So it was a collective victory for the village in April 2017, when then-16-year-old Chris became the youngest person in his community to harpoon a whale: Gambell fed off the bounty for months. But after his mom, Susan, posted about the exciting accomplishment on Facebook and the Anchorage newspaper picked up the news, the family received thousands of online hate messages—even death threats.

At once heartbreaking and heartwarming, this story is the subject of One with the Whale, a new, award-winning documentary that premieres on PBS’s Independent Lens on April 22. Created by co-directors Pete Chelkowski and Jim Wickens with the community’s blessing, it showcases the struggles of subsistence hunting—and the lack of understanding about its importance.

“Subsistence hunting is a traditional lifestyle that’s been passed down from generation to generation, and we rely upon it dearly,” says Daniel Apassingok. “It helps feed not just the community, but the next village and people all over the state.”

With a population of around 600 people, the remote town of Gambell sits on the northwest cape of St. Lawrence Island within the Bering Sea, closer to Russia (36 miles) than the Alaska mainland (200 miles). The environment there is rugged and barren, lacking trees or other vegetation. Conditions can be harsh, with temperatures dropping to -20°F in the winter.

For Chelkowski and Wickens, who are not Indigenous, making this film had a profound impact on their understanding of Alaska Native lifeways. “I’m from New York City, and there are probably more people living in the building I grew up in than in the whole village of Gambell—so witnessing the way of life in Gambell was really eye-opening,” says Chelkowski “But this is not some fairy tale; these are real people who are living in the most difficult conditions on the planet and overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And they do it with hope and love.”

In Gambell, packaged foods and other supplies arrive only by plane, and the inflated prices at the local grocery store reflect those import efforts. For their family of five, Susan spends upward of $500 a week on the mainly processed foods that line the store shelves. Compounding matters, a lack of jobs makes it tough for many Gambell residents—whose poverty rate hovers around 35 percent—to afford those high food costs.

“You have to hunt, you have to gather berries, you have to gather sea vegetables,” former John Apangalook School principal Rob Taylor explains in the film. “If you don’t do subsistence activities, you die.”

The school allows students to miss 10 school days per year for subsistence hunting and gathering, though kids often skip out on more than that in order to put food on the table. Given the imperative of providing for their families, it can be tough to impress upon young people the importance of formal education.

Of particular significance is the springtime bowhead whale migration, which kicks off a weeks-long whaling season starting in late March or early April, when temperatures warm up to 20°F. Apassingok recalls some seasons, like last year’s, when they didn’t catch any whales. In those years, they try to make up for the lost harvest by catching more seals and walruses throughout the spring and summer. But whales—particularly bowheads, one of the largest and heaviest species—are the ultimate prize. Each can yield hundreds of pounds of meat and maktak (skin with blubber), which are rich sources of lean protein, healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids, and vitamins A, D, and E.

Gambell is one of 11 Alaska villages that participate in whaling as authorized by the International Whaling Commission and regulated by the nonprofit Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, which oversees the quota system. The estimated 50 whales harvested by Alaska Native communities annually provide about 2 million pounds of food, which would cost upward of $20 million to replace with a store-bought protein such as beef, which averages anywhere from $10 to $20 per pound in these remote places.

“A small 30-foot whale will feed a family for a few weeks,” says Apassingok. “If you catch three whales, you can feed a family for the summer. Some people can’t afford to buy their food from the stores, especially when they have big families.”

Chasing a whale. (Photo credit: Jim Wickens)

The Yupik way of life is threatened by climate change, which is causing extreme weather, flooding, coastal erosion, and unprecedented ice loss across the Bering Sea. Those evolving conditions, in turn, have been shown to impact algae, zooplankton, fish, and seabird populations in recent years.

In addition to addressing food security concerns, whaling is also an important cultural tradition that has been practiced by Siberian Yupik peoples for thousands of years. Apassingok remembers going on his first hunting excursion at 5 years old. His son Chris started hunting seals at age 7, then at 15 became a striker—the hunter posted at the front of the boat during harrowing whaling outings. In Gambell, many of these customs have been well-maintained as a result of its isolated locale, far from modern-day influences.

The traditional and modern worlds collided back in 2017 after news spread of Chris’s rite-of-passage harpooning of a 200-year-old, 57-foot bowhead whale. When Canadian-American environmentalist Paul Watson heard about it, he took to social media.

“Some 16-year-old kid is a frigging ‘hero’ for snuffing out the life of this unique, self-aware, intelligent, social, sentient being,” the now-deleted Facebook post read. (The quote is preserved in a High Country News article from the time.). “But hey, it’s OK because murdering whales is a part of his culture, part of his tradition. . . . I don’t give a damn for the bullshit politically correct attitude that certain groups of people have a ‘right’ to murder a whale.”

That inflammatory post prompted Watson’s followers—and countless other keyboard warriors—to troll the Apassingok family. Thousands of negative comments flooded in, sending the shy and stoic Chris on a downward spiral that nearly prevented him from graduating from high school.

But the community rallied around him, as did many prominent Alaskans. Governor Bill Walker presented Chris with a certificate “in recognition of his skill and expertise in landing a bowhead and receiving the gift of the ancient whale’s life to sustain his people, and upholding the values and traditions of Alaska Native culture despite opposition.” U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan also recognized him as “Alaskan of the Week” on the Senate floor then went on to hold a Commerce Committee hearing about the importance of whaling in Alaska.

In October 2017, Chris was tapped to give the keynote speech at the Elders and Youth Conference, which preceded the notable Alaska Federation of Natives conference. “We take care of our land and ocean as they take care of us,” he said. “The biggest rule we are taught by the elders is to never become discouraged while hunting in hard situations. Even though we almost die, we must never give up. We must be prepared for any situation. We must know how to foretell the weather ourselves as our ancestors did. We must never be discouraged by any accident or anybody who may threaten us. I am part land, I am part water, I am always Native.” He then called upon attendees to join him in upholding traditional sustenance activities.

Seven years after that distressing situation, Chris and his family are both excited and anxious about having their story told to mainstream audiences. Naysayers will inevitably surface, especially as the documentary’s timing coincides with a call from Polynesian Indigenous groups to grant whales legal personhood as a protective measure. But the Apassingoks and the filmmakers hope that One with the Whale impresses upon viewers the vital role that whaling plays for Yupik peoples.

“The misunderstanding I see [about subsistence hunting] is beyond my imagination,” says Apassingok. “Our traditional lifestyle should be understood like a job or any other livelihood. With this film, we’re trying to help the world understand why we do this for a living.”

Chelkowski hopes the documentary inspires empathy among non-Native viewers, much like making the film did for him. “Subsistence hunters in Alaska are not only one with the whale; they’re one with nature,” he says. “They have co-existed beautifully with these animals for thousands of years. Without the whale, they can’t survive. In the end, the whale symbolizes tradition, love, and family.”

“One with the Whale” premieres on PBS’s Independent Lens on April 22. Watch the trailer below.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the Siberian Yupik people. We apologize for the error and appreciate the readers who alerted us to the mistake.

The post For This Alaska Town, Whaling Is a Way of Life appeared first on Civil Eats.

The opportunity to absorb Indigenous wisdom and share that knowledge with the community is what attracted 20-year-old Nyomi Oliver (Navajo/Chicana) to the Denver nonprofit, which offers a wide variety of cultural, culinary, and wellness programming. “I am a reconnecting Native and had lost my ways,” she says. “But Spirit of the Sun has shown me how important our Indigenous perspectives are and how our history has laid out a blueprint for us to follow in order to align with Mother Nature.”

Oliver got involved in Spirit of the Sun’s Indigenous science and foodways program in 2022, then joined the organization’s newest initiative, the mycelium healing project, which taps into the bioremediation properties of fungi to restore the land and feed the local community.

Mycelium—fungi’s web-like inner network structure—has been shown to remove toxins from the soil while improving its overall health. Last summer, for instance, the organization’s mycelium-inoculated foodscapes demonstration garden yielded more than 1,000 pounds of produce for the elder food share program.

These experiences prompted Oliver to pursue a nutrition degree and inspired her 14-year-old sister, Mia Madalena (Navajo/Pueblo/Chicana), to join Spirit of the Sun, too. “I was intrigued when Nyomi brought home mushrooms and was explaining how mycelium can help heal the world,” Madalena explains. She is now part of the organization’s youth leadership program and is interested in, quite literally, illustrating our world’s interconnectedness through her passion for painting.

At the helm of Spirit of the Sun is executive director and permaculture educator Shannon Francis (Diné/Hopi). She developed the mycelium healing project in 2021 to address the environmental injustice caused by known polluter Suncor Oil Refinery, located in nearby Commerce City. Since then, dozens of Native youth have participated in the program.

“I was a teen in the 1980s when the Exxon spill in the Gulf [of Alaska] happened, and I remember all the amazing things mycelium can do,” says Francis. “We wanted to share that knowledge in order to address the negative health impacts for the community around Suncor, which is primarily Chicano and Indigenous, including a lot of elders.”

Shannon Francis. (Photo courtesy of Spirit of the Sun)

Under the guidance of local mycology expert James Weiser, youth leaders have built out two mycelial mother patches—starter gardens full of fungi that can then be transplanted to create satellite colonies—and regularly host training sessions to teach their younger counterparts and community elders how to grow mushrooms. For the next phase of the initiative, they hope to develop additional mother patches and inoculate homeowners’ gardens to magnify the fungi’s positive impacts, which they are measuring through ongoing soil testing.

“When we’re healing the soil, we’re healing ourselves,” says Francis. “Our genetic makeup comes directly from the water we drink and the soil we eat from. Most of the soil in the Denver area is depleted of nutrients, so we have to constantly add nutrients back in. Mycelium is like a nervous system that does its job in conjunction with nutrients in the soil. There are so many positive benefits to soil that is healthy and alive; it is connected to our food, our ceremonies, our language, and our stories.”

Participants in the Spirit of the Sun’s toddler program. (Photo courtesy of Spirit of the Sun)

At Spirit of the Sun, education starts early on, beginning with the Indigenous toddlers and teachings program for children aged 2 and up. “If we can teach our youth to observe the world through an Indigenous lens, they are better able to hold respect for the natural world, for the animals, for the elements, and for each other,” she notes. “Most adults have forgotten how to do that. But we know that everything is in kinship, with a function and a purpose.”

Francis is proud to have her 23-year-old daughter, Chenoa, closely involved as Spirit of the Sun’s youth outreach and agricultural support coordinator. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Chenoa has been an outspoken advocate for Indigenous rights since childhood.

“Spirit of the Sun is about empowering Native communities one youth at a time,” says Chenoa. “Having our programs be youth-led is our way of letting them know they matter and giving them the power to take hold of their future. We also match our youth with elders to create that intergenerational connection. We want to help instill that even for youth who might not understand their connection to the past or their tribe, there is always a way to connect with the Earth.”

Although Spirit of the Sun programming is dedicated to uplifting Native individuals, the benefits extend to the greater community, which Eve Hemingway can attest to. After moving to Denver in 2021, Hemingway found a reconnection to place upon attending a Spirit of the Sun workshop about plant relationships and seed keeping. That led to volunteering with the organization delivering food to families in need, then eventually to their current role as urban agriculture coordinator at anti-hunger nonprofit Metro Caring.

“Shannon helped me find my way back to the land, to the community, and to myself as a farmer,” says Hemingway. “What I find truly beautiful about my experience with Spirit of the Sun is that I can bring my whole, queer self to the table; I feel fully seen in all of my identities.”

Spirit of the Sun acts as a partner on Metro Caring’s Urban Agriculture Program, which supports community-based, farm-to-table food sovereignty. One of the project’s biggest obstacles is losing already rare Denver-area growing spaces to new construction projects, Hemingway explains. The Spirit of the Sun team has been instrumental in creatively approaching this challenge, with solutions like transforming willing homeowners’ lawns into mini gardens.

“Ensuring that our community has control over our food system cannot be achieved without organizations like Spirit of the Sun to steward the rematriation of the land,” says Hemingway. “As we continue to work toward food security for the Denver community and beyond, it’s imperative that we do so through a food sovereignty lens—ensuring that the foods produced are culturally relevant, factors of production are in the hands of the community, and food is produced sustainably through traditional Indigenous practices.”

In lieu of having its own land—which is a current focus area for Spirit of the Sun—the organization relies on partnerships with local individuals and organizations that allow Shannon and her team to utilize portions of their properties to grow those culturally relevant foods to feed elders, the unhoused, and others in need.

Participants in the Spirit of the Sun’s youth cooking class. (Photo courtesy of Spirit of the Sun)

Colorado-based Kaizen Food Rescue, which aims to uplift refugee and immigrant communities in the Denver area, has been partnering with Spirit of the Sun since the pandemic, when food insecurity was at an all-time high. Founder and Executive Director Thai Nguyen values that collaboration not only for its real-world impacts but also for its symbolism.

“This exchange of resources and shared knowledge highlights the importance of community networks and the strength that comes from unity,” she says. “Shannon has generously taught our community members, volunteers, and youth how to nurture and grow food in a sacred manner. By focusing on decolonizing diets and promoting culturally responsive practices, we’re not just addressing immediate food security issues—we’re also working toward long-term food sovereignty.”

These local partnerships reflect Spirit of the Sun’s goal to positively affect the lives of not only Native youth and elders, but also other marginalized groups that have been negatively impacted by the long-lasting effects of colonialism.

“Our intention is to try to heal ourselves from the intergenerational traumas that many Native and BIPOC folks experience,” Shannon says. “For example, I have boarding school survivors on both sides of my family. We believe that creating new positive memories can override traumatic memories. Through our programs, we talk about all these positive Indigenous principles and values. Our youth cooking classes, for instance, are focused on ancestral foods, the stories behind them, their health benefits, and the need to bring them back.”

That traditional ecological knowledge is also key for helping younger generations prepare for their role in mitigating the challenges of climate change. Both experts and research highlight the importance of Indigenous wisdom for biodiversity preservation, regenerative agriculture, and other holistic management approaches.

“A lot of it is genetic memory, which ties us to all our experiences and our ancestors,” Shannon says. “We have to remember the traditional ecological knowledge that will help us move forward. We want to help these kids become more resilient and give them the tools, resources, and support they need to move through climate change. Our programs are focused on uplifting youth to make them proud of who they are and give them hope about the future.”

The post Native Youth Learn to Heal Their Communities Through Mycelium appeared first on Civil Eats.

For almost three hours before the event, about 150 protesters—many of them Native Americans—blockaded the road that leads to the controversial national monument. Carrying signs reading, “You Are On Stolen Land” and “Honor All Treaties,” the activists were contesting Trump’s policies, standing in solidarity with the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, and calling for the return of land to Indigenous peoples—namely South Dakota’s sacred Black Hills. They faced off with local law enforcement and National Guard soldiers in riot gear, eventually disbanding following the arrest of 21 people.

Among those apprehended was Nick Tilsen, the Oglala Lakota president and CEO of NDN Collective, a Native-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power, which has been on the frontlines of the fight to return land to tribal communities. (The charges against him were dropped in December 2022.)

