Rose Island Farm is an Indigenous family-owned farm in southeast Tacoma. We prioritize and center people of culture and all our Indigenous relatives.
Our farm is located in the territory of the Puyallup Indian Tribe and their coastal Salish relatives. We lovingly grow and care for herbs, foods, and create herbal supports for relatives at the Tahoma Indian Center and local BIPOC relatives. Melissa hosts community classes at the farm and provides safe space for Black and Indigenous community and families.
Our farm is named after the village that Melissa comes from in northern BC, Lax kw’alaams or “Island of Wild Roses.”
Our farm logo was designed by Nuxalk artist Danika Saunders.
Melissa Meyer
Melissa Meyer is matrilineally Eagle clan from the Gis’paxloats tribe of the Tsimshian Nation in northern British Columbia. She is Scandinavian & German by her father. She is married into the Nuxalk Nation by her partner, Mike for 24 years and they share two children. She is a community trained herbalist with a love to share wild and cultivated herbal supports. She served as a Traditional Plant Medicine Practitioner at Seattle Indian Health Board for the last 3 years. Now she collaborates with the Canoe Journey Herbalists and the Tahoma Indian Center to provide community herbal care.
Melissa’s favorite childhood memories are of being with family and community on the land. These involved stripping cedar bark, harvesting seaweed, plant medicines and traditional foods, fishing, berry picking, and interacting with the many relatives that inhabit the northwest coastline. She imagined her journey taking her into Indigenous Governance and earned a degree in that field. She thought this path would help her empower her community to heal their relationships that had been systemically altered. However, it was Melissa who needed to change and heal. Her healing journey would carry her to teachers and mentors that would steer her back to her first love. Together, her degree and wild plant journeys give Melissa a unique and profound understanding of food and plant medicine sovereignty and the importance of empowering our communities through the (re)membering of ancestral teachings.
Like so many of us, she took for granted her cultural teachings in her younger years. Witnessing the profound shift away from our songs, ceremonies, and cultural practices reawakened a passion in Melissa, and she realized the path she would take to interrupt this devastating shift. She also has a degree in Anthropology and developed a lens for observing cultural change and its impacts. She noticed that as we began to rely on supermarkets, media, and moved away from our reciprocal relationship with the land and the gifts she provides, our families and Nations suffered. As she has undertaken this work, she has seen the incredible drive that our people, especially youth and elders, have for reconnecting with our cultural memory. Food and plant medicine sovereignty offers autonomy and healing without barriers or dependence.
As a community-trained herbalist, I am eternally grateful for those who have taught and continue to teach me the ways of care, reciprocity and community. I am grateful to and humbled by the wisdom of my ancestors that continues to be passed to me by my Mother, my relatives, and my deep ancestral lineages of community. I also lift up the following people who’ve opened their homes, memories, and practices to me and my family as we walk this path together: