We're freezing prices for two years in the Virgin Media playhouse.
Switch to our super fast, reliable broadband now and freeze your prices or law broadband offers for twenty four months from just thirty five euro month with no activation fee. Switch in store or at Virgin Media dot I Virgin Media.
It's playtime.
Tcenc's applies subject to availability new broadband customers and twenty four month contracts only. You won't receive a price increase with the duration of this contract from thirty five euro month for twenty four months seventy euro thereafter. Nce February eighteenth, twenty twenty six.
Get value you can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Have the perfect night in with their finest frozen pizza meal deal. Get a finest frozen pizza, chips and ice cream all for six euro. Like our delicious spicy salami, hot honey and do Ya or Margarito wood fired pizzas, served up with their crispy chunkie chips and ice cream like sea salta caramel or pistachio for dessert. Can't argue with that shop in store or online. Tesco
every little helps available in most stories. Prices vary in express.
Oh.
Hi, hi, it's that mechanical pencil that's out of lead. Oh wait, click click, wait, oh look there you go, alli word. I hope you're hungry for a small, bite sized version of indigenous cooking. So this is an episode of smologies, and smologies are shorter edited episodes of longer full length episodes, but we cut out all the swear words and we make it safe for all ages. If you're looking for the full version, it's linked right in the show notes. But if you're here for smologies, you're
in the right place. This episode's great. It's just a wonderful romp through time and identity and history and culture and food with someone who you may know as in digit Kitchen Online Indigenous Digital Kitchen Online cooking lessons in digit Kitchen. Can you dig it? You can?
So.
This guest is of both Begani Blackfeet and Cherokee heritage, and is based on the one point five million acre black Feet Reservation in northwestern Montana. I was so excited to get to know her, and I was nervous because she's very cool, and I had a bunch of questions and I didn't want to be annoying. You know what, after all that worrying, I was annoying and I did ask embarrassing questions. But she rolled with it because she's awesome and that's what I'm here for. Okay, but let's
get on with it. Indigenous Queisonology which is the study of a culture through its food, and indigenous comes from a Latin root for indeed, genus, which is sprung from the land or native. You're gonna love her, Your love her work so much, Okay, So belly up, stuff a
napkin into your collar. Boy, howdy, get hungry for stories involving fallen stars, mushroom, DIBs, food, sovereignty, squash, acorns, flower bulbs, bison, The Wildest of Rice's meditations on fry bread, and how cooking with native foods isn't part of a past but an essential aspect of the future. With environmental scientist, engineer, cooking show host and advocate Mariah Gladstone, soligious.
Pology con cheu mon jeez.
My name is Mariah Gladstone.
She her and now You're based in northwest Montana.
Yep. I'm on the Blackfeet Reservation just south of the Canadian border. I'm about five minutes outside the eastern entrance to Glacier National Park.
Yeah, okay.
You know, when you're coming up with recipes, are you really kind of basing it on rather than maybe hyperlocal? Are you looking for seasonal types of foods that might be traditional to whatever season is coming up, or how do you plan your the recipes that you're gonna film and shoot and disseminate.
That's a great question. Yeah, it's a combination of regional things, especially when I'm doing really old or ancestral recipes, things that would have been made very similar to the way that I'm showcasing them. And in that case, of course, you're looking for a whole bunch of ingredients that would
have been found in the same area. We're thinking of foods that are in season right now, so of course it is the time of winter squashes, and it's the time of pumpkins, and it's hunting season, and there's all of these wonderful foods that are available now. It's after ricing, so people have fresh, parched wild rice, and it's fun to incorporate those all at the same time. Even though now,
of course, we have ways of preserving foods. So I have picked berries from August, but I can pull them out at any time and use them for things because I have them in the freezer, I have them dehydrated or whatever that may be. But also I recognize, you know, Indigenous people are living in the twenty first century with everyone else, and we have always used the tools that we have access to. And right now, maybe that's a
big chest freezer. Maybe that's an instapot. Maybe that is a coffee grinder that can blend sunflower seeds into flower at lightnings ps.