“The Land Back movement is much older than 2020, but that was a catalyzing moment,” he says. “We had the entire White House press corps here, and we wanted to amplify this authentic Indigenous narrative at that very specific time in history when we were seeing statues getting toppled and Confederate flags being lowered around the country. We see Land Back everywhere now, and that’s because this is a decentralized movement that isn’t driven by just one organization or leader. It’s truly a movement.”

In so many ways, the Black Hills—known as Paha Sapa in Lakota—serve as a striking symbol of the Land Back movement. As detailed in the popular 2022 documentary Lakota Nation vs. United States, the western South Dakota mountain range is considered sacred by area tribal nations and was long a key hunting ground for bison, pronghorn, elk, and deer. Its unlawful seizure nearly 150 years ago remains a major point of contention.

As colonialism swept across what would become the United States during the 19th century with blatant disregard for the land’s original inhabitants, Native peoples fought off settler and military encroachment of their hunting, fishing, and gathering territories. Their lifeways—and foodways—were hugely altered and restricted.

Deadly clashes on the Great Plains prompted the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which created the Great Sioux Reservation spanning 60 million acres around the Black Hills. But after gold was discovered in the mountains, the federal government redrew the treaty lines and seized the Black Hills in 1877, an act the nine tribes comprising the Great Sioux Nation have contested since that time.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the land had been illegally taken and awarded more than $100 million in reparations (though the land was not returned). The tribes refused to take the money, even as it grew to a value of more than $1 billion, because the Black Hills were never for sale.

Native peoples have lost nearly 99 percent of their historical land base in the U.S., according to recent research. With it, they lost access to important hunting and fishing grounds as well as myriad places to gather and prepare food.

For Tilsen and other Native thought leaders, the contemporary Land Back movement is about championing Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and economic opportunity while pushing back against long-standing discriminatory policies that continue to cause tribal communities undue hardships, including disproportionate poverty rates, outsized food insecurity, marked health disparities, and lower life expectancies. But it’s also about a powerful yearning to rebuild relationships to actual places—and the countless living things that inhabit them.

In Montana, for example, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes now oversee 18,000 acres where bison roam once again. In Nebraska, the Ponca people have been growing their sacred corn on farmland signed back to them in 2018. In New York, the Onondaga Nation is cleaning up the polluted waterways, once abundant with fish, on 1,000 returned acres.

In Minnesota, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe recently secured 12,000 acres within Chippewa National Forest, an important area for hunting, fishing, gathering, and harvesting wild rice. And in California, the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council (made up of 10 area tribal nations) is stewarding coho salmon and steelhead trout within a 523-acre property managed in partnership with the Save the Redwoods League.

Mohawk seed keeper and farmer Rowen White prefers to think of this revolution as rematriation. “I often choose the word rematriation over Land Back, because I hope that it can transcend the narrow Western/imperial concept of land ownership and tenure,” she wrote recently on Instagram. “Rematriation is in service to restoring relationality with the land and the countless more-than-human kin held within that land. Relationships-back. Loving interspecies reciprocity-back. Caring songs sung to the land that holds the bones of our ancestors-back.”

For White and many other food sovereignty activists, the movement to return ancestral homelands to their rightful tribal communities is inherently intertwined with the movement to revitalize Indigenous foodways. She points out that the massive land loss Native peoples experienced due to settler colonialism—more than 1.5 billion acres across the U.S., according to eHistory’s Invasion of America project—has hugely impacted their abilities to hunt, fish, forage, and farm.

As Tilsen mentions, Land Back predates that 2020 catalyzing moment at Mount Rushmore and the many modern-day grassroots efforts taking place across the globe. Alvin Warren was studying history at Dartmouth in the late 1980s when Santa Clara Pueblo tribal leaders tapped him to help resolve a decades-old Indian Claims Commission claim to regain some of their traditional homelands in modern-day New Mexico. Upon seeing his 221-page thesis paper on the history of his people’s homelands, the tribal council asked him to start a land acquisition program.

“I was 21 years old and had no idea how to even do that,” he recalls. “But I took it on, and we spent the better part of a decade collectively doing things we had only dreamed of. We were able to get three pieces of legislation through Congress, raise nearly $5 million, and get back more than 7,500 acres. That might not sound like a lot, but it was transformational for us because we had been hitting up against the same wall for well over a century.”

Warren helped the people of Santa Clara Pueblo regain more than 16,000 acres of their ancestral homelands, then answered the call from other tribal nations around the country to assist in reacquiring titles, entering into co-management agreements, and otherwise protecting their traditional lands. He went on to become the director of the Trust for Public Land’s tribal land program, the lieutenant governor of Santa Clara Pueblo, and eventually New Mexico’s Indian Affairs cabinet secretary.

His passion was reignited with the Biden administration’s historic appointment of Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) as interior secretary. She has ushered in a new era for a department that was once responsible for the systematic removal of Indigenous communities from their land. On her watch, thousands of acres have been returned to Native oversight, co-stewardship programs have been developed to protect sacred sites, and important species such as bison, bighorn sheep, and salmon have been restored to tribal lands.

Warren acknowledges this significant progress, yet he remains unsatisfied with recent state and federal efforts to return land to Native groups.

“Yes, we’re seeing a steady trickle of stories about land coming back into tribal control, but by and large, they are tiny bits of property,” he says. “We’re talking about 1.5 billion acres that have been taken from Indigenous people; we’re not going to get to anything remotely just if we’re doing this at 50, 100, 1,000 acres at a time.” He adds that tribes often have to repurchase these pieces of land and are often constrained by conservation easements, which place restrictions on land use and development.

Tribes have also been invited to co-manage land, which both Warren and Tilsen view as an insufficient end point. “It’s Land Back Lite,” Tilsen says with a laugh. “Co-management is a pathway for us to be able to manage our lands in better ways, but my worry is that it locks us into a longer power dynamic relationship with the federal government. What I’m really interested in is returning public lands and their titles to tribes or Indigenous cooperatives and coalitions.”

Though the Land Back movement is obviously uplifting Indigenous communities, they aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from more land being in tribal possession. As the climate crisis intensifies, so too does the clamor for real-world solutions. Increasingly, experts are turning to Native knowledge keepers and recognizing the power of traditional ecological knowledge, including practices such as agroforestry, fire stewardship, regenerative agriculture, and holistic wildlife management.

Recent research backs this approach. A 2019 ScienceDirect study showed that Native-managed lands foster as much or more biodiversity than protected areas, which could be key in mitigating the negative impact of extractive agriculture. Additionally, a 2016 World Resources Institute report determined that securing Indigenous forestland tenure in the Amazon basin could yield economic benefits up to $1.5 trillion over a 20-year period through carbon storage, reduced pollution, and erosion control.

“We know that countries that have made commitments to address climate change and biodiversity loss are falling short,” Warren says. “The restoration of land to tribal nations would actually help many countries get back on track. We have more and more researchers who are making this connection between the restoration of land to Indigenous peoples and the protection of our Earth, which ultimately is the protection of all people on this planet.”

Despite this compelling call to action for collective benefit, very real resistance remains due to misconceptions about the movement. “Land Back triggers people’s white fragility; they think we’re coming for the house, the picket fence, the 2.5 kids, and the dog,” Tilsen says. “But we as Indigenous people are not trying to repeat the history that was done to us. There’s also this misconception that white people don’t play a massive role [as] allies, when the reality is that Indigenous peoples’ fight to return our land is bound up with the very future of this country.”

Tilsen has concerns about what a presidential administration change could mean for Native representation and progress, but it’s not just about party lines. “The Nixon, Obama, and Biden administrations have been responsible for more actual Land Back than any other administrations,” says Tilsen. “Does it matter who is in office? Hell yeah, it matters. But our success doesn’t depend on one political party. We need to build power around this year’s historical election and develop solutions and strategies no matter who wins.”

