Exploring and creatively expressing thought, representation and intersections across storytelling, cultural identity, food, place, and sense of belonging through multi-genre literature.
Teresa Peterson, Utuhu Cistinna Win, is Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and citizen of the Upper Sioux Community.
Photo by Nedahness Greene
Teresa Peterson, author of the forthcoming book, Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden shares prose, poetry, and recipes guiding us through the Dakota seasons to impart lessons from her life as a gardener, gatherer, and lover of the land. The publisher University of Minnesota Press shares, “In this intimate seasonal cycle, we learn how the garden becomes a healing balm. Peterson teaches us how ceremony may be found there: how in the vegetables and flowers, the woods, the hillsides, the river valley—even in the feeding of friends and family—we can reclaim and honor our relationship with Mother Earth. She encourages us to bring perennial ceremony into our own lives, inviting us on a journey that brings us full circle to makoce kiŋ mitakuye: the land is my relative.”
Teresa is also the author of:
Voices from Pejuhutazizi: Dakota Stories and Storytellers Peterson & LaBatte, Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Grasshopper Girl, a children’s book originally published by Black Bears and Blueberries Publishing.
Poetry in The Racism Issue of the Yellow Medicine Review.
Contributor to the anthology, Voices Rising: Native Women Writers.
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The planting and growing space that overlooks the wide river valley provides me sanctuary, offering a neutral space where life’s dichotomies and contradictions melt away. This way of life nurtures my body, mind, and spirit. As I commune with mother earth, I have come to understand that gardening is ceremony.
My true passion is digging in the garden that overlooks the Mni Sota River valley and feeding friends and family.