While we recorded this, I was like, oh, what recipe? Use is sunflower butter? So I didn't want to interrupt her, but if your stomach just gurgled in curiosity, I looked it up. She has a sunflower butter popcorn recipe that involves honey and maple syrup, and the note that this stuff is addictive. I'm willing to take the risk.
Whatever it is, we are able to recognize that ancestral wisdom and the indigenous brilliance of agriculture or harvesting or foraging or hunting or whatever it may be, along with our presence in this day.
You mentioned a little bit about how the diets veered off based on what was available and cheaper, less healthy foods. People hear indigenous food and they think frybread.
Does that just make you want to rage? Ever, to be.
Honest, side note, frybread is this pillowy, oil bathed white flower comfort food and it's used as a taco base or even as like this honey drizzled dessert. But it's been in the hot seat. So how does an expert feel about its place on the food landscape.
You know, it's funny because frybread, of course, came from a period of time where Native people were dependent on government rations, which were like shelf stable processed boxes of food that were distributed to households and they weren't things we recognized as food, so we made something out of them because survival, and that's what where friybread came from.
So I will say that frybread is a traditional food in that it's part of our history and it got us through a period of time that would have otherwise met starvation. But there is a tendency of oppressed people to mistake our oppression for our culture, and I think that's kind of what people do with friedbread or commodity, cheese or whatever thing that has become part of these subsidized food systems. And so I don't I don't spend
a lot of time trashing fry bread. So rather than focusing on all this negative stuff, we just focus on all of the resources that we do have, the things that we do have access to, whether it be in our grocery stores or in our communities, or in the lands that we can forage, or the things that we can grow in our soils, whatever it may be, those are the things that I focus on and really tie it all back to the incredible wisdom that has put
those things in place, that has helped us recognize. You know, corn corns edible, right, but the ways in which we eat corn now are not traditionally how they were eaten. Our ancestors recognized that corn had to be treated with this process of niche timalization.
Why does it mixed amalization.
It's called nextimalization and it comes from the indigenous and Wantlau meaning lime ashes and tamal for corn dough.
So nick stimilization this process of treating corn with a highly alkaline solution that you make from adding wood ash to water and it chemically dissolves the hull of the corn, and that transforms the bound and n iosin into free niosin, and you have amazing indigenous chemistry happening, while also recognizing that you've now added way more nutritional value to the corn and the wood ash has added calcium which is way more absorbable than the calcium and dairy for example, And all of that.
Has taken generations of indigenous knowledge to put in place.
And when you are finding out about how food was processed and cooked and used, what kind of sources do you usually go for? Are you like pouring through biochemistry journals? And what is it like when you when you find out something new that you hadn't known before.
Oh, it's it's funny because I'm of course, I'm living on the Black Hate Reservation, so I have cultural connections here. I have indigenous botanists that are super informed and have a lot of information themselves. But I also I'm a graduate student and I can occasionally approach things from an academic side. Sometimes I get information just by reaching out to Native chefs and asking questions, especially if it's from
a community that I don't have knowledge of. So if you're talking with plant folks, they might say, oh, yeah, this plant is edible. Great, what part of the plant when do you harvest it? You know, Camus roots, for example, Camus bulbs are edible.
What are these?
Okay, I'd never heard of them, but they are plant friends in the asparagus family, and they're flowers sometimes carpet whole beautiful meadows with these lilac or white or deep violet blooms. And then the root, the bulb tastes like a freaking baked pear, So go find them just by blossom spotting, right.
No, but it is more traditional for people to wait until after they've bloomed, which makes them a little bit harder to identify. And then you also have to know what it could be mistaken as, like death cavas, which is a white flower versus a blue flower. But if they're not blooming when you're harvesting them, that's hard to tell. And then you have to know, of course, how to cook it. And for camus, it's really really high in inulin.
Okay.
Inulin is a fiber. And I'm going to read between her lines here and break the windy news. She's talking farts. People delicious, creamy sweet. Inulin has a price, and it's ripping hot once for days.