To safeguard present and future progress, Warren implores policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels to take action in creating institutionalized mechanisms for tribal nations to acquire publicly managed and owned land. On the private side, he highlights the need for legitimate funding sources, since Native communities are typically asked to buy back stolen land, and urges individuals to consider donating unused lands to local tribes and including them in their estate planning.

Kavon Ward. (Photo credit: Gabriella Angotti-Jones)

The powerful impact of the Indigenous-led Land Back movement has sparked similar action among other marginalized groups. Reparative justice advocate Kavon Ward is driving the Black Land Back movement. She helped steward the 2021 return of Bruce’s Beach in California, a once-thriving Black community that was improperly seized in 1924 through eminent domain.

Today, Ward leads the advocacy organization Where Is My Land, which helps Black people discover and reclaim U.S. land taken from them. “I’m of the belief that you can’t have equality until there’s equity,” she says. “True remedy is returning what your ancestors stole from my ancestors.”

Much like the dispossession Native peoples have experienced, Black farmers lost about 13.5 million acres from 1920 to 1997, according to a 2022 AEA Papers and Proceedings study. That equates to roughly $326 billion of acreage. (As of the 2017 agricultural census, Black farmers operated 4.7 million acres, up from 1.5 million in 1997.)

In the end, the Land Back movement serves to not only support Native sovereignty but also safeguard our environment and strengthen our food systems.

“The future of conservation in the United States is Indigenous,” NDN’s Tilsen affirms. “There’s a massive opportunity to fight climate change and increase biodiversity while also achieving justice. Let’s hold a mirror up to America and find a path forward that includes Black reparations, the return of stolen Indigenous lands to Indigenous hands, and the changing of systems that perpetuate violence and oppression. The future we’re fighting for is not just a future for Indigenous people—it’s a future for people everywhere.”

The post The Land Back Movement Is Also About Foodways appeared first on Civil Eats.

After overseeing the food sovereignty program at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota, Black Elk recently became the education director for Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman’s Minneapolis-based nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS). There, she’s using her vast ecological expertise to develop curriculum for the Indigenous Food Lab training center and lead community engagement programming.

“As NATIFS’ education director, I organize classes about Indigenous foods covering a wide range of specialties, from how to cook wild rice to how to make perfect corn tortillas,” she explains. “We’ll be inviting guest chefs like Crystal Wahpepah from Wahpepah’s Kitchen to come in and prepare some of her favorite dishes. We’re also in the process of building a huge video library that is completely open source, so everyone will have access to resources about food safety, knife skills, game animal processing, and more.”

In addition to inspiring both Native American and non-Native students and her many social media followers, Black Elk has also earned the respect of fellow foragers such as author and natural historian Samuel Thayer. “Linda has such a broad knowledge base, and I have learned so much from her,” he says. “She is undoing the cultural shame that was instilled from boarding schools and the other ways that Indigenous people were pushed away from their food traditions. She mixes Indigenous traditional knowledge with modern science in a way that feels practical yet fun.”

Black Elk’s efforts go beyond education. In 2016, she was one of thousands of water protectors protesting the Dakota Access pipeline over concerns that an oil spill would contaminate the Standing Rock Sioux’s water supply and other resources. (The pipeline was ultimately built in 2017 and has been operational since.)

Civil Eats recently spoke with Black Elk about decolonizing our palates, foraging as an act of resistance, and developing intimate relationships with dandelions.

What sparked your initial interest in ethnobotany?

My [paternal] grandma and I would go for walks, and she would point out all the plants I could eat and which ones I couldn’t. She was always picking wild onions and poke greens, which we would cook up with scrambled eggs for breakfast. She kept fresh strawberries around because they were my favorite snack.

My mom was an Indigenous woman from Korea, and she grew up foraging and growing her own food as a matter of survival. Because her family was extremely poor, she needed to know all the plants she could eat because they were free. When she came over to this country with my father, it was a natural thing for her to carry over. She was surprised to find a lot of plants here that were similar to the ones she grew up with—amaranth, dandelion, goldenrod, lamb’s quarter, Solomon’s seal, tickweed—and she incorporated them into our diet.

In my family on both sides, we always considered plants as food and medicine. For example, if I had a sore throat, my mom would make me ginger and lemon tea with honey. I’ve never had a single year when I haven’t had a garden, even if that was a container garden. I grew up with a lot of really amazing fresh food that was both grown and harvested, and all of that family history led me to study plants in school.

Why is traditional ecological knowledge so important as it relates to both food sovereignty and climate change?

Let’s back up a bit. Everyone talks about decolonizing, but what does that even mean? In terms of food sovereignty, we’re talking about getting back to the foods of our ancestors. Unfortunately, our entire food system is determined by colonization, and our palates have also been colonized, largely by salt and sugar—so we believe that everything we eat needs to be salty or sweet. Our palates have forgotten how wonderful and healthful flavors like pungent and bitter can be.

For example, my husband’s people are Lakota, and during the cold winter months when there aren’t any bitter greens to eat, they would traditionally get bitter compounds from various parts of the buffalo. So they would dip pieces of meat in the bitter bile of the buffalo’s gallbladder. Similarly, one of my Ojibwe friends told me that during the winter, they would dip pieces of fish in the fish bile then eat it.

It’s that kind of knowledge of the people who came before us—about not only what is good to eat but what keeps us going physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—that is going to lead us into the future of food sovereignty. Traditional ecological knowledge is different from Western ecological knowledge in that it includes and understands the importance of culture and spirituality.

For instance, why is fry bread so popular as an Indigenous food? It’s not just that our palates now love gluten and sugary, salty foods. It’s also that people have watched their grandma make fry bread, so there’s this emotional and spiritual connection to that food. We need to rebuild those connections with our traditional foods, those really visceral memories of processing wild rice and cutting up bison meat to hang and dry. I have beautiful memories of making kimchi, a traditional Korean food, with my mom.

Linda Black Elk (third from left) and others butcher a bison. (Photo courtesy of Linda Black Elk)

The fact is that our current food system pours herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides on so much of our food. Our meat is laced with all kinds of hormones and antibiotics. Not to mention that industrial agriculture is hugely destructive to the environment. In order for us to move away from that, we have to get back to foods that love growing here, foods that we have a long-term relationship with.

We’re trying to grow crops that would love tons of precipitation that we just don’t have. We’ve also destroyed our topsoil, so we now have to put minerals and other nutrients back into the soil. It’s just hugely destructive and contributes to climate change. So if we get back to traditional foods through traditional ecological knowledge, we won’t have the full-scale destruction brought on by industrial agriculture.

Our consumption culture really contributes to climate change as well. When you build a relationship with the natural world, you start to realize that plants and animals are beings that have more value than just their monetary value. You start being more careful about how you move through the world and how you walk on the land. When you have a relationship with plants and animals, you’re a lot less likely to use and abuse these gifts. Instead, you’re going to make sure they’re well taken care of for future generations. 

How can we improve our relationship with plants, animals, and the natural environment around us?

On an individual level, it is about getting out there, introducing yourself to the natural world, and being willing to speak and listen. Plants do communicate with us if we take our time and approach them in a respectful way. For example, one spring day I noticed chickweed had started randomly growing right outside my kitchen door, which seemed so strange because it had never grown there before. Then I found out I had a thyroid issue. Chickweed has historically been used for thyroid regulation, so I realized that plant was communicating with me, being like, “Here I am. You need me.”

I do think plants come to us when we need them. But if you don’t recognize that plant, you might not know that it’s trying to communicate with you. I always recommend starting with dandelions and learning about their place in the world, since everyone knows what a dandelion looks like. They are a gateway plant, because they’ve been so vilified by Western culture yet they are an amazing food and medicine. Building these relationships opens us up to listening to the world around us instead of just constantly thinking about consumption.

Can you explain how you see foraging as an act of resistance?

