Speaker 1: Oh, hi, Hi, it's that mechanical pencil that's out of light.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, click click wait, oh look there you go.
Speaker 1: Ali word. This episode's great. There's no screaming like last week's.
Speaker 1: But it's just a wonderful romp through time and identity
Speaker 1: and history and culture and food with someone who you
Speaker 1: may know as in digit Kitchen Online Indigenous Digital Kitchen
Speaker 1: Online cooking lessons in digit Kitchen. Can you dig it?
Speaker 1: You can so? Its founder grew up in Montana and
Speaker 1: got an environmental engineering degree at Columbia University in Manhattan
Speaker 1: and has been on the board of the Native Youth
Speaker 1: Food Sovereignty Alliance is a Sloan scholar who just a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago graduated with her Masters at Sunny College
Speaker 1: of Environmental Science and Forestry via the Center for Native
Speaker 1: Peoples in the Environment, which you may remember we talked
Speaker 1: about in Doctor Robin Wallkimer's Biology Moss episode. Hello everyone there,
Speaker 1: but this guest is of both Bagani Blackfeet and Cherokee
Speaker 1: heritage and is based on the one point five million
Speaker 1: acre Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana. And you may have
Speaker 1: seen her TEDx Boseman talk. You may have seen her
Speaker 1: on the Today Show perhaps also kind of a big deal.
Speaker 1: So I heard about her work and I've been wanting
Speaker 1: to have her on for years, and knowing she was
Speaker 1: also from Montana, where my dad was born, we have
Speaker 1: a ton of family, I was so excited to get
Speaker 1: to know her. And I was nervous because she's very cool,
Speaker 1: and I had a bunch of questions and I didn't
Speaker 1: want to be annoying, And you know what, after all
Speaker 1: that worrying, I was annoying and I did ask embarrassing questions,
Speaker 1: but she rolled with it because she's awesome, and that's
Speaker 1: what I'm here for. Thank you for being here, by
Speaker 1: the way, especially you patrons who have made the show
Speaker 1: possible since before day one, and a few days ago
Speaker 1: I asked what episode patrons wanted to hear, and a
Speaker 1: bunch of you said, please, please this one, So here
Speaker 1: you go. Also, thank you just to anyone listening to
Speaker 1: the show, recommending it to friends and sending such sweet notes.
Speaker 1: Thank you to everyone who leaves a review, such as
Speaker 1: this one from sego One, who wrote that they liked
Speaker 1: that ologies has donated to dozens of charities chosen by
Speaker 1: her ologists. That's the cherry on top of an already
Speaker 1: five star show that hooked me Sego one. Thanks to
Speaker 1: the review Hold On to Your Butts. Because of Patreon
Speaker 1: support and sponsors to the show, we were able to
Speaker 1: do our biggest ever donation three thousand and sixty seven
Speaker 1: dollars and seventy nine cents worth for this episode. Why
Speaker 1: that weird number. It's a good story, okay, but let's
Speaker 1: get on with it. Indigenous queisonology. I wanted to call
Speaker 1: this colinology, but it turns out that that term is
Speaker 1: a registered trademark of some cooking school. But a word
Speaker 1: that has been in usage since at least nineteen eleven
Speaker 1: is queisonology, which is the study of a culture through
Speaker 1: its food, and Indigenous comes from a Latin root for
Speaker 1: indied genus, which is sprung from the land or native.
Speaker 1: You're gonna love her, Your love her work so much, Okay,
Speaker 1: So belly up, stuff a napkin into your collar. Boy,
Speaker 1: howdy get hungry for stories involving New York City, elk meat,
Speaker 1: mushroom DIBs, fallen stars, food, sovereignty, squash, acorns, flower bulbs, bison,
Speaker 1: the wildest of Rice's acorn pies, pre contact nutrition, meditations
Speaker 1: on fry bread and how cooking with native foods isn't
Speaker 1: part of a past but an essential aspect of the future,
Speaker 1: with environmental scientist, engineer, cooking show host and advocate Mariah Gladstone.
Speaker 2: My name is Mariah Gladstone.
Speaker 1: She her and now you're based in northwest Montana.
Speaker 2: Yep, I'm on the Blackfeet Reservation, just south of the
Speaker 2: Canadian border. I'm about five minutes outside the eastern entrance
Speaker 2: to Glacier National Park.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I was just there this summer.
Speaker 2: Awesome.
Speaker 1: I have relatives that live on that reservation in Brownie.
Speaker 3: Okay, very cool.
Speaker 1: Oh hey, what's up? Evan's family, Lila, is of the
Speaker 1: Blackfeet Confederacy and she and my cousin Boyd have raised
Speaker 1: a lovely family, plus a bunch of beautiful Harry bison
Speaker 1: on their ranch. And if they seem familiar, you heard
Speaker 1: their voices during the Bisonology episode of last year twenty twenty. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, love y'all. Fam.
Speaker 3: That's a cool connection, Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: It's Yeah, my dad's from up there, and then I
Speaker 1: have cousins up there as well, so we just got
Speaker 1: to see them this summer. But I wanted to ask
Speaker 1: a little bit about your background. So you graduated with
Speaker 1: a degree in environmental engineering and you also cook. Can
Speaker 1: you tell me a little bit about how long you've
Speaker 1: been interested in cooking?
Speaker 2: Ooh. So my mom was taking an early childhood development
Speaker 2: class when she when I was I don't know, probably
Speaker 2: three four years old, uh huh.
Speaker 3: And in it she.
Speaker 2: Was told that kids that grow up cooking have a
Speaker 2: better understanding of math because they learned how to do
Speaker 2: fractions and things become much more hands on. And so
Speaker 2: she would have me cooking at home. So we'd just
Speaker 2: make banana bread because we'd have overrite bananas or cookies,
Speaker 2: and so I learned what went into food and it
Speaker 2: kind of got me started on coming up with my
Speaker 2: own recipe ideas. So even when I was really really little,
Speaker 2: I would wake up and I would go, I had
Speaker 2: a dream, I have a new recipe for cookies, and
Speaker 2: I'm off. My mom would let me experiment with making cookies,
Speaker 2: and so she made me write down everything I put
Speaker 2: into the recipes, and so I have these things that
Speaker 2: are handwritten in marker with weird spellings. And sometimes my
Speaker 2: recipes turned out and sometimes they didn't. And as long
Speaker 2: as I was supervised. The worst case scenario is that
Speaker 2: we lost a little bit of flour and sugar and
Speaker 2: butter or whatever.
Speaker 1: So do you still have those handwritten recipes?
Speaker 2: I do?
Speaker 1: I do you do? Where do you keep them?
Speaker 2: I have them in my file folder cabinet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1: They should go right next to your degree, just to
Speaker 1: have framed.
Speaker 2: Now I have an engineering degree. I don't use things
Speaker 2: to the great math knowledge.
Speaker 1: Did it help in STEM? Did it help with math?
Speaker 2: I mean probably, because you know, those things become very intuitive.
Speaker 2: If you know how to visualize those things, you can
Speaker 2: you can divide one half into half. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'll credit that not to mention that we're so behind
Speaker 1: on the metric system that it's even more work to
Speaker 1: try to figure out when you're actually cooking. But if
Speaker 1: you just use if we went by like grams, things
Speaker 1: have you much more straightfawl.
Speaker 2: I've been following recipes that are written in a metric
Speaker 2: system and I'm sitting there with my little scale and
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, this is pretty cool, actually, but it
Speaker 2: feels more like chemistry class. So I'm cool with it.
Speaker 1: When it came to deciding what you were going to
Speaker 1: pursue for college. How did you pick environmental engineering.
Speaker 2: I've always been really interested in sustainability and finding ways
Speaker 2: to give back to my community, and for a while,
Speaker 2: because of my interest in math and science, I thought
Speaker 2: that the best way to do that would be through engineering,
Speaker 2: specifically through sustainability and looking at renewable energy, and so
Speaker 2: that's really what I studied. I did work on green
Speaker 2: energy building design in school and looked at wind power
Speaker 2: systems and solar power systems and things like that. You know,
Speaker 2: that work has translated a little bit to what I
Speaker 2: do now because I still have a strong sustainability focus,
Speaker 2: but it's definitely not the true mechanical engineering side of things.
Speaker 1: So after Mariah graduated from Columbia, she said she was
Speaker 1: in rush to find a job and she went into
Speaker 1: engineering management, but didn't find it really had enough to
Speaker 1: do with her degree or what she loved in life.
Speaker 1: That's okay, as Rose Evelis said in the Futurology episode,
Speaker 1: the future isn't written. It just hasn't happened yet. It's
Speaker 1: okay to change course.
Speaker 2: If I realize, if I looked back, I probably should
Speaker 2: have taken like a solar installer tech course instead of
Speaker 2: going for a full engineering degree.
Speaker 3: But it was definitely, you know, part of.
Speaker 2: That journey in going to school being in New York City,
Speaker 2: being away from my home community and our foods, and
Speaker 2: struggling in New York City where you are supposed to
Speaker 2: be able to find any food you want to find
Speaker 2: the foods I wanted, and contrasting that to being back
Speaker 2: home during the summer on the reservation and having all
Speaker 2: of these ancestral foods around me, but of course being
Speaker 2: forty miles away from a grocery store and having to think, now,
Speaker 2: if I want to make a curry, what am I
Speaker 2: going What.
Speaker 3: Am I going to use for that?
Speaker 2: And I'm like, I'm going to make moose vindaloo because
Speaker 2: we have moose meat and the freezer and that's what
Speaker 2: I have access to right now.
Speaker 3: So it kind of became.
Speaker 2: This adventure in different foods, and it was that contrast
Speaker 2: in New York City life and reservation life that really
Speaker 2: led me to start re learning so much of my
Speaker 2: own indigenous food knowledge. So ultimately, i'd say that I
Speaker 2: am very very content with the field that I chose,
Speaker 2: though I'm fortunate that I do have that engineering background now,
Speaker 2: so that I have a better understanding of how all
Speaker 2: of those things work together from this really sciencey perspective.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering when you talk about ancestral foods. I'm sure
Speaker 1: this must come up a lot too, that it's based
Speaker 1: so regionally and by nation. I'm sure when you set
Speaker 1: out to learn more about it, did you start really
Speaker 1: really locally or did you have mentors or people that
Speaker 1: you looked to in other places.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question because there is this very
Speaker 2: regional focus in indigenous foods. You know, there are the
Speaker 2: foods that I have access to walking outside my door
Speaker 2: next to the mountains in Montana, and there are foods
Speaker 2: that folks in the Great Lakes region have access to,
Speaker 2: or folks in the Southwest, and they're all very different.
Speaker 2: But there has been a common thread of trade that
Speaker 2: has united us in the past. And now, of course
Speaker 2: there is a lot more interaction, easy interaction, whether it's
Speaker 2: through Facebook or conferences or however natives get together now
Speaker 2: that kind of continues and allows us to share our
Speaker 2: foods even when we are from different regions. So I
Speaker 2: was lucky that when I started, I got to know
Speaker 2: some of the foods around my area, both from botanists
Speaker 2: and elders working within our community. And then I also
Speaker 2: got to know folks that work with foods from different areas,
Speaker 2: and sometimes those were chefs, folks like Sean Sherman who
Speaker 2: runs the Sioux Chef Organization. Or even the first recipe
Speaker 2: I ever put out on in Digita Kitchen was a
Speaker 2: recipe that my friend Lakota Pachedley, who is citizen Potawatame,
Speaker 2: used to bring to Potlux in college, and so I
Speaker 2: messaged her and asked her to send me the recipe
Speaker 2: for it. And it was a wild rice, berry and
Speaker 2: maple syrup dish, and so she sent me a newspaper
Speaker 2: clipping from her home tribal paper.
Speaker 3: And so that's how we swap recipes.
Speaker 2: So even when it's not something that's specifically from our region,
Speaker 2: we have ways of interacting and learning more about those things.
Speaker 1: Was there anything when you were in New York you
Speaker 1: were really craving from home?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yes, wild game meet for sure. I definitely.
Speaker 2: After a fall break, I think I flew back to
Speaker 2: New York with frozen deer and elk packed in my
Speaker 2: carry on and like wrapped in clothing so that it
Speaker 2: wouldn't thaw. Out on like the flight back to LaGuardia,
Speaker 2: and I was like, well, if my check baggage gets lost,
Speaker 2: I don't want to have rotting meat in there. And
Speaker 2: so I was like, I'll just wrap this in here.
Speaker 2: In TSA is like what is this? And I'm like,
Speaker 2: this frozen meat. It's a solid, it's fine, and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess that doesn't violate any rules.
Speaker 1: It's got to be hard to have freezer space in
Speaker 1: New York too, you know, yeah, the chest freezers. There's
Speaker 1: not a lot of those in New York.
Speaker 3: No, not a lot of chest freezers in New York.
Speaker 2: And of course all I had access to was my
Speaker 2: little basic dorm mini fridge, but it did have a
Speaker 2: little freezer on top that was separate from the fridge part,
Speaker 2: so I had enough room to put my frozen game
Speaker 2: meat in there and thought out when I needed it.
Speaker 2: Native chefs always swap stories about TSA and the things
Speaker 2: that we've carried through TSA. And I know that every
Speaker 2: time anyone carries blue corn meal through TSA, it gets
Speaker 2: opened and it has to be you had to swipe
Speaker 2: your hands for bomb residue or something, and we're all like,
Speaker 2: it's just blue cornmeal mesquite flour.
Speaker 3: Same thing.
Speaker 2: One time I flew to New York City to do
Speaker 2: a cooking demonstration at a college and it was one
Speaker 2: of those fast turnaround flights, and so I had to
Speaker 2: fly in in the morning and fly out in the evening,
Speaker 2: and so all I had was my carry on and
Speaker 2: in it I had just packed an instapot that was
Speaker 2: filled with all the ingredients and tools and stuff that
Speaker 2: I needed. And so that's all I had on the
Speaker 2: plane with me. And I'm like, this is going to
Speaker 2: go through. It's going to set off the alarms. Guys.
Speaker 2: It's just an instapot. And so they, of course like
Speaker 2: had to open it and everything, and they're like, it's
Speaker 2: just filled with like my little cooking spoons and stuff
Speaker 2: in there. And I was like, see, it's fine. They're like,
Speaker 2: what are you doing?
Speaker 1: You know, when you're flying around or when you're coming
Speaker 1: up with recipe, are you really kind of basing it
Speaker 1: on rather than maybe hyperlocal? Are you looking for seasonal
Speaker 1: types of foods that might be traditional to whatever season
Speaker 1: is coming up, or how do you plan your the
Speaker 1: recipes that you're going to film and shoot and disseminate.
Speaker 2: That's a great question. Yeah, it's a combination of regional things,
Speaker 2: especially when I'm doing really old or ancestral recipes, things
Speaker 2: that would have been made very similar to the way
Speaker 2: that I'm showcasing them. And in that case, of course,
Speaker 2: you're looking for a whole bunch of ingredients that would
Speaker 2: have been found in the same area.
Speaker 1: And by the bye, we actually recorded this episode in
Speaker 1: late November, and to be honest, I didn't feel okay
Speaker 1: releasing this during Native American Heritage Month, when all the
Speaker 1: editors of all the magazines and all the producers of
Speaker 1: new segments like scramble to put up some relevant content
Speaker 1: as kind of a nod, and having one twelfth of
Speaker 1: the year to have your history recognized and your customs
Speaker 1: appreciated and your injustice is acknowledged seems kind of like
Speaker 1: more patronizing colonizer shit. So it's coming out in January,
Speaker 1: which is still winter food season and still a good
Speaker 1: time to care about Indigenous people. So, wow, look at
Speaker 1: this evergreen content.
Speaker 2: We're thinking of foods that are in season right now.
Speaker 2: So of course it is the time of winter squashes,
Speaker 2: and it's the time of pumpkins, and it's hunting season
Speaker 2: and there's all of these wonderful foods that are available now.
Speaker 2: It's after ricing, so people have fresh, parched wild rice,
Speaker 2: and it's fun to incorporate those all at the same time.
Speaker 2: Even though now, of course, we have ways of preserving foods.
Speaker 2: So I have picked berries from August, but I can
Speaker 2: pull them out at any time and use them for
Speaker 2: things because I have them in the freezer. I have
Speaker 2: them dehydrated or whatever that may be. But also I recognize,
Speaker 2: you know, Indigenous people are living in the twenty first
Speaker 2: century with everyone else, and we have always used the
Speaker 2: tools that we have access to. And right now, maybe
Speaker 2: that's a big chest freezer. Maybe that's an instapot, Maybe
Speaker 2: that is a coffee grinder that can blend sunflower seeds
Speaker 2: into flower at lightning speed ps.
Speaker 1: While we recorded this, I was like, oh, what recipe?
Speaker 1: Use is sunflower butter? So I didn't want to interrupt her,
Speaker 1: but if your stomach just gurgled in curiosity, I looked
Speaker 1: it up. She has a sunflower butter popcorn recipe that
Speaker 1: involves honey and maple syrup and the note that this
Speaker 1: stuff is addictive. I'm willing to take the risk. I'm
Speaker 1: going to link so much stuff on my website for
Speaker 1: this episode. It's going to get absurd how many links
Speaker 1: I mentioned are on my website.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Please do a tiny and perceptible butt dance every time.
Speaker 2: Whatever it is, we are able to recognize that ancestral
Speaker 2: wisdom and the indigenous brilliance of agriculture or harvesting or
Speaker 2: foraging or hunting or whatever it may be, along with
Speaker 2: our presence in this day.
Speaker 1: And you know, on the topic of agriculture and foraging
Speaker 1: in the work that you do to educate, how do
Speaker 1: you start to educate people about hunting and gathering and
Speaker 1: foraging versus land stewardship and where indigenous food sources really
Speaker 1: come from? How much of that would you say, do
Speaker 1: people really understand?
Speaker 2: That's a good question. When I talk to non native audiences,
Speaker 2: I think I approach things quite a bit differently than
Speaker 2: when I talk to predominantly Native audiences. And it is
Speaker 2: all based on setting this foundation. And so I start
Speaker 2: with a history lesson that talks about the really intentional
Speaker 2: work that has been done to dispossess Native people of
Speaker 2: our food systems, the targeting of indigenous food systems that
Speaker 2: has occurred, whether that be through intentional hunting of bison
Speaker 2: almost to extinction, whether that be through the burning of
Speaker 2: native crops and fields and storehouses of food, whether that's
Speaker 2: through the damming of rivers that stopped irrigation or stopped
Speaker 2: fish migrations, whatever that may be. We have to frame
Speaker 2: the work that we're doing with indigenous foods within this
Speaker 2: larger historical context, because I think part of the issue
Speaker 2: that we have when we talk about Native people in
Speaker 2: our food systems are all of these diet related illnesses,
Speaker 2: but it's rarely talked about in terms of this bigger context,
Speaker 2: which explains why we're at where we're at with diabetes. Right.
Speaker 3: There's been intentional.
Speaker 2: Work to shift our diets into these highly processed, subsidized
Speaker 2: food systems, and so the work to restore that information
Speaker 2: and restore our access to those places also has to
Speaker 2: be really intentional. And so I frame this within this
Speaker 2: why context, not just what we're doing, but why we're
Speaker 2: doing it, and reminding people that it's not just about,
Speaker 2: you know, trying to regain physical health, Like that's cool
Speaker 2: to not have diabetes that's harming your body, right, but
Speaker 2: it's really it's really cool to be able to look
Speaker 2: at ancestral wisdom and the ways in which our ancestors
Speaker 2: recognized that need to you know, really steward the land.
Speaker 2: This traditional land management that's been practiced, and I know
Speaker 2: a previous podcast episode talked about indigenous fire ecology and
Speaker 2: that as a tool of land management, and that intersects
Speaker 2: with food in so many ways. Blackfeet people, for example,
Speaker 2: traditionally practiced prairie burning that would not only clear off
Speaker 2: the old d eyegrass from the top of the prairies,
Speaker 2: but that blackened patch of grass would warm much faster
Speaker 2: in the springtime, would encourage news shoots of grass to
Speaker 2: grow and of course become a big like homing beacon
Speaker 2: for bison and other grazing ungulans on the prairies. But
Speaker 2: also those low intensity prairie fires helped certain seeds, like
Speaker 2: our prairie turnips Germany, because it broke their seed coat
Speaker 2: and that was enough to really help them grow and
Speaker 2: create this wonderful basically a prairie potato with a relatively
Speaker 2: low glycemic value.
Speaker 1: I had never even heard of a prairie potato, but
Speaker 1: apparently they're in the lagome family, and we're also called
Speaker 1: bread root and scurf pea also Topeka residents, capital City
Speaker 1: of Kansas. Topeka's thought to mean, in the language of
Speaker 1: the kinds of people, a good place to dig prairie turnips.
Speaker 1: So look around.
Speaker 2: And so it was through those land management techniques and
Speaker 2: that recognition of our place within this work that we
Speaker 2: could help recognize not only how our food takes care
Speaker 2: of us, but also how we can take care of
Speaker 2: the places where our food comes from.
Speaker 1: You mentioned a little bit about how the diets veered
Speaker 1: off based on what was available and cheaper, less healthy
Speaker 1: foods see Mariah's ted talk.
Speaker 4: Government rations turned into the commodity food programming, issuing a
Speaker 4: limited number of staples like flour, sugar, lard. Thus was
Speaker 4: born frybread delicious and absolutely devastating to Native people.
