Mycelium Healing Project

We are addressing environmental damages from an oil refinery that Colorado’s BIPOC populations disproportionately face. The main focus of this project is Commerce city, which has a population of over 65,000 consisting of more than 50% BIPOC families who fall into the low income bracket; this population has been burdened with disproportionate pollution from the Suncor oil refinery.  Additionally, Commerce City continues to rank as a top-ten worst air-polluted city in the nation. This ecosystem is at a brink of failure and requires an urgent response. Not only is the ecosystem at stake, the people who reside within these spaces face health concerns such as asthma, cancer, heart-lung ailments, chronic coughs, and congestion due to the air pollution they are exposed to.

This restorative justice effort aims to help restore the rights of nature by mitigating harmful pollutants in the soil, water, and air through mycelium, the organism that produces mushrooms. The earth has rights to thrive just as humans do. For us to have access to healthy air, water, and land, the earth must also be healthy. The practices that we plan to use are not new, Indigenous communities have always practiced the rights of nature, however, these practices are being reclaimed by Spirit of the Sun.

This project aims to address the effects of corporate pollution which disproportionately impact our BIPOC and low income communities, which are often targets of environmental racism from major corporations such as Suncor. With over 800,000 tons and pollution emitted each year the air, soil, and water need rejuvenation in a healthy and eco-friendly way. We aim to restore the health of the people and the land.

Native and Indigenous youth leading this program will co-create and co-lead Mycelium grow-kit and inoculation training for their communities. Youth, Elders, families and community leaders of the area will then continue throughout the next few years and beyond to inoculate their front and backyard soil spaces, gardens and community food growing spaces with the mycelium they’ve grown in order to remediate their soil and Indigenous foodscapes to continue to build healthy soil and ecosystems for all of our communities.

These inoculations will mitigate harmful pollutants in the soil, water, and air through mycelium, the organism that produces mushrooms. Mycelium increases organic matter available in the soil by breaking down waste, pollutants, and toxins found in the environment. By ‘planting the water’ and mycelium, we will grow local ecosystems to sequester carbon and metabolize pollutants before they leach out into the atmosphere and watersheds. Additionally, we will ensure the stewardship of Indigenous plants and bugs to the affected lands to promote food sovereignty and Indigenous education. We plan to use the knowledge and cultivation of mycelium to improve our health and the health of ecosystems while driving economic growth for our communities. As our community shapes the long term vision of this project, youth leaders will be doing as our ancestors have always done and take an active role in caring for our Mother Earth, building relationships and practices of Rematriation, and supporting rights of nature and climate justice. They, alongside their Elders and community leaders will continue to strengthen community-building, land caretaking, climate justice and social justice organizing and leadership skills as well as make wonderful memories together practicing Indigenous science and building Indigenous foodways that we can continue to carry forward with us wherever we choose to go and share with our expansive communities and the next 7 generations and beyond. Everything we are, emotional, physical, and mental made of, eat and drink from starts with healthy lively soil.

We serve the urban Native community in the Denver metropolitan area. The development and implementation of SOTS programming is informed by program participant surveys, interviews with elders and other community members, needs assessments created by our partner organizations, and by word of mouth from community members and leaders. As a small, social community, we are naturally in touch with our constituents. Our board members and majority of our staff are also community members and leaders in tune with the voices and needs of Native and BIPOC individuals and communities across the Denver metropolitan area. In late 2023, SOTS also conducted a community needs assessment to gauge the needs of our community members.

Our board is 100% Native, our Executive Staff are 100% Native, and our program staff is 89% Native. Our staff have a deep connection to the Denver Native community.

We have conducted a few inoculations at private residences, school gardens, and partner farms across Denver and Commerce City, but we have not yet been able to conduct extensive soil, air, and water quality testing to measure our progress and operate at a larger scale.

We have struggled to get financial support for this uniquely Native-led solution as it does not fit with typical Western scientific norms and funders tend to prefer more Westernized strategies. We are also looking for technical assistance in quantifying the impact of our project in terms of soil quality and pollution reduction. We would also like to spread awareness of our solution and our work.

Shannon has been a member of the Denver Native community for thirty years and serves on the Winds American Indian Council as Chair and is the Director for the Indigenous Agricultural project at Four Winds. 

In 2009, she started out as a garden volunteer at the Denver Indian Center and led the Indigenous garden project until 2015, beginning from five 5×8 ft beds to what has now expanded over one fifth of an acre. The Denver Indian Center, Inc. exhibited and grew at least one ton of produce on a small area. In 2014, DICI gave out over 1300 packets of heirloom and GMO-free seeds to everyone who visited or attended the garden workshops. Shannon is deeply embedded in the Denver native community and continues to build pro-active reciprocal relationships between community members and organizations and also between people, animals and the natural world.

The use of Mycelium as a soil regenerative system is not a common practice in Colorado and we hope to shed some light on this clean way of restoring the land. Our project highlights the rights to nature; we recognize that the earth has rights to thrive just as humans do. For us to have access to healthy air, water, and land, the earth must also be healthy. Indigenous communities are beginning to establish the rights of natures in their communities and our work in Denver is innovative because we suspect we are the first to locally establish the rights to nature in our community. This practice is not new, Indigenous communities have always practiced the rights of nature; however, this practice is being reclaimed by Spirit of the Sun.

Mycelium inoculation could easily be replicated in any North American community provided that an appropriate local species is selected. We envision that this technique will in future years be utilized to heal the soil in other cities, in other high risk or highly impacted areas, on Indigenous lands, and used for disaster cleanup. We envision that this work will be performed largely by Indigenous leaders and will served Native and BIPOC communities. We have had requests to share our teachings with organizations globally, so we would like to send youth leaders to educate other organizations on these practices in the coming years.