The post Sean Sherman Expands His Vision for Decolonizing the US Food System appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Sean Sherman walks through an expansive commissary kitchen in South Minneapolis, his eyes lighting up with excitement. He isn’t taking in the kitchen as it is—dormant but well-equipped with an industrial smoker, a walk-in sausage-making area, and plentiful storage space. Instead, he’s seeing the future of his Meals for Native Institutions initiative, when the space is up, running, and realizing a long-term vision to introduce more Indigenous foods into the American food system.
Sherman, an Oglala Lakota tribal member with an unassuming demeanor, a soft smile, and a signature long braid hanging down his back, has endeavored to revitalize Native American food traditions since 2014, when he founded The Sioux Chef, a catering and educational enterprise. His focus is on “decolonized” food—made without Eurocentric ingredients such as beef, pork, chicken, dairy, wheat flour, and cane sugar—most notably at his acclaimed Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni.
“We’re scaling up our efforts almost simultaneously in Minnesota and Montana, and the goal is that we’re developing a model that works anywhere.”
There he’s become known for cedar-braising bison (flavoring meat with sprigs of the coniferous tree), chopping up plant medicines like ramps, morels, and sweet potatoes, and finishing off dishes with seasonings like sumac and sage. His Indigenous Food Lab (IFL), also in Minneapolis, is an incubator and training kitchen where Native chefs and entrepreneurs can access equipment and information from Sherman and other knowledge keepers.
Sherman still cooks at his restaurant, but these days, he has his sights set on a triad of initiatives that bring him closer to the goal of making the U.S. food system more inclusive and indeed more Indigenous. The opening later this year of an Indigenous Food Lab satellite in Bozeman, Montana, is part of that vision. So too is his cookbook Turtle Island (Clarkson Potter), which I coauthored, covering Native foodways across North America.
But in this moment, Sherman is most excited about Meals for Native Institutions, which will provide schools, hospitals, penitentiaries, and community centers with large-format Indigenous foods.
“This model has such immense potential to have a huge impact on the way we eat, especially for kids and elders—and really everyone,” he says about the larger efforts to decolonize institutional food.
Realizing a Vision
This year feels like a full-circle moment for Sherman, who grew up eating government commodity foods—think canned beef and neon-orange blocks of cheese—on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. That tribal community has endured some of the most devastating impacts of European colonization and U.S. policies on Indigenous cultures, practices, and foodways, including the government-sanctioned slaughter of the all-important bison.
Sherman cooking at the Indigenous Food Lab incubator and training kitchen in Minneapolis. (Photo credit: Bill Phelps Studio)
Today, Pine Ridge has some of the highest poverty rates in the nation and lowest life expectancies in the world. For Sherman, a TIME 100 honoree and three-time James Beard Award winner, a return to Indigenous foods can address some of those marked inequities.
“Maybe down the road we’ll even be able to get some of these Native food products into the commodity food program, which so many rural Indigenous communities like the Navajo Nation and Pine Ridge still utilize today,” he added.
His mission to revitalize Indigenous foodways began with a yearning to learn more about his people’s food while also curtailing the marked health inequities tribal communities experience, including disproportionate rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. He’s done this through his nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), and through Owamni, and now he’ll have additional ways to move toward these goals.
Meals for Native Institutions will be housed in a newly acquired space that Sherman has named Wóyute Thipi (meaning “food building” in Dakota), situated along what’s known as the American Indian Cultural Corridor on Minneapolis’ Franklin Avenue, a cultural district home to several Indigenous-owned businesses, including a coffee shop and an art gallery.
The building will serve as NATIFS’ headquarters and feature a counter-service Indigenous BBQ restaurant dubbed ŠHOTÁ—the Dakota word for smoke—that’s expected to open later this year. Like Owamni, that public-facing eatery is meant to bring more meaningful attention to his big-picture goal.
“There is a huge need for culturally appropriate foods, especially in schools and programs serving Native people.”
Although the institutional foods initiative is still in the early stages, with Sherman actively fundraising to get it off the ground this summer, he foresees the well-equipped 4,000-square-foot commissary kitchen churning out a plethora of simply prepared, nutritious Indigenous foods. Early recipes include wild rice pilaf with dried berries; baked tepary beans lightly sweetened with maple syrup; and a three sisters soup that brings together nixtamalized pima corn, tepary beans, and delicata squash.
Much like the fare served at Owamni and planned for ŠHOTÁ, the meals created for schools and hospitals will be devoid of ingredients introduced by Europeans during colonization. Sherman’s team is working closely with a nutritionist to ensure recipes will meet established USDA nutritional standards for those settings.
“We know that the menus designed for the American school system aren’t great,” he said. “For example, pizza is somehow considered a perfect food because it covers the meat, grain, dairy, and fruit and vegetable requirements all in one swoop, but we know that pizza isn’t a perfect food for schoolkids. We’re not trying to replace the entire lunch program; we’re trying to create culturally specific components so there are options to build out menus using these recipes with at least one ingredient coming from an Indigenous producer.”
Local Indigenous advocates are cheering Sherman on as he expands his purview to better serve the robust Native community in the Twin Cities, estimated at more than 35,000 individuals. “There is a huge need for culturally appropriate foods, especially in schools and programs serving Native people, and I’m grateful Sean is supporting this with his new business,” said Indigenous Food Network Program Coordinator Kateri Tuttle. “There will always be a need to continue to expand services that provide our families and community with these important foods.”
Sherman wants to introduce more Indigenous foods into the American food system. (Photo credit: Bill Phelps Studio)
As much as this is about feeding people, it’s also about uplifting Native entrepreneurs and businesses. To that end, Sherman estimates that NATIFS currently funnels some $700,000 a year to Indigenous producers and farmers. He only see that growing from here.
“We want to ensure there’s always money going toward Indigenous food production,” he said. “I think we could probably double or triple our current purchasing power with this move into institutional food, where we’ll eventually be creating thousands of servings a day. So we’re not only addressing a need, but we’re also helping create a more sustainable system.”
Muckleshoot nutrition educator and food sovereignty advocate Val Segrest, who has collaborated with Sherman on past initiatives, emphasized the importance of initiatives like this.
“Efforts like this are a powerful reclaiming of space [and] story, and strengthen food sovereignty,” she said in an email. “By establishing Indigenous-owned food hubs in the heart of our communities, we restore pathways for cultural knowledge, health, and economic vitality to thrive. This is more than a building or initiative—it’s a beacon for Indigenous food futures, rooted in our values and nourished by our ancestors’ vision.”
Sherman is also eager to launch the satellite IFL in Bozeman, developed in partnership with Montana State University’s Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative, the Montana Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative, and the Human Resource Development Council of Southwest Montana.
Set to open this fall, it will be located in the Human Resources Development Council of Southwest Montana building and feature an incubator kitchen, a classroom, and a large warehouse designed to replicate the model he has developed in Minneapolis. Similar satellite IFLs are in the works in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Anchorage, Alaska—all intended to empower regional Indigenous chefs, entrepreneurs, community members, and organizations with professional equipment, culinary knowledge, and other support as needed.
For Sherman’s collaborators in Montana, it’s a welcome development. “First and foremost, the Indigenous Foods Lab is about revitalizing the kinship economy for the well-being of the people and the land; in the current climate, this work is more important than ever,” said Jill Falcon Ramaker, PhD (Bishkane Mishtadim Ikwe), director of the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative.
“In the past, our [Native] food system was sustainable for more than 13,000 years because of the networked work of Native people and reliance on the gifts of the land or our older-than-human relatives,” she said. “As we return to the land in a place-based food system, we must rebuild our community amongst Native nations in the region.”
But the impact of the forthcoming IFL goes beyond just the area’s tribal communities, explained KayAnn Miller, co-executive director of the Montana Partnership to End Childhood Hunger. She pointed to alarming state statistics that she hoped the IFL could help curtail: that about two in five Montana residents have two or more chronic diseases, and that about a third of Montana children have at least one chronic disease.
An entree from Owamni, Sean Sherman’s award-winning restaurant, featuring elk. (Photo credit: Scott Streble).
“As we know, chronic diseases often have a dietary component, which means we need to eat a whole lot better in Montana,” said Miller. “Indigenous foods—which tend to be whole and healthy with an emphasis on lean proteins and fruits and vegetables—are right in line with what we all need to eat to reduce health challenges like heart disease and diabetes, which are two of the top 10 causes of death in our state. I see the Indigenous Food Lab as a way for all of us to learn more about these good foods, how to prepare and cook them, and how to grow and eat more of them.”
For Sherman, it’s an opportunity to address the inequities he grew up with back on the Pine Ridge Reservation while also uplifting local Native communities.
“We’re scaling up our efforts almost simultaneously in Minnesota and Montana, and the goal is that we’re developing a model that works anywhere—the Dakotas, Alaska, Hawaii,” he said. “Not only does this give Indigenous communities a platform to talk about the true histories of their cultures and these lands, but it’s also building skills and creating jobs within our communities. This is the kind of food sovereignty we’ve always been working toward.”
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]]>The post Indigenous Food Reciprocity as a Model for Mutual Aid appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the Arctic and Far North, where a successful hunt can mean the difference between feeding the village or scrounging to make ends meet, one might assume a scarcity mindset would take hold. Instead, reciprocity prevails.
Examples of this sharing-focused approach abound. A recent documentary, One With the Whale, follows the hunting practices of an island community in the Bering Sea. In one scene, after a long period without finding game, a hunting crew harpoons a seal, which will allow them to feed some of the community. “It’s always a blessing to receive any animal that you catch,” Siberian Yupik hunter Daniel Apassingok tells the filmmakers. “As small as the game is, the game is dispersed with four or five other boats. We don’t ever say no to anybody.” Later, when the hunters take a whale, his wife, Susan, characterizes this too as a “blessing,” describing it in a way that recognizes it as beyond a commodity.
The notion of “mutual aid” is relatively new in name, but it mirrors a concept that’s been prioritized by Indigenous cultures since time immemorial: a focus on the collective. A foundational value among Native American communities, it stands in stark contrast to America’s modern hyper-fixation on the individual.
This idea of reciprocity extends far beyond humans, beginning in the natural world around us. It is a worldview informed by abundance and mutual existence—not scarcity and competition—where gratitude trumps greed. At a time of pervasive extraction and exploitation, we might take a moment to understand the importance of this worldview, still practiced the world over.
“In a traditional Anishinaabe economy, the land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: One life is given in support of another,” Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her newest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. “The focus is on supporting the good of the people, not only an individual. Receiving a gift from the land is coupled to attached responsibilities of sharing, respect, reciprocity, and gratitude.”
Throughout my work covering Indigenous foodways for Civil Eats and beyond, I have witnessed this culture of abundance and generosity time and again. The idea is expansive, beyond human, and happening all around us all the time—even right under our feet in the soil, where carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycle in an interdependent exchange.
“In a traditional Anishinaabe economy, the land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: one life is given in support of another.”
Symbiotic relationships in the natural world are well-documented by Indigenous knowledge-keepers. Centuries ago, tribal communities across Turtle Island, as North America is commonly referred to in Native circles, began growing the three sisters—corn, beans, and squash—maximizing their complementary properties and creating a mini-ecosystem that results in higher yields and improved soil health. Each plant contributes to the well-being of the other, for the well-being of all.
Much in the same way, Indigenous groups had long stewarded the land in a collective, non-extractive manner, until European standards of private land ownership were forced upon them. To reject this extractive, “scarcity” thinking, Kimmerer reminds us, is to make way for another kind of economy: “In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away,” she writes.
In a society driven by scarcity thinking, generosity can seem like a radical concept, but within Indigenous cultures, it’s intuitive. For instance, many tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest regularly host potlatches—the word comes from the Chinook term meaning “to give”—which are festive feasts centered on gift exchanging.
“When one’s heart is glad, he gives away gifts,” the late, visionary ‘Na̱mg̱is filmmaker Barb Cranmer explains in a short documentary series about the potlatch ceremony. “It was given to us by our creator, our way of doing things, of who we are. The potlatch was given to us as a way of expressing joy. Everyone on earth is given something. This was given to us.”
Much like this ceremony dedicated entirely to the dissemination of food and gifts, there are words in many Native languages simply meaning “to share food.” This focus on the greater good isn’t just something that happens in community, in isolation, or in the past. It’s happening today, and Indigenous thought leaders are incorporating this value of reciprocity into their business models as well.
Samuel Gensaw III of the Yurok Nation roasting wild salmon from the Klamath River, as seen in the documentary Gather. (Photo credit: Renan Ozturk)
Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman, for example, imparts this ancestral wisdom with his nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NĀTIFS), which promotes Indigenous foodways access and education. Back in 2020, Sherman delayed the opening of his acclaimed restaurant Owamni in order to distribute free meals after the police killing of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising that transformed entire Minneapolis neighborhoods into food deserts.
Now, Sherman is turning his attention to supplying decolonized food—meaning devoid of Eurocentric ingredients such as beef, pork, chicken, dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, and the like—to institutions such as schools and hospitals. He is getting one step closer to realizing his vision of bringing the myriad benefits of Native foodways to people everywhere.
Then there’s Denver-based restaurant Tocabe, which donates Indigenous ingredients and ready-made meals to tribal communities across the country with every purchase made from its online marketplace. For Osage cook and co-owner Ben Jacobs, this food reciprocity is at the heart of all his work, reminiscent of the feasts his tribal nation has long held to honor elders and other community members.
These cycles of reciprocity aren’t just to show love and respect to one another; they’re also imperative for our collective future.
“In [a] climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver,” writes Kimmerer. “Climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss are the consequences of unrestrained taking by humans. Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?”
These themes ripple through the 2020 documentary Gather, about the Native movement to reclaim cultural identity through food sovereignty. In one scene, a group of young Yurok men fish for salmon along the Klamath River, but with no luck. Seeing this, a family friend shares his catch, giving them a huge salmon, which they’ll cook over a fire alongside the rocky riverbank later that night. “He’s helping us out because it’s important,” one of the youths says as he carries the massive fish back to camp. “And that’s how we do it.”
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
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]]>The post An Alaska Native Chef Builds Foodways for the Future appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>As Hurricane Helene made its way up the East Coast last October, Rob Kinneen tracked the storm from his home in Durham, North Carolina. When lashing winds and heavy rains began battering the state and reports started coming in of disastrous flooding throughout Appalachia, Kinneen knew he needed to act.
“I drove up to this small town, Swannanoa, with my apron and my knife,” he says, “and within minutes of arriving at the commissary kitchen that had been set up, I was cutting up vegetables.”
Kinneen, an innovative Tlingit chef, has dedicated much of his professional life to sharing his knowledge of Alaska foodways, focusing on local, sustainable ingredients and helping the public understand the benefits of those foods. It was second nature for him to jump in to help.
“Rob’s ability to create a bridge between Alaska Native culture and the broader food world is inspiring.”
“When it comes to food relief efforts, healthy, culturally relevant foods are so important,” says Kinneen, whose jovial nature is reflected in the easygoing smile he’s donning more often than not.
He put his culinary skills to use that day and for many afterward, helping prep big batches of roasted squash and cabbage-apple slaw to be distributed alongside braised beef and pork. He was heartened to see that visitors to the makeshift pantry—many of whom had lost everything and were living in tents or cars—maintained a positive mood.
“Even though we were just weeks out from a catastrophic event that washed away people’s homes, there was still this uplifting sense of community and camaraderie,” he recalls. “It’s a good reminder that food relief, which has become increasingly political and bureaucratic, is really about basic humanity.”
For Kinneen, food insecurity isn’t just a worst-case scenario—it’s a reality he witnessed while growing up in Alaska. Then, as now, Indigenous communities depend heavily on subsistence hunting and fishing, maintaining traditional lifeways while blunting the exorbitant cost of groceries in the state, particularly for fresh foods. This can mean the gathering of land and sea plants such as berries, beach asparagus, kelp, and black seaweed as well as hunting for whales, seals, and walruses.
Tlingit Chef Robert Kinneen’s bison flank steak with tepary bean salad and juniper-epazote sauce. (Photo credit: Grace Bowie, courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution)
Many of the state’s isolated, rural villages are reachable only by plane and are hit hard when disaster strikes, even if the catastrophes are far away. Sept. 11, the 2016 Old Iliamna earthquake south of Anchorage, and the pandemic all created food shortages and demonstrated the fragility of the food system in Alaska, where an estimated 95 percent of food is imported.
“Every decade, something has disrupted the [Alaska] ecosystem, and people have been stuck without access to food,” says Kinneen, highlighting the importance of subsistence hunting and fishing. “Alaska also has limited emergency rations, so if people don’t have the resources to [meet their own needs], it can be really debilitating.” Early on, he learned the value of gathering and sharing local food within the community, and of developing the skills that enabled people to feed themselves and others.
Kinneen was born in the 3,000-person town of Petersburg, on an island in Southeast Alaska. His connection to community, food, land, and water grew from family outings to dig clams and gather wild blueberries, which sparked an early interest in cooking. As a teen, he moved with his family to Anchorage, Alaska’s most populous city, with some 287,000 residents.
There, he got his first experiences in professional kitchens, though admittedly in “lackluster” cafes and nondescript restaurants. “I’ve wanted to be a chef for as long as I can remember,” Kinneen says, adding that he “barely graduated high school” but that a culinary program teaching classic French techniques solidified his passion for cooking.
After high school, thanks to the influence of a culinary instructor and out of a yearning to make something of himself beyond his home state, Kinneen traded Anchorage for upstate New York, to attend the Culinary Institute of America. “For me, the biggest culture shocks were the sheer mass of population and the disconnect from land,” he says.
In New York, he was exposed to foods he’d never tasted before. He also encountered myriad misconceptions that people held about Alaska—that it was a food “desert,” for instance. Kinneen had never experienced that, nor had his Tlingit ancestors, who lived off the land and sea for millennia. He decided his path would be to set the record straight about Alaska Native foodways, by sharing stories about his lived experiences alongside the rich flavors of his culture, in restaurants, at special events, and through recipes online.
“We should be mapping today’s thought processes and technology onto Indigenous stewardship models to help promote food knowledge.”
“All the Indigenous communities across Alaska were thriving pre-colonialization,” he says. “There are petroglyphs and remnants of fish traps that show that we were not just surviving, but thriving. That even goes for places with a harsh climate, like Utqiagvik, where it could be 30 degrees below zero and you don’t see the sun for three months.”
After culinary school, Kinneen cut his teeth in restaurant kitchens from Louisiana to North Carolina before returning to Alaska for a 15-year stint, eager to better connect with his Tlingit ancestry and showcase the state’s culinary bounty. That took shape as multiple high-profile chef gigs in restaurants, his Fresh Alaska Cookbook, and a web video series designed to demystify life in the Far North. The series documents Kinneen’s travels across the state to meet with knowledge keepers and prepare contemporary takes on traditional foods.
For instance, his posole recipe swaps pork with richly flavorful seal meat in this classic Mexican stew, bringing together food traditions from across Turtle Island, as many tribal communities call North America. His rockfish fumet infuses a favorite French soup with important Southeast Alaska ingredients, including black seaweed, yarrow greens, and wild parsley—all topped with clarified seal oil, which Kinneen says is similar, when freshly rendered, to a heady extra-virgin olive oil.
Tlingit chef Rob Kinneen, left, with Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman. (Photo courtesy of Rob Kinneen)
Those dishes reflect a harmony between past and present, and are an acknowledgment of modern Alaska Native communities where traditional ecological knowledge is alive and well.
Kinneen’s approach and expertise made him a natural fit as outreach director for Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman’s nonprofit, NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), which aims to promote Indigenous food knowledge and access. Kinneen’s role is very much a continuation of his lifelong efforts, but on a larger scale. He travels often to visit tribal nations across the country, learning about and uplifting their food sovereignty efforts and helping preserve longstanding culinary traditions.
That work, both through the nonprofit and on his own, has led him to the White House for the annual Tribal Summit, which brings together leaders from the federal government and tribal nations to strengthen nation-to-nation relationships and support tribal sovereignty and self-determination.
For the past two years at the summit, he has organized Indigenous-focused feasts for hundreds of attendees, featuring dishes like turkey tamales, ahi poke, and three sisters salad with corn, beans, and squash. Last year, he traveled to Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, tapped by the Wilderness Society to spend a week cooking with ingredients that existed before colonization—blue corn, wild rice, and cranberry pancakes for breakfast and maple-braised bison with roasted hearty vegetables and quinoa for dinner—for a group of 20 people in the remote Brooks Range. His setup wasn’t much more than a transportable Coleman camping stove, a double propane burner, and a water filtration system.
“How can we be in a symbiotic, stewardship relationship with the Earth when it comes to food production?”
All these efforts have left a lasting impression on his contemporaries, including Penobscot chef Joe Robbins, who worked with Kinneen at the 2023 Tribal Summit and also teamed up with him to develop recipe videos employing both government commodity foods and traditional, culturally significant ingredients. That’s especially important because many tribal communities still depend on food rations from the U.S. government, which historically have not been particularly nutritious.
“As I look at the work Rob has done with constant dedication to not just to his tribe in Alaska but to all Indigenous communities on Turtle Island and beyond, it strengthens the work that all Indigenous chefs, farmers, and producers are doing every day,” Robbins says. “When it comes to Indigenous representation in the culinary world, we are still lacking, though the tides are shifting quickly. Perspective of our cultures has always come from the outside, but the work NATIFS is doing is coming from tribal communities, giving us all a much louder voice.”
Amy Foote, an Alaska-based chef who is striving to introduce traditional foods into healthcare facilities and other institutions there, echoes that sentiment. “Rob’s ability to create a bridge between Alaska Native culture and the broader food world is inspiring,” says Foote, who is not Indigenous but has focused much of her career on the deeply Indigenous notion of food as medicine. “By working alongside global Indigenous communities, he is reviving lost or endangered food knowledge and providing a means for communities to reclaim and reconnect with their food heritage. Rob is a grounding presence to a sovereign food future.”
Indeed, Kinneen embodies a reverence for the past with a vision for the future—a juxtaposition many Alaska Native communities are currently navigating. “Although ancestral knowledge is rooted in tradition, that doesn’t mean it can’t be adapted,” he says. “We should be mapping today’s thought processes and technology onto Indigenous stewardship models to help promote food knowledge.”
As prime examples of non-extractive Indigenous ingenuity, he points to the resurgence of Zuni waffle gardens for vegetable growing, which help conserve water in the Southwest, and the kelp farming that Dune Lankard of the Native Conservancy is spearheading along Alaska’s south-central coast, simultaneously bolstering the local economy with a nutritious traditional food and helping mitigate climate change impacts like ocean acidification.
For Kinneen, his childhood lessons from Alaska, about community and resilience, apply to the wider environmental and climate crises the planet is facing. “We should be asking ourselves, ‘How can we be in a symbiotic, stewardship relationship with the Earth when it comes to food production?’” he says. “I realize that approach would likely cut down on profitability, but the flip side is that we have a place to live.”
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]]>The post For This Alaska Town, Whaling Is a Way of Life appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>For many Alaska Native communities, subsistence hunting and fishing is a way of life. For the Apassingok family, it accounts for more than 80 percent of their food. If Daniel Apassingok and his sons, Chris and Chase, have a particularly fruitful day out on the water pursuing seals, walruses, and whales, they can feed their entire Siberian Yupik village of Gambell.
So it was a collective victory for the village in April 2017, when then-16-year-old Chris became the youngest person in his community to harpoon a whale: Gambell fed off the bounty for months. But after his mom, Susan, posted about the exciting accomplishment on Facebook and the Anchorage newspaper picked up the news, the family received thousands of online hate messages—even death threats.
At once heartbreaking and heartwarming, this story is the subject of One with the Whale, a new, award-winning documentary that premieres on PBS’s Independent Lens on April 22. Created by co-directors Pete Chelkowski and Jim Wickens with the community’s blessing, it showcases the struggles of subsistence hunting—and the lack of understanding about its importance.
“Subsistence hunting is a traditional lifestyle that’s been passed down from generation to generation, and we rely upon it dearly,” says Daniel Apassingok. “It helps feed not just the community, but the next village and people all over the state.”
The Apassingok family in Gambell. (Photo credit: Jim Wickens)
With a population of around 600 people, the remote town of Gambell sits on the northwest cape of St. Lawrence Island within the Bering Sea, closer to Russia (36 miles) than the Alaska mainland (200 miles). The environment there is rugged and barren, lacking trees or other vegetation. Conditions can be harsh, with temperatures dropping to -20°F in the winter.
For Chelkowski and Wickens, who are not Indigenous, making this film had a profound impact on their understanding of Alaska Native lifeways. “I’m from New York City, and there are probably more people living in the building I grew up in than in the whole village of Gambell—so witnessing the way of life in Gambell was really eye-opening,” says Chelkowski “But this is not some fairy tale; these are real people who are living in the most difficult conditions on the planet and overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And they do it with hope and love.”
In Gambell, packaged foods and other supplies arrive only by plane, and the inflated prices at the local grocery store reflect those import efforts. For their family of five, Susan spends upward of $500 a week on the mainly processed foods that line the store shelves. Compounding matters, a lack of jobs makes it tough for many Gambell residents—whose poverty rate hovers around 35 percent—to afford those high food costs.
“You have to hunt, you have to gather berries, you have to gather sea vegetables,” former John Apangalook School principal Rob Taylor explains in the film. “If you don’t do subsistence activities, you die.”
“You have to hunt, you have to gather berries, you have to gather sea vegetables. If you don’t do subsistence activities, you die.”
The school allows students to miss 10 school days per year for subsistence hunting and gathering, though kids often skip out on more than that in order to put food on the table. Given the imperative of providing for their families, it can be tough to impress upon young people the importance of formal education.
Of particular significance is the springtime bowhead whale migration, which kicks off a weeks-long whaling season starting in late March or early April, when temperatures warm up to 20°F. Apassingok recalls some seasons, like last year’s, when they didn’t catch any whales. In those years, they try to make up for the lost harvest by catching more seals and walruses throughout the spring and summer. But whales—particularly bowheads, one of the largest and heaviest species—are the ultimate prize. Each can yield hundreds of pounds of meat and maktak (skin with blubber), which are rich sources of lean protein, healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids, and vitamins A, D, and E.
Gambell is one of 11 Alaska villages that participate in whaling as authorized by the International Whaling Commission and regulated by the nonprofit Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, which oversees the quota system. The estimated 50 whales harvested by Alaska Native communities annually provide about 2 million pounds of food, which would cost upward of $20 million to replace with a store-bought protein such as beef, which averages anywhere from $10 to $20 per pound in these remote places.
“A small 30-foot whale will feed a family for a few weeks,” says Apassingok. “If you catch three whales, you can feed a family for the summer. Some people can’t afford to buy their food from the stores, especially when they have big families.”
Chasing a whale. (Photo credit: Jim Wickens)
The Yupik way of life is threatened by climate change, which is causing extreme weather, flooding, coastal erosion, and unprecedented ice loss across the Bering Sea. Those evolving conditions, in turn, have been shown to impact algae, zooplankton, fish, and seabird populations in recent years.
In addition to addressing food security concerns, whaling is also an important cultural tradition that has been practiced by Siberian Yupik peoples for thousands of years. Apassingok remembers going on his first hunting excursion at 5 years old. His son Chris started hunting seals at age 7, then at 15 became a striker—the hunter posted at the front of the boat during harrowing whaling outings. In Gambell, many of these customs have been well-maintained as a result of its isolated locale, far from modern-day influences.
The traditional and modern worlds collided back in 2017 after news spread of Chris’s rite-of-passage harpooning of a 200-year-old, 57-foot bowhead whale. When Canadian-American environmentalist Paul Watson heard about it, he took to social media.
“Some 16-year-old kid is a frigging ‘hero’ for snuffing out the life of this unique, self-aware, intelligent, social, sentient being,” the now-deleted Facebook post read. (The quote is preserved in a High Country News article from the time.). “But hey, it’s OK because murdering whales is a part of his culture, part of his tradition. . . . I don’t give a damn for the bullshit politically correct attitude that certain groups of people have a ‘right’ to murder a whale.”
That inflammatory post prompted Watson’s followers—and countless other keyboard warriors—to troll the Apassingok family. Thousands of negative comments flooded in, sending the shy and stoic Chris on a downward spiral that nearly prevented him from graduating from high school.
But the community rallied around him, as did many prominent Alaskans. Governor Bill Walker presented Chris with a certificate “in recognition of his skill and expertise in landing a bowhead and receiving the gift of the ancient whale’s life to sustain his people, and upholding the values and traditions of Alaska Native culture despite opposition.” U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan also recognized him as “Alaskan of the Week” on the Senate floor then went on to hold a Commerce Committee hearing about the importance of whaling in Alaska.
“Our traditional lifestyle should be understood like a job or any other livelihood. With this film, we’re trying to help the world understand why we do this for a living.”
In October 2017, Chris was tapped to give the keynote speech at the Elders and Youth Conference, which preceded the notable Alaska Federation of Natives conference. “We take care of our land and ocean as they take care of us,” he said. “The biggest rule we are taught by the elders is to never become discouraged while hunting in hard situations. Even though we almost die, we must never give up. We must be prepared for any situation. We must know how to foretell the weather ourselves as our ancestors did. We must never be discouraged by any accident or anybody who may threaten us. I am part land, I am part water, I am always Native.” He then called upon attendees to join him in upholding traditional sustenance activities.
Seven years after that distressing situation, Chris and his family are both excited and anxious about having their story told to mainstream audiences. Naysayers will inevitably surface, especially as the documentary’s timing coincides with a call from Polynesian Indigenous groups to grant whales legal personhood as a protective measure. But the Apassingoks and the filmmakers hope that One with the Whale impresses upon viewers the vital role that whaling plays for Yupik peoples.
“The misunderstanding I see [about subsistence hunting] is beyond my imagination,” says Apassingok. “Our traditional lifestyle should be understood like a job or any other livelihood. With this film, we’re trying to help the world understand why we do this for a living.”
Chris and Ina on a date. (Photo credit: Pete Chelkowski)
Chelkowski hopes the documentary inspires empathy among non-Native viewers, much like making the film did for him. “Subsistence hunters in Alaska are not only one with the whale; they’re one with nature,” he says. “They have co-existed beautifully with these animals for thousands of years. Without the whale, they can’t survive. In the end, the whale symbolizes tradition, love, and family.”
“One with the Whale” premieres on PBS’s Independent Lens on April 22. Watch the trailer below.
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the Siberian Yupik people. We apologize for the error and appreciate the readers who alerted us to the mistake.
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]]>The post Native Youth Learn to Heal Their Communities Through Mycelium appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>At Spirit of the Sun, Native American youth are not only learning about traditional ecological knowledge, they’re also empowered to do the teaching.
The opportunity to absorb Indigenous wisdom and share that knowledge with the community is what attracted 20-year-old Nyomi Oliver (Navajo/Chicana) to the Denver nonprofit, which offers a wide variety of cultural, culinary, and wellness programming. “I am a reconnecting Native and had lost my ways,” she says. “But Spirit of the Sun has shown me how important our Indigenous perspectives are and how our history has laid out a blueprint for us to follow in order to align with Mother Nature.”
Oliver got involved in Spirit of the Sun’s Indigenous science and foodways program in 2022, then joined the organization’s newest initiative, the mycelium healing project, which taps into the bioremediation properties of fungi to restore the land and feed the local community.
Mycelium—fungi’s web-like inner network structure—has been shown to remove toxins from the soil while improving its overall health. Last summer, for instance, the organization’s mycelium-inoculated foodscapes demonstration garden yielded more than 1,000 pounds of produce for the elder food share program.
Participants in Spirit of the Sun’s Mycelium Healing Project (MHP) prepare mushrooms. (Photo courtesy of Spirit of the Sun)
These experiences prompted Oliver to pursue a nutrition degree and inspired her 14-year-old sister, Mia Madalena (Navajo/Pueblo/Chicana), to join Spirit of the Sun, too. “I was intrigued when Nyomi brought home mushrooms and was explaining how mycelium can help heal the world,” Madalena explains. She is now part of the organization’s youth leadership program and is interested in, quite literally, illustrating our world’s interconnectedness through her passion for painting.
