Stephen Webster:
It started about seven years ago, with me and my wife getting into a local white corn co-op group where we grew for the very first time our Indigenous corn, which everybody refers to as white corn. It evolved into us growing a garden in the backyard. We kind of fell in love with that process and the meaning and the history, and we really connected with those seeds. At the time, we were both working for the Oneida tribe — my wife was an attorney and I was the records director for our elected officials. And so at that point, we kind of had this plan in our head that, just sitting around the dinner table, talked about like, "What if we just quit our jobs, sold our house and built a farm, and just like focused on growing these foods and taking care of these seeds?" And so that was the initial basis of, it sent us down a direction to forming Ukwakhwa. Doing that, or saying that was one thing, but doing that was another. It took seven years of pretty much nonstop construction to build this along with also running an active farm. So, some of the fire that came with me, giving us the passion, I guess, to do this came from both us both working in tribal government. In the bureaucracy sometimes, you get a little frustrated with, you know, some of the things that stand in the way of actually implementing some plans. I joke sometimes, like I used to think to myself in some of these meetings, like, "I'm tired of just talking about doing this stuff — I want to do it." And so that really helped us give us the drive to do what we do today.