Programs

Buffalo Nations Summer Fellowship

The Buffalo Nations summer student fellowship is an immersive land-based education opportunity in which students work full-time tending Indigenous gardens, conducting Indigenous plant restoration, participating in Indigenous community cultural events including buffalo harvest, learning to wild harvest and process plants, seed saving and more. This education opportunity is multicultural and intergenerational based on Indigenous methods of knowledge sharing. Applications for the summer fellowship are available each spring by contacting our program.

Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Food Systems

The Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Food Systems will be offered beginning in Spring 2025. This one-year, four course certificate can be combined with any degree to give students a deep grounding in the buffalo nations food system, Indigenous foodways, and the seasonal round. Instruction will be online and community-based in a seasonal-ecological model of learning.

Ancestral Seed Bank

The Ancestral Seed Bank located in American Indian Hall is a living seedbank in which students are responsible for cleaning, tending, and propagating heritage seeds, including corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and medicinal plants. The seed bank is an educational laboratory and a resource for seed sharing with Indigenous organizations and community horticultural programs in the Buffalo Nations Biocultural Region. An annual distribution of seed bundles is done each spring through our partnership with the Montana Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative, 501(c)-3.

Gardens

The Buffalo Nations gardens currently include an Indigenous Culinary Garden located behind the American Indian Hall, the Ancestral Seed Garden located on the MSU Horticulture Farm/Towne’s Harvest Garden, and the Indigenous Learning Garden at the Story Mill Community Park in Bozeman.

Steward-to-Steward Exchange

The Steward-to-Steward Exchange is a program for Indigenous farmers, buffalo caretakers, and cattle ranchers, gardeners, foragers, and other caretakers of the land in the Buffalo Nations biocultural region to connect with one another through a paid work exchange. Following the historic Indigenous grassroots movement, Campesino-a-Campesino,  Indigenous land stewards will be connected with a fellow steward in the region for a paid 2-day work exchange affording an opportunity to visit each other’s farm, ranch, and/or community, to spend time together visiting and sharing Indigenous perspectives as food producers and land caretakers.