At the helm of Spirit of the Sun is executive director and permaculture educator Shannon Francis (Diné/Hopi). She developed the mycelium healing project in 2021 to address the environmental injustice caused by known polluter Suncor Oil Refinery, located in nearby Commerce City. Since then, dozens of Native youth have participated in the program.
“I was a teen in the 1980s when the Exxon spill in the Gulf [of Alaska] happened, and I remember all the amazing things mycelium can do,” says Francis. “We wanted to share that knowledge in order to address the negative health impacts for the community around Suncor, which is primarily Chicano and Indigenous, including a lot of elders.”
Shannon Francis. (Photo courtesy of Spirit of the Sun)
Under the guidance of local mycology expert James Weiser, youth leaders have built out two mycelial mother patches—starter gardens full of fungi that can then be transplanted to create satellite colonies—and regularly host training sessions to teach their younger counterparts and community elders how to grow mushrooms. For the next phase of the initiative, they hope to develop additional mother patches and inoculate homeowners’ gardens to magnify the fungi’s positive impacts, which they are measuring through ongoing soil testing.
“When we’re healing the soil, we’re healing ourselves,” says Francis. “Our genetic makeup comes directly from the water we drink and the soil we eat from. Most of the soil in the Denver area is depleted of nutrients, so we have to constantly add nutrients back in. Mycelium is like a nervous system that does its job in conjunction with nutrients in the soil. There are so many positive benefits to soil that is healthy and alive; it is connected to our food, our ceremonies, our language, and our stories.”
Participants in the Spirit of the Sun’s toddler program. (Photo courtesy of Spirit of the Sun)
At Spirit of the Sun, education starts early on, beginning with the Indigenous toddlers and teachings program for children aged 2 and up. “If we can teach our youth to observe the world through an Indigenous lens, they are better able to hold respect for the natural world, for the animals, for the elements, and for each other,” she notes. “Most adults have forgotten how to do that. But we know that everything is in kinship, with a function and a purpose.”
Francis is proud to have her 23-year-old daughter, Chenoa, closely involved as Spirit of the Sun’s youth outreach and agricultural support coordinator. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Chenoa has been an outspoken advocate for Indigenous rights since childhood.
“Spirit of the Sun is about empowering Native communities one youth at a time,” says Chenoa. “Having our programs be youth-led is our way of letting them know they matter and giving them the power to take hold of their future. We also match our youth with elders to create that intergenerational connection. We want to help instill that even for youth who might not understand their connection to the past or their tribe, there is always a way to connect with the Earth.”
Young people work on the Spirit of the Sun farm. (Photo courtesy of Spirit of the Sun)
Although Spirit of the Sun programming is dedicated to uplifting Native individuals, the benefits extend to the greater community, which Eve Hemingway can attest to. After moving to Denver in 2021, Hemingway found a reconnection to place upon attending a Spirit of the Sun workshop about plant relationships and seed keeping. That led to volunteering with the organization delivering food to families in need, then eventually to their current role as urban agriculture coordinator at anti-hunger nonprofit Metro Caring.
“By focusing on decolonizing diets and promoting culturally responsive practices, we’re not just addressing immediate food security issues—we’re also working toward long-term food sovereignty.”
“Shannon helped me find my way back to the land, to the community, and to myself as a farmer,” says Hemingway. “What I find truly beautiful about my experience with Spirit of the Sun is that I can bring my whole, queer self to the table; I feel fully seen in all of my identities.”
Spirit of the Sun acts as a partner on Metro Caring’s Urban Agriculture Program, which supports community-based, farm-to-table food sovereignty. One of the project’s biggest obstacles is losing already rare Denver-area growing spaces to new construction projects, Hemingway explains. The Spirit of the Sun team has been instrumental in creatively approaching this challenge, with solutions like transforming willing homeowners’ lawns into mini gardens.
“Ensuring that our community has control over our food system cannot be achieved without organizations like Spirit of the Sun to steward the rematriation of the land,” says Hemingway. “As we continue to work toward food security for the Denver community and beyond, it’s imperative that we do so through a food sovereignty lens—ensuring that the foods produced are culturally relevant, factors of production are in the hands of the community, and food is produced sustainably through traditional Indigenous practices.”
In lieu of having its own land—which is a current focus area for Spirit of the Sun—the organization relies on partnerships with local individuals and organizations that allow Shannon and her team to utilize portions of their properties to grow those culturally relevant foods to feed elders, the unhoused, and others in need.
Participants in the Spirit of the Sun’s youth cooking class. (Photo courtesy of Spirit of the Sun)
Colorado-based Kaizen Food Rescue, which aims to uplift refugee and immigrant communities in the Denver area, has been partnering with Spirit of the Sun since the pandemic, when food insecurity was at an all-time high. Founder and Executive Director Thai Nguyen values that collaboration not only for its real-world impacts but also for its symbolism.
“This exchange of resources and shared knowledge highlights the importance of community networks and the strength that comes from unity,” she says. “Shannon has generously taught our community members, volunteers, and youth how to nurture and grow food in a sacred manner. By focusing on decolonizing diets and promoting culturally responsive practices, we’re not just addressing immediate food security issues—we’re also working toward long-term food sovereignty.”
These local partnerships reflect Spirit of the Sun’s goal to positively affect the lives of not only Native youth and elders, but also other marginalized groups that have been negatively impacted by the long-lasting effects of colonialism.
“We want to help these kids become more resilient and give them the tools, resources, and support they need to move through climate change.”
“Our intention is to try to heal ourselves from the intergenerational traumas that many Native and BIPOC folks experience,” Shannon says. “For example, I have boarding school survivors on both sides of my family. We believe that creating new positive memories can override traumatic memories. Through our programs, we talk about all these positive Indigenous principles and values. Our youth cooking classes, for instance, are focused on ancestral foods, the stories behind them, their health benefits, and the need to bring them back.”
That traditional ecological knowledge is also key for helping younger generations prepare for their role in mitigating the challenges of climate change. Both experts and research highlight the importance of Indigenous wisdom for biodiversity preservation, regenerative agriculture, and other holistic management approaches.
“A lot of it is genetic memory, which ties us to all our experiences and our ancestors,” Shannon says. “We have to remember the traditional ecological knowledge that will help us move forward. We want to help these kids become more resilient and give them the tools, resources, and support they need to move through climate change. Our programs are focused on uplifting youth to make them proud of who they are and give them hope about the future.”
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]]>The post The Land Back Movement Is Also About Foodways appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In 2020, just months after George Floyd’s murder, then-President Donald Trump visited South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore as part of an Independence Day celebration and used to rally his right-wing supporters with a “dark and divisive speech.” Complete with a showy fireworks display and fighter-jet flyover, the affair satisfied his longtime desire to mark the Fourth of July standing before the “Shrine of Democracy.” But the occasion served as another rallying cry as well.
“We see Land Back everywhere now, and that’s because this is a decentralized movement that isn’t driven by just one organization or leader. It’s truly a movement.”
For almost three hours before the event, about 150 protesters—many of them Native Americans—blockaded the road that leads to the controversial national monument. Carrying signs reading, “You Are On Stolen Land” and “Honor All Treaties,” the activists were contesting Trump’s policies, standing in solidarity with the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, and calling for the return of land to Indigenous peoples—namely South Dakota’s sacred Black Hills. They faced off with local law enforcement and National Guard soldiers in riot gear, eventually disbanding following the arrest of 21 people.
Among those apprehended was Nick Tilsen, the Oglala Lakota president and CEO of NDN Collective, a Native-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power, which has been on the frontlines of the fight to return land to tribal communities. (The charges against him were dropped in December 2022.)
Nick Tilsen during a Land Back march in Rapid City. (Photo credit: Willi White)
“The Land Back movement is much older than 2020, but that was a catalyzing moment,” he says. “We had the entire White House press corps here, and we wanted to amplify this authentic Indigenous narrative at that very specific time in history when we were seeing statues getting toppled and Confederate flags being lowered around the country. We see Land Back everywhere now, and that’s because this is a decentralized movement that isn’t driven by just one organization or leader. It’s truly a movement.”
In so many ways, the Black Hills—known as Paha Sapa in Lakota—serve as a striking symbol of the Land Back movement. As detailed in the popular 2022 documentary Lakota Nation vs. United States, the western South Dakota mountain range is considered sacred by area tribal nations and was long a key hunting ground for bison, pronghorn, elk, and deer. Its unlawful seizure nearly 150 years ago remains a major point of contention.
As colonialism swept across what would become the United States during the 19th century with blatant disregard for the land’s original inhabitants, Native peoples fought off settler and military encroachment of their hunting, fishing, and gathering territories. Their lifeways—and foodways—were hugely altered and restricted.
Deadly clashes on the Great Plains prompted the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which created the Great Sioux Reservation spanning 60 million acres around the Black Hills. But after gold was discovered in the mountains, the federal government redrew the treaty lines and seized the Black Hills in 1877, an act the nine tribes comprising the Great Sioux Nation have contested since that time.
In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the land had been illegally taken and awarded more than $100 million in reparations (though the land was not returned). The tribes refused to take the money, even as it grew to a value of more than $1 billion, because the Black Hills were never for sale.
Native peoples have lost nearly 99 percent of their historical land base in the U.S., according to recent research. With it, they lost access to important hunting and fishing grounds as well as myriad places to gather and prepare food.
“I often choose the word rematriation over Land Back, because I hope that it can transcend the narrow Western/imperial concept of land ownership and tenure.”
For Tilsen and other Native thought leaders, the contemporary Land Back movement is about championing Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and economic opportunity while pushing back against long-standing discriminatory policies that continue to cause tribal communities undue hardships, including disproportionate poverty rates, outsized food insecurity, marked health disparities, and lower life expectancies. But it’s also about a powerful yearning to rebuild relationships to actual places—and the countless living things that inhabit them.
In Montana, for example, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes now oversee 18,000 acres where bison roam once again. In Nebraska, the Ponca people have been growing their sacred corn on farmland signed back to them in 2018. In New York, the Onondaga Nation is cleaning up the polluted waterways, once abundant with fish, on 1,000 returned acres.
In Minnesota, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe recently secured 12,000 acres within Chippewa National Forest, an important area for hunting, fishing, gathering, and harvesting wild rice. And in California, the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council (made up of 10 area tribal nations) is stewarding coho salmon and steelhead trout within a 523-acre property managed in partnership with the Save the Redwoods League.
Mohawk seed keeper and farmer Rowen White prefers to think of this revolution as rematriation. “I often choose the word rematriation over Land Back, because I hope that it can transcend the narrow Western/imperial concept of land ownership and tenure,” she wrote recently on Instagram. “Rematriation is in service to restoring relationality with the land and the countless more-than-human kin held within that land. Relationships-back. Loving interspecies reciprocity-back. Caring songs sung to the land that holds the bones of our ancestors-back.”
For White and many other food sovereignty activists, the movement to return ancestral homelands to their rightful tribal communities is inherently intertwined with the movement to revitalize Indigenous foodways. She points out that the massive land loss Native peoples experienced due to settler colonialism—more than 1.5 billion acres across the U.S., according to eHistory’s Invasion of America project—has hugely impacted their abilities to hunt, fish, forage, and farm.
As Tilsen mentions, Land Back predates that 2020 catalyzing moment at Mount Rushmore and the many modern-day grassroots efforts taking place across the globe. Alvin Warren was studying history at Dartmouth in the late 1980s when Santa Clara Pueblo tribal leaders tapped him to help resolve a decades-old Indian Claims Commission claim to regain some of their traditional homelands in modern-day New Mexico. Upon seeing his 221-page thesis paper on the history of his people’s homelands, the tribal council asked him to start a land acquisition program.
“I was 21 years old and had no idea how to even do that,” he recalls. “But I took it on, and we spent the better part of a decade collectively doing things we had only dreamed of. We were able to get three pieces of legislation through Congress, raise nearly $5 million, and get back more than 7,500 acres. That might not sound like a lot, but it was transformational for us because we had been hitting up against the same wall for well over a century.”
Warren helped the people of Santa Clara Pueblo regain more than 16,000 acres of their ancestral homelands, then answered the call from other tribal nations around the country to assist in reacquiring titles, entering into co-management agreements, and otherwise protecting their traditional lands. He went on to become the director of the Trust for Public Land’s tribal land program, the lieutenant governor of Santa Clara Pueblo, and eventually New Mexico’s Indian Affairs cabinet secretary.
His passion was reignited with the Biden administration’s historic appointment of Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) as interior secretary. She has ushered in a new era for a department that was once responsible for the systematic removal of Indigenous communities from their land. On her watch, thousands of acres have been returned to Native oversight, co-stewardship programs have been developed to protect sacred sites, and important species such as bison, bighorn sheep, and salmon have been restored to tribal lands.
“We know that countries that have made commitments to address climate change and biodiversity loss are falling short. The restoration of land to tribal nations would actually help many countries get back on track.”
Warren acknowledges this significant progress, yet he remains unsatisfied with recent state and federal efforts to return land to Native groups.
“Yes, we’re seeing a steady trickle of stories about land coming back into tribal control, but by and large, they are tiny bits of property,” he says. “We’re talking about 1.5 billion acres that have been taken from Indigenous people; we’re not going to get to anything remotely just if we’re doing this at 50, 100, 1,000 acres at a time.” He adds that tribes often have to repurchase these pieces of land and are often constrained by conservation easements, which place restrictions on land use and development.
Tribes have also been invited to co-manage land, which both Warren and Tilsen view as an insufficient end point. “It’s Land Back Lite,” Tilsen says with a laugh. “Co-management is a pathway for us to be able to manage our lands in better ways, but my worry is that it locks us into a longer power dynamic relationship with the federal government. What I’m really interested in is returning public lands and their titles to tribes or Indigenous cooperatives and coalitions.”
Though the Land Back movement is obviously uplifting Indigenous communities, they aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from more land being in tribal possession. As the climate crisis intensifies, so too does the clamor for real-world solutions. Increasingly, experts are turning to Native knowledge keepers and recognizing the power of traditional ecological knowledge, including practices such as agroforestry, fire stewardship, regenerative agriculture, and holistic wildlife management.
Recent research backs this approach. A 2019 ScienceDirect study showed that Native-managed lands foster as much or more biodiversity than protected areas, which could be key in mitigating the negative impact of extractive agriculture. Additionally, a 2016 World Resources Institute report determined that securing Indigenous forestland tenure in the Amazon basin could yield economic benefits up to $1.5 trillion over a 20-year period through carbon storage, reduced pollution, and erosion control.
“We know that countries that have made commitments to address climate change and biodiversity loss are falling short,” Warren says. “The restoration of land to tribal nations would actually help many countries get back on track. We have more and more researchers who are making this connection between the restoration of land to Indigenous peoples and the protection of our Earth, which ultimately is the protection of all people on this planet.”
Despite this compelling call to action for collective benefit, very real resistance remains due to misconceptions about the movement. “Land Back triggers people’s white fragility; they think we’re coming for the house, the picket fence, the 2.5 kids, and the dog,” Tilsen says. “But we as Indigenous people are not trying to repeat the history that was done to us. There’s also this misconception that white people don’t play a massive role [as] allies, when the reality is that Indigenous peoples’ fight to return our land is bound up with the very future of this country.”
Tilsen has concerns about what a presidential administration change could mean for Native representation and progress, but it’s not just about party lines. “The Nixon, Obama, and Biden administrations have been responsible for more actual Land Back than any other administrations,” says Tilsen. “Does it matter who is in office? Hell yeah, it matters. But our success doesn’t depend on one political party. We need to build power around this year’s historical election and develop solutions and strategies no matter who wins.”
To safeguard present and future progress, Warren implores policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels to take action in creating institutionalized mechanisms for tribal nations to acquire publicly managed and owned land. On the private side, he highlights the need for legitimate funding sources, since Native communities are typically asked to buy back stolen land, and urges individuals to consider donating unused lands to local tribes and including them in their estate planning.
Kavon Ward. (Photo credit: Gabriella Angotti-Jones)
The powerful impact of the Indigenous-led Land Back movement has sparked similar action among other marginalized groups. Reparative justice advocate Kavon Ward is driving the Black Land Back movement. She helped steward the 2021 return of Bruce’s Beach in California, a once-thriving Black community that was improperly seized in 1924 through eminent domain.
Today, Ward leads the advocacy organization Where Is My Land, which helps Black people discover and reclaim U.S. land taken from them. “I’m of the belief that you can’t have equality until there’s equity,” she says. “True remedy is returning what your ancestors stole from my ancestors.”
Much like the dispossession Native peoples have experienced, Black farmers lost about 13.5 million acres from 1920 to 1997, according to a 2022 AEA Papers and Proceedings study. That equates to roughly $326 billion of acreage. (As of the 2017 agricultural census, Black farmers operated 4.7 million acres, up from 1.5 million in 1997.)
In the end, the Land Back movement serves to not only support Native sovereignty but also safeguard our environment and strengthen our food systems.
The ceremony to return the Bruce’s Beach land back to its original stewards. (Photo credit: Starr Genyard-Swift)
“The future of conservation in the United States is Indigenous,” NDN’s Tilsen affirms. “There’s a massive opportunity to fight climate change and increase biodiversity while also achieving justice. Let’s hold a mirror up to America and find a path forward that includes Black reparations, the return of stolen Indigenous lands to Indigenous hands, and the changing of systems that perpetuate violence and oppression. The future we’re fighting for is not just a future for Indigenous people—it’s a future for people everywhere.”
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]]>The post Listen to Plants, Says Indigenous Forager and Activist Linda Black Elk appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Linda Black Elk grew up listening to plants. The Indigenous ethnobotanist and food sovereignty activist foraged with her mom and grandmother in the Ohio River Valley as a child, then made the Standing Rock Reservation area in North Dakota her home alongside her husband, Luke, who is Cheyenne River Sioux. These days, honoring her Korean, Mongolian, and Native roots, she teaches others how to nurture their relationships with the natural world. Together, she and Luke have spent years teaching members of their community (and their three sons) about the importance of traditional foods and medicines through publications, seminars, and hands-on workshops.
After overseeing the food sovereignty program at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota, Black Elk recently became the education director for Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman’s Minneapolis-based nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS). There, she’s using her vast ecological expertise to develop curriculum for the Indigenous Food Lab training center and lead community engagement programming.
“As NATIFS’ education director, I organize classes about Indigenous foods covering a wide range of specialties, from how to cook wild rice to how to make perfect corn tortillas,” she explains. “We’ll be inviting guest chefs like Crystal Wahpepah from Wahpepah’s Kitchen to come in and prepare some of her favorite dishes. We’re also in the process of building a huge video library that is completely open source, so everyone will have access to resources about food safety, knife skills, game animal processing, and more.”
“Unfortunately, our entire food system is determined by colonization, and our palates have also been colonized, largely by salt and sugar—so we believe that everything we eat needs to be salty or sweet.”
In addition to inspiring both Native American and non-Native students and her many social media followers, Black Elk has also earned the respect of fellow foragers such as author and natural historian Samuel Thayer. “Linda has such a broad knowledge base, and I have learned so much from her,” he says. “She is undoing the cultural shame that was instilled from boarding schools and the other ways that Indigenous people were pushed away from their food traditions. She mixes Indigenous traditional knowledge with modern science in a way that feels practical yet fun.”
Black Elk’s efforts go beyond education. In 2016, she was one of thousands of water protectors protesting the Dakota Access pipeline over concerns that an oil spill would contaminate the Standing Rock Sioux’s water supply and other resources. (The pipeline was ultimately built in 2017 and has been operational since.)
Civil Eats recently spoke with Black Elk about decolonizing our palates, foraging as an act of resistance, and developing intimate relationships with dandelions.
What sparked your initial interest in ethnobotany?
My [paternal] grandma and I would go for walks, and she would point out all the plants I could eat and which ones I couldn’t. She was always picking wild onions and poke greens, which we would cook up with scrambled eggs for breakfast. She kept fresh strawberries around because they were my favorite snack.
My mom was an Indigenous woman from Korea, and she grew up foraging and growing her own food as a matter of survival. Because her family was extremely poor, she needed to know all the plants she could eat because they were free. When she came over to this country with my father, it was a natural thing for her to carry over. She was surprised to find a lot of plants here that were similar to the ones she grew up with—amaranth, dandelion, goldenrod, lamb’s quarter, Solomon’s seal, tickweed—and she incorporated them into our diet.
Linda and Luke Black Elk (Photo courtesy of Linda Black Elk)
In my family on both sides, we always considered plants as food and medicine. For example, if I had a sore throat, my mom would make me ginger and lemon tea with honey. I’ve never had a single year when I haven’t had a garden, even if that was a container garden. I grew up with a lot of really amazing fresh food that was both grown and harvested, and all of that family history led me to study plants in school.
Why is traditional ecological knowledge so important as it relates to both food sovereignty and climate change?
Let’s back up a bit. Everyone talks about decolonizing, but what does that even mean? In terms of food sovereignty, we’re talking about getting back to the foods of our ancestors. Unfortunately, our entire food system is determined by colonization, and our palates have also been colonized, largely by salt and sugar—so we believe that everything we eat needs to be salty or sweet. Our palates have forgotten how wonderful and healthful flavors like pungent and bitter can be.
“The fact is that our current food system pours herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides on so much of our food.”
For example, my husband’s people are Lakota, and during the cold winter months when there aren’t any bitter greens to eat, they would traditionally get bitter compounds from various parts of the buffalo. So they would dip pieces of meat in the bitter bile of the buffalo’s gallbladder. Similarly, one of my Ojibwe friends told me that during the winter, they would dip pieces of fish in the fish bile then eat it.
It’s that kind of knowledge of the people who came before us—about not only what is good to eat but what keeps us going physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—that is going to lead us into the future of food sovereignty. Traditional ecological knowledge is different from Western ecological knowledge in that it includes and understands the importance of culture and spirituality.
For instance, why is fry bread so popular as an Indigenous food? It’s not just that our palates now love gluten and sugary, salty foods. It’s also that people have watched their grandma make fry bread, so there’s this emotional and spiritual connection to that food. We need to rebuild those connections with our traditional foods, those really visceral memories of processing wild rice and cutting up bison meat to hang and dry. I have beautiful memories of making kimchi, a traditional Korean food, with my mom.
Linda Black Elk (third from left) and others butcher a bison. (Photo courtesy of Linda Black Elk)
The fact is that our current food system pours herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides on so much of our food. Our meat is laced with all kinds of hormones and antibiotics. Not to mention that industrial agriculture is hugely destructive to the environment. In order for us to move away from that, we have to get back to foods that love growing here, foods that we have a long-term relationship with.
We’re trying to grow crops that would love tons of precipitation that we just don’t have. We’ve also destroyed our topsoil, so we now have to put minerals and other nutrients back into the soil. It’s just hugely destructive and contributes to climate change. So if we get back to traditional foods through traditional ecological knowledge, we won’t have the full-scale destruction brought on by industrial agriculture.
Our consumption culture really contributes to climate change as well. When you build a relationship with the natural world, you start to realize that plants and animals are beings that have more value than just their monetary value. You start being more careful about how you move through the world and how you walk on the land. When you have a relationship with plants and animals, you’re a lot less likely to use and abuse these gifts. Instead, you’re going to make sure they’re well taken care of for future generations.
“We’ve got to change our diets so we can break that vicious cycle of a poor diet leading to poor health, which then leads to higher risk factors.”
How can we improve our relationship with plants, animals, and the natural environment around us?
On an individual level, it is about getting out there, introducing yourself to the natural world, and being willing to speak and listen. Plants do communicate with us if we take our time and approach them in a respectful way. For example, one spring day I noticed chickweed had started randomly growing right outside my kitchen door, which seemed so strange because it had never grown there before. Then I found out I had a thyroid issue. Chickweed has historically been used for thyroid regulation, so I realized that plant was communicating with me, being like, “Here I am. You need me.”
I do think plants come to us when we need them. But if you don’t recognize that plant, you might not know that it’s trying to communicate with you. I always recommend starting with dandelions and learning about their place in the world, since everyone knows what a dandelion looks like. They are a gateway plant, because they’ve been so vilified by Western culture yet they are an amazing food and medicine. Building these relationships opens us up to listening to the world around us instead of just constantly thinking about consumption.
Can you explain how you see foraging as an act of resistance?
In this society, food and medicine are expensive and inaccessible for a massive portion of the population. We are purposefully kept ignorant about and in fear of plant foods and medicines; we are indoctrinated into this idea that they are somehow dangerous or inferior.
But why? Why is a round crunchy ball of water in the form of iceberg lettuce somehow better than dandelion leaves? It certainly is not more healthful, but we have this perception that it is somehow better. We have to resist by questioning these assumptions about so-called “wild” foods. Even the word “wild” has certain connotations and can bring up images of danger in people’s minds. So it is an act of resistance to stand against that indoctrination and decolonize our palates.
Nothing exemplifies this better than the pandemic. What did we find out were some of the major risk factors for COVID complications? Diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. We were seeing all these elders and knowledge keepers dying from COVID and complications that were exacerbated by these health issues that are very much associated with diet and air quality. How are we going to prevent this from happening again in the future? We’ve got to change our diets so we can break that vicious cycle of a poor diet leading to poor health, which then leads to higher risk factors.
In March 2020, our family came up with a grassroots project to feed people. We were seeing these food kits being sent out with bags of flour, sugar, potatoes, white rice, and powdered milk—basically commodities that were exactly what was exacerbating the problem. So, we decided to make food and medicine kits with traditional Indigenous ingredients and organic, shelf-stable items.
They contained items like hand-harvested wild rice from Dynamite Hill Farms, corn grown by Oneida farmer Dan Cornelius, tepary beans from Ramona Farms, Tanka Bars, real maple syrup, freeze-dried vegetable mixes, bone broth, and amazing medicines like fire cider and elderberry elixir. We put out a call on social media, and people rallied, sending supplies and donating money so we could support these incredible Indigenous producers.
Our coverage area included North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and even Missouri. My husband and I would drive all over in our minivan delivering these kits and also picking up supplies to cut down on shipping costs. So far, we have sent out more than 3,000 kits, and we’re still doing it today. It is really just about showing our kids that individuals can make a difference.
From your perspective, what will it take for our food systems to be resilient once again?
We have to build community. We do that by building each other up instead of tearing each other down. When we build community, we know who has the seeds. We know how to plant those seeds, because we have learned from our community members and they’ve learned from us.
Under our current food system, if a blight comes and affects [the main] variety of corn, we would have no corn and there would be millions of starving people. But when we build a community of growers who are growing 500 different varieties of corn, if a blight comes and takes out one variety, we still have 499 varieties to rely on. That’s what resiliency is—it’s about working together to make sure that no one thing can tear us down.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Building a Case for Investment in Regenerative Agriculture on Indigenous Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>For three generations, Fanny Brewer’s family has been ranching the same land in South Dakota’s Ziebach County. Encompassing part of the 1.4-million-acre Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, where she grew up, the county is among the poorest areas in the United States. But for Brewer, her husband, and their four kids, it represents prosperity.
The Brewers run cattle and grow some alfalfa across 12,000 acres of grassland that’s a combination of owned land, leased tribal land, and federal trust land. This complicated arrangement isn’t unusual for Indigenous producers, who experience unique hurdles such as financial lending discrimination, limited land ownership opportunities, additional governance requirements, and disproportionately high poverty rates as a result of colonialism.
“Some Native families never develop that generational wealth, whereas our non-Native neighbor, whose family has owned their land since the late 1800s, has been able to grow their business.”
Despite these systemic obstacles, the Brewers plant cover crops between alfalfa rotations and use fewer chemicals on their crops than most conventional operations. They’d like to use more regenerative ranching practices, including adaptive, multi-paddock grazing, on more land and help prove that those practices are worth investing in.
For those reasons, the ranch is one of 14 operations participating in a three-year study from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Intertribal Agriculture Council (IAC) that is examining the benefits and barriers of regenerative agriculture among Indigenous ranchers and farmers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Montana.
“The volatility of leasing land and how it affects your borrowing power with banks has always been a struggle for Native producers,” says Brewer, who also serves as the IAC’s Great Plains technical assistance specialist. “Some Native families never develop that generational wealth, whereas our non-Native neighbor, whose family has owned their land since the late 1800s, has been able to grow their business. Those are the hard realities we have to face.”
She points to a recent example when a desirable plot of land came up for sale. Compared to a local non-Native rancher who could leverage her owned land and secure a bank loan quickly to purchase that real estate, Brewer needed to put up her livestock, machinery, and other material assets as collateral since her family doesn’t own all their land—and it took weeks to assess.
“I don’t hold anything against her, but I didn’t realize until then how differently we approach things,” Brewer says. “At that time, I chose to pull out some of our land that was in trust with the U.S. government and put it in deed status so that the next time I walk into the bank, I have more power. Some people have questioned my moves, but these are choices I have had to make for my family so we can take control of our own destiny.”
This is an all too common experience among Indigenous entrepreneurs, says Skya Ducheneaux, also a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the founder of the Native-focused community development financial institution (CDFI) Akiptan. “Many Native producers aren’t able to list their land on their balance sheet, so they can’t leverage that value,” she explains. “When you don’t have as much equity to leverage, lending institutions deem you risky, and because of that, you get shorter repayment terms and higher interest rates. You end up stuck in this cycle of just surviving.”
Regenerative practices—most of which are already in Indigenous farmers’ and ranchers’ wheelhouses because they align more closely with, and are often based upon, their traditional practices—are much harder to employ because they’re more expensive and labor-intensive.
Brewer chose to participate in the EDF/IAC study because it will yield quantitative data about both those costs—including financial investments and loan terms—as well as the benefits of investing in regenerative practices, such as profitability, soil health improvement, forage quality, and livestock growth. To gather that information, the pilot cohort is receiving technical assistance from the IAC team and participating in the Minnesota Farm Business Management Program. Offered through the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, it provides one-on-one financial education such as record keeping and performance analysis.
Fanny Brewer, IAC technical assistance specialist for the Great Plains region, discusses the regenerative agriculture projects with Jess Brewer. (Photo courtesy of Intertribal Agriculture Council, www.indianag.org)
All of the producers in the study raise livestock, and some also grows crops. Many are in the process of transitioning from more extractive conventional methods to regenerative practices, with data being collected from 2022 through 2024. Although full results will not be available until the project’s completion, researchers are developing intermediate case studies, including one that should be released before the end of the year.
The researchers hope the study encourages producers to adopt climate-smart practices, such as using adaptive grazing, planting cover crops, and reducing tillage. The larger goal, however, is to urge financial institutions to reframe their understanding of Indigenous ranchers and farmers, who are often considered high-risk given their limited equity.
The shift to regenerative practices can take three to five years and reduce profitability by up to $40 per acre during the transition, according to recent research by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s One Planet Business for Biodiversity coalition. But farmers and ranchers can expect a 15 to 25 percent return on investment and profit growth by up to 120 percent in the long run, according to the study, which calls for public and private assistance to alleviate these burdens placed on the individual business owners.
While the term regenerative agriculture hasn’t yet appeared on many food labels, a whole range of interests—including corporate marketing departments and individual producers hoping to earn a higher premium—are anticipating a wider embrace of the term in the consumer market in the coming years. Simultaneously, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is investing heavily in new and existing carbon markets designed to reward growers for the carbon they store on their farms.
Although they’re not the focus of the current study, IAC Regenerative Economies Director Tomie Peterson (Cheyenne River Sioux) says, “Carbon credits are an opportunity that I would like to provide more education on to Native producers.”
Ducheneaux is optimistic that the EDF/IAC study will prompt traditional lenders to better support Indigenous entrepreneurs interested in taking up or highlighting their existing regenerative practices in ways akin to how Native-focused community development financial institutions are already doing so. “We have all this anecdotal evidence about the positive impacts of regenerative agriculture in Indian Country, but we don’t have the quantitative data that the rest of the world likes to see,” she says. “This study is really groundbreaking because it will reinforce what we already know, open the doors for even more producers, and broaden the impact across Indian Country.”
Although she too is eager to address these so-called credit deserts—which have notable overlap with tribal territories—Peterson wants to manage expectations about what this initiative can realistically accomplish. “The study is just trying to find the facts; I don’t know if we can overcome barriers,” she says candidly. That said, she is confident that the project findings will help cohort participants better understand if and how their practices are paying off and therefore make informed business decisions.
“The food system in North America has become very brittle, so a new model of agriculture that focuses on community and connection with the natural world is really important.”
This study closely aligns with the EDF’s objective to promote climate-beneficial farming practices while also helping producers prepare for and mitigate the escalating impacts of the climate crisis.
“Climate change majorly affects farmers and ranchers across the country,” says EDF Climate-Smart Agriculture Manager Vincent Gauthier. “We are focused on developing solutions that allow farmers to invest in the resilience of their farms against those weather extremes and changing conditions.”
Gauthier, Peterson, and the study leaders were very intentional in the language they chose to define the project, since regenerative agriculture is a hot-button topic within Indigenous communities, who used traditional ecological knowledge long before farmers and businesses started using terms like regenerative or organic. Gauthier explains that the team landed on a definition of regenerative they think transcends geographies and methodologies: a holistic approach to revitalizing land and the ecological system that focuses on improving soil’s ability to regenerate over time by involving the entire ecosystem, including humans and wildlife.
Farmer-researcher Jonathan Lundgren, whose grassroots 1,000 Farms Initiative is similarly aimed at studying and quantifying regenerative agricultural systems, notes that a larger paradigm shift is crucial. He underscores how vital hard data—about soil carbon, sequestration, reversal of desertification, promotion of biodiversity, increased farm resilience, and the like—is to incentivizing financial institutions to invest in producers employing practices that many of them have never seen or heard of.
“The food system in North America has become very brittle, so a new model of agriculture that focuses on community and connection with the natural world is really important,” he says.
Lundgren also sees Indigenous producers as an ideal group to receive more investment, as many already have the experience and tools to spearhead efforts to bring about a larger movement toward more regenerative practices. “Traditional Indigenous food systems have a deeper understanding of why the land and the life around them is essential to the long-term happiness and resilience of their culture and community.”
Jess Brewer walks alongside Fanny Brewer, IAC technical assistance specialist for the Great Plains region. (Photo courtesy of Intertribal Agriculture Council, www.indianag.org)
Ducheneaux and many thought leaders agree. They contend that an embrace of Indigenous knowledge is crucial in mitigating the effects of climate change in the years ahead. After all, while Native peoples comprise just 5 percent of the world’s population, they protect around 85 percent of global biodiversity.
“Native producers have been doing regenerative agriculture since time immemorial,” she affirms. “I hope there will be more research into tribal ecological knowledge so that the American agriculture industry as a whole can start to heal itself, and we can all hold ourselves to a higher standard in taking care of the land so it can in return take care of us.”
Back in South Dakota, rancher Fanny Brewer wants to help usher in that shift, but she needs the U.S. food system to provide an on-ramp to make it possible.
“I wish in this country you could make more money simply by doing the right thing—but that’s not how it’s set up,” she says. “I have four kids that I’m trying to raise, feed, and clothe, so I can’t be doing something just because I have a passion for it. I hope this study helps people see that you can do the right thing for the environment and for the health of human beings and animals and that you can still make it. You can be a good steward and still keep your head above water financially.”
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]]>The post Tribes Are Building Food Sovereignty With Help From the Nation’s Largest Hunger-Relief Group appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Like so many Indigenous communities, the Hualapai experienced outsized food insecurity during the pandemic. The northwestern Arizona tribe received sporadic food donations through a local church but wanted to take matters into its own hands. In 2021, tribal council member and emergency manager Cheyenne Majenty started Helping Hands for Hualapai, a volunteer effort to facilitate food donations on a regular basis. The group soon joined forces with the Hualapai food security committee and realized they needed to start producing their own food to address this ongoing challenge.
When Feeding America announced its multi-year Natives Prepared program in 2022, Majenty knew the group needed to apply for the pilot cohort. The national hunger-relief nonprofit has long supported Indigenous groups through its network of more than 200 national food banks but in recent years has endeavored to solidify its partnerships with tribal nations. Leading this effort is Mark Ford (Chiricahua Apache Tewa/Tiwa), who became Feeding America’s first director of Native partnerships in 2021 after spending years working in tribal relations.
“We want to teach our community to be more self-sustaining so that we’re ready if the semi-truck drivers boycott or if the highways or nearby farms shut down.”
The overarching aim of Natives Prepared is twofold: to empower Indigenous groups to produce and/or source their own food and to ensure they have integrated disaster resources. To kick off the program, Feeding America is working with a pilot cohort of five tribal nations: the Hualapai, the Onondaga Nation in New York, the United Houma Nation in Louisiana, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, and the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in Washington.
Each community partners with a local food bank tasked with providing fiduciary and technical support. They’re currently in the process of developing individualized project proposals that will be implemented over the next two years with a maximum budget of $450,000 per participant. From there, Ford foresees this as the first cohort of many.
For the Hualapai, whose emergency operations program launched this summer, the focus is on developing greater food sovereignty through community gardens. “Because we’re in an extremely rural location, we rely heavily on transportation to get our groceries from the next town over, which is 50 miles away,” Majenty says. “We want to teach our community to be more self-sustaining so that we’re ready if the semi-truck drivers boycott or if the highways or nearby farms shut down.”
With assistance from Partnership With Native Americans (PWNA)—an Indigenous-led nonprofit tapped by Feeding America to liaise with tribal nations—the Hualapai committee created a detailed outline of its goals and needs in transforming a dozen empty lots into gardens to grow squash, beans, corn, turnips, onions, and other traditional plants. Majenty hopes that these gardens will eventually cover more of the 1-million-acre reservation to help feed its approximately 1,400 residents.
For inspiration, Majenty looks to the New York–based Onondaga Nation, which has enough food reserves from its farm to feed its tribal members for four years. Since they’re both in the pilot cohort, the Hualapai and Onondaga people can learn from one another and share best practices, which is by design. Angela Ferguson, who oversees the Onondaga Nation Farm, explains that their revered food sovereignty program started small, too.
“With so many tribal nations, there’s an inability to respond to our own disasters, especially when it comes to food.”
“We began with just a few workers who were willing to dedicate themselves to traditional agriculture,” she says. “Part of our responsibility is putting food away for the people, which is what we do with half our harvests each year.” During the pandemic, the Onondaga Nation had ample reserves of traditional foods like bison, venison, fish, corn, beans, and squash to feed its citizens.
Although Natives Prepared project proposals are still in the works, each cohort participant has a unique strategy in mind. The Onondaga Nation wants to develop a command center for distributing its extensive reserves and providing other emergency support. The Louisiana-based United Houma Nation needs warehouse space to store food and supplies, since it’s deeply involved with the volunteer Cajun Navy, which delivers essentials to people by boat during storms and floods. South Dakota’s Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate hopes to build a meat-processing plant to handle their own harvests of elk, deer, and other wild game.
The initiative was born out of this stark reality: After a long history of colonialism, oppression, and harmful federal policies, Native Americans face disproportionately high food insecurity, estimated at nearly 24 percent. Those challenges are exacerbated by emergencies, since Indigenous peoples are among the hardest hit by disasters and the last to receive aid. Ford witnessed this firsthand during his time with the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Indian Affairs, when he helped area tribes in the aftermath of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike.
“With so many tribal nations, there’s an inability to respond to our own disasters, especially when it comes to food,” says Ford. As a more recent example, he points to last December’s Winter Storm Diaz, which pelted South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation with 30 inches of snow and stranded residents in their homes with limited supplies of food, medicine, propane, and other essentials for more than a week.
Oglala Sioux tribal members called Ford and pleaded for help. Together with Feeding America Director of Disaster Services Vince Davis, he engaged Feeding South Dakota, the state and U.S. agriculture departments, and Partnership With Native Americans to bring in relief. “It reaffirmed just how important it is for to immediately respond to disasters on their own, since they best know what their needs are,” says Ford.
To that end, the Natives Prepared program is driven by self-determination, letting tribal nations dictate what will meaningfully support their self-sufficiency then pulling in adequate funding to execute their highly customized plans. Just as each community’s needs are unique, so too are their policies. For instance, the Onondaga Nation doesn’t accept any government funding, so Feeding America must secure appropriate private donors and partners to bring their project to fruition. Partnership With Native Americans has been instrumental in navigating unique circumstances like this.
“No one knows how to end hunger better than the people who experience it, which is why we want to elevate their voices and solutions.”
“We were brought in to act as an intermediary, provide a safe space, and bring people together to have honest dialogues,” explains PWNA President and CEO Joshua Arce (Prairie Band Potawatomi). “Feeding America can feel like a big corporate entity, and they just don’t have the relationships we have with these communities. We’re here to make sure their voices are heard.”
Natives Prepared is one of the first major joint initiatives between PWNA and Feeding America, and thus far, Arce is encouraged by the efforts. “The financial and personnel investment Feeding America is putting into this is staggering,” he says. “It’s really important that this isn’t just some plan that sits on a shelf. There are tangible action steps that will have positive outcomes and create once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for these tribal nations.”
Arce emphasizes the need for corporations and government agencies to provide meaningful support to Native communities yet acknowledges the lack of trust many Indigenous peoples have for these large entities. He thinks this program could be transformational not only in bolstering tribal sovereignty but also in setting the bar for how a big player like Feeding America can make a big difference.
Feeding America’s Ford is not naïve efforts it will take to repair these relationships, which is why he is personally involved with the pilot cohort in addition to a dedicated team. He also recognizes that Feeding America’s investment in tribal sovereignty might seem counterintuitive.
After all, Feeding America is no stranger to scrutiny. As the nation’s largest charity, it brings in more than $4 billion in private donations. The nonprofit—and the hunger-relief industry at large—has been criticized for its high-salaried executives and reliance on donations from large corporations, such as Walmart, which in turn receive generous tax breaks.
But Ford sees supporting food sovereignty as part of the nonprofit’s three-pronged approach. “We’re addressing hunger by feeding the line—meaning our food banks supply food to people in need—but also by shortening and eventually ending the line through support for the farm bill and initiatives like this,” he says. “No one knows how to end hunger better than the people who experience it, which is why we want to elevate their voices and solutions.”
“I look at food as a form of a reparation. We had a lot of our land taken from us and a lot of our foods destroyed.”
For the Hualapai, it took some convincing to get tribal leadership on board with the Natives Prepared program. Majenty believes they’ll come around when they see the positive impact on the community but also understands the skepticism. “For so long, we have had entities coming in with this attitude of ‘I’m going to save you,’” she explains. “Now the conversation has shifted to, ‘What can we do to help you be successful?’ We need to know these resources are here to actually help us and not extort or abuse us. So far with Feeding America, we’ve had that kind of support.”
Although there’s still much work to be done, the pilot cohort has begun down a path toward healing and reconciliation.
“I look at food as a form of a reparation,” says Ferguson of the Onondaga Nation. “We had a lot of our land taken from us and a lot of our foods destroyed. Even though this happened generations ago, we’re still carrying the historical trauma of our ancestors. Food is the one common unifier that brings all human beings together and lets us start a dialogue about how we can work together to fix these issues.”
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]]>The post This Oregon Farmer Is Building a New Model for Indigenous Food and Agriculture appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Like many Alaska Natives, Spring Alaska Schreiner (Chugach Alaska Native Corporation / Valdez Native Tribe) grew up exercising her subsistence rights with her family—gathering berries, digging clams with her mom, catching and cleaning fish alongside her uncles. She recalls being surrounded by endless natural bounty throughout her childhood in Valdez, a waterfront city situated near the head of a deep fjord in Prince William Sound. When she moved to Oregon in 2006, she noticed a contrasting lack in access to culturally relevant foods, which has been a driving force behind her decades-long work championing Indigenous food sovereignty through agriculture, advocacy, and activism.
At her 6-acre Sakari Farms outside Bend, Oregon, Schreiner employs traditional ecological knowledge to cultivate regional first foods—foods consumed before European colonialization—and passes that expertise down to Native American youth.
“We have created a template for a tribal farm, which operates very differently than a standard non-Native farm.”
The operation started out with an urban nursery growing plants to makes salves, tinctures, oils, and lotions through Schreiner’s company, Sakari Botanicals. In 2018, the farm expanded and moved to the current high-desert property, which, in addition to growing crops such as peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, and herbs, also houses an Indigenous seed bank and a new community kitchen called Niqi Native Kitchen.
“I have always been the nerd with my head in the soil trying to learn more,” she explains. “Many tribes in Alaska are very intertribal, sharing similar foods and waterways. There’s not a lot of access up there with highways, and a lot of [traveling is] done by air and water, so we’re always sharing. That’s what food sovereignty is: becoming self-sufficient while also helping others secure food for themselves. I wanted to create that sense of community here in Oregon.”
She’s done just that, developing a hub for Native producers, chefs, and other folks to gather for education and inspiration. Today, Sakari offers hands-on farming and cooking classes, hosts long table dinners, and provides free tribal food boxes containing nutritious, culturally relevant ingredients to those in need—a pandemic initiative to help fight food insecurity among the local Indigenous community that has continued. The farm is not a nonprofit organization, so Schreiner depends largely on small one-off grants, crowdfunding, and limited wholesale revenue to finance Sakari’s many efforts—all of which center on traditional ecological knowledge.
Spring Alaska Schreiner, owner of Sakari Farms outside Bend, Oregon. (Photo courtesy of Spring Alaska Schreiner)
“We have created a template for a tribal farm, which operates very differently than a standard non-Native farm,” explains Schreiner, who has a background in natural resource management, soil science, and water conservation. “We only grow things once [a year], because Native people have always used the whole plant, including the seed. We don’t want to trash the soil by turning crops all the time; we have volcanic ash here, which is like moondust, with little to no water. And we’re protecting these traditional Native plants that we grow for communities like the Hopi Nation and the Oneida Nation in the seed bank.”
Come autumn harvest after a short growing season of about 58 days, Sakari donates most of the yield to regional tribes with distribution assistance from state agencies. What remains is turned into teas, jams, sauces, and other shelf-stable products that are sold wholesale to Native-owned businesses and bear the Intertribal Agriculture Council’s Made by American Indians seal. “We’re growing this for our people,” Schreiner affirms. “I don’t want anyone eating out of commodity food centers anymore. We don’t just grow beans; we show you how to take care of the seed and plant, then use the beans to become self-sufficient—so that we’re not eating beans out of a can.”
That’s where the new 900-square-foot tribal commercial kitchen comes into play, akin to chef Sean Sherman’s incubator Indigenous Food Lab. Two years in the making, Niqi Native Kitchen serves as a culinary playground for area tribes, aspiring chefs, and Native youth to train, develop recipes, and participate in workshops. It’s also home base for Sakari-employed chefs like Pao Rodriguez, who cook up fare such as buffalo empanadas, huckleberry pie, and blue corn cookies to be sold at farmers’ markets.
A scene from the new 900-square-foot tribal commercial kitchen, where Native chefs can experiment with traditional ingredients. (Photo courtesy of Spring Alaska Schreiner)
“We’re teaching youth how to do it from start to finish,” says Schreiner. “They can learn how to grow and harvest traditional foods, make their own recipes in the incubator kitchen, and market and sell their products. The farm is a safe space for Natives to come together, honor Indigenous traditions, and learn how to be Native again after experiences like displacement, generational trauma, and other factors beyond our control.” To further lift up Native producers, she also recently launched the Pacific Northwest Tribal Agriculture Guide, a free online resource that encourages consumers to buy from Indigenous entrepreneurs.
Schreiner’s extensive advocacy work also often takes her off the farm to push for legislation supporting BIPOC growers and combatting climate challenges. For instance, her testimony was instrumental in the 2021 passing of Oregon’s $100-million drought relief package. This year, she has been involved in the state’s SB 530 natural climate solution bill (which was enacted in July as part of a larger climate-resilience package) and HB 2998 healthy soil bill (which did not pass).
She serves on several national and regional agricultural boards and participates in organizations such as the Intertribal Agriculture Council, First Nations Development Institute, Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, Oregon Climate and Agriculture Network, and more. But she can’t do this work alone; Schreiner credits collaborators like Ben Jacobs, owner of Tocabe restaurant in Denver, Colorado, who has long cooked with Sakari-grown ingredients and promoted the farm’s products in the restaurant’s online marketplace.
In 2022, the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust called Schreiner “a leader who looks to the future” when it gave her one of its prized Indigenous Leadership Awards. And that’s not where the community admiration ends.
“To see Spring grow from a botanical grower to a full-scale farm that retails specialty foods demonstrates just how dedicated she is to revitalizing tribal food economies,” says Latashia Redhouse, the Intertribal Agriculture Council’s American Indian Foods director. “She has such an energetic girl-power personality that really ignites the network of tribal growers and entrepreneurs. Her impact is significant, as she leads many initiatives fueled by her passion to feed her family and community healthy and culturally relevant foods, all while being a good relative to the land, water, and environment.”
“I’m working hard to represent Native women farmers, because there are so few of us,” Schreiner says of her policy work, which directly impacts the livelihoods of growers like herself. Since she and her husband, Sam (who serves as farm manager), purchased the Deschutes County farmland back in 2018, they have endured wildfires, hailstorms, flooding, and drought. In fact, Central Oregon has recently faced some of the worst drought conditions in the country, with neighboring Crook County spending 87 weeks in exceptional drought, the U.S. Drought Monitor’s worst designation.
Sakari Farms offers a program that teaches youth how to grow and harvest traditional foods. (Photo courtesy of Spring Alaska Schreiner)
“Here in the high desert, the tribal people are extremely resourceful; I’m just carrying on that tradition and making the farm as climate-savvy as possible,” says Schreiner. “We’re dealing with the worst climate situations right now, yet our crops look great. I think some of the blood memory in this ancestral seed is digging the drought. The Hopi corn from 200 years ago is like, ‘We’ve been waiting our whole lives for this.’ It’s 10 feet tall now, whereas it should only be 5 or 6 feet tall.”
She believes that the practices she utilizes, which include growing cover crops and using controlled burns, can help fight climate change and prefers the term Native agriculture over “regenerative agriculture,” which she believes has been hijacked by conventional farmers hoping to benefit from greenwashing. But for traditional ecological knowledge to be effective in mitigating negative impacts, Schreiner says, it needs to be recognized and adopted on a larger scale. “For the future of food sovereignty, I hope that the agricultural industry starts acknowledging Native producers, paying us more, and learning the ways we’ve cared for the land since time immemorial,” she adds.
To that end, Schreiner is optimistic that the 2023 Farm Bill will be a step in the right direction. “It’s really moving forward in a good way for Native farmers,” she says. “The Intertribal Agriculture Council has been pivotal for years, pushing for more representation at the table. And Zach Ducheneaux, who has a long history with the IAC and now runs the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, has really come out for us. We’re already seeing a shift for disadvantaged BIPOC farmers when it comes to access to disaster relief funds and different loan opportunities.” For instance, Sakari recently secured loans to put up a greenhouse to prolong the growing season through Akiptan, a Native-focused community development financial institution (CDFI).
Adding another title to the long list of hats Schreiner already wears—mom, connector, ecologist, educator, activist, advocate, seed saver, Indigenous food warrior—she also recently co-produced a feature-length film, A Reflection of Life. The documentary delves into the climate change–induced water issues of the Pacific Northwest, with a focus on the effects on Native communities. It premiered in April and has since become a film festival darling; Schreiner is hopeful it will get streaming distribution soon in order to reach a wider audience.
Just like the many initiatives underway at Sakari Farms, it all comes back to sharing knowledge for Schreiner. She aims to do more of that in the coming years, with a focus on policy work and storytelling. “The goal is to someday hand the farm over to tribal youth so that I can use my brain rather than my body at this point in my life,” she says with a laugh. “We don’t have a lot of advocates in Indian Country, and I’m really good at speaking up for myself and others. I’d like to spend more time sitting down with tribal members, listening to their needs, and helping make it happen.” Although that involves a slight shift in focus, it still very much reflects her life’s work: sharing her unique talents with the Native community.
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]]>The post How Alaska Natives Lost the Right to Fish Sacred Salmon appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The many modern-day threats to the Alaska Native way of life are well-documented, but nothing offers an inside look into this world quite like My Side of the River. Weaving together personal stories and historical accounts, the debut book from Yup’ik agricultural specialist Elias Kelly explains how the 1971 Congressional Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA)—which extinguished aboriginal rights to hunting and fishing—forever changed Alaska Natives’ ability to feed their families.
Growing up in Pilot Station, a small Native village along the Yukon River, Kelly learned how to hunt, fish, and gather from elders like his uppa (grandfather). He went on to become a tribal council leader and a fierce advocate for Alaska Native rights in addition to working various jobs for the U.S. Forest Service and Alaska Department of Fish and Game, where he put so-called “Native science” to use alongside Western methodology.
“I think it is time to consider alternative fish and wildlife management methods, such as traditional management principles or the idea of co-management.”
This dichotomy between Native and non-Native approaches to wildlife regulation and conservation runs throughout My Side of the River, from details about Kelly’s own experiences with fish and game troopers to an overview of the historic Katie John case, which bolstered Alaska Native subsistence rights.
Kelly asserts that misguided management efforts by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Alaska Department of Fish and Game—what he says is often referred to as “wildlife micromanagement”—have contributed to the recent historic fisheries collapses and the pervasive Alaska Native food insecurity we’re seeing today.
In his new book, Kelly highlights the importance of subsistence harvests and points to the fact that, in 2000, some Alaska Natives harvested more than 700 pounds of wild foods per person.
“What Natives do is not a choice. Harvesting animals and birds, drying and storing fish is part of establishing our food security,” Kelly writes. “The economic reality of living in Native Alaska, where supermarkets do not exist, means there are few other options.”
And yet, restrictive subsistence regulations have left many Alaska Natives in rural areas no choice but to engage in so-called “poaching” to meet their food security needs.
Civil Eats spoke with Kelly about subsistence rights, tribal sovereignty, and the importance of a more cooperative approach to fish and wildlife management in Alaska—one that takes into account traditional Native wisdom and values.
You are both a subsistence fisher and a commercial fisher. How are these two intertwined?
Like many Natives, I grew up hunting and fishing with my relatives. I started helping out with commercial fishing when I was 10 years old. We didn’t see a conflict between commercial fishing and subsistence fishing. We usually went commercial fishing and kept some for subsistence needs. Subsistence fishing provided our food security, while commercial fishing provided some income to supplement our food security needs and pay household bills.
For the Lower Yukon, we have more than 600 state limited-entry commercial permits, enabling holders to fish and legally sell their salmon. Pilot Station has 54 commercial fishers. For these families, commercial sales are perhaps their only income.
But unfortunately for the Yukon River, the last commercial fishing took place in 2019 [due to unprecedented low salmon numbers]. To this day, families are still struggling.
What have been the long-term consequences of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act?
One of the major provisions of the act is the extinguishment of Alaska Native aboriginal rights to hunting and fishing. This reinforced the state of Alaska’s claim to management responsibility of all fish and wildlife for personal and commercial use, including subsistence.
In fact, the Alaska Constitution has a clause that outlines that the state will manage all fish and wildlife for sustainable harvests using the management principle of sustained yield. We can only look at our Yukon River and Kuskokwim River salmon numbers to determine whether these management efforts have worked. I think it is time to consider alternative fish and wildlife management methods, such as traditional management principles or the idea of co-management.
How have Native science and Western science historically clashed?
It is not unusual to hear claims that Alaska Natives live in harmony with nature. But the idea of traditional ecological knowledge, or Native knowledge, [is often seen as] archaic compared to the management principles administered by the state and federal agencies. The concept of non-Native science incorporates Western management doctrines and strongly influences our current harvest regulations.
Non-Native fish and game managers use quantitative and qualitative data to [tell] Natives when, where, and how to fish. To support this reasoning, they incorporate this data chronologically, where there is a beginning and an end.
In comparison, Alaska Natives tend to think in the abstract. We are very good at observing Mother Nature. This takes time and practice. We observe all this information as to weather, climate, and fish and wildlife conditions and have discussions with other Natives. This is Native science at work. But in Western science, this is called an “ad hoc hypothesis.” All this Native information is telling us what is going to happen, but the conclusion can be difficult to accept without proof.
What’s the significance of the Katie John case as it relates to subsistence rights?
Katie John was an Alaska Native Ahtna Athabascan elder who grew up along the Copper River in a very remote fish camp. After Alaska statehood in 1959, the state became responsible for managing all fish and wildlife resources using non-Native ethics, including restrictions, closures, and harvest limits. The state basically prohibited Katie John and her family from fishing at their camp. So, in 1985, she filed a lawsuit against the state of Alaska.
In 1980, Congress had passed the Alaska National Interest Land Claims Act (ANILCA). This gave the federal government the legal authority to manage fish and wildlife harvests on all federal land and waters, including in national wildlife preserves and parks. ANILCA includes a clause that gives rural Alaska residents an opportunity to harvest fish and wildlife—in simple terms, a subsistence harvest preference.
Katie John’s court case used this clause to claim that the state of Alaska denied her subsistence harvest rights, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. The state of Alaska had argued that the management responsibility of all navigable waters in Alaska belonged to the state, including all fish and wildlife harvests. But what many people don’t realize is that as a result of the Katie John case, we now have two regulatory agencies—federal and state—monitoring, regulating, and enforcing Native subsistence harvests.
Yukon River fish camp (photo credit: Josh Spice, National Park Service)
You explain that many Alaska Natives in rural areas resort to “poaching.” Why is this civil disobedience necessary?
Try to imagine your way of life being managed every day by someone from far away. This is what it is like living in rural Alaska; the economic conditions can be challenging. Even if the fish and game manager will not allow us to fish, the fish and wildlife trooper is not always around when the salmon are swimming past Pilot Station.
For example, in 2009, in the Native village of Marshall, there was a full salmon fishing closure. The Native residents went out and fished as a community during the closures, and the state fish and wildlife troopers couldn’t do anything about it. When subsistence restrictions are posted, Natives tend to stick together and dare the state to take action.
How do subsistence rights directly relate to issues like education, housing, and child custody?
Alaska Natives view wildlife harvests and resource gathering as family and community activities. These practices are not only part of our social network; they also determine our physical and spiritual well-being. When fish and game managers tell us we cannot harvest salmon, it disrupts our family and community stability, leaving people struggling without a job, income, or means to feed their family.
We tend to see more disputes, alcohol and drug abuse, and a broken family network. Families who are struggling do not like to ask for help. Believe it or not, Alaska Native harvesting supports enriched family values and community stability.
You pose the question: Can Alaska Native tribes be sovereign if they don’t own land? What’s your take on this?
In Alaska, there are more than 200 federally recognized tribes. Each addresses concerns within their own communities. Unlike the Indian reservation system in the lower 48 states, the majority of Alaska tribes do not own land. So, it is not unusual for non-Native leaders in Alaska to claim that Alaska Native tribes can never be sovereign because they do not own the land. But they do own the community.
For example, during the COVID crisis, Alaska Native tribes as sovereign governments only allowed visitors to come to the community with permission. There are no roads in rural Alaska; in my part of the state, everyone flies into the community on an airplane. Before the passengers boarded the airplane, the airline would require a confirmation letter from the tribe giving that person permission to travel to the community. The local tribes use their sovereign responsibility to support community members. If this is not sovereignty, I don’t know what is.
In your view, what factors have contributed to the current Yukon River salmon collapse?
There has been much discussion and research on salmon conditions in Alaska, not only on the Yukon River but statewide. There are many theories—everything from climate change and increasing water temperature to predation and intercept by commercial fisheries as the salmon migrate out to the ocean—but no burning proof. In reality, it could be a combination of all these factors.
Personally, I believe the one common cause is the condition of the feeder stock sources. We have seen declines in many marine mammals, birds, and fish as a result of [declining] numbers of salmon, whitefish, herring, and lamprey eels. Therefore it’s not only salmon that we should be concerned about. We need to treat all wild resources with an ecosystem management approach. To care for our homes, we need to care for ourselves. And to care for ourselves, we need to care for our homes.
Coho salmon (Photo credit: Craig Springer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
How would you like to see fish and wildlife management responsibility in Alaska change?
We need to consider alternative management schemes, such as co-management or intertribal fish commissions. In 2014, the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission became active. The Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission was created in 2015 and is influential in addressing management and stewardship obligations, including Alaska Native harvests. Both of these are modeled after the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.
Is it too late for these fish commissions? We have had no Yukon River subsistence salmon harvest since 2019 for king, chum, pink, or coho. In comparison, the Kuskokwim Inter-Tribal Fish Commission announced several planned subsistence salmon fish openings for June and July this year. There are currently no plans for Yukon salmon harvests. Just the other day, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game closed all salmon fishing for the Yukon River coastal communities of Hooper Bay and Scammon Bay—all the way to Kotlik. Perhaps we need more time for these intertribal fish commissions to work.
What do you hope readers take away from this book?
While ANCSA did extinguish Alaska Native aboriginal rights, it did not extinguish obligations of tradition management. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Alaska Department of Fish and Game are major decision-makers impacting our Native way of life using Western or colonial management guidelines. This book examines the different management guidelines—tradition versus Western, federal versus state, subsistence versus commercial versus sport—and asks: Who should be responsible for wildlife management? It is easy for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Alaska Department of Fish and Game to claim they have management responsibility. But are they the real stewards? The wild resources of Alaska belong to everyone.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post How Alaska Natives Lost the Right to Fish Sacred Salmon appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post An Indigenous-Led Team Is Transforming a Minneapolis Superfund Site into a New Urban Farm appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>A member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Holmes was born and raised in Little Earth of United Tribes, a 9.4-acre, 212-unit Housing and Urban Development subsidized housing complex in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the country’s only Native American preference Section 8 community.
“We are going to right generations of wrong. We know it isn’t going to happen overnight, but it’s a good start.”
Founded in 1973, Little Earth provides support services for its nearly 1,000 residents—who represent 38 different tribal affiliations—designed to help eliminate systemic barriers and address challenges many Indigenous communities face. It’s located in East Phillips, a neighborhood that has long been home to many heavy industry tenants and the so-called “arsenic triangle,” an area resulting from ongoing ground contamination by a chemical manufacturer over a 25-year period. Today, East Phillips residents—70 percent of whom identify as people of color—have some of the highest levels of asthma, heart disease, and other pollution-related ailments in the state of Minnesota.
Holmes is a board member of the East Phillips Improvement Coalition (EPIC) and a previous board member of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI), two organizations fighting environmental racism in the area. Now, she’s also at the center of a high-profile effort to bring fresh, local food to the neighborhood.
In May, East Phillips residents struck a historic deal with the city to purchase a 7.6-acre site to develop a community-owned indoor urban farm, affordable housing complex, and gathering space. After nearly a decade of activism, they blocked the city’s highly contested plan to develop a former Roof Depot warehouse into a public works campus.
Now, they’ve been given the opportunity to transform the site into a thriving community hub. The activists have raised $3.7 million and have been promised funds from the state to complete the sale in 2024. But hurdles still remain. EPNI will oversee the renovation and buildout process, which will cost an estimated $22 million to $25 million with the first phase expected to be completed by summer 2025. In addition to a solar-powered high-tech indoor urban farm, the vision includes housing units, cultural markets, community gathering spaces, job training sites, and more.
Civil Eats spoke with Holmes recently about the long fight that led to this historic deal, the impact the urban farm will have on the Little Earth community, and EPNI’s vision for a healthier, more equitable future.
A rendering of the East Phillips Urban Farm. (Courtesy of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute)
What does this historic deal mean for the East Phillips neighborhood?
For East Phillips, we’ve been fighting a lot of things that aren’t good for us and winning. Although this one took longer, I knew the right thing was going to happen eventually. But I think for all of Minneapolis, the United States, and even the world—because we have a lot of people from other countries supporting us—it’s such a big deal because it shows that good things can happen when a community stands up together for their right to very basic human needs, like less pollution.
We are going to right generations of wrong. We know it isn’t going to happen overnight, but it’s a good start. Down the line, the hope is that it really changes the dynamic of the community, especially for Little Earth residents. This is a big deal because, as Native people, we just don’t have equal access to things like home ownership and business ownership. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that will change the dynamic for generations to come.
Why is this particularly important for the Little Earth community?
Growing up in Little Earth, I didn’t realize I lived in this environment where people were dying. We just thought, “That’s what happens; that’s the way of life.” But losing a child to a heart condition he wasn’t born with, having a best friend lose a child to a heart condition she wasn’t born with, and having some of the younger kids pass away from asthma and diabetes was a big eye-opener.
Even though we consider ourselves elders at 55 years old because of our shorter life expectancy, I didn’t realize just how detrimental our environment was until I got into this fight. Now that our eyes are wide open, we’re realizing as a community that we need to fight for our kids and our future.
Can you say more about how the pain of losing your son acted as a catalyst?
When my son first got sick, nobody knew what it was. It took a long time for the doctors to diagnose him, and when they did, they couldn’t believe he was walking and talking. His heart function was at 12 percent, and he needed a heart transplant. We just didn’t understand, because nobody else in our family had been that sick. My kid—who didn’t drink, who didn’t do drugs, who was very active in sports and in his community—just got sick one day. Two years later, he died.
It was just a really hard time. I don’t use drugs, but I remember thinking that I could just drink the pain away. It was our community and our traditions that kept me sober, because I still had to be his mom and help him on his journey. But I kept asking questions, like, “Where did his heart condition come from?” The doctors told me, “He could have touched something that got into his system and attacked his heart. It could be the environment he grew up in. It could be hereditary.” They just didn’t have the answers.
“For Indigenous folks, you don’t live for yourself; you live for your family and your community. As a people, that’s what’s engrained in us.”
Then, when my best friend’s daughter died, that opened up my eyes. She thought she had congestion, so she went to the emergency room. She stayed overnight because they wanted to run some tests, but she never came back. The doctors said she had a heart condition, but we were like, “From what?” and they couldn’t answer our questions. It made me wonder, “What the hell is going on?” They both grew up in Little Earth. That’s when I start noticing all the sick people in our community and started asking questions.
Then a young boy got run over right up the block from Little Earth and died. Finally, we said, “We’re fed up. We don’t want [the city of Minneapolis] to have a sandbox where they bring in more vehicles and train their employees on diesel-run equipment, and that gets filtered out into our community. We have to do something.”
We don’t want anyone else to know the pain of burying a child. We always have to bury our loved ones, but a child is something else. For Indigenous folks, you don’t live for yourself—you live for your family and your community. As a people, that’s what’s engrained in us. The next generation isn’t going to have a perfect life, but we can still do something to make it better.
What was it like fighting the city’s development plans for the Roof Depot site?
It wasn’t a fight at first; it was the city holding a meeting about the Roof Depot site, which they had bought unbeknownst to us. We had a few community members who saw the building was not in use and had ideas for doing something positive with it. But the city didn’t let Little Earth residents know they bought it—none of our 212 units received a flyer or anything in the mail. My aunt Jolene was the interim director for the Little Earth Residents Association at the time, and she demanded the city host a meeting at Little Earth.
The city had this idea that they would take two people from each community—two Natives, two Blacks, two Hispanics, and so on—to put together this Guidelines Advisory Committee. I signed up for the committee and was chosen. As we were sitting in those meetings, we realized that the city already had their agenda set and it was just putting on a show so they could say they invited the community to provide ideas. But really, it was just dotmocracy; they gave us stickers and asked us to mark which of their ideas we liked.
“Green jobs, green education, food for cheap or free year-round—why would anybody fight that?”
During one of those meetings, former state representative Karen Clark, who is a resident of East Phillips, was in the peanut gallery. The facilitator was talking about the Clark-Berglund Environmental Justice Law, because we kept bringing it up. Karen interjected and said, “What you’re saying is not right; I know because I wrote that law with [former state senator] Linda Berglin.”
I don’t know if he got embarrassed, but the facilitator went charging after her. Everyone was in shock. Karen said she didn’t feel welcome or safe, so she left. I remember thinking, “If my representative and the elders in this community don’t feel welcome or safe, I’m leaving, too. But I’m not giving up my seat.” So, everybody decided to walk out except for two people.
That’s when the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute was born. It wasn’t easy. Even though I knew it was going to work out, there were times where it was lonely and scary. There were times when dealing with the city and politicians was so negative it made me throw up afterward. But I realized that I’ve felt worse—like I did after losing my son—and survived, so I could survive that, too.
Can you talk more about the Little Earth Urban Farm?
In 2017, in the process of all these meetings, Karen Clark secured $319,000 in funding from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) to be split up among the community. Little Earth got a portion of that, and we were trying to figure out how to use it. I was on the Little Earth board at the time and reminded people that the whole point of our fight was to stop the city from creating more pollution in our neighborhood.
At the same time, Aunt Jolene was having issues with some of our youth skipping school. She hosted a meeting to learn why, and they said, “We don’t have nice clothes or nice shoes. We’re tired of being made fun of all the time.”
So, we decided to hire the kids to work on the Little Earth Farm for the summer. We also hired elders to work with the kids and tell them stories about the plants and the foods—just connecting them with our youth. Their parents would help out sometimes, too. The deal was that the kids’ money would go into a savings account, then volunteers would take them shopping to buy clothes before the school year started. We were also teaching them budgeting at the same time.
The first summer, we had about 25 kids who worked on the farm and learned a lot. For example, there were kids who at first didn’t know what a radish was, but by the end of the summer, radishes were their favorite thing to eat because they had grown them. And on the first day of school, here were these kids bright and early waiting for the school bus. [The farming program] has been so successful and has gotten bigger and better every year. I think we have 60 to 75 kids working now, and the farm is really beautiful.
And that right there is what we need. Instead of these kids skipping school or selling weed or stealing money to buy nice clothes, they worked on something that actually helps the community. They’re proud of making their own money and buying their own clothes. Green jobs, green education, food for cheap or free year-round—why would anybody fight that? That’s the small version of what we want to see happen.
A rendering of an indoor farm and aquaponics operation. (Courtesy of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute)
What is the vision for the indoor urban farm, housing complex, and community hub?
The vision is to create a bigger version of what we’ve done in our smaller communities. We also envision a coffee shop, a bike shop since we’re just off a biking greenway, a commercial kitchen, a space for people to sell their crafts, and more. There will also be housing, because we have a lot of relatives who are unsheltered.
But just having this community space where we can build generational wealth—an opportunity we haven’t had before—will totally change the dynamic because we will actually have ownership in something. We will actually have a say in something. We will have a safe place to go. Above all, the most important thing is that we stopped an entity from continuing to hurt us; we stopped that pollution. Now, starting to work on our community is step two.
What meaningful impact do you hope this development has on future generations?
My hope is that East Phillips and Little Earth residents know that they have a voice and that they can have more than just what they’re given. I hope future generations will be better to themselves and their neighbors. They’ll have this opportunity to work with food and with the soil and to provide for their community. They’ll have power, faith, and ownership in something.
When you hear about Little Earth, it’s only when there’s a shooting or an overdose. We’re not always seen in the best light, but we have a lot of really great community members. I’m hoping there will be a different storyline in the future—talking about how successful this has been, how we have won awards, how this ownership has really paid off, maybe resulting in more homeowners than renters. There will still be negatives, but we won’t only have stories of violence and people dying. I see it as a real positive.
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]]>The post This Fund Is Investing $20 Million to Help Black Farmers Thrive appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>For the past decade, Afro-Puerto Rican farmer Rafael Aponte and his family have been running Rocky Acres Community Farm in Freeville, New York, just outside Ithaca. The South Bronx native focuses on sustainably producing vegetables, eggs, and meat for low-resourced communities as well as creating a space for transformational healing through agriculture. But when the pandemic hit, his community needed something else from him. That’s when Aponte applied for additional support from Black Farmer Fund.
Founded by farmer-activist Karen Washington and social entrepreneur Olivia Watkins in 2017, this nonprofit organization acts as a racially just investment fund created explicitly to support Black farmers, agricultural businesses, and food entrepreneurs in the Northeast, with the goal of building community wealth and local food sovereignty through collective power. Rocky Acres was among the first cohort of eight agricultural businesses that received support through the organization’s 2021 $1.1-million pilot fund.
The money helped Aponte shift his direct-to-consumer business model to include a home delivery service and a small on-farm store or bodega. “It allows me to aggregate products from other farmers of color who don’t have the time to spend at the market,” he says. “Being from the Bronx, I’ve always come at things from a food justice lens and really look to make sure folks have sufficient access to their foods.”
Inspecting the crop at Rocky Acres Farm. (Photo credit: Onyx Ramirez)
Rocky Acres started out as 10 acres but has since expanded to 30, all owned by Aponte and his family. The pilot fund support—including a $50,000 grant and a $25,000 loan—allowed him to put the additional acreage into production sooner, create infrastructure for new crop fields, install greenhouses, and establish the bodega, which opened on Earth Day 2022.
To stay true to its community roots, Black Farmer Fund tapped a committee of 11 Black farmers and food industry entrepreneurs to help determine which of 50 Pilot Fund applicants would receive grants and/or low-interest loans, supported by private donors and foundations such as the Sandy River Charitable Foundation.
All of the investees—including 716 CBD, Rootwork Herbals, Black Yard Farm Collective, and more—are based in New York, where there are marked inequities: The average annual net cash income for Black farmers in the state is $-900 while white farmers made over $42,000, according to Black Farmer Fund research.
This echoes the hugely disproportionate hurdles that Black farmers across America face, the long-lasting result of centuries of systemic racism. Despite acting as the bedrock of the agricultural industry, they have historically experienced violence, such as the 1919 Elaine Massacre, and discrimination when dealing with financial institutions and government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
These disparities have meaningful, measurable consequences, with research showing that Black farmers—who represent just 1.4 percent of farmers, compared to 14 percent a century ago—earn a mere $2,408 per year on average, compared to the $17,190 that white farmers take home.
“From a historic economic perspective, the loss of Black agricultural land represents a significant loss of wealth and capital to the Black community in the United States,” says Dania V. Francis, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who has extensively researched Black land loss.
“The USDA has to get their act together. . . . They need to change their ways to make it easier for communities of color to navigate their system.”
Francis and her colleagues estimate that the Black agricultural land that was lost or stolen in the U.S. from 1920 to 1997 would be worth a cumulative $326 billion today. “While that is only a fraction of the current Black-white wealth gap, it represents lost opportunities for Black farmers to invest in the higher education of their children, to invest in opening other small businesses, and to serve as a family and social safety net against hard times. Ownership of an asset as valuable as arable land comes with many benefits that could enhance the well-being of Black communities,” she explains.
Recent attempts to right these wrongs are often characterized as too little too late, such as the 2021 effort by the Biden Administration to offer Black farmers $4 billion in debt relief. The offer was walked back after white farmers brought multiple lawsuits claiming that the race-specific debt-relief program was discriminatory, then a group of Black farmers filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government in response.
The following year, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included $2.2 billion in funding to compensate farmers who have been subject to discrimination within USDA programs and $3.1 billion in loan help for farmers in serious financial distress. But how much of that will reach Black farmers is yet to be seen.
Karen Washington. (Photo credit: Black Farmer Fund)
“The USDA has to get their act together. They’ve put money out there, but they need to change their ways to make it easier for communities of color to navigate their system,” says Washington, a celebrated community organizer and co-owner of multigenerational QTBIPOC Rise & Root Farm in Chester, New York. “For so long, decisions have been made that impact communities of color and we’re never asked to be at the table.”
After watching what they describe as pervasive inequities and broken promises, Washington and Watkins have taken matters into their own hands. “We’re trying to break that extractive, capitalistic system that for so long has come from outside trying to control the lives and well-being of our community without our voices,” adds Washington.
The recipients of this year’s James Beard Award for Humanitarian of the Year, the duo recently launched BFF Fund 2.0, a $20-million integrated capital fund to support an estimated 30 Black farmers and agricultural businesses across the Northeast over the next four years. It builds on the momentum of the organization’s Pilot Fund and includes key improvements.
“The Pilot Fund was just that—a pilot,” says Watkins, who serves as the organization’s president. “There’s definitely a lot of gratitude that something like this exists; we’re hearing that people feel safe being able to access funding from people who look like them. And because we have community at our center, we’re really receptive to feedback about how we can evolve.”
Olivia Watkins. (Photo credit: Black Farmer Fund)
Due to popular demand, the coverage area for version 2.0 of the fund has expanded to include the broader Northeast. Over the past year, Black Farmer Fund has developed a more robust internal team to handle logistics and an influx of donors and applicants, again with a community-led investment committee to oversee the selection process. The nonprofit has also debuted a Rapid Response Fund to support Northeast Black farmers and food entrepreneurs in the event of an emergency.
“It’s still very early in the pilot fund, but we’re already seeing it enhance Black equitable businesses,” says Watkins, who notes that 95 percent of investees’ goods and services are sold within a 200-mile radius and that 35 percent of their suppliers are BIPOC. “We found that within the pilot cohort the hired workers on average make more than New York state minimum wage—showing that people are really invested in building wealth for others.”
Beyond capital, Black Farmer Fund also provides technical assistance, business development, relationship building, and other vitally needed support. The nonprofit’s summer community workdays, for instance, bring together farmers and volunteers to work on farm projects, like Aponte’s. “They literally came out and helped paint the bodega bright yellow and stood up on a ladder 20 feet in the air to help me put a greenhouse together,” he says. “I’ve never met any other lender that would do that.”
These bonding experiences reflect Black Farmer Fund’s mission to foster community. “Our workdays allow us to be grounded in our roots and bring people together in a way that’s in alignment with Afrocentric values,” says Washington. “Within that, we are creating a space for Black food businesses to come together and learn from one another, exchange ideas and resources, and celebrate the bounty and harvest. It’s a Pan-African tradition.”
Farmers working at Big Dream Farm. (Photo credit: Jared Davis)
Even with this early success, Washington and Watkins are eager to see a larger shift in power. That includes closing the racial wealth gap in the agricultural industry, which they say has long been perpetuated by skewed lending practices that often render small minority-owned farms high-risk. In 2022, for example, the USDA granted direct loans to only 37 percent of Black applicants versus 71 percent of white applicants.
“For so long, a lot of the people we work with have been considered risky by traditional banking standards,” says Watkins. “But what does it look like for traditional banking standards to shift from what’s the risk of investing to what’s the risk of not investing?”
Black food and economic development thought leaders across the country are eager to learn from the Black Farmer Fund to set up similar programs. “We’re just one part of the broader food justice movement, and we really want to see other folks doing this in a way that best suits their place,” says Watkins. “We’ve been talking with Black folks in other states and regions who are interested, and we’re very excited to be generous with all the information and materials we’ve developed along the way.”
“What does it look like for traditional banking standards to shift from what’s the risk of investing to what’s the risk of not investing?”
Watkins says local and state lawmakers have also approached her and Washington for more insight into the fund’s successes, but the organization is focused on its grassroots, community-based initiatives rather than trying to influence policy at this point.
“Here we are with no federal dollars, no state dollars, no city dollars—no support from the government. So, we have really built this on the backs of our community,” says Washington. That said, Black Farmer Fund has partnered with OpenTEAM and Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust to assess the interest among minority-owned agricultural businesses in technology that enables them to share information about crop yields, current markets, and the like—all useful for lender and grant application processes.
And while there’s undoubtedly more work to be done to get Black growers the support they need to start new farms and stay on the land, the Black Farmer Fund’s efforts to shift power back to these producers have certainly made a difference for agricultural entrepreneurs like Aponte of Rocky Acres.
“If folks believe in capitalism as a system, then we understand that businesses need to be able to compete—and we also understand the historic disenfranchisement of Black farmers in this country’s history,” Aponte says. “We need more resources at the table to level the playing field. The Black Farmer Fund is sorely needed and right on time. I hope to see them continue to grow and become the model for regenerative capital across the country.”
The post This Fund Is Investing $20 Million to Help Black Farmers Thrive appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Can Sean Sherman’s BIPOC Foodways Alliance Dismantle White Supremacy Over Dinner? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On a Monday night in January, a dozen people gathered around a dining table in the warm Minneapolis home of acclaimed Native American chef Sean Sherman and his life partner, Black chef and food writer Mecca Bos. The guest list for the dinner, the first in a series of events put on by the BIPOC Foodways Alliance, a new organization from Sherman and Bos, represented a mini melting pot of sorts, all of us from diverse racial backgrounds and various walks of life—media makers, public servants, and others you might not expect to find at a foodie fete like this.
Although we didn’t know quite what we were in for, there was a palpable energy in the room, because we were all there for a shared purpose: to help dismantle white supremacy through food—macaroni and cheese, to be precise.
After brief intros, Carolyn Holbrook and her granddaughter Tess Lee invited us to taste their family’s baked mac ‘n’ cheese recipe alongside roasted chicken, collard greens, honey cornbread, and sweet potato pie. While we ate, they led a casual discussion about what the meal means to so many Black communities. The dish—which was brought to the U.S. in the 18th century by James Hemings, a mixed-race, Paris-trained chef born into slavery who served as Thomas Jefferson’s head chef—has since become a popular food served at family celebrations in Black communities across the South and beyond.
At the dinner, Holbrook talked about being her family’s designated mac ‘n’ cheese bearer at holiday gatherings and explained that the role is an exalted one passed down through the generations. The conversation was illuminating and intimate, but it never felt forced or overly didactic. Instead, it was like a sacred meal shared with loved ones.
I savored every word along with each bite of macaroni and cheese. Afterward, we all toasted over mezcal and shared laughs watching TikTok videos that jest at the significance of mac ‘n’ cheese for Black families. At that moment, I realized just what a rare experience it was to be granted access to another culture’s traditions in such a warm, intimate way.
Baked mac ‘n’ cheese is served alongside roasted chicken, collard greens, honey cornbread, and sweet potato pie. (Photo credit: Uche Iroegbu)
That’s the goal of the BIPOC Foodways Alliance. Sherman—who was just named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023—has been in the news a great deal in recent years as his Native-focused restaurant, Owamni, has gained notoriety and won awards. But he and Bos know all too well that this attention comes after a long stretch when diverse voices were all but completely left out of the mainstream dialogues around food. That’s why the duo has set out to preserve, protect, and uplift food stories from the vast diaspora of BIPOC people across America through communal dinners like this.
“For people of color, there’s so much commonality in American history due to colonization and slavery, so we thought, why not invite everybody to the literal table to celebrate these diversities?” said Sherman in an interview after the event. “There are still so many barriers for people of color, especially in the food world. We wanted to create a space to bring people together to share their recipes, stories, and struggles, and to help people understand other cultures.”
“Dismantling white supremacy will not be easy, but we believe that bringing all BIPOC people together using food as the catalyst is a step in the right direction.”
This ambition is closely aligned with Sherman’s mission to revitalize Native American foodways through the decolonized fare served at Owamni as well as the efforts of his nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, and the Indigenous Food Lab, a training kitchen for Native American culinary entrepreneurs. Bos, who worked in the kitchens of several lauded Twin Cities eateries, has been amplifying the stories of marginalized peoples through her reporting for Minnesota Public Radio and other outlets.
In short, they have witnessed the inner workings of the food world and are uniquely positioned to help bring about change.
Unlike typical culinary incubators, the BIPOC Foodways Alliance isn’t designed to help aspiring chefs gain credibility or expertise. Instead, it’s built on the premise that everyone has a food story to tell, even if they don’t have a restaurant or a platform. With official nonprofit status currently in the works, the organization hopes to promote cross-cultural understanding by telling the unheard, underrepresented food stories of elders, immigrants, and other often-overlooked individuals who hold deep culinary knowledge.
For now, that translates to free monthly communal dinners held at Minneapolis’s Glass House event venue, made possible thanks to community fundraising.
Bos said the idea for the alliance actually stems from a joke between she and Sean in which they often say, “All we have to do is dismantle white supremacy.” And while, in reality, it’s an ambitious goal, she sees the dinner series as an important first step.
“Dismantling white supremacy will not be easy, but we believe that bringing all BIPOC people together using food as the catalyst is a step in the right direction. You only need to look at Sean’s work to see how powerful a tool food can be. It shows that when you bring people together, you only get stronger. I would love to see more folks lifting each other up in a tangible way,” says Bos, who will run the nonprofit until there is funding to hire a director. There’s a resonance about this notion of joining forces, understanding each other, and working toward the common goal of dismantling white supremacy.
And while these intimate meals are at the heart of their initiative, Sherman and Bos hope its reach stretches beyond those who will be sitting at the table. The dinners will be documented and disseminated online in an effort to make them more accessible while also helping document different cultural approaches to cooking and sharing food—many of which are often passed down orally and therefore stand to be lost. Sherman and Bos are also exploring the idea of creating media to accompany the meals, such as a recurring zine, a podcast, and even a possible book. Of course, all of these efforts are contingent on ample funding, a key focus for 2023.
So far, the Twin Cities community has been enthusiastic about the nonprofit’s recent launch, with hundreds of supporters in attendance at a February fundraiser.
“For me, the work of the BIPOC Foodways Alliance is personal,” says writer Natalia Mendez, who was in attendance. “When both sides of my family came here from Mexico, they faced oppression for their accents and skin color. They didn’t teach their kids Spanish, which closed off some access to our culture, but they retained some traditions. Food is one of the most important pieces of our culture we still have access to. I know what it’s like to look for that cultural access in an effort to decolonize the self, so when I heard about the fundraiser, I knew I had to attend. The event was multigenerational and celebratory, and I was so happy to see an incredibly diverse crowd.”
The duo also has their sights set on larger national—and even global—impact. “Food touches all of us, and there are so many people out there holding these really important food stories,” Sherman says. “As Mecca and I travel, we’re finding all these interesting BIPOC initiatives happening in various cities. We’re hoping we can do this not just in Minneapolis, but all over the world.”
Chef and food writer Mecca Bos and Native American chef Sean Sherman (Photo credit: Yasmin Yassin)
That future involves collaborating with similar organizations around the country, cohosting events in other destinations, and helping establish BIPOC Foodways Alliance chapters across the globe. The initiative will soon be getting some time in the spotlight, thanks to an upcoming dinner in early May at the James Beard Foundation’s new Platform culinary arts center in New York City. And later that month, the organization will take part in the George Floyd Global Memorial Celebration, with special culinary storytelling to take place at a Paisley Park gala featuring Floyd family recipes.
Even with these high-profile partnerships, the focus always comes back to creating space for people of color to share their own food stories. “The culinary world has been very Eurocentric for way too long, and historically we’ve seen a lot of recipes interpreted through this perspective,” says Sherman. “We’ve seen many white chefs become very famous for making other cultures’ foods feel safe and accessible for white people. It’s time to step back and let people of color tell their own stories.”
Bos is quick to point out that white allies play an important role in this effort, too. “We can’t afford to dismiss white allies,” she says. “To be frank, some of my white allies have been more supportive than some BIPOC people, probably because they understand their privilege and typically have access to more resources.”
So, what does success look like for BIPOC Foodways Alliance in year one? Sherman encompasses it in a single word: curiosity. He wants to see a world where more people stretch beyond their own identities, engage with different cultures, and stop seeing other foodways, traditions, and customs as foreign—a set of concepts he has long been championing when it comes to Native American foods.
He and Bos acknowledge they might not see this objective achieved within their lifetimes and that this effort will require more than just the two of them, as Bos explains: “Do Sean and I expect to dismantle white supremacy single-handedly? Absolutely not. Can a powerful legion of people of color make a mighty stand against racism? Yes.” That’s why they’re willing to put in the work, despite the odds.
“In this moment, just as we’re having this reckoning about the plight of people of color in this country, white supremacy is doubling down,” Bos says, alluding to the gun violence against people of color as well as voter suppression, book bans, and other policy efforts enacted by Republican lawmakers across the country.
“But we really are a minority-majority country, and I believe the only way to tackle the issue of white supremacy is for all people to come together,” she says. “After all, if something can be built, it can be dismantled.”
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]]>The post Alaska’s Climate-Driven Fisheries Collapse Is Devastating Indigenous Communities appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>“Fishing is more than simply having means to fill the pantry with my favorite food,” says U.S. Representative Mary Peltola (D-AK), the first Alaska Native (Yup’ik) in Congress.
Like so many Alaska Natives, Peltola grew up fishing for salmon with her family for subsistence.
“On the Kuskokwim, babies teethe on dried salmon strips,” she said. “People eat salmon just about any way you can think of—dried, smoked, jarred, frozen. It’s heartbreaking to witness the crash of salmon populations in river systems we’ve been able to rely on as long as I can remember.”
So when king crab, snow crab, and Yukon River salmon fisheries all collapsed last year, it hit Peltola’s community, and all Indigenous communities in Alaska, hard. And while these climate-related catastrophes might seem a world away from the Lower 48, they serve as a harrowing harbinger of what’s to come.
“The entire world is connected by oceans, and with more coastline than all the other states combined—more than 46,600 miles—Alaska’s oceans are in many ways America’s oceans,” says Peltola. “Marine ecosystems are the bedrock of our food supply, whether you eat fish or not. But if you do, around 60 percent of seafood harvested in this country comes from Alaska’s waters.”
“The entire world is connected by oceans, and with more coastline than all the other states combined, Alaska’s oceans are in many ways America’s oceans.”
The trouble started in late 2013, when a massive patch of warm ocean water dubbed “the Blob” developed in the Gulf of Alaska, increasing sea surface temperatures by as much as 7° F. Within two years, it had enveloped the entire West Coast, stretching more than 4 million square kilometers from Alaska to Mexico before ultimately splitting into three distinct masses.
The impacts to Alaska’s fisheries were colossal. Toxic algae blooms formed. Krill populations plummeted, causing ripple effects for pollock and other fish dependent on this food source. Gulf of Alaska pink salmon and Pacific cod fisheries collapsed, with cod biomass down 79 percent from 2013 to 2017. Fish migration patterns changed, with some shifting hundreds of miles north while uncharacteristic warm-water species, like skipjack tuna, moved into Alaskan waters. All the upheaval is being felt by the state’s residents, who rely on this work and indeed this food for their livelihoods.
But like so many climate emergencies, the consequences have been far from straightforward. Where some species suffered, others have thrived. For example, Bristol Bay sockeye salmon production has recently hit record highs, helping keep the state’s fisheries afloat during a time of massive disruption.
While for climate scientists and fisheries managers, the ongoing effects are hard to predict—they are poised to forever change Alaska’s foodways, industries, and way of life.
Disruptions and Their Impacts
Scientists are confident the warming of Alaskan ecosystems will continue and advise the people involved in Alaskan fisheries—and those consuming their products—to expect many more disruptions, says Mike Litzow, a program manager at NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center and a director at Kodiak Lab.
“Pretty much any fishery in Alaska should consider itself on notice in terms of potential vulnerabilities to climate change,” Litzow said. “The difficulty is knowing when and how those impacts are going to play out.”
“Pretty much any fishery in Alaska should consider itself on notice in terms of potential vulnerabilities to climate change.”
The issues go beyond just the Blob and vary greatly across Alaska’s 663,300 square miles. “The very rapidly changing ocean environment, and in turn the thinning and changing seasonality of sea ice, is a big problem for all of Western and Northern Alaska,” explains Rick Thoman, climate specialist at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks’ Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.
“For mainland Alaska, thawing permafrost is going to cause major issues, particularly related to infrastructure like roads and buildings,” he continued.
“Then in Southeast Alaska, the warming ocean waters have extended the season and prompted the presence of an invasive crab species, which could have a big impact on the marine ecosystem there,” he says. This highly competitive predator poses a threat to native species and habitats, according to NOAA, including possibly decimating shellfish populations, outcompeting native crabs, and reducing eelgrass and salt marsh habitats.
“In this area,” he continued, “we’re also seeing the transition of more precipitation to rain, higher snow levels, and less mountain snow cover, which means that places like Wrangell and Petersburg could become much more Seattle-like later this century.” This is already proving problematic in these areas that are so dependent on snowpack-driven hydroelectric power.
Native Communities at Risk
Detailed in the recent Arctic Report Card (which Thoman co-authored), these crises stand to reshape—or even wipe out—small coastal communities whose entire economies are built on harvesting and processing fish, like Unalaska/Port of Dutch Harbor and St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands. And in many cases, Alaska Natives/Native Americans—who make up 21.9 percent of the state’s population—are disproportionately affected.
“So many Indigenous communities in Alaska rely on salmon to get us through the winter,” says Peltola. “Otherwise, we have to purchase expensive foods at the few grocery stores with money that many of us don’t have. It just doesn’t sit right with me that underrepresented people in remote villages are being asked to take a huge share of the conservation burden on our shoulders.”
“Native villages like Shishmaref and Kivalina are imminently threatened, meaning they are one storm away from losing everything,” adds Thoman, pointing to how tropical storm Merbok spurred on the Newtok Native community’s long-coming relocation to a new village, Mertarvik.
“But Newtok is the exception; they were able to move nearby in an area that’s not on permafrost, whereas there’s no such spot near Shishmaref or Kivalina. My fear is that for these imminently threatened communities, when that big storm happens, there’s no relocation plan and instead people just get dispersed, causing a whole raft of cultural disruption issues.”
King Island serves as one such example of lost cultural heritage due to displacement. This Bering Sea village located 90 miles northwest of Nome was once the winter home to some 200 Inupiat but today sits abandoned, with dilapidated dwellings clinging to its cliffs. In 1959, the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed the isle’s school, effectively requiring families to stay on the mainland year-round. By the early seventies, all King Islanders had relocated. And as the elders with memories of this remote place pass away, those cultural experiences stand to be lost, a problem countless Indigenous groups currently face.
In addition to the loss of cultural identity, Native communities, who largely rely on the state’s natural bounty for sustenance, are experiencing serious food insecurity. The many tribes situated along the nearly 2,000-mile-long Yukon River have been hit hard by the historic collapse of both king and chum salmon, forced to find other protein sources that require more cost and effort.
Moreover, residents’ use of basic tools like ice cellars to store these subsistence foods is threatened in rural areas reliant on power systems that are highly susceptible to climate issues like stronger storms and melting permafrost.
Peltola puts it plainly: “Protecting our fish is critical to preserving our Alaskan way of life,” she says. “We need to take a holistic approach to understanding the causes of current fisheries declines, how those causes interact, and what can be done in response. That starts with a robust scientific approach that combines the best and brightest in marine studies, new technology for surveying, sampling and bycatch avoidance, and grounding all of it with traditional knowledge from Indigenous leaders who have been studying and managing our fisheries for thousands of years.”
The Way Forward
For her part, Peltola is pushing to update and reauthorize the Magnuson–Stevens Act, the 1976 law governing marine fisheries management in U.S. federal waters, as part of the Sustaining America’s Fisheries for the Future Act. It’s a key factor in federal fishery disaster assistance, which Litzow explains can be “notoriously slow.” Case in point: Fishers, processors, and towns affected by the 2016 pink salmon collapse didn’t receive federal relief—some $56 million total—until 2020.
The work to mitigate the impact of climate change on Alaska’s fisheries and foodways is well underway, with experts like Litzow and Thoman leading the charge in their respective fields. But those efforts are hindered by ever-changing, unpredictable hurdles, including those caused by the damage that has already been done.
“The best time to take action was 30 years ago; the second best time is today,” says Thoman. “A lot of damage has already occurred, but everything we can do from here on out will make it less bad for the future. From carbon removal to green energy sources to better diets—every effort matters.”
“A lot of damage has already occurred, but everything we can do from here on out will make it less bad for the future.”
The warming and sea level rise is on track to continue, regardless of how quickly the United States and other wealthy nations move to reduce emissions. “Let’s say that tomorrow we were able to get down to net zero greenhouse gas concentrations, which would bring warming to a halt within a decade or so,” Thoman continues. “There’s already enough heat stored, mostly in the oceans, that it would take millennia to cool off. We need to acknowledge that a lot of damage has been done, and a lot of it is not reversible on human timescales. But every little thing we can do is going to make it that much less bad for our children and grandchildren.”
That includes forward-looking policies from fisheries management, like the proposed 10-year plan to rebuild the Bering Sea snow crab population, which experienced a nearly 90 percent drop—an estimated 1 billion crabs—in two years.
“We certainly are facing big challenges, and the onus is on all of us to rise to those challenges,” says Litzow. “When the Alaska Department of Fish and Game looked at the snow crab stock levels last year, they made the very painful decision that conservation needs outweighed the value of having a small fishery.” That resulted in the closure of the fishery, which was hard on the industry, but, he adds “everyone acknowledges that this situation is very real and that we have to respond.”
Yet as Litzow explains, it’s not all doom and gloom. “There are still a lot of healthy fisheries in the Alaskan economy, and the state’s ability to provide marine food is still robust,” he says. “Alaska’s fisheries—these productive ecosystems that can support communities and economies and provide food in such a sustainable way—are truly a national treasure.”
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