Speaker 1: Side note, frybread is this pillowy, oil bathed white flower
Speaker 1: comfort food, and it's used as a taco base or
Speaker 1: even as like this honey drizzled dessert. But it's been
Speaker 1: in the hot seat and was even the subject of
Speaker 1: a twenty twenty one New York Times article titled frybread
Speaker 1: is Beloved but also Divisive, which quoted Cherokee writer Art
Speaker 1: call Is saying frybread is quote kind of like what
Speaker 1: one of the Supreme Court justices said about obscenity. I
Speaker 1: can't define it, but I know it when I see it.
Speaker 1: So how does an expert feel about its place on
Speaker 1: the food landscape? People hear indigenous food and they think frybread?
Speaker 1: Does that just make you want to rage?
Speaker 2: Ever, to be honest, you know it's funny because friybread,
Speaker 2: of course, came from a period of time where Native
Speaker 2: people were dependent on government rations, which were like shelf
Speaker 2: stable processed boxes of food that were distributed to households,
Speaker 2: and they weren't things we recognized as food, so we
Speaker 2: made something out of them because survival, and that's what
Speaker 2: where fribred came from. So I will say that frybread
Speaker 2: is a traditional food in that it's part of our
Speaker 2: history and it got us through a period of time
Speaker 2: that would have otherwise met starvation. But there is a
Speaker 2: tendency of oppressed people to mistake our oppression for our culture,
Speaker 2: and I think that's kind of what people do with
Speaker 2: fribread or commodity cheese or whatever thing that has become
Speaker 2: part of these subsidized food systems. And so I don't
Speaker 2: I don't spend a lot of time trashing frybread. Right.
Speaker 2: People know that frybread is not good for you nutritionally, right,
Speaker 2: but people also have deep family connections to frybread. You know,
Speaker 2: don't attack freybread, you're attacking my grandma. Right. And So
Speaker 2: rather than focusing on all this negative stuff, which I
Speaker 2: feel like is what a lot of nutrition educators do
Speaker 2: within our communities, is they come and they say, don't
Speaker 2: eat that, it's bad for you, Like, yeah, we know that,
Speaker 2: but also this is what we know how to make.
Speaker 2: And so rather than doing all of that, we just
Speaker 2: focus on all of the resources that we do have.
Speaker 2: The things that we do have access to, whether it
Speaker 2: be in our grocery stores or in our communities, or
Speaker 2: or in the lands that we can forage. Are the
Speaker 2: things that we can grow in our soils, whatever it
Speaker 2: may be. Those are the things that I focus on
Speaker 2: and really tie it all back to the incredible wisdom
Speaker 2: that has put those things in place, that has helped
Speaker 2: us recognize. You know, corn corns edible, right, but the
Speaker 2: ways in which we eat corn now are not traditionally
Speaker 2: how they were eaten. Our ancestors recognized that corn had
Speaker 2: to be treated with this process of niche stimalization. Why
Speaker 2: is it next aumalization.
Speaker 1: It's called nixtimalization and it comes from the indigenous and
Speaker 1: water aportmenteau meaning lime ashes and tamol for corn dough.
Speaker 2: So nextimalization this process of treating corn with a highly
Speaker 2: alkaline solution that you make from adding wood ash to
Speaker 2: water and it chemically dissolves the hull of the corn
Speaker 2: and that transforms the bound n iosin into free niosin,
Speaker 2: and you have amazing indigenous chemistry happening, while also recognizing
Speaker 2: that you've now added way more nutritional value to the corn,
Speaker 2: and the wood ash has added calcium which is way
Speaker 2: more absorbable than the calcium and dairy for example, And
Speaker 2: all of that has taken generations of indigenous knowledge to
Speaker 2: put in place. And so I get to talk about
Speaker 2: all of this really cool stuff. And I really don't
Speaker 2: have time to trash frybread, But I mean, I think
Speaker 2: frybread like has its place in our culture because we
Speaker 2: can recognize it as something that helped us survive. It
Speaker 2: doesn't need to be put on a pedestal. It's kind
Speaker 2: of a trash food, but that's you know, there's also
Speaker 2: ways that we can reindigenize frybread, right, we can make
Speaker 2: our frybread using blue corn meal instead of white flour,
Speaker 2: and we can use you know, bison tallow as a
Speaker 2: frying medium, and we can add bison burger and make
Speaker 2: cool Indian tacos with these things, and we can we
Speaker 2: can change how we imagine these foods. It doesn't need
Speaker 2: to be like lard and dry milk and white flour
Speaker 2: and white sugar and you know, cooking oil. So there
Speaker 2: are ways that we can recognize that as part of
Speaker 2: our history, but also work to recall some of that
Speaker 2: knowledge that had been really intentionally taken from us.
Speaker 1: And when you are finding out about how food was
Speaker 1: processed and cooked and used, what kind of sources do
Speaker 1: you usually go for? Are you like pouring through biochemistry journals?
Speaker 1: And what is it like when you when you find
Speaker 1: out something new that you hadn't known before.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's it's funny because I'm of course, I'm living
Speaker 2: on the Blackfeet Reservation, so I have cultural connections here.
Speaker 2: I have indigenous botanists that are super informed and have
Speaker 2: a lot of information themselves. But I also I'm a
Speaker 2: graduate student and I can occasionally approach things from an
Speaker 2: academic side, and so I remember reading through old ethnobotany
Speaker 2: journals from folks that had studied with Blackfoot peoples up
Speaker 2: in Canada. I know it was really interesting because I
Speaker 2: was reading through and I found someone had written a
Speaker 2: note about Blackfoot peoples using choke cherry wood, like just
Speaker 2: the branches the twigs of chokecherry and putting them in
Speaker 2: a roast as it cooked, so that it would infuse
Speaker 2: it with flavor. It's kind of like people would put
Speaker 2: clothes in a ham or something. And I was like, wait,
Speaker 2: this is so cool. And you're taking a hardwood, a
Speaker 2: fruit wood, and you're infusing it as it's slow cooking.
Speaker 2: And I was like, it's basically a cross between clothes
Speaker 2: and a ham and smoking something with a hardwood. And
Speaker 2: I was like, this is amazing. I have to try this.
Speaker 2: But I had found it by digging through old journals
Speaker 2: from ethnographers and stuff that it lived with the Blackfoot
Speaker 2: for a couple of months. And I was like, this
Speaker 2: is crazy, because no, I hadn't heard that before. And
Speaker 2: so occasionally I get information like that. Sometimes I get
Speaker 2: information just by reaching out to Native chefs and asking questions,
Speaker 2: especially if it's from a community that I don't have
Speaker 2: knowledge of. So I've reached out to a Navajo chef
Speaker 2: friend of mine when asking about blue corn mush recipe,
Speaker 2: like how much wood ash, how much juniper ash are
Speaker 2: you actually supposed to add to? How much water, how
Speaker 2: much blue corn meal? You know, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I know the ingredients, I don't know the proportions.
Speaker 2: If you're talking with plant folks, they might say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: this plant is edible, great, what part of the plant?
Speaker 3: When do you harvest it?
Speaker 2: You know, Camus roots, for example, Camas bulbs are edible.
Speaker 5: What are these?
Speaker 1: Okay, I'd never heard of them, but they are plant
Speaker 1: friends in the asparagus family, and their flowers sometimes carpet
Speaker 1: whole ass beautiful meadows with these lilac or white or
Speaker 1: deep violet blooms, and then the root the bulb tastes
Speaker 1: like a freaking baked pear. So go find them just
Speaker 1: by blossom spotting, right.
Speaker 2: No, but it is more traditional for people to wait
Speaker 2: until after they've bloomed, which makes them a little bit
Speaker 2: harder to identify. And of course, none of the plant
Speaker 2: identification books are going to show you what the camus
Speaker 2: is looking like when it's not blooming, and then you
Speaker 2: also have to know what it could be mistaken as,
Speaker 2: like death camus, which is a white flower versus a
Speaker 2: blue flower. But if they're not blooming when you're harvesting them,
Speaker 2: that's hard to tell.
Speaker 3: And then you have to know, of course, how to
Speaker 3: cook it.
Speaker 2: And for camas, it's really really high in inulin, which
Speaker 2: is the same thing that's in Jerusalem artichokes or sun chokes.
Speaker 1: Okay, Inulin is a fiber and I'm going to read
Speaker 1: between her lines here and break the windy news. She's
Speaker 1: talking farts people. Delicious, creamy sweet inulin has a price,
Speaker 1: and it's ripping hot once for days.
Speaker 2: And so you have to basically slow cook these or
Speaker 2: roast these for an extended amount of time, and traditionally
Speaker 2: that was done in a big pit underground and they'd
Speaker 2: be roasted for up to forty eight hours until basically
Speaker 2: the sugars are caramelizing and all the inulin's been processed
Speaker 2: down so your body can digest it.
Speaker 3: That's not something that it says.
Speaker 2: If you're like camus, bulbs are edible, right, So all
Speaker 2: of that information has to go along with it. Or
Speaker 2: else the resource is incomplete. You know, just knowing that
Speaker 2: something is edible doesn't necessarily help a resource all the time,
Speaker 2: because sometimes it can be dangerous. So, for example, choke
Speaker 2: cherries are edible, but the pits and choke cherries contain cyanide.
Speaker 2: But the pits were traditionally eaten by Blackfeet and Lakota
Speaker 2: and other people that have traditionally eat and choke cherries.
Speaker 2: Because we took choke cherries smashed them with a rock
Speaker 2: in their entirety into little choke cherry pancakes. Right, We
Speaker 2: basically made little fruit patties, and then we dried them
Speaker 2: until they were dehydrated. And then now they're dried out,
Speaker 2: they're very packable. They keep for a long time. But
Speaker 2: that drying process neutralizes the cyanide in them.
Speaker 1: So you can eat the.
Speaker 2: Pits because now they've been smashed into oblivion. And also
Speaker 2: the cyanide is not going to harm you. Wow, And
Speaker 2: some people will be like, oh, the Indians are magically
Speaker 2: immune to cyanide.
Speaker 3: Not quite, but it's just it's the preparation method.
Speaker 2: And otherwise, if you make choke cherry syrup, right, you
Speaker 2: have to remove the pits, so or I mean the
Speaker 2: cooking process will also neutralize the cyanide, like it doesn't elderberries, but.
Speaker 3: Just the fun things that go along with knowing something's edible.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, It's like saying in New York, like how do
Speaker 1: you get there? You take the subway and you're like, well,
Speaker 1: which direction and what train and where I can line?
Speaker 3: Also, why is this line always closed?
Speaker 1: What about some some myths that you commonly encounter that
Speaker 1: you love to bust, like some flim flam that native
Speaker 1: folks or non native folks think about indigenous cooking.
Speaker 2: That's a great question, thank you. I need to think
Speaker 2: about that one.