And so you have to basically slow cook these or roast these for an extended amount of time. And traditionally that was done in a big hit underground and they'd be roasted for up to forty eight hours until basically the sugars are caramelizing, and how the inulin's been processed down so your body can digest it. That's not something that it says if you're like Camas, bulbs are edible, right, so all of that information has to go along with it,
or else the resource is incomplete. You know, just knowing that something is edible doesn't necessarily help as a resource all the time because sometimes it can be dangerous. So, for example, choke cherries are edible, but the pits and choke cherries contain cyanide. But the pits were traditionally eaten by Blackfeet and Lakota and other people that traditionally eat
and choke cherries. Because we took choke cherries smashed them with a rock in their entirety into little choke cherry pancakes, right, We basically made little fruit patties and then We dried them until they were dehydrated, and then now they're dried out. They're very packable. They keep for a long time, but that drying process neutralizes the cyanide in them. So you can eat the pits because now they've been smashed into oblivion, and also the scyanide is not going to harm you.
Wow.
What about some myths that you commonly encounter that you love to bust? Like, is it flim flam that the North American indigenous diet is mostly acorns?
It's not all acorns? Maybe acorns?
Acorns are all edible?
Mm hmm.
I was just gonna say, I mean I don't come from I don't come from any acorn eating people. That sounds weird, Okay.
So I grew up in California and it's golden foothills are studded with oak trees. I love them so much. I grew up collecting acorns for school projects. So I thought it was a national teaching that indigenous foods were all acorn based, So that must be a myth. Turns out it's incredibly regional. Of course, Like Durward, did I embarrass myself? Sure a little bit. So go text your crush cut. Some banks ask the questions to the stuff you don't know.
That's really interesting to me because I think that obviously, in Montana, so much of our education is buffalo bison. And then on the East Coast where my partner's from, he's hodn ashone Onondaga from New York, and so a lot of their discussions about indigenous food are about the three Sisters, which is of course corn beans and squash. Coming from a very different agricultural community, which is similar to how my mom's people, Cherokee, traditionally grew food as well.
Up in the Great Lakes region, it's probably all focused about wild rice and rice and culture. And then you know down in the Southwest you get more corn beans and squash, but also there's sunflowers all over that people have incorporated as and bread specifically to have very large edible seeds, and cactuses Like cactuses don't get talked a lot about unless you're in Mexico, in which case everyone's like, oh, yeah,
I know, pals. But then we have prickly pear cacti in Montana and those produce the same edible fruit, and that is a treat for black feet people. It's so regional and that's the fun part of it. I don't know if people have a lot of misconceptions about native food. I think probably most people think potatoes came from Ireland, for example, and that's a big South American indigenous food.
Regardless of your type of potatoes. The Incan Empire had a massive agricultural knowledge about potatoes and there were and still are, thousands of varieties of potatoes. Tomatoes, of course, aren't indigenous food. Italians didn't have tomatoes until they were traded back to Italy with Columbus and future generations of folks.
I can make spaghetti, okay.
So we have questions from listeners if I may ask them, yes, okay, But before we do, we always shout out a cause of the ologists choosing. And this is for Fast Blackfeet. It's Food Access and Sustainability Team, which is a group of community leaders and health professionals and educators within the Blackfeet Nation who are dedicated to identifying food and security in their community, offering effective solutions related to access to
healthy food and nutrition, education, and addressing food sovereignty. And so this week the donation went specifically to them. I'm so stoked that this podcast in the community of folks were able to make that possible, along with sponsors of the show who I genuinely like. And then we take some of that money we give away.
We're freezing prices for two years in the verte Media playhouse.
Switch to our super fast, reliable broadband now and freeze your prices or law broadband offers for twenty four months from just thirty five euro month with no activation fee. Switch in store or at Virgin Media dot I Virgin Media.
It's playtime.
Tcenc's apply subject to availability new broadband customers and twenty four month contracts only. You won't receive a price increase for the duration of this contract from thirty five euro month for twenty four months seventy euro thereafter. N February eighteenth, twenty twenty six.