In this society, food and medicine are expensive and inaccessible for a massive portion of the population. We are purposefully kept ignorant about and in fear of plant foods and medicines; we are indoctrinated into this idea that they are somehow dangerous or inferior.

But why? Why is a round crunchy ball of water in the form of iceberg lettuce somehow better than dandelion leaves? It certainly is not more healthful, but we have this perception that it is somehow better. We have to resist by questioning these assumptions about so-called “wild” foods. Even the word “wild” has certain connotations and can bring up images of danger in people’s minds. So it is an act of resistance to stand against that indoctrination and decolonize our palates.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the pandemic. What did we find out were some of the major risk factors for COVID complications? Diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. We were seeing all these elders and knowledge keepers dying from COVID and complications that were exacerbated by these health issues that are very much associated with diet and air quality. How are we going to prevent this from happening again in the future? We’ve got to change our diets so we can break that vicious cycle of a poor diet leading to poor health, which then leads to higher risk factors.

In March 2020, our family came up with a grassroots project to feed people. We were seeing these food kits being sent out with bags of flour, sugar, potatoes, white rice, and powdered milk—basically commodities that were exactly what was exacerbating the problem. So, we decided to make food and medicine kits with traditional Indigenous ingredients and organic, shelf-stable items.

They contained items like hand-harvested wild rice from Dynamite Hill Farms, corn grown by Oneida farmer Dan Cornelius, tepary beans from Ramona Farms, Tanka Bars, real maple syrup, freeze-dried vegetable mixes, bone broth, and amazing medicines like fire cider and elderberry elixir. We put out a call on social media, and people rallied, sending supplies and donating money so we could support these incredible Indigenous producers.

Our coverage area included North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and even Missouri. My husband and I would drive all over in our minivan delivering these kits and also picking up supplies to cut down on shipping costs. So far, we have sent out more than 3,000 kits, and we’re still doing it today. It is really just about showing our kids that individuals can make a difference.

From your perspective, what will it take for our food systems to be resilient once again?

We have to build community. We do that by building each other up instead of tearing each other down. When we build community, we know who has the seeds. We know how to plant those seeds, because we have learned from our community members and they’ve learned from us.

Under our current food system, if a blight comes and affects [the main] variety of corn, we would have no corn and there would be millions of starving people. But when we build a community of growers who are growing 500 different varieties of corn, if a blight comes and takes out one variety, we still have 499 varieties to rely on. That’s what resiliency is—it’s about working together to make sure that no one thing can tear us down.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The post Listen to Plants, Says Indigenous Forager and Activist Linda Black Elk appeared first on Civil Eats.

For millennia, abundant spring spawning runs of chi filled 14 tributaries feeding North America’s most ancient lake. Thousands of Tribal members gathered at Clear Lake to communally hand-harvest and process chi into fish jerky that provided year-long sustenance. Following successive genocides of Tribal communities, countless generations of sustainable fish harvests were erased by five generations of environmental damage: water diversions, invasive species introductions, and habitat destruction. Within our lifetimes, the chi spawning runs diminished to only six streams, and throughout the recent drought, we didn’t witness a single run.

In 2022, fearing for the chi’s future, Tribal members drove hundreds of miles to testify at agency meetings in Sacramento, Eureka, and South Lake Tahoe. Our efforts inspired a series of historical firsts: interagency hitch summits at Big Valley Rancheria in 2022 and Robinson Rancheria in 2023 resulting in novel, cross-agency collaborations, resource-pooling, and data-sharing to address persistent threats to the chi.

Reversing the damage is a complex undertaking. To understand how to maintain water flows in spawning streams for chi eggs to survive and emergent fry to make their way back to the lake, the California Department of Water and the State Water Resources Control Board are helping to install specialized equipment to monitor surface and groundwater in creeks and creekside wells. Lake County Water Resources and the California Conservation Corps are clearing tons of debris from waterways to improve fish habitat and water flow and reduce streambank erosion.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) allocated millions of dollars to identify and dismantle hitch migration barriers, complete a hitch conservation strategy, and fund the Robinson Rancheria Environmental Protection department to track and remove invasive carp, a chi predator known to grow up to 25 pounds and “vacuum up” thousands of chi eggs and young.

As we wrote about last year, an exceptionally wet spring in 2023 mitigated California’s drought and brought the welcome surprise of tens of thousands of hitch to lakeside streams. Yet heavy water flows generated a new emergency: Chi were swept over streambanks and stranded in ditches and fields. Tribal staff, accompanied by CDFW and landowners who reported strandings, ultimately rescued more than 26,000 chi.

The sudden appearance of high numbers of chi has scientists scratching their heads—there’s a working hypothesis that adjacent water bodies provided a refuge for adult hitch—and has some local residents, including farmers whose water use has come into question, suggesting that the crisis is not legitimate.

In a public meeting co-sponsored by the Lake County Farm Bureau, the audience was shown graphics illustrating hundreds of sampling sites throughout Clear Lake and nine years of hitch survey data using seine nets, electrofishing, and stream observations by U.S. Geological Service and CDFW fish biologists—all clearly pointing to severe hitch population declines. However, some audience members accused agencies of creating a false crisis based on “faulty data.”

We know that one year of good fish runs doesn’t mean our chi have recovered. It will take years of juvenile recruitment—loads of healthy teenagers growing into reproductive adults—to ensure their future. This year, although another wet winter has brought several feet of rain to Lake County, we haven’t yet seen the kinds of consistent water flows that are needed for the annual upstream migrations of the chi between February and June.

We are still waiting, watching, and praying for our chi. And whenever we see them again, we will sing them home.

The post Op-ed: The Clear Lake Hitch, and the Tribes That Depend on Them, Face Continuing Threats appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2023/12/27/our-best-food-justice-stories-of-2023/ Wed, 27 Dec 2023 09:01:00 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=54828 This year, we further explored how people are working toward food justice in their communities. We told the compelling story of the Fee-Fo-Lay Café in Wallace, Louisiana, which galvanized local residents to defend the small town from industrial development. We detailed how a Minneapolis neighborhood is working to turn a former Superfund site into a […]

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Food justice reporting has been a cornerstone of Civil Eats’ coverage since we launched 15 years ago. The food system bears a disproportionate impact on communities of color, ranging from the farmworkers struggling to feed themselves even as they harvest the nation’s produce to the BIPOC farmers who are often shut out from crucial financing and other resources.

This year, we further explored how people are working toward food justice in their communities. We told the compelling story of the Fee-Fo-Lay Café in Wallace, Louisiana, which galvanized local residents to defend the small town from industrial development. We detailed how a Minneapolis neighborhood is working to turn a former Superfund site into a community-owned indoor urban farm and hub. And we brought you the story of the Ujamaa Farmer Collective, which is helping historically underserved farmers in California gain land access through cooperative ownership.

We believe it is critical to highlight stories like these and the intersectionality of food through the prism of social and economic justice. We are committed to elevating the voices of people who produce our food, as well as those who are affected by its production. Here is our best food justice reporting this year.

Photo credit: Oisakhose Aghomo

Forging Pathways to Land Access for BIPOC Farmers in Georgia
Emerging tools are helping young and beginning BIPOC farmers find farmland and navigate the confusing legal process needed to acquire and manage it.

How the Long Shadow of Racism at USDA Impacts Black Farmers in Arkansas—and Beyond
Cotton Belt farmers have been waiting on long-overdue debt relief to right historic wrongs. But some see court battles, legislation, and red tape as a continued sign of systemic discrimination.

How a Louisiana Café Became Home Base for Environmental Justice
Sister-run Fee-Fo-Lay Café in Wallace serves t-cakes and helps organize Black residents to fight against industrial pollution and preserve their cultural heritage.

