This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada

Beaked hazelnuts are a wild food native to North America. Indigenous peoples in British Columbia have passed down stories of these hazelnuts as a vital food source their ancestors planted and cultivated. These stories motivated Chelsea Geralda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University to look more deeply at the genetics of the beaked hazelnut and determine just how widely it was cultivated. Indigenous rights attorney Jack Woodward hopes research like this can make a difference in the Land Back movement, providing evidence that land once considered wilderness by European settler colonists was actually being carefully managed by tribes.

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