Get value you can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Have the perfect night in with their finest frozen pizza meal deal. Get a finest frozen pizza, chips and ice cream all for six euro. Like our delicious spicy salami, hot honey and Doya or Margarito wood fired pizzas served up with their crispy chunkie chips and ice cream like sea salta caramel or pistachio for dessert. Can't argue with that shop in store or online tesco.
Every little helps available in most stories, Prices varying express.
Okay your questions. Dan wants to know what role do mushrooms play typically in indigenous foods.
Oh, that's such a good question. It depends so much regionally. But here it's interesting because you know, as I said, I'm up in Montana, and so we have really fortunate we have morels that grow, especially in our old burnt forests, and so that's a really fun activity for folks to go out and do, is harvest morels a few years after fires come through. But we also have puffballs, and puffballs are of course these big mushrooms that grow mostly
out on the prairies. But there is actually a story that goes back that talks about a earth woman marrying a sky man and when she came back down to Earth and gave birth, there was a rule that her baby wasn't supposed to touch the ground for five days, and on the fifth day, his grandma, the girl's mother, was watching the baby and she wasn't really watching him
that well. And so the mom came back into the lodge and was looking for her baby, and she's, oh, he's under that blanket, and she lifted up the blanket and instead of a baby being there, it was a puffball, and the baby had been turned into a puffball. And that's how we got puffballs. And so now on some black Feet painted lodge designs, you'll see these circles, and they're bright white circles on a colorful background.
And real quick. So a lodge is what most non natives generally see and call a teepee, although a teepee is a word from a different nation the Dakota folks. Now in Blackfeet language, it would be called a natali or a lodge. But some individuals designs look like a band along the bottom with this graphic row of big pulka dots.
But they're puffballs.
They're mushrooms, is what they represent, and of course they're there's so many other indigenous peoples with different types of mushrooms, but we definitely have recognized mushrooms as part of traditional diets. I was just reading a Cherokee story from my mom's people the other day, about a type of mushroom, and our Cherokee stories tell us they say, once you see the mushroom, it will stop growing, but if you put
a stick through it, then it will keep growing. But it was interesting because I was reading this translation of this Cherokee text and they also said, in other words, if you see a mushroom with a stick through it, it means it's already been claimed and you have to leave it alone. But if it doesn't have a stick through it, then you can claim it and you can come back when it's ready to harvest. Okay, I see what you did there. And so I was like, oh, okay,
that makes sense. But it's funny because they translated what that principle was. It was like, we don't actually think the mush going to stop growing. This is just how you claim it. But like that's what the story is and that's why it relates. And so it's cool. But it's a delicacy. And then they talked about how to cook it up and you know, fry it and a little bit of animal fat and bread it with a little bit of corn meal or something. So there's definitely traditional stories with fungi.
That's wonderful to think of paintings of just big puffballs. I thought this was a great question. This is from Stephanie Shirley, who is a first time question asker and tone How do you propose natives decolonizing our diet when most reservations are food deserts and lack of resources to fresh fruits and vegetables and planting crops in a drought is costly in an already economically disadvantaged community.
So food deserts, of course are It's a term used by the USDA to define people's distance from a place where they can buy food, like a grocery store, and of course grocery stores on reservations have their own challenges within the food distribution system, including of course the last mile transport costs, so a lot of high premiums added to fresh foods like fruits and vegetables, for example, so
that in itself can be a challenge to navigate. That said, there are a lot of foods that folks likely do have within their communities. Wherever you're living, whether it's a true desert or not, there are foods that people have been eating there four thousands of years, and so sometimes it's just learning some of the plants in your area, even if it's just little plants that you know that you can harvest and dry and make tea out of later.
That's something that can bring you connection to your landscape. So for example, here we have yarrow, which is a great plant grows all over the northern hemisphere, has a flavor profile similar to tragon, so it could be used as a spice or it can be dried and made in to a tea. Lots of people grow in places that have wild mints. That's something to know. You learn to identify whatever wild onions are in your area. There's so many types of wild onions that grow all around.