Can Sean Sherman’s BIPOC Foodways Alliance Dismantle White Supremacy Over Dinner?
Chef Sean Sherman and food writer Mecca Bos have launched a new nonprofit to bring together people of color and their white allies to share meals, recipes, and stories of resistance.

Photo credit: Jared Davis

This Fund Is Investing $20 Million to Help Black Farmers Thrive
Farmer-activists Karen Washington and Olivia Watkins created the Black Farmer Fund to boost Black farmers, agricultural businesses, and food entrepreneurs in the Northeast with tools, training, and cash.

This Community Garden Helps Farmworkers Feed Themselves. Now It’s Facing Eviction.
The members of Tierras Milperas in Watsonville, Calif. are struggling to maintain access to their garden. Similar stories are unfolding across the country.

Photo courtesy of The Jemima Code and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

Op-ed: Black Women, Architects of the American Kitchen, Deserve a Rightful Place in the Sun
A chef and food writer takes a hard look at the Mammy stereotype, the rare outliers who have achieved recognition for their cooking, and the inequity that still prevents most Black women from owning restaurants.

‘Rhythms of the Land’ Preserves the Untold Stories of Black Farmers
Filmmaker and cultural anthropologist Gail Myers discusses the making of her documentary, the oppressive history of sharecropping, and power of seed saving for Black farmers.

An Indigenous-Led Team Is Transforming a Minneapolis Superfund Site into a New Urban Farm
Cassandra Holmes is working to bring fresh, local food to the Little Earth of United Tribes community in East Phillips. Now, the city has brokered a deal that could rehabilitate the former Superfund site and engage young residents.

Photo credit: Centre for Environmental and Minority Policy Studies

A Fight for Salmon Fishing Rights Connects Indigenous Peoples Across the Pacific Ocean
For Japan’s Indigenous Ainu people, salmon is king. With inspiration from Indigenous groups in Washington state, the Ainu are reclaiming their historical fishing rights.

The Organic Urban Farm Growing Healthy Food for One of Chicago’s Most Underserved Neighborhoods
For two decades, the 1.5-acre Growing Home farm grew fresh produce for restaurants and surrounding communities. Now it’s focused on feeding its neighbors with support from across the city.

California Will Help BIPOC Collective Cultivate Land Access for Underserved Farmers
With a recent grant from the state of California, Ujamaa Farmer Collective hopes to provide farmers of color with land to start or grow farming businesses.

The post Our Best Food Justice Stories of 2023 appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/11/28/this-indigenous-cook-wants-to-help-readers-decolonize-their-diets/ Tue, 28 Nov 2023 09:01:36 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=54407 Calvosa Olson grew up with a Karuk mother and an Italian father on a homestead in the Hoopa Valley Reservation, near California’s northern edge. She spent a great deal of time during those formative years outside, learning about her plant and animal relatives and eating a combination of commodity foods and the foods her parents […]

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Sara Calvosa Olson didn’t set out to write a traditional cookbook. She had spent several years writing a column about the Indigenous foodways of California for the quarterly magazine News From Native California when she landed a book deal with Heyday Books (the magazine’s publisher) to expand on the column. Then, the pandemic hit and Calvosa Olson turned toward her own kitchen and began writing about and developing recipes based on the meals she’d been cooking for more than two decades. Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen, released earlier this fall, is the fruit of that labor.

Calvosa Olson grew up with a Karuk mother and an Italian father on a homestead in the Hoopa Valley Reservation, near California’s northern edge. She spent a great deal of time during those formative years outside, learning about her plant and animal relatives and eating a combination of commodity foods and the foods her parents grew, gathered, hunted, and bartered for. “Family celebrations and special foods were formative to the way I now show love and connect to my identity as a flourishing matriarch,” she writes in the introduction to Chími Nu’am.

“We are all colonized, our palates are colonized. And it’s kind of impossible to raise children who don’t love Fruit Snacks and other processed foods.”

Although Calvosa Olson moved to the Bay Area, she stayed in touch with the Karuk community and continued to nurture the food traditions with which she was raised. She writes:

“When I had children of my own, I wanted to connect my sons to these family recipes and to being Karuk, as we were living away from Karuk community and traditional lands. By intentionally establishing this connection, I discovered a love for developing new and colorful recipes based on our old family recipes and traditions. Gathering wild foods, sharing, teaching, cooking, and tending have all been an opportunity to grow and heal in the nurturing way I didn’t know I needed.”

Chími Nu’am, which translates to “Let’s eat!” in the Karuk language, is in many ways a record of that process in addition to a compendium of recipes. Organized by season, the book guides its readers in gathering, processing, and cooking with Indigenous foods in hopes of helping us begin to integrate more traditional ingredients into our oversimplified modern palates.

Its recipes range from creative takes on familiar foods—blackberry-braised smoked salmon and elk chili beans—to dishes that will be entirely new to many readers, such as nettle tortillas, miner’s lettuce salad, and spruce-tip syrup. And it includes recipes for nearly a dozen foods made with acorns, including crackers, muffins, crepes, and hand pies, as well as a rustic acorn bread that calls for one cup of acorn flour and two cups of wheat flour.

Calvosa Olson has written a book that will speak to multiple audiences. But whether she’s guiding Indigenous readers to embrace more of their cultural foods or making recommendations for non-Indigenous readers interested in decolonizing their diets in an ethical way (hint: it’s about reciprocity), her voice and philosophy come through clearly on the page.

Civil Eats spoke to Calvosa Olson recently about the book, how she hopes it will reach those very different audiences, and her urgent call to all of us to begin reconnecting to the natural world through food.

How did the recipes in the book take shape, and how did you decide what to include and what to leave out to protect or preserve specific cultural foods and traditions?

I think we can all agree that Native people have lost so much, and so much has been taken, appropriated, and diluted. There are still some cultural foodways that are very similar to the foodways that we have always eaten. And because there are so few, I didn’t feel like it would be appropriate to put those in a book for everybody. Even in the work that I do for my own family, there’s a difference between what is for us in ceremony and what is for us to incorporate in our everyday lives or to maintain our connection to our stewardship.

We are all colonized, our palates are colonized. And it’s kind of impossible to raise children who don’t love Fruit Snacks and other processed foods. But I really wanted them to develop a love for foods that are bitter or fishy—those types of things that we shy away from in Western culture.

“We are all suffering from diet-related diseases. It’s terrible. And it’s so difficult to right that ship for many reasons.”

Different audiences will experience this book differently, but as a non-Indigenous reader, I felt invited in—invited to take part and understand more of the cultural experience behind these foods rather than merely follow recipes. That said, gathering and preparing these ingredients is also going to be a learning curve for some readers.

We all need to develop relationships with our foodways, and our lifeways, and what’s going on around us. Nobody can turn on the news and disagree with that. We need to at least develop some relationships with the rhythms of the world around us right now. So, I want the book to be a warm welcome in to do that.

But also, how you do that is very important. And I love that people are asking: How do I do it ethically? You have this opportunity to go forward intentionally and choose the lens that you want to view this work through, and you can center Indigenous people, and our traditional knowledge and our relationship-building and community-centered lifeways, as you go forward. Which means that you are also building relationship and building community with Indigenous people and we’re all working together.

And how do you interact with Native people who have been deliberately othered in the state, and deliberately made invisible? Growing up in the U.S., we don’t hear from Indigenous people, and that’s what causes a lot of the mystic Indian tropes. And you can see that in the [U.S.] education system, which ignores Native people, and refers to us in the past. But we are still here, and we are safeguarding so much of the world’s biodiversity.

We’re also at the forefront of environmental science; we have incredibly sophisticated people working in our environmental departments. We have climate action plans, we have stewardship plans, we have everything we could possibly need to go forward to rehabilitate the land except power and influence. Even if I only reach one person at a time, and they went about things in a different way and began to understand the value of [traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous foodways] in a new way, that would be a success.