Speaker 1: Is it flim flam that the North American indigenous diet
Speaker 1: is mostly acorns? It's not all acorns?
Speaker 3: Maybe acorns acorns are all edible?
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna say, I'm I don't come from I
Speaker 2: don't come from any acorn eating people. That sounds weird, Okay.
Speaker 1: So I grew up in California and its golden foothills
Speaker 1: are studded with oak trees. I love them so much.
Speaker 1: I grew up collecting acorns for school projects. So I
Speaker 1: thought it was a national teaching that indigenous foods were
Speaker 1: all acorn based, so that must be a myth. Turns
Speaker 1: out it's incredibly regional. Of course, like Durward, did I
Speaker 1: embarrass myself? Sure a little bit. So go text your
Speaker 1: crush cut some banks ask the questions to the stuff
Speaker 1: you don't know, because we're all just going to turn
Speaker 1: into ashes one day, or fungus or if we're lucky,
Speaker 1: an acorn.
Speaker 2: I need to get my friends in northern California slash
Speaker 2: southern Oregon to send me some acorns because I have
Speaker 2: been meaning to do recipes with acorns, because the process
Speaker 2: of actually making acorns edible or delicious is kind of complicated.
Speaker 2: Has really high tan, and so you have to leach
Speaker 2: it out, and there's like a hot leeching process versus
Speaker 2: a cold leeching process, and there's a whole way of
Speaker 2: getting the tannins out so that your acorns taste like
Speaker 2: flour instead of like the bitterest thing on earth. And
Speaker 2: of course different acorns have different flavor profiles. But I
Speaker 2: have a friend that does indigenous food work in northern California,
Speaker 2: and she has a recipe for I think she calls
Speaker 2: them Indian whoopie pies. But there are these whoopie pies
Speaker 2: that are made with acorn flour because that is a
Speaker 2: traditional food for her people.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, okay, I searched around. I think she's talking
Speaker 1: about the very cool Sarah Calvosa Olson's squash whoopie pies
Speaker 1: with maple cream, which are made with acorn flour. Sarah
Speaker 1: has a ton of great recipes, including things like deer
Speaker 1: stew and beet pickled quail eggs acorn bread. So for
Speaker 1: some beautiful photos and recipes, you can follow Sarah on
Speaker 1: Instagram at the Fry Bread Riot. It's a great name. Also,
Speaker 1: Sarah runs acorn leeching workshops, and her website says this
Speaker 1: workshop is free to Native people's and three hundred dollars
Speaker 1: for non natives, which, as a non native, I have
Speaker 1: to be honest and admit I think it's pretty awesome,
Speaker 1: so well done.
Speaker 2: But it's funny because ironically, of all the foods I've
Speaker 2: worked with, I've never done anything with acorns.
Speaker 3: And I have an elder that gave me a.
Speaker 2: Recipe for using acorns and making an acorn soup and
Speaker 2: I'm supposed to film it and I haven't done it
Speaker 2: yet because I need to get my hands on some acorns.
Speaker 1: So I've got I have an oak tree in my backyard.
Speaker 1: If you need me to send you any let me.
Speaker 3: Know, I'd be forever grateful. Yes, I have a priority
Speaker 3: box full acorns.
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've got one in my backyard and one down
Speaker 1: the street that I've never seen it have so many acorns.
Speaker 1: But I think that's in California, maybe a part of
Speaker 1: one class that's just like acorns, and then that's pretty
Speaker 1: much all we get to.
Speaker 2: That's really interesting to me because I think that obviously
Speaker 2: in Montana, so much of our education is buffalo bison. Right.
Speaker 2: I just finished helping write the Harvest of the Month
Speaker 2: material for Montana Farm to School to add bison as
Speaker 2: one of the foods, and so of course it's all
Speaker 2: about bison as an original food, and we really wanted
Speaker 2: to approach it and make sure that this material that
Speaker 2: was going out to Montana schools was also culturally appropriate,
Speaker 2: and so we're adding bison to that material. But of
Speaker 2: course it's all about bison, and then all the other
Speaker 2: things that bison was used for besides just food, you know,
Speaker 2: of course, clothing, shelter, tools, all of these other things.
Speaker 1: Again, see that bisonology up, which will be linked on
Speaker 1: the episode page. In the show notes do about dance.
Speaker 2: And then on the East Coast where my partner's from.
Speaker 2: He's hodnashone Onondaga from New York, and so a lot
Speaker 2: of their discussions about indigenous food are about three sisters,
Speaker 2: which is of course corn beans and squash, coming from
Speaker 2: a very different agricultural community, which is similar to how
Speaker 2: my mom's people, Cherokee traditionally grew food as well, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of corn beans and squash, and then up
Speaker 2: in the Great Lakes region it's probably all focused about
Speaker 2: wild rice.
Speaker 3: And rice and culture.
Speaker 2: And then you know, down in the Southwest you get
Speaker 2: more corn beans and squash, but also there's sunflowers all
Speaker 2: over that people have incorporated as and bread specifically to
Speaker 2: have very large edible seeds, and cactuses. I like, cactuses
Speaker 2: don't get talked a lot about unless you're in Mexico,
Speaker 2: in which case everyone's like, oh yeah, I no pals.
Speaker 2: But then we have prickly pear cacti in Montana and
Speaker 2: those produce the same edible fruit, and that is a
Speaker 2: treat for black Feet people. But I've never heard that
Speaker 2: talked about in our school system, for example, as its
Speaker 2: traditional food. Besides when I show up and talk about
Speaker 2: eating cactuses with the kids. But yeah, that's interesting because
Speaker 2: it's so it's so regional, and that's the fun part
Speaker 2: of it. But there's also been so much ancestral trade
Speaker 2: that's taken place, and there are anthropologists that are brilliant
Speaker 2: that have mapped out traditional trade routes based on archaeological fines.
Speaker 2: They know, you know, how did this food get in
Speaker 2: this place? Because the climate would have made it impossible
Speaker 2: to grow. How did they get it? And so of
Speaker 2: course native people used drying as our primary preservation technique.
Speaker 1: So drying, Mariah says, made it possible for different foods
Speaker 1: and resources to be carried long distances and then traded.
Speaker 1: And there's a great article in Indian Country Today that
Speaker 1: states that quote, much of California's highway and thoroughfare system
Speaker 1: dates back to before European contact, and they were indigenous
Speaker 1: routes long before settlers arrived. That's true for so many
Speaker 1: roots in colonized lands. And the paper also quotes a
Speaker 1: study in the journal American Anthropologist that traces trade connections
Speaker 1: across the whole continent and they dispersed California shells and oil,
Speaker 1: tar and obsidian to the east, while textiles and pottery
Speaker 1: came west, it says, and on other continents in Australia
Speaker 1: so called bush food things like nuts and grasses and
Speaker 1: kangaroo meat, turtles, EMUs, fruits and nuts. Those have become
Speaker 1: gourmet items. But Australian historians Echoa Maria is saying and
Speaker 1: that trade among indigenous folks was widespread and still is,
Speaker 1: just in case anyone ever doubted that.
Speaker 2: I don't know if people have a lot of misconceptions
Speaker 2: about native food. I think probably most people think potatoes
Speaker 2: came from Ireland, for example, and that's a big South
Speaker 2: American indigenous food. Regardless of your type of potatoes. The
Speaker 2: Incan Empire had a massive agricultural knowledge about potatoes, and
Speaker 2: there were and still are, thousands of varieties of potatoes. Tomatoes,
Speaker 2: of course, aren't indigenous food. Italians didn't have tomatoes until
Speaker 2: they were traded back to Italy with Columbus and future
Speaker 2: generations of folks. I can make spaghetti, you know.
Speaker 1: For a long time, just the smell of marinera sauce
Speaker 1: reminded me of my Italian grandparents who frankly were assholes.
Speaker 1: So given that food is loaded with so much emotion,
Speaker 1: I wondered if Mariah notices the opposite effect, like if
Speaker 1: this work makes her more excited about the things that
Speaker 1: she's eating.
Speaker 2: It's made me more conscious of the things that I'm
Speaker 2: eating and trying to think about the ways in which
Speaker 2: I can, you know, put good things into my body,
Speaker 2: whether those be from the land, or whether those be
Speaker 2: from farmers in my area, or from fish out of
Speaker 2: the lake, or whatever it may be. And so that
Speaker 2: gets me excited too. I have to be careful because
Speaker 2: I talk about food all the time and good choices,
Speaker 2: but also I, you know, one shouldn't feel guilty about eating.
Speaker 2: So that is I think something to just be aware
Speaker 2: of when approaching anything with food is that you should
Speaker 2: be excited about the foods that you're eating, and you
Speaker 2: should be eating them because they make you happy. And
Speaker 2: eating traditional foods and foods that come from the area
Speaker 2: and I get from other native harvesters and producers, those
Speaker 2: things make me happy. And I'm not doing that to
Speaker 2: try to feel skinny, or to try to you know,
Speaker 2: look a certain way or any of that. So I
Speaker 2: think that's important to emphasize too, just because so much
Speaker 2: of our society is caught up in diet culture and
Speaker 2: the obsession with food, and I think that's something that
Speaker 2: I want to be very careful to avoid. I'm trying
Speaker 2: to eat for health and wellness, but also not just
Speaker 2: for myself, for my community and for the ecosystem around me.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if this had ever happened to you
Speaker 1: in the past. But I'll get in ruts where I'll
Speaker 1: just maybe eat whatever is around or available, or I
Speaker 1: won't spend much time thinking about what I'm eating. But
Speaker 1: I get so much more excited when I actually am
Speaker 1: doing something intentionally that I want to eat, that I'm
Speaker 1: excited to eat, that I'm learning about, that has more
Speaker 1: value to me, you know. I think context can be
Speaker 1: so important when you're excited about what you're eating. Is
Speaker 1: a pot just like I gotta do, I gotta eat something,
Speaker 1: and whatever's easiest, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for sure?
Speaker 2: And I think you know, I get ideas all the
Speaker 2: time about things that I want to try.
Speaker 3: I keep thinking that now that the water is mostly out.
