Indigenous Foodways: The Decolonized Diet

of Origin Episode twenty, Indigenous food Ways. It is impossible to have a podcast, or a magazine, or even really a point of view at all on food origins without first centering Native communities. Today's guest represent a cross section of the indigenous food communities of North America, from the kitchen to the media. We begin with Seawan Sherman, who goes by the moniker of Sue Chef, which is also the name of his award winning cookbook of the same title.

Sean is unquestionably the most visible Native American chef of the United States. He was raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and after becoming a chef in his twenties, he quickly came to the realization that he wanted to cook the food of his own ancestors and shifted his cuisine from European cooking to that of his

Lakota ancestry. Now, with the creation of the Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sherman is leading the development of a restaurant, educational and training center that will further his mission of reintegrating native foods into tribal communities and diets throughout North America. Here, Sean, I grew up on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, so I'm actually enrolled with

Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe there. UM So I spent most of my youth on Pine Ridge Reservation, and I did high school and college in Spearfish, South Dakota, which is in the Black Hills, and then I moved to Minneapolis, which is where I currently am today. And what was your experience like growing up on a reservation? Oh, you know the Pineers Reservation. I think it's the third largest reservation in the US. UM it's a lot of land space,

so it takes up a huge chunk of southern South Dakota. UM. The landscape is kind of rolling hills, kind of sparse grasses, so though. UM. And we're also really close to the Black Hills too, which is you know, kind of the spiritual center for Lakota. You know. Pine Ridge is also has been the poorest area of the United States ever since its inception, pretty much, so you know, sevent of the population living in poverty or so making less than

six thousand dollars for the entire household. UM. And we saw a lot of issues for those of us who are unfamiliar. What would you want people to know about the Oglala Lakota UM. You know, the Oglala and the and the Lakota UM, all the groups UM in general, it's a pretty large group. There's quite a few different Lakota tribes across South Dakota UM in that region. UM and here in Minnesota, you know, are our relatives, the

Duck Kota live out this way. A lot of the work that we do is really just raising awareness to some of the histories of these places, because you know, I wasn't really I wasn't researching ancient history. This was just my great grandfather's era when all of this harsh change was happening to my family. And you know, it's very there's very similar stories out there from many different

tribes and many different families all across the US. And I got my first executive chef position in Minneapolis when I was pretty young. I was only like twenty barely twenty seven or something like that. And as a chef in the city, I had access to all sorts of great food and there's a lot of great culture around, so I learned a lot of different styles of cuisines um and then I one day just realized, you know that I knew very little about my own ancestry and

my own heritage food. Could you know, name hundreds of European recipes and only a handful of Lakota recipes that I felt, you know, weren't tarnished or didn't have the influence of European colonizers in the recipes. So it really and plus, you know, just looking around like there was nothing, like there was no you can find food from all over the world, but no restaurants that represented the land that we're standing on. And that's kind of the status

quote today. You know, you have giant cities like Manhattan, Chicago, l a zero Native American restaurants you know, in those in those metropolis and it's like that across the way. So it shot me on a path to really understand like what were my Lakota ancestors eating, and how are they preserving and storing foods and what kind of herbs

and plants were they collecting. You know, today we really focus on North America, so we look at North American traditional food systems and really try to understand the diversity that sits out there and all these beautiful lessons that we can learn from Indigenous knowledge of how to live sustainably in our regions and how they live sustainably in

their regions utilizing primarily plant knowledge. When it came down to it, it's an immense amount of stuff to study and to learn and bring back and help strengthen them through their own traditional foods. There's just so much health there. Hearing you talk about your your path to becoming u S chef, it's a story that is very reminiscent of chefs that we hear from marginalized groups, from people of color,

and from other members of Native communities. And it's a really beautiful moment that we're in and I and I often do refer to this momentum in our work because it comes up so frequently when you are thinking about or talking about decolonizing your food, presenting cuisine that is really a pre colonial cuisine. Why is that such a central part of the narrative for you? And why is that such an important part of of what you're bringing

forth in your work? You know, I mean there's a lot to that question, of course, UM, And a lot of our work was just discovering what happened in history, like how did we lose so much knowledge? You know, because I look at you know, my life one years prior to my birth, UM in eighteen seventy four, all of my Lakodd ancestors still had a hundred percent of their indigenous knowledge and education intact. So like, why why did we lose so much in such a short amount

of time? UM? Was kind of the question I started asking and really researching that, UM and seeing the beauty and the diversity of it, because you know, even though our sites are set on understanding North American cuisines and food systems from Mexico through Alaska, really the work resonates on a global scale because you know, Indigenous families from everywhere from South America, from Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, you know, went through a very similar

history of being colonized and the loss and the damage of their indigenous knowledge. That dismantling of these cultures, you know, as is harsh. Having that history of surviving, you know so well and in these different diverse regions, utilizing what's around them, and how we can apply that in today's world. One of the things that we did was to you know, remove colonial ingredients and try to really focus on regional flavors.

So cutting out things like dairy and wheat flour and cane sugar and beef, pork and chicken because those ingredients didn't exist in some of our and most of our regions not that long ago. We chose to only cook with this healthy indigenous food based. We only make healthy food,

you know. You know, so cutting out fried bread, for example, was just kind of a statement of saying, you know that peace has been integrated into our indigenous communities and it's something that we love, but it's also not very good for us. And there's so much more to explore, so much diversity that we should be exploring and not allowing this one piece to identify us when in reality

it has very little to do with us. Historically, you mentioned something that is astonishing and I think bears repeating, which is that in major metropolitan cities in the US, like Chicago, like New York, Uh, there are no Native American restaurants. Tell me about your restaurant, how it came to fruition, and what your hopes are for it. Well, this very first restaurant that we're preparing to open this year is called Indigenous Food Lab, and it's a part

of our nonprofit we created a few years ago. So we started a nonprofit called Natives dot org, which is an acronym for North American Traditional Indigenous food Systems, and through that UM we created this brand, Indigenous Food Lab. So Indigenous Food Lab is a five O one C three restaurant concept where the public will be able to come in and try a lot of creative indigenous foods that will be able to offer UM. But really it was about creating a space where we can have a

classroom and be able to teach UM. The just have

the offer create an you know, accessible indigenous education. So we want to be able to teach about Native American agriculture and seat saving and farming and wild food and ethnobotany and plant identification, medicinals, culinary applications, food preservation, language arts, history crafting, and just create a really safe and accessible space for that Indigenous focused education and UM utilizing this education and training center UM to work directly with tribal

communities in our vicinity and help them to develop their own healthy indigenous kitchen that's particular to their tribe and their community and their history and their land and region UM and being a support system for them. Knowing how hard food service operations can be, but creating that food access in these much needed communities where sometimes these small communities can have upwards to sixty type two diabetes because of their food access situation and surviving off a commodity

food program and things like that. And our hopes and goals are to replicate this entire process and open up indigenous food labs and urban areas all around the entire nation to help UM and work with tribal communities and its vicinity and help strengthen those communities through food. Why do you think it is that we have not seen more Native American restaurants open in this country. It's just the history of how indigenous people have been treated. Of course,

so you look at um. You know, if you read a book like An Indigenous People's History the United States by Rock sand dunbar Or, it's you know, she um walks through those histories really carefully and thoroughly, and it talks about how much damage was done throughout the entire eighteen hundreds. You know, you look at the start of the eighteen hundreds where what the United States was was

a very young government and country. But we see this massive push through the eighteen hundreds and this massive of loss of indigenous land and culture, and we see a huge and horrible atrocities happening. In genocide is happening. You know, there's bounty systems on indigenous people's you know, California has got an extremely ugly history, Minnesota's got an ugly history.

But it's kind of like that across the board. And then we see the nineteen hundreds, after the reservation systems are set and assimilation and dismantling of indigenous cultures of all across our nation. We weren't even American citizens until the nineteen twenties. UM, we couldn't celebrate our own religion until the nineteen seventies. We weren't able to vote until the nineteen sixties, right, and just so much poverty was

created through these reservation systems. So we just crawled out of that of the nineteen hundreds um and into the two thousands, where we're seeing a lot more Indigenous youth being empowered and becoming highly educated, and becoming highly skilled and being able to raise awareness to these stories. And you know, we're going to see a lot more Indigenous presence um and a lot more understanding of our history

as times forward is kind of what we see. You know, if there's five seventy six tribes in the US six Center in twenty two in Canada, I think, and you know of Mexico identifies as indigenous, and there's just a lot of indigenous cultures and diversity still alive today. And you know, with indigenous diversity, we can really showcase what

true regions are, true North American flavors are. And you look at the European diet and it's so limited and its plant diversity, and there's so much more that we can add to our diets by and really truly understand the landscape that we're on in North America by absorbing some of these past knowledge bases. So it's really important that could just continue on this path and we continue to grow, and we're hoping as we open up these

indigenous restaurants that we really make a change. We want to see a future where Indigenous kids in the future will grow up having access to their foods, knowing exactly what they are, knowing the names of those foods in their language, is how they feel when they eat those foods compared to some fast foods. We just feel like if you can control your food, you can control your future, just like our ancestors used to. And there's going to be a lot of strength and empowerment um and being

able to create that food sovereignty out there. Our next guest are Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, owners of Cafe Alone in Berkeley, California. Both Louis and Vincent are members of the Alona Tribe, the indigenous people who for twenty thousand years and at California central Coast from San Francisco to Monterey, from Monterey through the Salinas Valley, Lewis in Vincent's work centers on the revival of a lonely food traditions and using their cafe as an archival project to

keep tradition alive and accessible. Porsche Tuki macom So, good day to you all. Ka. Vincent Medina, So, my name is Vincent Medina and I'm a member of the Makoma Alonei tribe. My family is indigenous to the East Spay So the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay, the area that today encompasses Berkeley, Oakland, Hayward, Castra Valley three months down to about San Jose. Our family has lived in this area consistently. We've never left and we never will.

Knowing that we where we come from, and knowing that our community has been able to stay put in this place. It's a testament to the strength of our elders and our ancestors who also experienced a lot of pain during colonization. Colonization that's still unfolding today in front of us, just

in different ways. I'm the co founder of Cafe Aloni and makom Hum which my partner Lewis Trivino, He's also the co founder of this and we grew up here in this area where of our identity, aware that we come from this place, that we're indigenous to this place, and that this land also shapes our culture as well. Because of how hard colonization hit us here in the East Bay and throughout Metro California, it meant that much of our culture couldn't be carried on the organic way

it was meant to. That wasn't because our elders or those before us didn't care about our culture. That's not true at all, but it was because there was systematic roadblocks that try to stop us from practicing our culture outright. And also in spite of that, there was resistance that happened in our communities to the theft of our coal

sure into the suppression of our culture as well. Our ancestors are elders, are great grandparents, all of those before us have consistently been working to keep alive the things that matter, keep our culture going, and in some cases when things couldn't be carried on, there's thousands of pages of information on the form of archives in our collective communities that allow us to revive practices with our elders.

With my partner Lewis Trivino, we started an organization called macom Home first, macom Hom entreprennial language, which is the indigenous language of the East Bay. It means our food and the entire focus of this work is to revive our food traditions along with every other aspect of our traditional culture that as that was suppressed but also documented to be brought back. We started this organization because we wanted to see these foods become commonplace in our families again,

on the dinner tables in our community again. And then in September of two thou eighteen, we opened Cafe Alone, which is the first Aloni restaurant in modern times, and it's over in Berkeley and it's a way for us to teach the public about our story, but more importantly to provide a space for our community in Kutel macom cut up to Louis Travino it my cochland Takachiste p today. Hello everyone. My name is Louis Travino and i'm room Similoni.

My family comes from the Carmel Valley and the Monterey area. And this work we started by the guidance of our elders, both those who were recorded and those who are still with us, to revitalize our traditional Aloni foods as part of a broader revitalization of culture that our communities have gone through for the past few decades um and part of the efforts that our families have had since colonization began.

I think what makes in your work notable in this larger movement of moving towards or indigenous or native food ways is that Cafe ALONEI is that really the very first modern alone restaurant? As you say, do you all feel because European cuisine and because of the infrastructure of formal restaurants in dining, has been so far away from spotlighting in native cuisine and ingredients an additional burden for you all in doing this kind of reclamation work given

how absent indigenous cuisine has been in this country. That's a that's a good question because growing up, when we would talk about our culture, people would have complete unfamiliarity with with us as as a people. And so if they didn't know who we are as a people, they, by the nature that aren't going to know about our

foods or any other aspect of our culture. The thing that this this concept of being indigenous to this place is that these foods even if people didn't know that they were a lonely ingredients, they were often still many of them are still in use, things like hazel nuts,

things like watercress, things like these decadent mushrooms. But when people would often think about these ingredients, they're often thought about as being these hugely luxury ingredients that often there's no cultural context to understanding that these are indigenous foods.

By reinforcing and by teaching people at Cafe Alone that our community has never left our homeland, that our culture is beautiful, and that these foods that are indigenous to the East Bay into Carmel or Lewis's families from that these foods are also delicious as well. Many of them are our foods that people have eaten in their lifetime.

But by showing the way that we eat as ALONEI people, the way that our ancestors traditionally have eaten, we are able to dispel a lot of negative stereotypes just by the nature of how our food is served, how it tastes, the ingredients that it are being prepared, and also how it looks. The food that we make. It's seasonal food, um, it's it's food that much of which we gather. We gather much of it in the old village areas here in the East Bay that our family has always lived in.

An example of this is just earlier this week on Monday, we went to gather the yar baboina, which is a native mint that's familiar to our ancestors, which we call chatty shmen. And also when we went to gather bay and nuts, and we went to look for some mushrooms. And as we were out there, we were in an old area where our family has always lived. But it's

also an old area that our family has lived before colonization. Now, when we gather these foods in this place and we prepare them in the way that we know our ancestors made them, which is having multiple different dishes together served where you get these flavors of what's growing at the time, what's seasonal, but also you get these different flavors of bitter, of sweets, of salty, of savory, all these different tastes going together at the same time. When people eat our food,

they'll often ask is this indigenous? Is this the way that it's always been prepared? And for our most traditional foods will say yes, this is the way it's always

been prepared. But then for our contemporary foods, we teach people this is what contemporary Aloney foods look like in the twenty one century, and by people learning about these ingredients and getting to see Aloney food, and just by the nature of us having this restaurant where for everybody that's dining with us, except for a lonely people, it's their first time generally having food that's been prepared by alonely people, and also food that's being prepared in the

in the way that we have it at home. They get to see directly the sophistication that we eat with, the beauty that we eat with, the meaning that we eat with, and that destroys a lot of negative stereotypes that are out there because it lets us steer the

conversation on our own terms. And also it gets to destroy those stereotypes because people get to see sophistication and elegance and beauty, and that pushes back against what's been said about our community through negative textbooks, through anthropology, through university studies of often we were painted as being this minimalistic, simple people that kind of just barely got by, you know,

hunter and gatherers. They called us. And the truth is that our ancestors didn't just barely get by, but they lived in a world full of abundance and they ate well. There's been reasons for over two hundred and forty years that our family has been consistently trying to get back to that old way, and it was because our elders and us as results of that, know the value of it, know how you know how meaningful it is, and know

that it's worthy of being protected and fought forth. Now, even though many of these ingredients aren't common, and even though and some of them are, but for many of these ingredients like acorn, like veniceon, like our quail that we serve, you know these often these ingredients and the way that they're prepared unfamiliar to people, but once they taste it, we hear are so often these foods are delicious. Often people will say that they're eating something that feels clean,

that feels rooted. And by being able to teach people about this again on our own terms, we can steer this conversation to let them know that these ingredients are indigenous, that these are ingredients that have been loved for generations by our people, and that we loved in the future as well, and then they think about these foods in a different way and associate them more with us in

our community, which is what we want. I want to ask you about land because it isn't possible to have intellectually honest conversations about native people or cuisine without talking about land. How do you source for the restaurant um and how do you all think about uh land and of course agriculture and food that comes from the land. How do you think about the of land in your work? Well, once again just going back to how how long are people have lived here and how deep the love for

this land that we come from is. You know, the East space a relatively small place. You know, every bit of our existence comes from here. Our language was shaped by this place. Our our foods, you know, and our our culinary ways come from this place and have provided the foods that have nourished our our ancestors for generations. We have to be good stewards, We have to be responsible.

We can't over gather, but we also have to consistently advocate for this place, Advocate for the protection of this land, advocate for a clean bay, for clean waterways. First salmon and steelheads return back to our watersheds to advocate, to make sure that our ancestors who are also in the ground, that they're protected, that our shell mountains are mortuary monuments.

Knowing that every bit of who we are as a people comes from here, that we can't just pack up and move somewhere else, and we never want to either. This is this, this place is part of our of our bodies, you know, it's part of our soul. Ever moved from here, and we would never wants to, will be here till the end, but knowing that that this place also has provided all of this abundance for our

people for generations. And the way that the East Bay is composed, it's composed with a series of valleys and micro climates and huge amounts of biodiversity and a massive ridge line which goes down into the East Bay flat lands into these massive marshes which then go into the

Bay where salt is gathered. Now, in the old days before colonization, for thousands of years, our ancestors managed this area and through a series of controlled burns, and those burns, what they would do is they would take out the overgrowth which today leads to these big wildfires that we're seeing ever more prevalent than than we can never remember. You know, but these wildfires that are catastrophic wouldn't happen back then. They would be managed through these controlled burns

which to take out the overgrowth. At the same time it stimulates the plants that our people would want to see come stronger, those oak grows, those seating plants, those being able to have those nut plants, hazel nuts and black walnuts, being able to have every type of food imagine a bold And then these micro requirements in this huge amount of biodiversity that allowed different foods to exist relatively close to one another, just within a few miles

meant that meant that there was never shortages, There was never a famine in those old days when colonizers came in, when when Europeans came in and tried to change our our way of doing things and then later tried to change us or in some cases I always described me given physically kill us. Our people during that time were outlawed from doing those controlled burns, an outlaw also from gathering in that traditional way. My great grandmother, who was

born on the old rancheria, she would gather. She would gather as much as she could, and we still know some of her favorite plants that she liked to gather, and we serve them at Cafe alone. So in spite of those challenges, are people also are courageous and braved and they refuse. Now, if you can imagine, you know, let's fast forward to two thousand twenty and the East Bay.

It's still our home. We've never left, but it also looks much different in many areas than it did two hundred years ago, that it did even fifty years ago, than it even did ten years ago, because of all of the development that's happening, because of tech, because of gentrification, because of their vanity that's constantly encroaching on these open spaces, which in many cases are home to those village areas that our ancestors have always lived in. Because of this,

we can't gather everything that our people did before. We can't go and burn those old areas, and often up until recently, when we would go up and gather, it would be even illegal for us to do so as the first people. Technically, even if people weren't being caught by cops, often people just standing there looking at us, like if we're doing something wrong, like if we're criminals just for being in our own place, and if you could imagine the disc comfort that comes from other people

looking like that. But in spite of that, you know, we find the same courage that those before us did, which is not to not to stop doing these things because these ways are valuable. An example of this is when Lewis and I were gathering last Monday. We were gathering in this old area that our family has always lived always like from before colonization to now to you know, be there tomorrow too. But as we were there, there's all of these rich connections that come from being in

that space. The air smells sweet of Mincia abuna and spicy bay Laurel and Tooli that's in the background in Willow. You get to be able to get these bits of clarity to how that world was back then, even if it's much more overgrown than it was two years ago. And in those bits of clarity you see the beauty, you know, and you see the meaning of all of that. It makes sense. But then going back into the flat lands of the urban area, we're also part of that

world too, you know, I grew up right here. And this is also the urbanity of the East Bay also shaped who I am as well, you know, and that's part of my identity also. And so while we want our foods to be fully traditional, fully you know, connected to those old waves, we also don't want to shy away from embracing the fact that we're modern people. These foods aren't locked in a museum, they're not locked just one period of time, but they're living and they're part

of two thousand twenty two. When chocolate was introduced here, um, it was something that was embraced by our community and people took a liking to pretty quickly, and people traded for it. It's um it's something that that you know, is chocolate is just good as well, you know, so you can see why like chocolates. It's something that we

still love in our community today. But one thing that we wanted to do is when we're making these traditional foods, to occasionally add something that wasn't here two hundred years ago that fits the taste of our living community. The chocolate that we serve at Cafe alone, it comes from Zapotech chocolate makers from a Zapotec pueblo and in Central Mexico,

San Javier de Zura. And it's a way for us to be able to keep those connections going with other indigenous communities, you know, across North America, and and also to be able to embrace something that was introduced here that wasn't here you know, before colonization, but also that is loved by our people today. You know, sometimes will make things in a modern way instead of you know,

using the traditional way. But sometimes will will make the will make whatever dish we're making in the most traditional way as well, using old baskets for an example, to to be able to do the work instead of ovens

and and stovetops. And this is what contemporary and learning identity, you know, what it looks like today we're talking about land increasingly difficult as there's this you know, movement by some people to go out and many people call it foraging, you know, into our our homeland without much thought and taking resources that alening people are out there looking for as well, and often it will mean that something has already been depleted by other people without those same cultural connections,

and often just trying to sell it or a profit or something like that, which can of course be very very frustrating, but we still, in spite of that, you know, we we persevere and we gather as much as we can. We gather our salt from the Bay shore, from the same salt ponds that our ancestors that they shape directly with their own hands, salt ponds that were later used by Leslie and Salts and Morts and Salts to make

a profit off of East based salts. But we go out there and we gather the same salts that we we know our ancestors have gathered from those same places,

even if we find a big patch. Again, you know about reciprocity and relationship and doing the right thing, and when we're gathering, it would be wrong for us to over gather more than what we can, so we never over gather, and if we do gather from an area that only has a few we will gather the smallest amount possible just to savor and taste of it, not overgather,

and make sure we're being responsible. Our foods are traditional foods are completely inseparable from all other aspects of our culture. Foods are given to us at our creation time. That's how it's taught to us. So those foods are deeply embedded in the specific places that we come from. So as we work with our languages, I thinks that I am both very active in the traditional languages of our families,

the revival of those languages. Our languages were both not spoken for at least two generations, but we're heard by our great grandparents and spoken by that generation. But today those languages are spoken too, Keno being the language of the East Bay and that's his family and rooms, and being the language of Cormel Valley. So the revival of our languages was a model for the revival of our foods.

How possible it is to have aspects of our culture that were experienced by our living elders and by our elders who were recorded, but then being able to bring them out of that memory and making them lived experiences. Our foods are very similar. This is all done because of love, love that we share both for one another and for our cultures, for our families. It all part

of that moment um. So another note about land access, because obviously it's always been central to conversations about sovereign diets, and it still is today. For Vincent and Lewis sourcing ingredients from their Native land has different stakes than their other chef counterparts. Much of what they're looking for has already been taken or over gathered by non indigenous and

soul for profit. Instead, they have to be creative about how they source in order for their food to tell the story they wanted to tell, like finding a quail egg farmer in a nearby county that they can develop a relationship with, or varietals of heirloom potatoes that merely approximate their own. And when they do gather, they are mindful not to take too much, to not deplete the

crop so that some is left for others. In Navajo food, some of those ingredients are corn, beans and squash, and you're going to see that in a lot of other Native communities. To the Three Sisters, because those were things that you could eat pretty much all year. We have a variety of different soups and and it's kind of like to Molly's corn packed up in it's in a

corn husk and baked underground. Andy Murphy is the host of the Toasted Sister podcast, a podcast that highlights the chef and farmers who worked to preserve indigenous food heritage. She's also a member of Navajo Nation. She and I discussed how displacement and poverty impediments to connecting with indigenous ingredients. As Andy tells us, she didn't grow up in a home where traditional Navajo recipes were cooked. Instead, like many households in the United States, she ate things like spaghetti

and mashed potatoes. But one of my favorites, and I think it's like every every other Navajo favorite is um blue corn mush. But that's something that I didn't eat a lot when I was a kid. We didn't have a lot of that in our house. But lately since I've been really paying attention to need the food, and it was curious about, you know, the different ways you can prepare blue corn. I have bluecorn mush, and you know,

every every week, a couple of times a week. You know, it's about an ingredient being really that versatile to our our palates today, inviting these ingredients and these flavors back into our our pantries. Like right now, you know, I thinking about foods now and thinking about the kind of foods that I had, you know, growing up, prepackaged. It's because we were poor. We were we were really poor, and um and I kind of feel bad for the little girl I was and and for my family back then.

It's because we struggled a lot. But at least we ate, and I think that's where a lot of Native people come from. At least we ate, at least we we have food for the next day, where maybe some some people don't even have that. But yeah, because a lot of people don't make the connection between first of all, the poverty and the diet, um, with the displacement and um,

and with the genocide of Native American people. But as it relates to the diet, it in particular when when people are living, you know, on reservations, they are not

allowed to practice traditional food ways. They don't have access to foraging, they don't have access to hunting, they don't have access to the same types of agriculture and those eating customs, those traditions that the intergenerational knowledge is supplanted with, like McDonald's, and of course for children who grow up in this country, we all no matter what our ethnic backgrounds are or what our means are, that's like a

universal thing. So there's a lot of complex factors I think in that inform the diets of Native American people, and yet now we see really disproportionately negative health outcomes as a result of this. A lot of these issues with health health disparities in in Native America are because of access to food. So it's a really big challenge and it's it and it's a challenge in a couple

of ways. You can have lack of access to actual food and actual stores that have food, whether that's a convenience store, some kind of gas station, like a flea market, or like supermarket. You know, a Navaja nation, some people have to travel, make a whole day out of it just to get to the nearest grocery store. You can

have that lack of access to knowledge, cooking knowledge. A lot of people really don't know how to cook, or you know a lot of people like myself, aren't connected to like the traditional food waste can't really cook some of these traditional things in my own kitchen, but you know, I'm trying. You know, some people on the Navajo nations still don't have water and electricity. I can imagine how

hard that is to cook. Some people are living in a household where there's three families living there and trying to produce a really click easy foods. So one very important thing that I've learned from all of my work is we need to cook and learn how to cook and find value in that, and we need to bring these ingredients into our own kitchen. It comes down to like an individual person's food sovereignty a man I wholeheartedly

agree and could not agree more. The bulk of my work for me personally as someone that's shock saw is trying to learn and understand like what is my cuisine? And I've been really thankful and very blessed to have different anties people I consider aunties or that helped me to learn more about our traditional food. Brent Read works for the two Lala Health Clay Nick, a training program that assists Native communities in reclaiming their local food systems.

Is a member of the Eye Collective, a coalition of Indigenous chefs, cooks, artists, culture keepers, and savers, all dedicated to the preservation of Native food ways. She cites the origin of the Collective to an incident in two thousand seventeen when some white ladies from Portland went to Mexico, stole some recipes, and obtusely proceeded to come back to the United States and brag about what they had just done as part of the promotion for their new business venture.

The business didn't last, but the audacity sufficiently ignited an already burgeoning reclamation movement in Native and Indigenous food communities. I'm a member of the Eye Collective. It was founded in two thousand and seventeen and it's essentially a collective that has Indigenous chefs, books, activists, knowledge keepers, and savers

an artist. What we started off as initially there was an instant that happened years ago where these girls from Portland had famously gone down to Wahaka and had through the media kind of touted how they straight out like stole um these Aboila's recipes for tortillas and other things.

And at the same time here in Seattle, there was an incident with this upper scale restaurant who had gone ahead and a culturally appropriated a bunch of close salege foods and was selling them a hundred dollars per ticket or more without actually bringing up anybody that was native

to the whole process. And so they went on Twisted sister podcast um Annie Mercy's podcasts and has had this episode called not So Gental Indians Part one where they were talking about all these different things, and then after that kind of formulated the Eye Collective and our first clip series was in New York City and the initial concept of that was to be able to address the miss of Thanksgiving and also to be able to showcase

our traditional suits and talk about different issues. I want to ask you about your own journey on this path because you mentioned that you are a descendant of Choctaw nation, but you weren't actually born in a tribal community. So what was it that brought you to this I guess enlightenment that you wanted to use your identity and food specifically as a as a means of returning to your ancestral homeland so to speak. Yeah, for me, um, I'm

an adoptee. And for people that don't know what that means and they give like water context Essentially, starting back in the eight hundreds, there was movement in the United States to of course like remove Native people from native land um, and then to reinforce that they wouldn't be on their lands anymore. A part of that was putting them in boarding schools. In general Pratt, who was a

famous general, had said that the boarding schools. The reasoning for that was to to kill the Indians staves the man. And when we talk about u S history, especially like in the past years, people are appalled that the government is imprisoning kids and taking them away from their families, and they say, this is in America, that's a d percent in America. Um, we've been doing this since the beginning.

And so they would take the children away from their communities, oftentimes shipping them across the country so that if they ran away, they had no way of getting back. Because there's also a lot of kids that did run away and died trying to get back home along the way, and they literally like be and abused out in every form of abuse. UM to assimilate them. And we have a lot of issues in our communities still from that time.

But starting in the forties or fifties, the government had a meeting and that meeting they said that they wanted to shift to adopting out Native kids instead of putting them in boarding schools as the money staying measure, and that it would still do that best basically do the same thing of assimilating kids into like white like euro

American society. And so like as I was like digging into like rejoining native community up here, reconnecting folks back home in Oklahoma, and then all like other Chalktaw people that happened to be up here in the Seattle area, because there's actually like quite a bit of Chalktow people here in the Northwest. I started wondering, I feel like,

what is the food tradition here? You know, like I do my little like Google or whatever, um like chalktok sees and of course like Tonto logo and never come up or like well actually like grape dumplings and wild onions and and eggs and banaja, which is essentially kind of like one of the tomorrow Liza they have done the wakaka, the rss beans and like corn milan. And then as I was going along, I started looking into traditional foods and food sovereignty and what it means for

our communities. But never really we've unfortunately removed from our traditional foods. It really concerns me when the UN says that by twenties fifty they expect for the world food supply to completely collapse. But thinking of like Talila right now, like I went around like the nutritionists when um back when we had were here, and they have several markets here on the reservation, but when we went to every single one of them, the only thing that was fresh

produce on the reservation outside of Walmart was one banana. Really, that's that's really all the fresh produce yact. This is the only non process being So that conserves me as someone that works for the diabetes program, right, and also I know I ten us relationships around food and trying to access food that to that people have had its drastic measures that can in the day to just try and send people into like get food, but there's still

some pain hand in the community around that. Remember last spring in June, the salmon berries were out, my nephew, I think like two and a half and four at the time, something like that, walking them around and showing them with bushes, and I remember how excited it's how much they live up seeing those salmon berries and me like can I eat it? And we're like yeah, they would just taken off a bush. You can eat it.

I swear to God there in like that candy room and Willy Wonka, And I think that's such an important memory, like something I super want to drive towards to make sure that the people where I live, are you able to have that same experience, especially kids, and have those relationships with the plants, and that way too, should something happen, that they have that knowledge of this is a plant here that will take care of us and we'll provide for us and that we can eat, or that whole

sovereignty as well. One last thought from today's episode, You Know, over and over I am reminded of the absurdity of discussing Native food in antiquity. The magic of Cafe Alone in Berkeley, for instance, is that Vincent is not only in the land of his ancestors, but he also grew up in Oakland, so he is equally part of that native story and a contemporary food story happening in the

Bay Area. The more we resist the urge to conflate indigenousity with antiquity, the less likely we are to perpetuate the language of erasure. And lastly, if you're a forger or have friends who are into such activities, I would encourage you all to see if there are existing efforts by Native American communities in your area who you're foraging could help support and even for those of us who

don't forage. I hope we realize that penalizing of population that has always relied on wild foods is very, very wrong, particularly when we supplanted those diets with industrial food systems on reservations all across the United States that have spread illness and death to these same communities. The industrial food system continues to grow without oversight, with impunity, and with subsidies.

As we are now all thinking more than ever about our diet and its origins, I hope that we can use this moment as a way to advocate for food sovereignty for native communities all throughout the United States. M Thank you to the sushi chef Shawn Sherman, Andy Murphy, host of the Toasted Sister podcast, Louis Trevino, and Vincent Medina from a lone A Cafe in Berkeley, California. And

Britt Reid, chef at two Lallap in Marysville, Washington. Thank you to Simon Lavender for creating the music feature in today's episode. This is our last episode of Point of Origin season two. We will be back very soon with Point of Origin Season three, but in the meantime, why not go backwards? Catch up on the entire catalog the previous nineteen episodes. You can also follow us on i G for the very latest of all things wet Stone.

I'd like to thank our I Heart Radio team for another great season, thanks to the amazing wet Stone team and our co founder Mel she I'm Steven Saderfield, the origin Forger. We'll be back soon with more from wet Stone Point of Origin podcast. The World of Food Worldwide m Hey