You recommend that non-Native folks contact their local tribal representatives when they want to learn how to gather acorns and other Indigenous ingredients. What do you say to people who worry that they’d be bothering them in asking for their services?

There are non-Native people out there who run foraging classes and you have the choice to either pay them or you can call or email tribal peoples or tribal entities and say, “Listen, I’m interested in learning more about this. And I can pay non-Native foragers, but I would prefer to put my resources with you. I want to center your knowledge. Do you offer any classes to the public for gathering or know of anybody willing to show us how to gather?”

I realize it’s uncomfortable! Because, again, [people are used to] othering of us, and don’t know how to interact with us. They feel like they’re going to bother us. But that just keeps people going to foragers who are non-Native. But overcoming that awkwardness is important because the worst thing that can happen is that they can say, “Yikes, we don’t know anybody.”

“People are still reliant on commodity food and subsistence gathering. And often when you go out to gather your traditional foods, they’re not there anymore.”

You share strategies for decolonizing your diet gradually by adding, for example, a cup of squash to frybread or a cup of acorn flour to bread to replace processed white flour. Can you say more about that approach?

Because our palates are all colonized, to some degree, we have to reintroduce these foods gradually. There’s a dilution that occurs. But I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. Because we can’t all go rushing into the forest right now to completely decolonize our diets. It’s impossible. We would we need to set up new food systems that are as robust as the ones we have now before we could do that. This is a gradual change.

One cup of acorn flour instead of one cup of white flour is still one less cup of white flour. In [Indigenous] communities that really matters. We are all suffering from diet-related diseases. It’s terrible. And it’s so difficult to right that ship for many reasons. There’s so little food education, no access to healthy foods. People are still reliant on commodity food and subsistence gathering. And often when you go out to gather your traditional foods, they’re not there anymore. The fish are gone and the fires have burned the mycelium mats, so the mushrooms aren’t coming back the same.

Anything that we can do to start turning this ship around is important. And it’s about eating and nourishment, yes. But it’s also about connecting to community and connecting to our role as people for the environment—and waking up to our obligations to everything around us.

You recommend that readers start to expand their worldview and their approach to Indigenous foods slowly, but you also go on to write, “I want to impress upon everybody the urgency with which we must act to keep our ecosystems healthy.” How do you balance that desire to move slowly and build deeper connections to ecosystems against that larger sense of urgency?

“Hurry up! And go slow”—that’s what I’m telling people. Connecting to this approach requires you to go slow in the beginning, but as you develop your own connections and your own relationships it’s like a snowball; it will start to build on itself exponentially. And you will become more attuned to these issues and more connected to the activism that Indigenous people are engaged in. And then, in a year, you will have so much more knowledge and it will be an exponential leap to the next year. And it goes on from there. If you go too fast, and you’re not developing relationships or practicing reciprocity, then you’re just perpetuating the same cycles of settler colonialism and extraction that got us into this mess in the first place.

You worked with the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center teaching cooking to Indigenous elders during the pandemic. Can you speak to how that work helped shape this book?

Indigenous readers were really the first and only audience that I was considering at first. This whole book took a lot of checking in with community and gut-checking constantly about how to go forward and be inclusive, because I really, genuinely believe that we need everybody together to do this. And I don’t think that Indigenous people alone can do this. But I do want to prioritize the health of our communities first, because I want us to be healthy and ready to keep it up.

“We are reclaiming that history and knowledge, and we have to teach it to our children.”

As lost as [non-Native people] might feel sometimes about how to go forward and who to ask about Indigenous foods and practices, we often feel the same way. Many Native people are disconnected from family and community, and they’re spread out or flung all over the place. For instance, I’m on Coast Miwok land, but I’m not Coast Miwok, so I’m still a guest on this land. How do I go forward here in a way that centers reciprocity? And we’re all asking these kinds of questions.

Most of our foodways were not documented in California because it was considered “women’s work.” We just have smoked salmon and acorn soup. I know we had a massive variety of foods, and it was vibrant, colorful, nuanced, and delicious. And yet, if you were to read documentation about the Karuk tribe, you would see that we only ate two things.

We are reclaiming that history and knowledge, and we have to teach it to our children. And sometimes I teach it to older people who were sent to boarding schools or whose parents were sent to boarding schools and didn’t want to have anything to do with their indigeneity when they returned. It is complicated for all of us. There are not very many people doing this work in a way that is engaging all people. And that’s mainly because there are so few of us and the first focus has to be on fortifying the people in our own communities. But I’m a white Indian, so I want to be able to leverage my whiteness to speak to a non-Native community, and to engage them about how to go about this in a good way. I’m like a liaison.

I have a whole half of me that isn’t Native, and it’s a challenge to reconcile these two sides. But I don’t have to reconcile them right now. What I can do is use what was good on [my Italian side]—the things I learned about family and community and how to show my love through food and laughter and storytelling—to uplift the Native people in my communities.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Acorn Pumpkin Muffins

Muffins are such a forgiving bake, so this is a great place to mess around with some dried fruits and toasted nuts if you like a little extra something in your morning nosh. Muffins are also very easy for little hands to make! Get the niblings involved with this one.

Makes 12 muffins

Ingredients

1½ cups all-purpose flour 1⁄2 cup acorn flour
½ cup chocolate chips (see Note)
¼ cup maple sugar
1½ teaspoons baking soda
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1½ teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
½ teaspoon salt
1⅓ cups whole milk
1 large egg
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup cooked squash puree

Note: This is a very forgiving recipe, so you can add more or fewer chocolate chips or substitute them with dried fruit and/or nuts.

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

In a large bowl, mix together the flours, chocolate chips, maple sugar, baking soda, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, and salt.

In another large bowl, mix together the milk, egg, vanilla, and squash puree.

Stir them together to form a batter. Do not overmix. Fill the cups of two 6-cup muffin tins three-quarters of the way full.

Bake for 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

This recipe is excerpted from Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen by Sara Calvosa Olson. Reprinted with permission from Heyday © 2023.

The post This Indigenous Cook Wants to Help Readers Decolonize Their Diets appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/11/20/building-a-case-for-investment-in-regenerative-agriculture-on-indigenous-farms/ Mon, 20 Nov 2023 09:00:49 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=54321 The Brewers run cattle and grow some alfalfa across 12,000 acres of grassland that’s a combination of owned land, leased tribal land, and federal trust land. This complicated arrangement isn’t unusual for Indigenous producers, who experience unique hurdles such as financial lending discrimination, limited land ownership opportunities, additional governance requirements, and disproportionately high poverty rates […]

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For three generations, Fanny Brewer’s family has been ranching the same land in South Dakota’s Ziebach County. Encompassing part of the 1.4-million-acre Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, where she grew up, the county is among the poorest areas in the United States. But for Brewer, her husband, and their four kids, it represents prosperity.

The Brewers run cattle and grow some alfalfa across 12,000 acres of grassland that’s a combination of owned land, leased tribal land, and federal trust land. This complicated arrangement isn’t unusual for Indigenous producers, who experience unique hurdles such as financial lending discrimination, limited land ownership opportunities, additional governance requirements, and disproportionately high poverty rates as a result of colonialism.

“Some Native families never develop that generational wealth, whereas our non-Native neighbor, whose family has owned their land since the late 1800s, has been able to grow their business.”

Despite these systemic obstacles, the Brewers plant cover crops between alfalfa rotations and use fewer chemicals on their crops than most conventional operations. They’d like to use more regenerative ranching practices, including adaptive, multi-paddock grazing, on more land and help prove that those practices are worth investing in.