Speaker 2: Of the wood for the year, it's transitioning into winter,
Speaker 2: I want to go harvest some wood and specifically serviceberry
Speaker 2: wood and cut it into wood chips and let those
Speaker 2: dry and then put them in the smoker and see
Speaker 2: if we can make like sarvicebury smoked elk or starvesberry
Speaker 2: smoked fish or something like that, and try smoking with
Speaker 2: woodchips that I make myself. I think that would be
Speaker 2: super cool. So that excites me. I'm excited about trying
Speaker 2: traditional drying methods for preserving squash, about all of these
Speaker 2: different things. So I get to approach these from a fun,
Speaker 2: sciencey perspective, but also, you know, with that kind of
Speaker 2: culinary side where I'm trying to make things delicious too.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not just about the science and about
Speaker 2: making things food safe, but also it's all of these
Speaker 2: other connections that go along with it, and ultimately I
Speaker 2: just want to eat delicious food at the end of
Speaker 2: the day too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, So we have questions from listeners if I
Speaker 1: may ask them, yes, okay, But before we do, we
Speaker 1: always shout out a cause of the ologists choosing And
Speaker 1: this is the weirdest one we've ever done. It's this
Speaker 1: biggest single donation in ologies history for Fast Blackfeet. It's
Speaker 1: food access and Sustainability Team, which is a group of
Speaker 1: community leaders and health professionals and educators within the Blackfeet
Speaker 1: Nation who are dedicated to identifying food and security in
Speaker 1: their community, offering effective solutions related to access to healthy
Speaker 1: food and nutrition, education, and addressing food sovereignty. And so
Speaker 1: this week the donation went specifically to them. Right after
Speaker 1: I hit stop on the record button, I asked mar Oh,
Speaker 1: where do you want the donation to go? And she
Speaker 1: mentioned this organization because she was on the board and
Speaker 1: she was helping arrange to buy and harvest a bison
Speaker 1: to feed families via the food pantry and to help
Speaker 1: other indigenous folks get to know quality bison meat. And
Speaker 1: I said, oh, that's great. My cousins I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: have a bison ranch up there, and she asked their
Speaker 1: names and it turned out she had already arranged to
Speaker 1: buy a bison from their herd. What what are the
Speaker 1: fucking kids, guys. I'm so sad. I stopped recording because
Speaker 1: it was such a fun and sweet and weird moment.
Speaker 1: Right at the end, I was like, you're getting a
Speaker 1: bison from Boyd. So I hopped on the phone with
Speaker 1: my cousin Boyd do you think they'll get to do
Speaker 1: any high tanning at all with it?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: I think so? Yes.
Speaker 1: Is that part of the process for some folks who
Speaker 1: come up to the ranch they kind of harvest them themselves.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, that's that's normally what we do. But we
Speaker 6: have a local guy that started a packing house. Oh
Speaker 6: she's iad it about three or four years ago, but
Speaker 6: she just finally getting to the point where she's got
Speaker 6: all of her equipment and everything. Looks like she can
Speaker 6: probably process oh maybe six seven animals a week. Oh wow,
Speaker 6: So that's helped a little.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What's that one called.
Speaker 6: CNC Meats in Duck Lake.
Speaker 1: Bab Oh cool.
Speaker 6: She's got two of our buffalo there right now and
Speaker 6: two stairs.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 6: So we kind of filled her up for there couple
Speaker 6: of weeks. But yeah, so that's kind.
Speaker 1: Of helped the Do you have any recipes that Lila's
Speaker 1: gotten from previous generations that you cook with.
Speaker 6: We mostly just eat steaks and burgers, nothing really fancy.
Speaker 1: Mariah's got a great one where she makes lasagna with
Speaker 1: like a butternut squash as the noodles and then layers it.
Speaker 1: It looks good. I want to make that, she told
Speaker 1: me about it. I was like, whoo, anyway, we did
Speaker 1: some number crunching and because of patrons and how great
Speaker 1: y'all are as an audience and the sponsors of the show,
Speaker 1: we were able to cover the cost of a whole
Speaker 1: bison and processing. So I got to call Marian back
Speaker 1: and tell her because I was so excited, and I
Speaker 1: emailed mackenzie if fast to arrange payment to them, and
Speaker 1: it turns out she's an ologite, so that was fun too.
Speaker 1: Hi everyone there, and she just let me know. McKenzie
Speaker 1: did that their planned harvest went well in December and
Speaker 1: that their local butcher, Christina Flemont, was there teaching folks
Speaker 1: about the harvest. And Mackenzie says that that meat fed
Speaker 1: around one hundred and twenty families and the hide will
Speaker 1: be tanned and auctioned to go back into the Kiddy
Speaker 1: with the ologies donation for the next bison, and then
Speaker 1: both hides will be auctioned off, she wrote me, and
Speaker 1: will hopefully fund another bison and keep the cycle going.
Speaker 1: So that is the story of this week's donation, which
Speaker 1: is like so exciting. I'm so stoked that this podcast
Speaker 1: in the community folks were able to make that possible,
Speaker 1: along with sponsors of the show who I genuinely like,
Speaker 1: and then we take some of that money and we
Speaker 1: give away. Okay, your questions. I went back in my
Speaker 1: Questions doc to see who else asked this fun fungus question,
Speaker 1: and it turns out only one of you, dirty birds did.
Speaker 1: Dirty Dan wants to know what role do mushrooms play
Speaker 1: typically in indigenous foods.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's such a good question. It depends so much regionally,
Speaker 2: but here it's interesting because you know, as I said,
Speaker 2: I'm up in Montana, and so we have really fortunately
Speaker 2: have morels that grow, especially in our old burnt forests,
Speaker 2: and so that's a really fun activity for folks to
Speaker 2: go out and do, is harvest morels a few years
Speaker 2: after fires come through. But we also have puffballs, and
Speaker 2: puffballs are of course, these big mushrooms that grow mostly
Speaker 2: out on the prairies. But there is actually a story
Speaker 2: that goes back that talks about a earth woman marrying
Speaker 2: a sky man and when she came back down to
Speaker 2: Earth and gave birth, there was a rule that her
Speaker 2: baby wasn't supposed to touch the ground for five days,
Speaker 2: and on the fifth day, his grandma, the girl's mother,
Speaker 2: was watching the baby, and she wasn't really watching him
Speaker 2: that well. And so the mom came back into the
Speaker 2: lodge and was looking for her baby, and she's, oh,
Speaker 2: he's under that blanket, and she lifted up the blanket
Speaker 2: and instead of a baby being there, it was a puffball,
Speaker 2: and the baby had.
Speaker 3: Been turned into a puffball. And that's how we got puffballs.
Speaker 2: And so now on some black Feet painted lodge designs,
Speaker 2: you'll see these circles, and they're bright white circles on
Speaker 2: a colorful background and real quick.
Speaker 1: So a lodge is what most non natives generally see
Speaker 1: and call a tepee, although a teepee is a word
Speaker 1: from a different nation the Dakota folks. Now in Blackfeet
Speaker 1: language it would be called a natali or a lodge.
Speaker 1: But some individuals designs look like a band along the
Speaker 1: bottom with this graphic row of big pulka dots.
Speaker 2: But they're puffballs. They're mushrooms, is what they represent. And
Speaker 2: of course there's so many other indigenous peoples with different
Speaker 2: types of mushrooms, but we definitely have recognized mushrooms as
Speaker 2: part of traditional diets. I was just reading a Cherokee
Speaker 2: story from my mom's people. The other day about a
Speaker 2: type of mushroom and our Cherokee stories tell us they say,
Speaker 2: once you see the mushroom, it will stop growing, but
Speaker 2: if you put a stick through it, then it will
Speaker 2: keep growing. But it was interesting because I was reading
Speaker 2: this translation of this Cherokee text and they also said,
Speaker 2: in other words, if you see a mushroom with a
Speaker 2: stick through it, it means it's already been claimed and
Speaker 2: you have to leave it alone.
Speaker 3: But if it doesn't have a stick through it.
Speaker 2: Then you can claim it and you can come back
Speaker 2: when it's ready to harvest.
Speaker 3: Okay, I see what you did there.
Speaker 1: It's kind of just like putting a coaster on your beer,
Speaker 1: like beer bee.
Speaker 5: Thanks.
Speaker 2: And so I was like, oh, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: But it's funny because they translated what that principle was.
Speaker 2: It was like, we don't actually think the mushroom's going
Speaker 2: to stop growing. Yeah, this is just how you claim it.
Speaker 2: But like that's what the story is and that's why
Speaker 2: it relates.
Speaker 3: And so it's cool. But it's a delicacy.
Speaker 2: And then they talked about how to cook it up,
Speaker 2: and you know, fry it and a little bit of
Speaker 2: animal fat and bread it with a little bit of
Speaker 2: corn meal or something. So there's definitely traditional stories with fungi.
Speaker 1: That's wonderful to think of paintings of just big puffballs.
Speaker 1: They're so giant.
Speaker 3: It was a coloring book too.
Speaker 2: It was a children's coloring book that I was reading
Speaker 2: it in and that was written in the Cherokee language,
Speaker 2: and I was like reading these translations and I was like,
Speaker 2: this is amazing, because of course there's like a black
Speaker 2: and white sketch for children to color and that's like
Speaker 2: this mushroom and it looks like a chicken of the woods.
Speaker 2: But I'm not really sure. I need to find out
Speaker 2: what the actual scientific name is of this mushroom because
Speaker 2: it just had the chair keyword for it. But I
Speaker 2: had this big stick through it and I was like,
Speaker 2: this was great, okay.
Speaker 1: Ps. I asked Maria later, and it's the Cherokee Nation
Speaker 1: Education coloring book and it's called Cherokee First, and yes,
Speaker 1: I will link that on my website. Also, side note,
Speaker 1: a lot of Indigenous nations names were given to them
Speaker 1: by other people kind of like gossiping about them, and
Speaker 1: then that name stuck. So if you're like, wait, why
Speaker 1: have I never heard of the hot NASANI or the
Speaker 1: DNA before well, your grade school textbooks maybe used Iroquois
Speaker 1: or Navajo respectively, or rather irrespectively, because a lot of
Speaker 1: times they were like, what'd you call us? But there
Speaker 1: are five hundred and seventy three tribes within the US,
Speaker 1: each with their own history and traditions and culture and cooking.
Speaker 1: I wish this episode were five hundred and seventy three
Speaker 1: hours long, but we gotta get cracking.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So a few patrons, including Alex Cows and beloved longtime
Speaker 1: question asker Kelly Rockingon, had healthy food questions, but one
Speaker 1: patron asked more specifically about symbiosis with your simmering intestines.
Speaker 1: One listener, Earl Shaul Peleg, had a great question, has
Speaker 1: there been any research on indigenous diet in relation to
Speaker 1: gut health and bioinformatics and does indigenous diet help improve
Speaker 1: gut health and thus indirectly help with mental health.
Speaker 2: That's a great question. So yeah, there's I mean, there's
Speaker 2: been a lot of research that talks more about indigenous
Speaker 2: diets on glycemic spikes and things like that. Gut health
Speaker 2: is still not talked about as much as it should be,
Speaker 2: but I think when we look at the foods that
Speaker 2: comprise indigenous diets, they are predominantly anti inflammatory foods. You're
Speaker 2: looking at a lot of of course, fresh foods. There's
Speaker 2: very few grains. You're not going to see any wheat,
Speaker 2: you're not going to see any rice. Wild rice is
Speaker 2: actually a grass seed that's not related to other rice,
Speaker 2: if you were wondering. But it's interesting because of course
Speaker 2: there's a lot of meats and proteins with relatively low
Speaker 2: ratios of omega sixes. And so when you look at
Speaker 2: like even bison versus beef, for example, the bison meat
Speaker 2: is of course lower in fat. Even when you compare
Speaker 2: grain fed bison versus grass fed beef, you still have
Speaker 2: lower fats within the bison, but also your omega three
Speaker 2: to omega six ratios are much higher. So you're getting
Speaker 2: a lot of those really good fats with your wild
Speaker 2: game meat, with your bison, and that helped people's diets.