If you have any types of fruit trees, you know berries obviously, nut trees, whether they're black walnuts or hickory nuts, those nice beautiful shelled tree nuts like pecans, those are all indigenous foods acorns. Learn how to process them. So there's foods that are out there, and I love folks getting out and just connecting more with our landscapes. Learning to identify what plants in your area and what you can do with them, how to prepare them.
So for more on that, you can see the foraging ecology episode of Alexis Nelson aka Black Forager.
I would just say that if you're lucky enough to know someone that has traditional medicinal or botanical knowledge, even if it's just someone that knows a few plants in your area, go learn those plants, go out with them, and then share that information.
And last listener Qustomer, we got from a few people Ali Vessels, Consetta Gibson, Ali v Elise Hickman. And this is for non native folks, cross cultural implications. How do non indigenous friends do right by our indigenous friends when making and sharing your incredible food?
Are their appropriation concerns we should consider?
How do you feel is the best way for non natives to appreciate and to participate in Indigenous food?
Yeah, that's a good question, So I reiterate, learn about your plants. And that's just me as an ecologist thinking about you know, how do you connect with your landscape? Whenever you get outside and you just learn a little bit more about those spaces, it can help inherently build that connection. If you go out berry picking, you also see the birds that are out there picking berries with
you yelling angrily. Maybe you might run into a bear, right but you understand all of those other creatures that are part of that connection with the berries too, and if something threatens the berries, you suddenly know that it's not just your berry patch that's being threatened, but you know all of the other beings that rely on that too, and so you're more inclined to take care of that because of your vested interest in it.
Last qustomers always ask, are what your favorite thing about your job is.
I get to spend all of my time educating and teaching and working with foods, whether that be as a contractor that's developing educational materials, whether that be teaching cooking classes or being in the community teaching folks how to harvest native plants, whatever it is. I get to grow and harvest and hunt a lot of food, and that also helps keep me fed, but with delicious, healthy things.
From here. There is new and exciting things every day, and sometimes I get frustrated trying to learn how to use video editings software and trying to clean my kitchen and all the other fun things. But honestly, it's it is the most fun and rewarding thing I could be doing.
So ask generous people, not genius questions. And just do it out of respect and curiosity and everyone will walk away better for it. It's a huge, huge thank you too, Mariah Gladstone. I'm a giant fan of her and in Dija Kitchen. For more of Mariah's work, you can go to in Digitkitchen dot com. She's at Indja Kitchen on Instagram and Mariah Gladstone on Twitter and Instagram. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Aliward with
one L on both. Also linked is Aliward dot com slash Asmologies, which has dozens more kids Safe and shorter episodes you can blaze through. And thank you Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Shared Sleeper of mind gam Media for editing those, as well as Zeke Rodriguez Thomas and says we like to keep things small around here. The rest of the credits are in the show notes.
And if you stick around until the end of the y episode, I give you a piece of advice and listen. I get it.
Mornings are hectic. They're busy, everyone's fighting to get out the door. You're forgetting stuff, and so I like to film my water bottle the night before. That way, it's not the thing that I go forget it, have it filled, and I grab it out the door.
You can do it the night before. You can even put ice in it, and if it's an insulated bottle.
It stays cool.
So I do that on days when I know I have busy mornings.
I hope that helps.
Okay, Bye bye.
Poldy Agi logee.
We're freezing prices for two years in the Virgin Media playhouse. Switch to our super fast, reliable broadband now and freeze your prices or law Broadband office for twenty four months from just thirty five year old month with no activation fee. Switch in store or at Virgin Media dot I Virgin Meidia.
It's playtime TCENC supply subject to availability new broadband customers and twenty four month contracts only. You won't receive a price increase for the duration of this contract from thirty five year ow month for twenty four months seventy euro thereafter. N Februar eighteenth, twenty twenty six.
Get value you can't argue with. At Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Have the perfect night in with their finest frozen pizza meal deal. Get the finest frozen pizza chips and ice cream all for six to Euro, like our delicious spicy salami, hot honey and do Ya or Margarito wood fired pizzas served up with their crispy, chunky chips and ice cream like sea salta caramel or pistachio for dessert. Can't argue with that shop in store
or online. Tesco Every Little helps available in most stories, Prices varying Express