For those reasons, the ranch is one of 14 operations participating in a three-year study from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Intertribal Agriculture Council (IAC) that is examining the benefits and barriers of regenerative agriculture among Indigenous ranchers and farmers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Montana.

“The volatility of leasing land and how it affects your borrowing power with banks has always been a struggle for Native producers,” says Brewer, who also serves as the IAC’s Great Plains technical assistance specialist. “Some Native families never develop that generational wealth, whereas our non-Native neighbor, whose family has owned their land since the late 1800s, has been able to grow their business. Those are the hard realities we have to face.”

She points to a recent example when a desirable plot of land came up for sale. Compared to a local non-Native rancher who could leverage her owned land and secure a bank loan quickly to purchase that real estate, Brewer needed to put up her livestock, machinery, and other material assets as collateral since her family doesn’t own all their land—and it took weeks to assess.

“I don’t hold anything against her, but I didn’t realize until then how differently we approach things,” Brewer says. “At that time, I chose to pull out some of our land that was in trust with the U.S. government and put it in deed status so that the next time I walk into the bank, I have more power. Some people have questioned my moves, but these are choices I have had to make for my family so we can take control of our own destiny.”

This is an all too common experience among Indigenous entrepreneurs, says Skya Ducheneaux, also a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the founder of the Native-focused community development financial institution (CDFI) Akiptan. “Many Native producers aren’t able to list their land on their balance sheet, so they can’t leverage that value,” she explains. “When you don’t have as much equity to leverage, lending institutions deem you risky, and because of that, you get shorter repayment terms and higher interest rates. You end up stuck in this cycle of just surviving.”

Regenerative practices—most of which are already in Indigenous farmers’ and ranchers’ wheelhouses because they align more closely with, and are often based upon, their traditional practices—are much harder to employ because they’re more expensive and labor-intensive.

Brewer chose to participate in the EDF/IAC study because it will yield quantitative data about both those costs—including financial investments and loan terms—as well as the benefits of investing in regenerative practices, such as profitability, soil health improvement, forage quality, and livestock growth. To gather that information, the pilot cohort is receiving technical assistance from the IAC team and participating in the Minnesota Farm Business Management Program. Offered through the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, it provides one-on-one financial education such as record keeping and performance analysis.

Fanny Brewer, IAC technical assistance specialist for the Great Plains region, discusses the regenerative agriculture projects with Jess Brewer. (Photo courtesy of Intertribal Agriculture Council, www.indianag.org)

All of the producers in the study raise livestock, and some also grows crops. Many are in the process of transitioning from more extractive conventional methods to regenerative practices, with data being collected from 2022 through 2024. Although full results will not be available until the project’s completion, researchers are developing intermediate case studies, including one that should be released before the end of the year.

The researchers hope the study encourages producers to adopt climate-smart practices, such as using adaptive grazing, planting cover crops, and reducing tillage. The larger goal, however, is to urge financial institutions to reframe their understanding of Indigenous ranchers and farmers, who are often considered high-risk given their limited equity.

The shift to regenerative practices can take three to five years and reduce profitability by up to $40 per acre during the transition, according to recent research by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s One Planet Business for Biodiversity coalition. But farmers and ranchers can expect a 15 to 25 percent return on investment and profit growth by up to 120 percent in the long run, according to the study, which calls for public and private assistance to alleviate these burdens placed on the individual business owners.

While the term regenerative agriculture hasn’t yet appeared on many food labels, a whole range of interests—including corporate marketing departments and individual producers hoping to earn a higher premium—are anticipating a wider embrace of the term in the consumer market in the coming years. Simultaneously, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is investing heavily in new and existing carbon markets designed to reward growers for the carbon they store on their farms.

Although they’re not the focus of the current study, IAC Regenerative Economies Director Tomie Peterson (Cheyenne River Sioux) says, “Carbon credits are an opportunity that I would like to provide more education on to Native producers.”

Ducheneaux is optimistic that the EDF/IAC study will prompt traditional lenders to better support Indigenous entrepreneurs interested in taking up or highlighting their existing regenerative practices in ways akin to how Native-focused community development financial institutions are already doing so. “We have all this anecdotal evidence about the positive impacts of regenerative agriculture in Indian Country, but we don’t have the quantitative data that the rest of the world likes to see,” she says. “This study is really groundbreaking because it will reinforce what we already know, open the doors for even more producers, and broaden the impact across Indian Country.”

Although she too is eager to address these so-called credit deserts—which have notable overlap with tribal territories—Peterson wants to manage expectations about what this initiative can realistically accomplish. “The study is just trying to find the facts; I don’t know if we can overcome barriers,” she says candidly. That said, she is confident that the project findings will help cohort participants better understand if and how their practices are paying off and therefore make informed business decisions.

“The food system in North America has become very brittle, so a new model of agriculture that focuses on community and connection with the natural world is really important.”

This study closely aligns with the EDF’s objective to promote climate-beneficial farming practices while also helping producers prepare for and mitigate the escalating impacts of the climate crisis.

“Climate change majorly affects farmers and ranchers across the country,” says EDF Climate-Smart Agriculture Manager Vincent Gauthier. “We are focused on developing solutions that allow farmers to invest in the resilience of their farms against those weather extremes and changing conditions.”

Gauthier, Peterson, and the study leaders were very intentional in the language they chose to define the project, since regenerative agriculture is a hot-button topic within Indigenous communities, who used traditional ecological knowledge long before farmers and businesses started using terms like regenerative or organic. Gauthier explains that the team landed on a definition of regenerative they think transcends geographies and methodologies: a holistic approach to revitalizing land and the ecological system that focuses on improving soil’s ability to regenerate over time by involving the entire ecosystem, including humans and wildlife.

Farmer-researcher Jonathan Lundgren, whose grassroots 1,000 Farms Initiative is similarly aimed at studying and quantifying regenerative agricultural systems, notes that a larger paradigm shift is crucial. He underscores how vital hard data—about soil carbon, sequestration, reversal of desertification, promotion of biodiversity, increased farm resilience, and the like—is to incentivizing financial institutions to invest in producers employing practices that many of them have never seen or heard of.

“The food system in North America has become very brittle, so a new model of agriculture that focuses on community and connection with the natural world is really important,” he says.

Lundgren also sees Indigenous producers as an ideal group to receive more investment, as many already have the experience and tools to spearhead efforts to bring about a larger movement toward more regenerative practices. “Traditional Indigenous food systems have a deeper understanding of why the land and the life around them is essential to the long-term happiness and resilience of their culture and community.”

Jess Brewer walks alongside Fanny Brewer, IAC technical assistance specialist for the Great Plains region. (Photo courtesy of Intertribal Agriculture Council, www.indianag.org)

Ducheneaux and many thought leaders agree. They contend that an embrace of Indigenous knowledge is crucial in mitigating the effects of climate change in the years ahead. After all, while Native peoples comprise just 5 percent of the world’s population, they protect around 85 percent of global biodiversity.

“Native producers have been doing regenerative agriculture since time immemorial,” she affirms. “I hope there will be more research into tribal ecological knowledge so that the American agriculture industry as a whole can start to heal itself, and we can all hold ourselves to a higher standard in taking care of the land so it can in return take care of us.”

Back in South Dakota, rancher Fanny Brewer wants to help usher in that shift, but she needs the U.S. food system to provide an on-ramp to make it possible.

“I wish in this country you could make more money simply by doing the right thing—but that’s not how it’s set up,” she says. “I have four kids that I’m trying to raise, feed, and clothe, so I can’t be doing something just because I have a passion for it. I hope this study helps people see that you can do the right thing for the environment and for the health of human beings and animals and that you can still make it. You can be a good steward and still keep your head above water financially.”

The post Building a Case for Investment in Regenerative Agriculture on Indigenous Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

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