The Kincentricity Garden

Growing Community through Learning Gardens.

Welcome to The Kincentricity Garden! We’ve reimagined our first floor garden to create a new space that respects and honors the native plants in our area and the people who care for them.

Kincentricity is an initiative established in 2021 in collaboration with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) and Amah Mutsun Land Trust (AMLT). It is titled after the view that all things—plants, animals, earth, air, and water—are kin, and as such, we are to care for them. The project heeds the call to center Indigenous peoples and their history, needs, beliefs, traditional arts, and modern expressions in community-based artistic and curatorial practice.

We hope the MAH’s Kincentricity Garden will invite you to be curious about native plants, honor indigenous wisdom, and support the many efforts of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust. Perhaps, it will encourage you to create your own kinship garden in your backyard or shared space. We can imagine kincentricity gardens throughout our community as a way to learn and grow together.

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This Kincentricity Garden will be a link to other native plant gardens in our area, such as the UCSC Arboretum’s Amah Mutsun Relearning Program, Pie Ranch Native Plant Garden, and the San Juan Bautista Native Garden. AMLT designed and installed these gardens to celebrate the ethnobotanical history of the California coast.

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The MAH is grateful for the funding for this project provided through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Museums for America program. Kincentricity is a multiphase project that took place over a 3-year period, between September 2021-August 2024.

This garden is tended by AMLT Volunteer Team members, who tend the plants, weed, water, collect trash, and spread mulch.

The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. Today there are no known survivors of the Awaswas-speaking tribes. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of Indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma. It is important that all people honor the Awaswas speaking people and ensure they are never forgotten.

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