (May – September 25, 2022). We’re preparing to move to Alaska!
What We Offer
- Seasonal produce — market garden and bioregional crops grown using careful, soil–tending practices
- Chicken eggs — hens fed with local food scraps and organic soy-free feed, with space to roam, peck, and play
- Herbs and medicinal plants — teas and medicinal preparations grown on the farm and wildcrafted from the land
- Plant starts & seeds — young and mature plants for your own garden
- Mushrooms (seasonal) — edible wildcrafted mushrooms gathered from our forests
- Locally gleaned fruit (seasonal) — gathered from regional trees
Who We Are
We are a trio of young folk living near the San Francisco Peaks (Dookʼoʼoosłííd, Nuvaʼtukyaʼovi) who care deeply about land, water, food, health, and our communities.
Caleb was born in Dena’ina and Ahtna territory in Alaska’s Matanuska-Sustina Valley and has lived much of his life on occupied lands at the base of the San Francisco Peaks. His draw to tend the land was grown in his childhood raising backyard chickens and giant vegetables in the far north, and through his undergraduate studies involving people’s relationships to place, water, and settler colonialism. Through farming and media-making, he seeks to support regional food sovereignty and tend lively, contemplative kinships with and among others.
Heather is a born-and-raised Flagstaff local, and was raised by the colorful canyons, dark thunderheads, and winds whipping through the pines of this place. Her ancestors come from the southern slopes of the Dolomiti. Her formal background in land-work includes a degree in Sustainability from Arizona State, working with the Arboretum at Flagstaff in native and endemic plant research and preservation, and work with the Grand Canyon Trust in ecosystem restoration on the Mogollon Rim. Currently she is pursuing a masters’ degree from Northern Arizona University in the Sustainable Communities program and completing her Permaculture Design Certification. She wrestles with questions of meaningful relationship with Place as a non-native person in a settler-colonial society, and questions of community and kinship in our rapidly shifting and unsettling world.
Nick is an Arizona native who got his undergraduate degree in Forestry at Northern Arizona University, focusing on fire ecology and forest pathology. He has contributed to forestry and botany research for the Museum of Northern Arizona, NAU, and the USFS. Nick is interested in adapting his knowledge of native ecology and resource management to serve the local food system of Flagstaff. In his spare time, he enjoys being outside backpacking, bouldering, or going somewhere new.
Contact
Email: info@refugiagardens.org
Instagram: @refugia.gardens
Facebook: Refugia Gardens
Subscribe to the Refugia Collective Newsletter
While our farm is moving, we’ll be keeping in touch with folks through our collaborative, community-oriented work as part of Refugia Collective. We’re hoping to start up our new farm in Homer, Alaska in mid-2023. In the meantime, sign up for dispatches, updates, & events from our wider community crew!