Speaker 2: It helped brain health, it helped of course inflammation, all
Speaker 2: of these things that go into that. And then of
Speaker 2: course we can look at your basic vitamins that people
Speaker 2: are consuming, because even when folks were eating predominantly dried foods,
Speaker 2: so you have things like rose hips which have incredibly
Speaker 2: high rates of vitamin C, same for any type of
Speaker 2: pine noodle tea. Even prairie turnips have high rates of
Speaker 2: vitamin C. So there's documentation long before people knew what
Speaker 2: vitamin C was or had any cures for scurvy. One
Speaker 2: hundred years before the cure for scurvy was documented, there
Speaker 2: actually was a written account of someone interacting with native
Speaker 2: folks who told them to drink pine noodle tea and
Speaker 2: cured they's scurvy, but no one acknowledged it until one
Speaker 2: hundred years later. Just interesting things like that. So none
Speaker 2: of that really relates to gut health explicitly, but there
Speaker 2: is a lot of research about that type of anti
Speaker 2: inflammatory diet, and you know, eating fresh foods, they're avoiding
Speaker 2: preservatives things like that, and you're sticking to drying or
Speaker 2: freezing is your predominant method of preservation. So that's all
Speaker 2: really good. But I think the.
Speaker 3: Researcher that's probably done the most is Value Secret. She
Speaker 3: has a whole.
Speaker 2: Unit about healthy beverage choices and relating that it's of
Speaker 2: course related to diabetes in many cases, but she's actually
Speaker 2: done some work on actual nutritional analysis specifically for folks
Speaker 2: within her community around the Pacific Northwest. But she works
Speaker 2: with a Native American Agricultural fund and she just came
Speaker 2: out with her own cookbooks, so she's done some of
Speaker 2: the best actual research and numbers documentation that I've seen.
Speaker 1: Oh hello, Valerie also had a ted X talk.
Speaker 7: My name is Valerie Seagrist, and I'm a member of
Speaker 7: the Muckleshute Indian tribe. I work as a community nutritionist
Speaker 7: and a Native foods educator, and for the past several
Speaker 7: years have coordinated the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project.
Speaker 1: And as long as I was just googling until my
Speaker 1: nails broke. Another great voice in indigenous health is a
Speaker 1: baky Beck, who is a Saint Louis based writer and
Speaker 1: a public health researcher, and I will link her socials
Speaker 1: and her work alongside Valeries on my website, also alongside
Speaker 1: the work of Sean scherm Aka, the SIU chef who
Speaker 1: co founded the North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems with
Speaker 1: Dana Thompson. It's just put on deodorant, get excited. There's
Speaker 1: a link party in the show notes.
Speaker 2: But more and more folks are doing the work every day,
Speaker 2: and it's really really cool to see that. I also,
Speaker 2: just on a side note, the Decolonizing Diet Project out
Speaker 2: of Northern Michigan University, which was ran by Professor Marty
Speaker 2: Reinhardt there actually did a project where folks switched their
Speaker 2: diets over to indigenous foods from the region. Not all
Speaker 2: the participants were Native, but everyone switched their diets to
Speaker 2: foods that would have been found in the Great Lakes
Speaker 2: region prior to colonization. And I think they did an
Speaker 2: entire year of this. They have a cookbook now that's
Speaker 2: come out. It's you can buy it through the Northern
Speaker 2: Michigan University bookstore.
Speaker 1: So it's called the Decolonizing Diet Project Cookbook, and I'm
Speaker 1: linking to that study on my site of course. Also
Speaker 1: the Decolonizing Diet Project just yesterday Monday, January twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: posted that the National Congress of American Indians is seeking
Speaker 1: applicants for its Tribal Food Sovereignty Advancement Initiatives fellowship. They're
Speaker 1: looking for applicants. Of course, I'm going to put the
Speaker 1: link on my website. Move your bottoms. So it's a
Speaker 1: six month paid position for entry level college graduates. Amazing
Speaker 1: link of my website. They just posted this yesterday. Oh okay.
Speaker 1: So back to Martin's work and the Decolonizing Diet Project, and.
Speaker 2: Part of it's just recipes that they were experimenting with
Speaker 2: and trying to figure out what they were going to
Speaker 2: eat for a year. But it was interesting because they
Speaker 2: did the documentation on how their bodies felt and their
Speaker 2: vitals over that period of time and how that affected
Speaker 2: their own health. So that's again indigenous foods from the
Speaker 2: Great Lakes region. So they had corn bands, squash, hayl
Speaker 2: on nuts, black waalnuts, hickory nuts, they had turkey, pumpkin seeds.
Speaker 2: I remember my friend who is Marty Reinhart's daughter, Dobby,
Speaker 2: was telling me about having to eat some pizza that
Speaker 2: had like turkey and pumpkin on it or something, and
Speaker 2: it was like, but there was no cheese on it,
Speaker 2: of course, and so she was like, that was not
Speaker 2: a good pizza. Remember eat that. I remember she did
Speaker 2: not recommend the recipe, but they did have a ton
Speaker 2: of really cool recipes in that book and they did
Speaker 2: the documentation. So the Decolonizing Diet Project has also put
Speaker 2: that in place as an actual research project. And then
Speaker 2: in my home community on Blackfeet, they will be doing
Speaker 2: a similar type of research project where they have participants
Speaker 2: switched to Blackfeet diets and provide them with food and
Speaker 2: track their vitals over the course of I think ninety days.
Speaker 2: I think it's a three month program. So there are
Speaker 2: things happening. There are definitely research projects that are taking place.
Speaker 2: And also it's like, how do we prove to the
Speaker 2: IRB that this is totally fine and people are allowed
Speaker 2: to eat indigenous foods?
Speaker 1: Hey, hey, okay, the IRB Institutional Review Board under the FDA,
Speaker 1: they just need to make sure it's okay to eat
Speaker 1: a whole food s based diet, all right, got to
Speaker 1: be strict about it. And I looked around for this
Speaker 1: upcoming study and I reached out to a Bocky back
Speaker 1: and she pointed me to the Pagani Lodge Health Institute,
Speaker 1: which is run by Montana State University and Blackfeet member
Speaker 1: Kim Paul, who's done a ton of research on food systems.
Speaker 1: I'm going to link researchers, of course, on my website.
Speaker 1: And if you're like less research more foods, please well.
Speaker 1: Non Indigenous patrons had some questions. Alice Hickman, Aliv Conchetti,
Speaker 1: Gibson Alley Vessels, and Ryan McCullough wants to know, how
Speaker 1: can we make sure that we're buying that when we're
Speaker 1: buying indigenous ingredients and food, that investments are getting back
Speaker 1: to Native communities.
Speaker 2: So fur folks that are interested in buying native foods
Speaker 2: from Native producers, look up the American Indian Foods Program
Speaker 2: through the Intertribal Agricultural Council. They work with a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of Native producers across the entire United States and
Speaker 2: they partner. They work with really small producers that don't
Speaker 2: even have their own websites, so it's really cool because
Speaker 2: they help the market and sell their foods. Sometimes those
Speaker 2: are fish harvesters, Sometimes those are folks making traditional teas.
Speaker 2: Sometimes those are wild rice harvesters, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of really great producers through that program.
Speaker 2: And if you're interested in buying foods, especially really really
Speaker 2: traditional foods like wild rice. For example, when you want
Speaker 2: to make sure you're buying hand harvested, wood parched wild
Speaker 2: rice from Native communities rather than the commercialized version that
Speaker 2: looks black, you probably find it at your local health
Speaker 2: food store. We call that driveway rice because the only
Speaker 2: thing it's good for is paving your driveway. But yeah,
Speaker 2: there are definitely ways of supporting native producers. So check
Speaker 2: out the American Indian Foods Program, and I think that's
Speaker 2: a great resource.
Speaker 1: So the American Indian Foods Program is a platform for
Speaker 1: American Indian food businesses to showcase their products, show people
Speaker 1: what they've got. They also have some of Maria's recipes up,
Speaker 1: including an instapot or pressure cooker, wild rice dish, and
Speaker 1: just shout out to Native listeners Seagueny Dana, who asked,
Speaker 1: how do I cook wild rice?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 1: I like it. When I've tried it in the past,
Speaker 1: the taste was overpowering, So do I need to cook
Speaker 1: it for longer or overcompensate with other flavors? So, Seguenny,
Speaker 1: you might want to try Mariah's recipe with temperi beans
Speaker 1: and cedar, smoked salt and some elk if you've got
Speaker 1: it or want it. So those recipes and resources are
Speaker 1: up at Indianagfoods dot org, which yes linked in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Do you need more recipes, like a book
Speaker 1: of them? So, patrons Mackenzie, Sere, Katie Pinnett, Rosaria Nira
Speaker 1: and R. J. Doytsch, who's a member of the Oligites
Speaker 1: who Cook Facebook group, wanted to know any cookbooks that
Speaker 1: you would recommend.
Speaker 2: Oh, there's so many good cookbooks right now. I mentioned
Speaker 2: Valerie Seacrest's cookbook. The Sioux Chef came out with a
Speaker 2: cookbook a few years ago that's still an awesome one.
Speaker 2: It's really I mean beautifully plated dishes.
Speaker 3: And I think that one won a James Beard Award.
Speaker 1: Okay, I did fact check this and Sean Sherman aka
Speaker 1: The Sioux Chef did not win a James Beard Award.
Speaker 1: He won two, two of them, two James Beard Awards.
Speaker 1: So in twenty eighteen, The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen Cookbook
Speaker 1: won the James Beard Award for Best Book in the
Speaker 1: American category overall, which is giant, big, huge, big deal.
Speaker 1: And then in twenty nineteen, Sean won the twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: Leadership Award. So yes, look for his book, The Sioux
Speaker 1: Chef's Indigenous Kitchen. Shawn's nonprofit called North American Traditional Food
Speaker 1: Systems and the Indigenous Food Lab that he co found
Speaker 1: so many links on the website, So many great people
Speaker 1: such as.
