By Morgan Maki
Land is where our work begins. As a team, we often share this sentiment as a way of creating context and structuring our engagement with farms, businesses and landscapes. A core tenet of our work lies in understanding the landscape that we are working in, what it is capable of producing and what it wants to be in its natural state. If left unattended by humans, would this grassland used for grazing evolve into a forest? Is this riverine wetland capable of producing food? Does this community lack access to healthy foods? We use that information to write operating plans, build food businesses, develop conservation proposals, and incorporate regenerative growing practices into our work. However, in the wake of George Floyd’s death this spring we, like so many others, have begun to question and evaluate our privilege and, in turn, our relationship to the land we work with.
Often times, our company’s relationship with the land we work with is complicit with this system. Our work does not always directly address racism or create equity. In years past, we would have acknowledged this fact, but we probably would have also quickly offered up a rebuttal. We would have shared that our work was focused on other important environmental and food-system oriented goals. We would have acknowledged that all of these concepts are important, but that we were only focused on the ones that fit within the project’s scope. But now, as we continue to learn and unlearn as individuals and as a team, we are beginning to understand a more complete picture. In order for humans to have a mutually beneficial relationship with land, we must work to change everything that is out of balance. All of our actions and inactions are tethered together and there cannot be a path forward with just selective goals.
The concept of land ownership is a tool frequently used to create and maintain a system of inequity. It is a system of control that perpetuates racist ideas and policies that shape all parts of our culture, community, country and our food system. The taking of land by force from Indigenous people hundreds of years ago and the installation of a system of private land ownership (and of public lands controlled by the various layers of government) established a racist system that is designed to control and oppress non-white people. After the Civil War, the control of land was tightly restricted and throttled by racist policies, so that previously enslaved Black people and their descendants could find no path to equity through a relationship with land. From where we stand today, it is clear to see that not enough has changed in our country. The control of land (ownership and access) is not equal and not equitable. Wealthy white individuals, organizations and our government, still control much of the land in our country.
To do this work and to make this change is hard. And it starts with us as individuals creating intention and applying it to ourselves and to our work. Right now, we are still learning, reading and sharing, taking responsibility for our education, building our understanding of what must change and how to do it. In honor of Native American Heritage Month, our team is using this space to share what we are currently reading and listening to around Indigenous lands and food pathways.
David Zilber on the Future of the Restaurant, The Next 20 Years Podcast
Contributed by Jacob Ward
This podcast with David Zilber (a chef, most recently at the famous Danish restaurant NOMA) explores the future of the restaurant, a concept that feels as old as human history, but whose roots extend only so far back as the 18th century. The thesis of this episode is that restaurants are fundamentally broken. This is also not a new concept. Progressive cooks across the hospitality industry (like Zilber) were identifying fractures in the modern restaurant model well before the pandemic. But it wasn’t until the pandemic that many of these fractures became unmistakably noticeable to the general audience. Zilber’s fissure of choice is waste – food, staff, community and otherwise. The restaurant of the future wastes much less than its contemporary counterpart. And as Zilber puts it, many of our oldest problems – say, how we feed each other – have solutions just as old.
Zilber looks to the Iroquois Confederacy, a collection of five (eventually six) distinct Indigenous nations in the Northeast – the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. The Haudenosaunee, as the confederacy is also known, translates to People of the Longhouse. In Haudenosaunee culture, the longhouse is a communal home shared by several families and used for, among other things, sharing communal meals. To David, the Haudenosaunee had designed an ideal way to share meals long before the modern restaurant was conceived, and the tradition of the longhouse could very well be the template for the restaurants of our future. At the very least, this podcast is an excellent example of the humility and respect of looking backward in time to solve the problems of today.
The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen
Contributed by Meriwether Hardie
As our team unlearns, learns and reflects on Indigenous land and Indigenous land rights, I am also thinking about the resources that we pull from that same land – energy, water and in particular, food. Last month my colleague Jacob wrote a poignant blog on how food can be a connector but how it can also be a common thread between issues of racism, immigration, and welfare.
I recently attended a virtual cooking workshop with Sean Sherman, a chef, food educator, business owner, and member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. Sean began the workshop by sharing some of his story. At 13, he got his first job at a steakhouse in South Dakota and from there he worked his way up the line in the restaurant world (from dishwasher to head chef). But it wasn’t until he spent a year in Mexico as a young adult and observed how closely the local Huicholes people live to their culinary traditions that he realized that he did not know what his own ancestors ate before colonization. This experience inspired Sean to spend the next many years answering that very question, and led him to work with native chefs, elders, academics and historians all over the US.
In the workshop Sean then made a joke that he doesn’t understand how the original Indigenous diet isn’t “all the rage today… since it is hyperlocal, ultraseasonal, and uber healthy.” It is also high protein, low salt, and mostly plant based. We then went on to cook several recipes together, all of which can be found in his cookbook, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, which won the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook in 2018. With each recipe, Sean shared the history and Indigenous peoples behind the recipe, as well as cooking techniques.
After the workshop I bought the cookbook, and just the other night I made Sean’s Hunters Stew (I substituted some Colorado elk instead of the bear that Sean recommends as his choice meat for flavor). The stew had a rich and delicious thick broth, but was simple in composition and showcased the earthly flavor of the mushrooms and the elk.
We as a team share a lot of conversation around food – we love cooking, talking about, learning about and exploring foods from around the world. Yet so often we focus on the flavor, composition, and the sourcing of ingredients, and we forget to also honor the people and culture that the recipe originated from. This is something that we are all working on and learning more about. Sean Sherman and his non-profit NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), have been important resources for me as I learn more about the full history of our country and our food systems.
Our land was taken. But we still hold the knowledge of how to stop mega-fires, The Guardian
Contributed by Kristen Moree
As a Colorado resident living through one of our state’s most unprecedented wildfire seasons in history, frequent prescribed burning is a ‘new’ term I’ve become privy to. Prescribed burning is the intentional regular burning of forested land under favorable conditions, and I’ve heard it described by representatives of our National Forest Service as a ‘newly’ explored practice for managing wildfires in the West. But in actuality, there is nothing new about it. Cultural burning has been practiced for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples. Their use of fire was (and is) both sacred and ecologically beneficial. As the author points out, himself a member of the Karuk tribe, “(Fire) renews life…It changes the molecular structure of traditional food and fiber resources making them nutrient dense and more pliable. Fire does so much more than western science currently understands.” When European settlers arrived in the West and stripped Indigenous peoples of their land, they also stripped away their rich ancestral knowledge of land stewardship practices that had been passed down for generations and generations. Now, thousands of years later at the helm of a rapidly changing climate, we are relying on these ancient practices to save our cherished western landscapes.
This article is a call to action for our federal and state agencies to begin listening and yielding to the impressive historical land knowledge that our Indigenous tribal communities offer. Instead of suppressing their ability to steward this land and to offer valuable insight into tried-and-true forest management practices, we need to advocate for their tribal sovereignty and land ownership rights by changing policy and funding tribal stewardship programs, such as the Endowment for Eco-Cultural Revitalization Fund. The West has an incredibly complicated and deeply entrenched history of resource management and land stewardship entangled with Indigenous rights and environmental justice. We cannot analyze one without understanding the other. Ready or not, this summer’s wildfire season has revealed just how indebted we are to the complete and wholly unraveling and rewriting of our Western history.
Gather Documentary Film
Contributed by Gaelen Means
Amid the flogging that has been 2020, including a global pandemic, not to mention a US election and roller coaster news cycle, there have been encouraging, hopeful, and necessarily sobering reality checks. Gather is a documentary film centered around Indigenous food sovereignty. The subjects of this film share an interest in combating the injustices done to their ancestors by white colonialists through reconnecting their communities with their native food systems. Through food sovereignty, they have found a means of liberating themselves and their loved ones from many of the inequities that have resulted from the genocide of their relatives and the genocide which continues today. Unlike many messages of 2020, which seem to be simple reactions with singular objectives, this film reveals how food sovereignty is a vector for solving a multitude of issues, including drug abuse, obesity, food insecurity, racial injustice, climate change, genocide, oppression, racism, and many others.
As an introverted human amid the turmoil of COVID-19, one of the glimmers of a silver lining has been my increased sensitivity to the reality that I am a necessarily social organism, part of a network and system rather than an isolated individual. Among the many takeaways of this film, I latched onto the connectedness and reliance of the story tellers on each other and on their surrounding systems. Over untold numbers of generations, they have relied upon the landscapes they inhabit for food and life, creating a system that recognizes the importance of their role as both a beneficiary of and provider for larger forces. Environmental, political, and social factors are minimizing their ability to sustain previous ways of living, and they are fighting back. This is not new, but perhaps now more than in the past, we do have the chance to start listening.
It would behoove us to ask permission to join Indigenous communities in their quest to rewire themselves as social beings with their food systems, to reconnect with the ideas that already bind us to the places we live and look to for sustenance. There is so much to be learned from people who have known such intimate and recent connections to place. Through such a realignment, carried out with care and respect, we might hope to make amends for a very few of the injustices we have forced upon them while also sharing in that value that comes with it. We will never be able to right the wrongs that were inflicted on Indigenous peoples or the lands they inhabited. But COVID-19 may just be an opportunity to really think through the ways we relate to the world around us. I, for one, hope that through long, isolated days and self-reflection, I will be able to start answering some of these questions and come out of the other side of the pandemic with a starting point for a healthier and more sensitive view of my life and its connections to these people and the landscapes we share.
To Manage Wildfire, California Looks To What Tribes Have Known All Along, NPR
Contributed by Lilly Hancock
This year the American West witnessed its worst fire season to date; over 4.2 million acres of land have already burned. In efforts to limit these massive, destructive fires, California is now turning to members of Indigenous tribes who, until the mid-nineteenth century, used to manage and tend to these fire-prone lands through cultural burning. By starting and managing small fires, native people were able to clear out underbrush and encourage new plant growth, thereby minimizing fuel loads and reducing fire intensity and spread.
This summer multiple articles were published acknowledging how Western settlers dramatically changed California’s fire regime through the forceful removal of Indigenous people and the banning of cultural practices that involve fire. Work is now being done to learn from these tribe members to better understand the culture of fire, prescribed burning, and how to potentially bring back and scale these methods. Although climate change is exacerbating the situation, racism and racist policies towards Indigenous people and culture is also to blame.
The Original Vermonters
Contributed by Tad Cooke
As a Vermonter living in Colorado, I treasure the chance to spend time with family while visiting our Philo Ridge Farm project in Vermont. I won't be traveling over Thanksgiving, but on a trip earlier this fall I spent a cold night in front of the woodstove looking through a collection of books on farming and local history from my grandmother. Between tomes on land use and geology, I found The Original Vermonters, a 1981 book on the Indigenous history of Vermont.
Vermonters have often considered themselves hardy, independent people. Even today, there are easier places to live, less expensive, more accessible to cities, with better job markets. For farmers, there's more fertile and less expensive farmland, with better weather, longer growing seasons, and better access to markets. Not surprisingly, that self-imposed challenge inspires substantial pride – "native Vermonter" is a common boast, and one I'm guilty of with many generations of family history in Vermont. Despite that pride, I had only a peripheral understanding of the Indigenous people of my home, their culture and knowledge, and their 10,000 year history on the land that is now Vermont.
In reading the archeological history of Indigenous Vermonters, the predecessors of today's Abenaki, I smiled to see the themes of independence, self-reliance and cautious adoption of technology and trends have born out over millennia. Through the Archaic, Woodland, and Historic periods, stretching from 6000 BC to the arrival of Europeans in roughly 1600, Vermonters were independent, slow to adopt, and stretching the implications of archeology to its limits - proud of their independent lifestyle: "Vermont's peoples did not slavishly imitate any of their neighbors. Rather, they were selective about their borrowing, went about it in their own good time, and put their distinctive stamp upon the things they did borrow. The result was a rich and varied culture, not unlike those of other peoples in the Northeast, but not quite like them, either."
These commonalities with early Vermonters have left me considering what I might learn from my predecessors. During this year, and especially now at the end of November, when a surge in COVID-19 cases has limited travel during the busiest travel day of the year, I think of home, and how a sense of home is often too a connection to the land. In the Abenaki people, "it is not really accurate to say that a family band actually owned its territory...there could be no buying or selling of land; indeed it might almost be said that the members of the band belonged to the territory, so close was their connection with it. The 'sense of place' of these peoples seems to have been a good deal stronger than that of modern North Americans."
As William Haviland writes in The Original Vermonters: "We owe a major debt to Vermont's Abenakis...their steadfast refusal to renounce their cultural heritage in the face of tremendous pressures to do so should prompt us all to stop and think about our own traditions, and our attitudes toward those whose traditions may differ from our own."
Seattle was named after a tribal chief. Now his descendants own less than an acre of city land, The Washington Post
Contributed by Morgan Maki
Last year, my family and I moved to Seattle and we have spent a lot of time learning about the history of this place and exploring the broader Pacific Northwest region. It is a beautiful part of the world and its human history is long and complex.
This month, I have focused some of my anti-racist reading on the history of the Duwamish Tribe, who are part of the Coast Salish group of Indigenous peoples who are ethnically and linguistically related, and have long lived in the area of the Pacific Northwest coast that borders the Salish Sea. Understanding the history and current position of the Duwamish Tribe is important to me, because they are the Indigenous people that lived in the area of the Puget Sound where Seattle is now located.
As the region was settled by groups of people from the United States, the people of the Duwamish Tribe were made to surrender their homelands and were displaced and marginalized by a combination of military force and government backed treaties and actions. At the present time, the Duwamish Tribe continues to engage with the Federal Government in an effort gain status as a Recognized Tribe, so that it can receive the formal support from the government and become eligible for benefits and subsidies.
This process has been ongoing for decades and continues to be delayed and stalled by our government, and the Duwamish people still have no formal recognition as the Indigenous inhabitants of land that I now live on. In order to take this knowledge and have it translate to a personal anti-racist action, I continued to read and look for avenues to support change. In taking these next steps I have found grassroots level ways to engage with local organizations. This month, two action oriented ways that I am implementing to engage, is to create a Land Acknowledgement and begin to make a monthly Real Rent payment.
The Land Acknowledgement is a statement that I have built with my family and is a way for us to show respect and honor the Duwamish people and their relationship with the land that we now live on. The monthly Real Rent payment is a cash contribution that we make to a fund that is used by the Duwamish Tribal Services to support the revival of Duwamish culture and the vitality of the Duwamish Tribe. These are small things and they can sometimes feel insignificant when compared to the progress towards equity for the Duwamish people that must still be made. But I know that the act of stating an intention and making an ongoing contribution are important first steps for me and my family to take.
Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit
Contributed by Olivia Maki
Last month I joined a virtual storytelling gathering with the non-profit Real Food Real Stories and Chef Crystal Wahpehpah. Chef Crystal shared a personal story of her journey rediscovering her own Indigenous food pathways and reconnection to the land. Throughout her talk, I was reminded how little I know about Indigenous food culture. As someone who has proudly worked in the food and agricultural space for over a decade, this gap in my knowledge left me feeling ashamed. I’ve since spent time learning more about Indigenous food and land access, which lead me to this Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit.
The concept of land reparations can feel threatening to some but I’ve come to see it as an integral part of the conversation around equity and justice for BIPOC communities. Land reparations are not just about redistributing land but also redistributing wealth and power — two things that are not possible without access to land. I recommend this toolkit because it provides a history lesson, additional reading and resources, organizations to engage with, and tangible action items for individuals who want to work in solidarity with Indigenous communities. It also provides real examples of how land transfers have worked in the past including this collaboration in Maine between 25 non-Native conservationists and the Wabanaki tribe.
Conservations and environmentalists have a history of racism and genocide in the US towards the BIPOC community. My hope for the future is to have more partnerships and more resource sharing between these groups. We have a lot to learn from each other.