Honoring the Earth—Red Cloud Celebrates Earth Day through Service to Community
posted April 22, 2016
On Friday, April 22, the entire Red Cloud community will come together to mark the 46th annual celebration of Earth Day. Across both campuses, students, teachers, and staff are preparing to get involved in a range of Earth Day activities, from planting tree and native shrubs, to cleaning up community spaces, to learning about current environmental challenges and solutions. For Red Cloud’s greenhouse coordinator and health teacher Garrett Waters, the celebration presents an opportunity to reflect on the gifts the earth provides—and how we can educate ourselves to be better stewards of those gifts.
“To me, every day is earth day. When I reflect on who we are as human beings I realize that we are inherently part of the earth. The earth gives us oxygen, food, and water. So she is literally our breath, our body, our blood.”
Red Cloud community members will work side-by-side to clean up campus, add new plantings and learn new environmental lessons. Activities will include:
Planting Trees and Native Plants
Garrett Waters will be working with students from second to ninth grades to plant both native shrubs and trees. Early in the day, the seventh grade science class will plant shrubs along the football field’s fence and second and ninth graders will complete the work later in the afternoon. Students at both Red Cloud and Our Lady of Lourdes (OLL) will be planting new trees around their campuses, which can help to clean the air, provide oxygen and even fight climate change.
Cleaning Up the Community
Red Cloud and OLL will also pitch in to clean up areas that need additional care—on campus and in the outside community. Red Cloud High School will dismiss early so that students can clean up around the sweat lodge and the entrance to campus. Juniors will be taking the short trip into Pine Ridge to clean up at YO Park and second graders will hike to Mission Cave to help with trash pickup. At OLL, after students help with tree planting, they will split into grades and tackle cleanup projects around the grounds.
Environmental Education
Students will also have the opportunity to learn about environmental challenges facing both the local and global communities. Kindergarteners will enjoy a field trip to a farm in Gordon to learn about using the earth’s resources to produce nutritious foods. And sophomore Payton Sierra will share a presentation about her recent trip to Antarctica—and how the environment in most uninhabited place in the world can affect us all.
These preparations, according to Garrett, are further steps toward securing a stronger future for the community. “We are planting a lot of fruit-producing shrubs like chokecherry, buffalo berry, and sand cherry. If we care for them properly, 5-8 years from now they will be producing delicious fruits.”
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Photo © Red Cloud Indian School