Researcher and entrepreneur Kendal Garlow knows that locally grown food can – and does – change lives.
Garlow is Mohawk and Wolf Clan from Six Nations of the Grand River. A student in the inaugural cohort of the Master of Indigenous Studies, Garlow is studying Indigenous food systems and supporting food sovereignty.
Throughout the course of her master’s, while interviewing people to learn about their lived experiences with food and Haudenosaunee foods, a recurring theme she’s heard is that “everything is a part of this.” The food you eat matters, for nutrition but so much more, too.
“You can talk about food and language, you can talk about food and identity, and food and health care,” she said. “There’s a lot of intersections.”
Those intersections are evident in Garlow’s own work – which has covered food, identity, health, community and more.
Indigenous Studies ‘the reason I chose Mac’
Garlow started her McMaster journey back in high school, when she took part in the University Consortium program through Six Nations Polytechnic. She later earned two undergraduate degrees from McMaster: a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Human Behaviour. Now, she’s working on her Master of Indigenous Studies, and plans to graduate in December 2025.
“The Indigenous Studies department specifically is the reason I chose Mac,” Garlow said. She liked the program’s push for more land-based learning. Associate professor Rick Monture, one of the founding members of McMaster’s Indigenous Studies program and a relative, was also “a big part” of that decision.
Kendal Garlow (right) with fellow Master of Indigenous Studies students Tia Kennedy (left) and Kelsy Chan (middle) at the Storytellers Conference in April 2025.
During her undergrad, Garlow was involved with Nourish, a Canada-wide not-for-profit that focuses on food in healthcare settings. Six Nations was one of Nourish’s five anchor teams on a three-year project working to connect the dots between food and health. Through a partnership between Six Nations Department of Well-Being and McMaster University, Garlow served as project lead from February 2024 to May 2025.
“Basically, our efforts were to incorporate more Haudenosaunee food into a health–care context,” she said. “We want to be sustainable, we want to source from local vendors, we want to increase the amount of food programming we have on Six Nations, and we need to figure out what Haudenosaunee foods really are.”
That question is what prompted her master’s research. In collaboration with Six Nations Department of Well-Being, Garlow is exploring Haudenosaunee food and identity.
Originally, she wanted to focus on the Healthy Roots study, from 2018, and expand on it “to include food as a means of cultural transportation, knowledge, transmission, identity, and kind of looking at all of these qualitative things that food can do besides just nutrition.”
Now she’s narrowed it down, and her research question is: “How do Haudenosaunee food decisions help influence our identity, and vice versa?”
A lot of our food decisions are influenced by our identity, Garlow said – from growing your own garden to where you get your food – and people may be making these decisions without realizing the underlying causes for them.
“We find a lot of ourselves in the foods that we eat, how we prepare them, how we grow them.”
Her research is focused on what Garlow describes as “almost the spiritual aspect of food: How does this shape who we are? Who have we become as a community and also as individuals because of the food that we eat? And historically, where did this come from?”
A pepper growing in a greenhouse test bed.
The conclusion that she’s come to is that food influences identity decisions – but it also influences so much more.
She hopes that her work can help people to be more conscious of the food that they’re consuming, where it’s coming from, and what it might mean to them. “I want people to feel something when they eat.”
Improving access to fresh food
Garlow wraps up her master’s at the end of this year, and will be working with the Indigenous Mentorship Network of Ontario until February.
After that, her full-time focus will be starting an exciting new chapter as an entrepreneur.
Garlow and her husband, Thomas Sweeney, who is a Mac electrical engineering grad, are starting a business to support Indigenous communities in increasing access to fresh produce.
They’re building a self-watering greenhouse to offer affordable, freshly grown food to the Six Nations community. They’re also hoping to sell the technology, allowing a variety of customers access to the type of tech that’s usually only available to large-scale operations.
The business idea stemmed from conversations Garlow had with community members during the Indigenous Studies Experiential Learning Course. She found that people had the space to garden, but not enough volunteers to keep it going. “We were talking about labour and how that’s a really big problem to food sovereignty efforts on Six Nations,” Garlow said.
Sweeney suggested they automate a greenhouse system. “I was like, that’s crazy…. but we can try. I know the Indigenous aspect of it. I know my community. I know what we need.”
This year, Garlow and Sweeney launched their business: SproutSync.
They’ve built their own greenhouse and have been growing produce over the summer, from peppers to “a ton of tomatoes.”
Garlow and Sweeney in their greenhouse.
Their next steps are to finish building the prototype and doing their first set of data runs – collecting data from each plant to figure out how much water and humidity it needs to grow, how much yield it produces, and how to optimize this.
“How can our tech really benefit the community in the best way?” Garlow said. “How can we get the most food in the smallest space?”
This work really ties in with her research on food sovereignty and how food makes us who we are, Garlow said. “It’s really exciting. I get to start my own business in my own way with somebody who I love very much. I get to tie everything together and I’m kind of living that experience of everything being connected to one another.”
The pitch
SproutSync was selected as Sustainability Winner and a finalist for the Pow Wow Pitch Grand Prize.
Recently, Garlow competed in Pow Wow Pitch, a one-minute pitch competition for Indigenous entrepreneurs across Turtle Island. SproutSync has been selected as one of 18 finalists; they find out on Oct. 22 if they win the $25,000 Grand Prize.
Everyone she’s met in her journey at McMaster has helped support her to get where she is now, Garlow said.
“If I didn’t work as hard as I did and make the connections that I did, I wouldn’t be able to kind of move away, I wouldn’t be able to take on this business,” she said.
Right now, she and Sweeney want to stay within Six Nations as they figure out the product – but their dream is to help a broad range of communities that don’t have food access.
“We want to be able to support greenhouses and lowering costs for food, especially if they have technology like ours involved in their greenhouse,” Garlow said.
“We have a lot of dreams for where this could go of how many communities we might be able to help, how many people we might be able to feed.”
Kendal Garlow would like to thank MIRI, ISS, ISD, IHLL, the Ogyohsraniyohsdoh team on Six Nations, and especially Dr. Adrianne Xavier for all of their support throughout her entrepreneurial and scholarly journey.