Speaker 2: Tashi A Heart just came out with a Good Buried
Speaker 2: cookbook which is a wonderful cookbook, especially for folks in
Speaker 2: the Great Lakes region that are interested in learning a
Speaker 2: million ways to use wild rice for everything. That's an
Speaker 2: awesome one. So those are three that come to mind
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 1: And also that Decolonizing Diet Project cookbook we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: Mariah suggested another one that was across the room on
Speaker 1: her shelf out of eyeshot that divides recipes into different regions,
Speaker 1: and it turns out it was Spirit of the Harvest. Yes,
Speaker 1: thanks website. I thought this was a great question. This
Speaker 1: is from Stephanie Shirley, who is a first time question
Speaker 1: asker and dine. How do you propose natives decolonizing our
Speaker 1: diet when most reservations are food deserts and lack of
Speaker 1: resources to fresh fruits and vegetables and planting crops in
Speaker 1: a drought is costly in an already economically disadvantaged community. Also,
Speaker 1: what are your opinions on trad foraging and herbalist knowledge
Speaker 1: being lost every day because of the increasing rate of
Speaker 1: elders passing away due to COVID among other things before
Speaker 1: teaching the younger generations this knowledge because of language extinction.
Speaker 1: I asked, because my grandma was an herbalist and that
Speaker 1: knowledge was not passed down because my siblings and I
Speaker 1: could not speak our language. Sorry, this question is so long,
Speaker 1: but I.
Speaker 2: Thought a great question.
Speaker 1: I know so many good ones. So decolonizing a diet
Speaker 1: in a food desert and also not being able to
Speaker 1: pass down knowledge in terms of herbalism and foraging because
Speaker 1: of language.
Speaker 2: Okay, so many good questions. So food deserts, of course
Speaker 2: are It's a term used by the USDA to define
Speaker 2: people's distance from a place where they can buy food,
Speaker 2: like a grocery store, and of course, grocery stores on
Speaker 2: reservations have their own challenges within the food distribution system, including,
Speaker 2: of course, the last mile transport costs, so a lot
Speaker 2: of high premiums added to fresh foods like fruits and vegetables.
Speaker 1: For example, one article about the fast food pantry noted
Speaker 1: that a reservation the size of Delaware, like the Blackfeet Reservation,
Speaker 1: can have two grocery stores like their reservation, and that
Speaker 1: a box of tea or ahead of cauliflower can cost
Speaker 1: ten or eleven bucks, which is hardly accessible. Even like
Speaker 1: the whole foods, organic moms I know would not spend
Speaker 1: eleven dollars on ahead of cauliflower. Who's going to buy
Speaker 1: an eleven dollars head of cauliflower.
Speaker 2: So that in itself can be a challenge to navigate.
Speaker 2: That said, there are a lot of foods that folks
Speaker 2: likely do have within their communities. Wherever you're living, whether
Speaker 2: it's a true desert or not, there are foods that
Speaker 2: people have been eating there four thousands of years, and
Speaker 2: so sometimes it's just learning some of the plants in
Speaker 2: your area. Even if it's just little plants that you
Speaker 2: know that you can harvest and dry and make tea
Speaker 2: out of later, that's something that can bring you connection
Speaker 2: to your landscape.
Speaker 3: It's relatively little.
Speaker 2: Investment, and those things are native plants, so they likely
Speaker 2: do well in your climate because they're from that climate.
Speaker 2: So for example, here we have yarrow, which is a
Speaker 2: great plant grows all over the northern hemisphere, has a
Speaker 2: flavor profile similar to terragon, so it could be used
Speaker 2: as a spice, or it can be.
Speaker 3: Dried and made into a tea.
Speaker 2: Yarrow is also incredible if you ever get cut, and
Speaker 2: you won't stop bleeding. You can show up some yarrow
Speaker 2: leaves and put that on your wound and it will
Speaker 2: clot your blood. It's the og band aid. It was
Speaker 2: said that's what made Achilles invincible.
Speaker 3: Really, the scientific.
Speaker 2: Name is actually Achillea millifolium, so it comes from that story.
Speaker 2: But it is common all over the northern hemisphere. So
Speaker 2: if you're lucky enough to live in a place with yarrow,
Speaker 2: that's super helpful and it's a good field medicine technique too.
Speaker 2: Lots of people grow in places that have wild mints.
Speaker 2: That's something to know. You learn to identify whatever wild
Speaker 2: onions are in your area. There's so many types of
Speaker 2: wild onions that grow all around. If you have any
Speaker 2: types of fruit trees, you know berries. Obviously, all blueberries
Speaker 2: are indigenous. We have indigenous raspberries as well. Wild strawberries
Speaker 2: grow all over, but sometimes you have to hunt for
Speaker 2: them because you have to look underneath the leaves. There are,
Speaker 2: of course sarvice berries or service berries which grow all
Speaker 2: over as well. Some people call them juneberries if you're
Speaker 2: in Canada, or Saskatoon berries. So there's lots of different
Speaker 2: types of things. I'm not even going to get into
Speaker 2: the many other hundreds of types of berries because it
Speaker 2: varies so much based on where you are. Nut trees,
Speaker 2: whether they're you know, black walnuts or hickory nuts, those
Speaker 2: nice beautiful shelled tree nuts like pecans, those are all
Speaker 2: indigenous foods acorns, learn how to process them. So there's
Speaker 2: foods that are out there, and I love folks getting
Speaker 2: out and just connecting more with our landscapes, learning to
Speaker 2: identify what plant it's in your area and what you
Speaker 2: can do with them, how to prepare them.
Speaker 1: So for more on that, you can see the Foraging
Speaker 1: Ecology episode of Alexis Nelson aka Black Forager. Yes I'm
Speaker 1: going a linker episode, so.
Speaker 2: I think that's always great. I think that also we
Speaker 2: need to work on, obviously, institutional solutions to this status
Speaker 2: as food deserts. Work with local producers to find out
Speaker 2: what people are growing. If you can buy directly from
Speaker 2: farmers in your community that are already practicing sustainable food solutions,
Speaker 2: talk about partnering and setting up a CSA community supported
Speaker 2: agriculture where you can buy it directly from the farmer
Speaker 2: because they'll get a higher benefit for their food and
Speaker 2: they don't have to worry about transporting it to a
Speaker 2: major hub things like that, So that could be really beneficial.
Speaker 2: On my own community, we don't have a lot of
Speaker 2: local producers. We have a really short growing season, and
Speaker 2: so that in itself it can be really challenging to navigate.
Speaker 2: But we also started a lot of folks this year
Speaker 2: through our local food pantry actually growing native plants that
Speaker 2: we've traditionally used as peas. Because they're native, they grow
Speaker 2: easily even in drought years, and we taught them how
Speaker 2: to harvest them, and now they're selling those dried plants
Speaker 2: back to the food pantry so they can be distributed
Speaker 2: back to community members as part of Blackfeet Traditional beverages,
Speaker 2: and so it helps provide a healthy beverage to food
Speaker 2: pantry participants that are relying on an emergency food supply,
Speaker 2: and it's helping provide an economic source for community members
Speaker 2: that are interested in growing native plants. So there's ways
Speaker 2: to do things, but it depends so much on the
Speaker 2: area you're from and what the resources are. I think
Speaker 2: that many of us are really fortunate to still have
Speaker 2: food within our communities, but part of us been the
Speaker 2: knowledge that has been lost and how not only you
Speaker 2: know when do we harvest those things, what do we harvest,
Speaker 2: how do we preserve those things so that we have
Speaker 2: food throughout the year, And then how do we ensure
Speaker 2: that we have a food distribution system that also makes
Speaker 2: sense for our communities. Also, there was a question about
Speaker 2: traditional knowledge in there. Briefly, I would just say that
Speaker 2: if you're lucky enough to know someone that has traditional
Speaker 2: medicinal or botanical knowledge, even if it's just someone that
Speaker 2: knows a few plants in your area, go learn those plants.
Speaker 2: Go out with them, and then share that information. They
Speaker 2: don't have to be an elder, they don't have to
Speaker 2: be native. If they can teach you to identify a
Speaker 2: couple plants, great, that gives you a starting point, and
Speaker 2: you can go and you can network, and you can
Speaker 2: work with other native folks who may have a little
Speaker 2: bit more information on that, and you can just keep
Speaker 2: building that knowledge. If there's a way for you to
Speaker 2: document it yourself, that's awesome as well, even if it's
Speaker 2: taking out your iPhone and recording what they're saying so
Speaker 2: that you can reference back to it. That's why I
Speaker 2: got started doing the work that I do, because people
Speaker 2: would share information with me and I'd want to share
Speaker 2: it on a greater level, so of course I'd get
Speaker 2: their permission, and then I am able to use that
Speaker 2: as a knowledge resource and really create a database where
Speaker 2: we can reference back to that over time and ensure
Speaker 2: that that information stays alive and people continue to add
Speaker 2: to it as well.
Speaker 1: Just a side note, this past week, my native plant
Speaker 1: nerd friend David Newsom from LA's Wild Yards Project gave
Speaker 1: me a wonderful educational tour of the buffet of edible
Speaker 1: plants in my yard. He left. I forgot every single
Speaker 1: one of them, and then I stood in front of
Speaker 1: each weed asking myself can I eat you? I don't remember,
Speaker 1: so I second the video taping with your phone machine
Speaker 1: so you don't have to sheepishly text your teachers later
Speaker 1: and be like, what was this? One and last listener
Speaker 1: question we got from a few people Ali Vessels, Consetta Gibson,
Speaker 1: Ali v Elise Hickman. And this is for non native folks.
Speaker 1: Cross cultural implications. How do non indigenous friends do right
Speaker 1: by our indigenous friends when making and sharing your incredible food?
Speaker 1: Are there appropriation concerns we should consider? How do you
Speaker 1: feel is the best way for non natives to appreciate
Speaker 1: and to participate in indigenous food.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good question, regardless of the time of year,
Speaker 2: regardless of where you're living. I think one of the
Speaker 2: great things anyone can do is just learn more about
Speaker 2: the local foods that are accessible. So I reiterate, learn.
Speaker 3: About your plants.
Speaker 2: And that's just me as an ecologist thinking about, you know,
Speaker 2: how do you connect with your landscape? What do you know?
Speaker 2: How will you survive a zombie apocalypse or whatever it
Speaker 2: may be, But how do you really, you know, learn
Speaker 2: about the land that you're on. And obviously a big
Speaker 2: part of that is learning about the plants and the
Speaker 2: animals and all of those things that are in the
Speaker 2: same space that are sharing space with you. And I
Speaker 2: think that that's important. Whenever you get outside and you
Speaker 2: just learn a little bit more about those spaces, it
Speaker 2: can help inherently build that connection. If you go out
Speaker 2: berry picking, you also see the birds that are out
Speaker 2: there picking berries with you, yelling angrily. Maybe you might
Speaker 2: run into a bear, right, but you understand all of
Speaker 2: those other creatures that are part of that connection with
Speaker 2: the berries too, And if something threatens the berries, you
Speaker 2: suddenly know that it's not just your berry patch that's
Speaker 2: being threatened, but you know all of the other beings
Speaker 2: that rely on that too, and so you're more inclined
Speaker 2: to take care of that because of your vested interest
Speaker 2: in it. And that sounds selfish, but that's also kind
Speaker 2: of how people work. And then you know, with with
Speaker 2: my recipes, I think food is meant to be shared.
