(Doyne Park beyond space)
Location:
At Tiny Green Trees, we play and learn on the lands that include Doyne Park, a 35-acre green space in Milwaukee’s Story Hill neighborhood. The park sits along the Menomonee River to the north and is part of the Milwaukee County Parks system. For thousands of years, this land has been the homeland of the Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Ojibwe, Odawa, Sauk, Fox (Meskwaki), and Oneida Nations, among others who have lived, traveled, and gathered along the river valleys of this region.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the land that is now Doyne Park was used as a stone quarry and later as a landfill, before being reclaimed and restored as a public park. Today, it features open green space, playgrounds, and a segment of the Oak Leaf Trail, connecting our neighborhood to the broader Milwaukee park and trail system.
Place-based:
Our program uses a place-based approach to nature education. That means that we learn about the natural world by experiencing it directly. Our use of the land includes time to play and wonder. We learn the names of the plants and trees around us. We rest on the ground, we look at the sky. We run, we climb, we listen to stories. We experience the land in every season and in all weathers. In doing so, we deepen our own connection to Place, and come to understand that we are a part of nature, and that nature is a part of us.
We acknowledge that the land on which Doyne Park sits and the watersheds and trails that flow through it, are the ancestral homelands of Indigenous Peoples: including the Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk), and Mamaceqtaw (Menominee) nations, among other Anishinaabe and First Nations peoples.
We honor the enduring presence of these sovereign nations and their descendants, whose relationships with this land and these waters existed long before European settlement and continue today.
We commit to being respectful stewards of this place, mindful of its natural and cultural history, and to learning how we may support ongoing Indigenous sovereignty, cultural resilience, and healing.
We acknowledge that we are on the traditional homeland of the Potawatomi (Bodéwadmi), Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk), Kickapoo (Kiikaapoi), and Menominee (Mamaceqtaw) nations, along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee, and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the where people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations remain present today.
“When we talk about land, land is part of who we are. It’s a mixture of our blood, our past, our current, and our future. We carry our ancestors in us, and they’re around us. As you all do.”
Mary Lyons
(Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe)