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American Indian Panel Illuminated Indigenous Peoples' Food Challenges
- Bob Benenson
- 1 minute ago
- 8 min read
Recap of Farm Aid Forum is Presented to Mark Indigenous Peoples Day
I have had deep empathy for this nation's indigenous people since I was quite young.
We learned that the Thanksgiving holiday was rooted in the legendary hospitality that American Indians provided to the Pilgrims who settled New England. In school we learned that white settlers were saved from starvation by Indians who taught them their sophisticated agricultural practices. In college I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and other books that drove home the death and destruction inflicted on American Indians over this nation's history.
This is why I subscribe to the concept of observing Indigenous Peoples Day on the second Monday of October. I am not here to start an argument with those who believe that first colonizer Christopher Columbus should continue to be honored with a national holiday on this date. I would urge them to read more deeply into how he sparked centuries of oppression against the indigenous peoples of the "New World."
Rather, this article recaps an important panel discussion about the challenges that American Indian people face in food and farming to this date. This panel was the leadoff segment for Farm Aid's Farmer Forum in Minneapolis on September 19, the day before the non-profit advocate for family farmers held its festival and concert.
The panel was moderated by Kari Jo Lawrence, a South Dakota rancher and chief executive officer of the Intertribal Agricultural Council. She engaged in conversation with:
Chef Sean Sherman (one of my heroes), who has elevated the visibility of American Indian foodways through his nationally recognized Owamni restaurant and his North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS) non-profit. He is known by the sobriquet of The Sioux Chef.
Shelly Buck, Prairie Island Dakota leader of Owámniyomni Okhódayapi, which is working to transform five acres of traditional Indian land along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis into a place of healing, restoration, education and connection.
Luke Black Elk, a member of the North American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA) leadership council.
Kari started the session off by creating some context:
We've been aggressively addressing underlying policies that were detrimental to tribal agriculture and producers, and through advocacy and strong partnerships, like through Farm Aid, we have tireless producers and tribal leaders moving the needle on bipartisan solutions.
Agriculture in Indian Country is as diverse as the 574 federally recognized tribes that have a government to government relationship with the United States. Accordingly, while none of us can speak for the whole of Indian Country, we can speak about our own experiences and our work aimed at uplifting tribal food producers.
She then noted, "I'm really thrilled to be here with you all today, with folks who are actively engaged in supporting the growth in Native foodways through advocacy and policy change, technical assistance to producers, and then market development and also the community engagement."
The theme of the Farmer Forum was "Seeding Democracy from Our Fields to Our Future," and Kari's first question was what democracy means for the nation's First Peoples:
Shelley Buck: "When we think about democracy, you're talking about who has a voice and who holds the power. And unfortunately, for years, the Dakota people and Native people in general have had their voice, their language, their culture taken from them. And so for us, it's about getting that power and that voice back to our people, especially here on our traditional homelands... It's important that people don't forget that history and why that land is so important to us. We have a relationship with the land. And I think when you have that relationship, and you see something like the land, the water, the plants, the animals as a relative, you tend to treat them better."
Sean Sherman: "I feel like for democracy from the indigenous perspective... it's self determination. And I feel that we need a lot of representation, because our voices have been stifled historically... I feel, in a perfect world, like we should have unified indigenous voices, and we should have representation, and in the House, we should be able to elect our own officials to be a voice, to kind of leave some balance there. Because right now, we've allowed billionaires to buy out our entire government... I feel like if we had indigenous voices to be able to balance, we represent the land, we represent the water... If we had more control and more voice in our governmental systems and our democracy, we would be really leaning into protecting our spaces, to making sure that we're growing enough food for ourselves, protecting our water resources and not just handing everything to large corporations."
Luke Black Elk: "Indigenous nations need to come together and really make a stand together with one voice... I really take a lot of lessons from my Haudenosaunee relatives. [The Haudenosaunee is also known as the Iroquois Confederacy of tribes in what is today upstate New York.] They talk about one dish, one spoon... This is where democracy came from... We're all eating from the same dish. Mother Earth, that we live on, is one dish. And we all have to eat from here. We have one spoon. We have to share that, we pass it around to each other, and we take turns."
Kari then asked Shelley about the benefits of collaborations within Native communities.
Shelley: "I think partnerships are key to everything. You can't do things alone, and when you work with other people, other nations, other organizations, I think you're able to attain more and achieve more together... There are four Dakota tribes in [Minnesota], and we started meeting as a collective tribal leadership, and we would meet quarterly and rotate whose reservation we meet at. And that really started the partnership with the Dakota tribes, which then led into partnerships with all 11 tribes here in the state on issues that we all have in common... We were able to achieve so much in this state as a whole than if we had tried to go at it alone, and I think that's really key and helpful for not only Native people and tribal nations, but for everyone to work together."
Sean was then given the opportunity to describe his work promoting American Indian foodways:
When I started doing work around indigenous foods, I was trying to just highlight and showcase the wonderful and beautiful diversity that we have of indigenous peoples, and really trying to lay a path where we can really identify what our foods are moving forward...
There's no reason why we shouldn't have Native American restaurants across North America everywhere. And so for our work, we just wanted to highlight what we can do moving forward... We're not trying to cook like it's 1491, we're trying to showcase what's possible moving forward....
In North America, the Eurocentric culinary world has largely ignored indigenous peoples and their knowledge, especially around foods. There's so much plant diversity out there that just doesn't get touched. You know, people label everything a weed because they're lazy and they don't take the time to learn what that plant is.
And, you know, even just protein diversity. So if you ever come to some place like Owamni, our philosophy was removing colonial ingredients and taking away things like dairy products and wheat flour and cane sugar, beef, pork and chicken. It was really just to prove a point that we had massive amounts of amazing, beautiful and nutritional and flavorful foods across North America, and that we have a space for modern indigenous restaurants. Because I just want to change the way kids in the next generation grow up, to have that normalized so when they're going out there and they're Doordashing, do they want Chinese? Do they want pizza? Do they want Native American? We just want to be on that list...
I am a product of growing up on a reservation where we grew up largely with commodity food program foods, which was just a lot of governmental foods with vegetables packed in sodium and fruits packed in corn syrups and literally, gallons of corn syrup to eat at the table, commodity cheese, powdered milk, you name it. All those pieces were a part of our pantry and our cupboard, and so that had nothing to do with who we were as indigenous peoples. It spoke to nothing. Because, you know, taking our food away was a power move, and making us reliant on government is something that they continue to wish. And so it's really important that we push for the food sovereignty aspect of growing our own foods, of utilizing our land spaces more wisely.
Luke then focused on food sovereignty, under which individuals, families and communities achieve self-sufficiency in their food needs:
So without food sovereignty, we can't really be sovereign. Indigenous nations around North America are sovereign nations. We were here for millennia before colonization happened. We'll be here long after colonization ends. But we have to be able to support ourselves with our own food. If we can't, if we can't produce food for ourselves, then we are a dependent nation. So without being able to produce our own food, we're not going to be really sovereign...
We have to as a whole society come together, because it's not just Indigenous people. We're not here alone, and we're trying to survive. We're going to survive, we have survived. We've gone through our Apocalypse, and we're still standing here. It's the rest of humanity that that's kind of at question right now, because we've all got to get on the same wavelength. We all have to have the same thought, come back to that idea of what democracy is, that one dish, one spoon. We have to pass that spoon around to each other.
We have to be able to to move into the future, because we're not here alone as indigenous people. We're all here people of color, all colors, and we're all living on the same planet, and we're all wanting the same thing for our children, and that's what we have to think about. It's not about what's good for us, how much money we make, how big our house is, how many cars we have and how many phones we have. It's about whether or not our kids are going to survive.
We think seven generations ahead, that's what we're taught. We're thinking about what's going to happen seven generations into the future, how our actions will affect the future. And so I think one thing that a lot of indigenous people say is, try to be a good ancestor to your children, right? That's what we really have to do.
There was much more to this discussion. If there appears to be sufficient interest, I will create a Part 2 to this article.
Also, it was mentioned during the session that Sean Sherman has a new informative cookbook coming out in November, titled Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Click the first button below to place a pre-order, and subsequent buttons to learn more about the organizations mentioned in this article.