Speaker 2: I think that there is a lot of value in
Speaker 2: just recognizing where those foods come from and knowing you know,
Speaker 2: whether it's butternut squash that has been you know, specifically
Speaker 2: bread by Native people, but you pick this butternut squash
Speaker 2: up by from your local farmer down the road, and
Speaker 2: you're going to make it into a lasagna with some
Speaker 2: bison meat or whatever it may be. There's just value
Speaker 2: in recognizing that, even if it's silently, because I think
Speaker 2: that you're acknowledging these these connections and all of this
Speaker 2: role that we each have on this landscape. So I
Speaker 2: think that that's a good place. I'm not trying to
Speaker 2: like make people feel guilty when eating food. For sure,
Speaker 2: there's benefit to eating local, fresh foods from your community
Speaker 2: for anyone. I don't think there's a downside of that,
Speaker 2: right I think.
Speaker 1: It's so much better for our mentality to get excited
Speaker 1: about eating healthier foods than to feel bad about eating
Speaker 1: foods that are thought of as unhealthy. For sure, it's
Speaker 1: better to pick up a new habit than to shame
Speaker 1: yourself for an old one, you know.
Speaker 2: And if you're eating foods that are native to your location,
Speaker 2: you are also inherently eating things that have lower transportation costs,
Speaker 2: lower input costs, are more resilient to your climate, all
Speaker 2: of those things. So there's a lot of benefit in
Speaker 2: that as well. But ultimately, we get to eat delicious
Speaker 2: foods and you know, share that with our people in
Speaker 2: our community. And I think that there's a lot of
Speaker 2: value in that.
Speaker 1: Last questions I always ask, are the hardest thing about
Speaker 1: your job?
Speaker 3: Ooh, the hardest thing about my job? I'm thinking.
Speaker 2: I honestly, the hardest thing about my job is that occasionally,
Speaker 2: I like really have to clean my kitchen so that
Speaker 2: it can be on zoom for everybody else.
Speaker 3: No, it's I'm really lucky.
Speaker 2: I get to I get to create new things, I
Speaker 2: get to create recipes, I get to spend time outside.
Speaker 2: I get to garden and hunt and make it part
Speaker 2: of my career, and no one told me in high
Speaker 2: school that I could do that, that that was an
Speaker 2: actual job, And honestly, it's really funny. I think the
Speaker 2: hardest part of my job is maybe just dealing with
Speaker 2: people that don't understand that I have a real job,
Speaker 2: you know, despite it being full time work, and I
Speaker 2: get to spend all of my time educating and teaching
Speaker 2: and working with foods, whether that be as a contractor
Speaker 2: that's developing educational materials, whether that be teaching cooking classes
Speaker 2: or being in the community teaching folks how.
Speaker 3: To harvest native plants. Whatever it is.
Speaker 2: It is full time work and it's varied and I
Speaker 2: don't have a real schedule, and that works for me.
Speaker 2: But it's interesting because people go.
Speaker 3: What do you do for work?
Speaker 2: And they're like, and that you can survive doing that,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, yeah, I can't. Actually. Also, I'm just
Speaker 2: I get to grow and harvest and hunt a lot
Speaker 2: of food, and that also helps keep me fed with delicious,
Speaker 2: healthy things. From here, there is new and exciting things
Speaker 2: every day, and sometimes I get frustrated trying to learn
Speaker 2: how to use video editing software and trying to clean
Speaker 2: my can and all the other fun things, but honestly,
Speaker 2: it's it is the most fun and rewarding thing I
Speaker 2: could be doing.
Speaker 1: What about last question? I would usually ask what your
Speaker 1: favorite thing about your job is? But that was that
Speaker 1: was so beautiful already. What about your favorite dish? A
Speaker 1: lot of listeners want to know this too.
Speaker 3: Favorite dish? I'm a lasagna person.
Speaker 2: No, I one of my favorite things for any time
Speaker 2: of the year. And maybe it's because my family used
Speaker 2: to My mom didn't like making like a big turkey
Speaker 2: or ham during holiday meals, and so we would just
Speaker 2: get together and we would make a homemade lasagna for
Speaker 2: holiday meals, and we would make it with bison meat
Speaker 2: rather than beef or sausage or something like that. And
Speaker 2: so bison lasagna became this holiday meal. And when I
Speaker 2: started doing did you Kitchen? I realized I could substitute
Speaker 2: butternut squash for the noodles in the recipe, and I
Speaker 2: actually just cut off the cheese. It wasn't necessary, but
Speaker 2: you could make a butternut bison lasagna with cheese if
Speaker 2: you really wanted to. I just I love the comfort
Speaker 2: food of eating lasagna for some reason. And of course,
Speaker 2: you know tomatoes are indigenous and squash is indigenous, and
Speaker 2: you could use any type of wild game. Whatever ground
Speaker 2: meat you have access to works in lasagna. And you
Speaker 2: can add whatever veggies you wanted if you wanted to
Speaker 2: put a whole bunch of substitutions in. It's really easy
Speaker 2: to change up lasagna. And so that is probably one
Speaker 2: of my favorite recipes because it's so simple. It requires,
Speaker 2: you know, a basic meat sauce and a butternut squash
Speaker 2: and you just layer it and you bake it and
Speaker 2: tell everything soft. And I'm excited now because that's that's
Speaker 2: a recipe that is going to accompany the harvest of
Speaker 2: the month materials or buffalo in the state. But also yeah,
Speaker 2: but also it's just it's good comfort food. And every
Speaker 2: time I eat Azaangna, I feel guilty because I'm like,
Speaker 2: I should be eating a vegetable, right, And then when
Speaker 2: I eat that, I'm like, I am eating a vegetable.
Speaker 2: It's the noodles. The noodles are a vegetable.
Speaker 1: This is fine, And I've seen pictures of it and
Speaker 1: it looks so good.
Speaker 3: It's really funny.
Speaker 2: When I do gigs anywhere in the country, I run
Speaker 2: into someone who's like, I love the Lasagna, and I'm like, cool,
Speaker 2: that's great, That's the best. Who's ever? So do I amazing?
Speaker 1: Any cookbook plans in the works.
Speaker 2: I have to finish my master's degree, which oh that
Speaker 2: should hopefully happen in December, and then and then I
Speaker 2: can talk to folks and see if someone wants to
Speaker 2: publish me.
Speaker 8: Who knows publishers, lit agents get at you go for it,
Speaker 8: so ask generous people, not genius questions, and just do
Speaker 8: it out of respect and curiosity, and everyone will walk
Speaker 8: away better for it.
Speaker 1: It's a huge, huge thank you too, Mariah Gladstone. I'm
Speaker 1: a giant fan of her, and in digit Kitchen she
Speaker 1: let me lob so many questions at her and shared
Speaker 1: so much knowledge and pointed out so many great people
Speaker 1: also working this space. Thank you to Lyla and Boyd
Speaker 1: Evans and my wonderful cousins Jamie, James, Crystal and all
Speaker 1: of you for raising bison for the community and let
Speaker 1: me ask questions about it. For more episodes with indigenous ologies,
Speaker 1: I will link those on my website. You can also
Speaker 1: always find more topics at aliward dot com. Slash ologies
Speaker 1: dash by dash topic easy to find whatever interests you
Speaker 1: more links for everything I mentioned are at aliwar dot
Speaker 1: com slash Ologies slash Indigenous Queisonology that'll be linked to
Speaker 1: write in the show notes. You can just go to
Speaker 1: that and then just an absolute wardrobe, deep and never
Speaker 1: ending filled with links. For more of Mariah's work, you
Speaker 1: can go to in digitkitchen dot com. You can follow
Speaker 1: Mariah Gladstone and congratulate her for getting her Masters a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago. She's at in digit Kitchen on Instagram
Speaker 1: and Mariah Gladstone on Twitter and Instagram. Also shout out
Speaker 1: to Split Sun Creations for their beautiful drums and rattles
Speaker 1: and crafts. It's her partner. They'll be linked on my
Speaker 1: page two because they make great stuff. We are at
Speaker 1: Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Elie Ward with
Speaker 1: one al on both. Happy Happy, Happy birthday to the
Speaker 1: dear Aaron Talbert, who not only admins the Ologies podcast
Speaker 1: Facebook group, but also spent countless hours with me cracking
Speaker 1: acorns from the oaks behind our houses since we were four.
Speaker 1: Love you so much. Thank you to Shannon and Bonnie
Speaker 1: of the Your That podcast for helping with the Facebook work.
Speaker 1: Thank you to Emily White of the word Reef for
Speaker 1: making our professional transcripts available for free on our website
Speaker 1: to anyone who needs them. Caleb Patton bleeps episodes to
Speaker 1: make them kid friendly, and then about every fortnight we've
Speaker 1: been putting out Asmologies episode, which is a condensed, shorter,
Speaker 1: very classroom friendly cut of classics. So thank you to
Speaker 1: Zeek Rodriguez Thomas for handling those and Stephen Ray Morris
Speaker 1: for the assist. Thank you to lead editor head cheerleader
Speaker 1: Jared Sleeper of mind Jam Media for putting these episodes
Speaker 1: and my brain together. Every week. Nick Thornburn made the
Speaker 1: theme music and if you listen until the very end,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you secret. And this week it's that in
Speaker 1: my bathroom, we have a tooth brusholder and one of
Speaker 1: them has been broken for about eight or nine months,
Speaker 1: and I tried to weld it back together. I tried
Speaker 1: to super glue it, and every day I just look
Speaker 1: at it and I've got one that works. Jarrett's side,
Speaker 1: his toothbresholder is broken, and I don't know what is
Speaker 1: wrong with me, but I'm like, just order another toothbrushoulder.
Speaker 1: Then I'm like, well do I have to order shite?
Speaker 5: Order two?
Speaker 1: Then just use one of them. Do I just scrap
Speaker 1: the whole set. I don't know, but every day I
Speaker 1: look at it, I go I gotta fix a toothbrusholder Anyway,
Speaker 1: next week's episodes on ADHD, in case you've ever wondered
Speaker 1: why can't I do this very simple thing, we'll dive
Speaker 1: into executive functions and it's a great episode for everyone
Speaker 1: who struggles with ever doing anything ever, which is exactly
Speaker 1: all of us. Also, thank you to everyone who sent
Speaker 1: me such sweetweet messag just after I ended last week's
Speaker 1: episode falling. You are great and I love you, and
Speaker 1: I will be back next week with another episode, of course,
Speaker 1: because I love doing it.
Speaker 5: Okay, bye bye now.
Speaker 6: Right, Live off Land mainly looks like you go to
Speaker 6: Sonics a lot.
Speaker 2: Why are you here?