Here & Now

How Ukwakhwa's Seed-to-Table Effort Celebrates Native Food

Frederica Freyberg:
To combat health disparities on the Oneida reservation, Ukwakhwa or Our Foods is using a $250,000 grant to provide culinary knowledge and ancestral education to the Oneida tribal community. “Here & Now” reporter Erica Ayisi traveled to De Pere to learn more about the “From Seed to Table” program. This report is in partnership with ICT, formerly Indian Country Today.

Erica Ayisi:
Eldon Powless is an Oneida chef. He’s making lunch at Ukwakhwa or Our Foods kitchen on the Oneida Reservation near Green Bay.

Eldon Powless:
Here I get to just do what I want. They’re just like, as long as it’s — as long as it tastes as good and it’s nutritious. Go ahead.

Erica Ayisi:
He says his Northern Comfort Bowl is an Indigenous take on southern comfort food.

Eldon Powless:
I wanted to do like a little twist on that and use wild rice and use the beans that we have and whatever we have available local.

Erica Ayisi:
Ukwakhwa isn’t a restaurant, but Powless is their guest chef for this week’s meal. He says he uses some heirloom Indigenous foods that are harvested on their farm the Oneida way.

Eldon Powless:
I try to, like, incorporate whatever we can get locally.

Erica Ayisi:
His recipe of diced celery, onions, carrots and locally sourced wild rice are added to a butter cream sauce with roasted corn. Black beans simmer in braised smoked ham hocks on the side. Stephen Webster is director of farm and culinary operations at Ukwakhwa. He says their “From Seed to Table” grants with the Wisconsin Partnership Program subsidizes sales of hot lunches made by indigenous chefs to restore wellness to their diets.

Stephen Webster:
They get a stipend. They cook about 80 to 100 meals for the community. The community then puts in orders. How many we want, and then we pretty much disburse those meals throughout the community.

Erica Ayisi:
Webster says their grant program offers community members meals rooted in ancestral knowledge for modern living, integrating traditional ingredients like corn and beans with contemporary cuisine.

Stephen Webster:
The goal of this was to try to expand people’s palates.

Erica Ayisi:
The grant also subsidizes hands on meal preparation workshops using products harvested on the reservation.

Stephen Webster:
We’ve had people make maple seed cookies, which blows my mind sometimes where I was, like, it was — there was no gluten in it.

Erica Ayisi:
Webster says in this first year, the program is meeting its goals.

Stephen Webster:
We did 1,393 meals just through the Hot Meal Noon program. And then we did another 80 some meals through the meal prep class.

Erica Ayisi:
Webster says meals like the Northern Comfort Bowl would cost about $30 each in local restaurants, but Ukwakhwa is able to offer it here for $13 to the Oneida community due to the reduced pricing by the grant. Webster says he hopes to continue the same pricing when funding ends.

Stephen Webster:
But now I feel like we’re much stronger from a logistics standpoint to take on this stuff in the future.

Erica Ayisi:
Webster says both food programs help the Oneida community reconnect to their Indigenous foodways from a time when their ancestors were relocated from New York to Wisconsin in the early 1800s.

Stephen Webster:
When they came here, again, it was they were following Christian missionaries, but there were still people who practice our traditions, our language and all that other stuff. And a lot of those seeds came with them as well.

Erica Ayisi:
What did they tell you about Indigenous cultivation?

Stephen Webster:
The biggest one that most people are aware of is companion planting: the Three Sisters style of planting.

Erica Ayisi:
He says maintaining Oneida’s agricultural methods of planting varieties of corn, beans and seeds next to each other is a balancing act of traditional and modern farming.

Stephen Webster:
For two or three people like me and my wife to do it, we have to use the tractor. We have to do stuff, but we still make it a point to hand plant and hand weed and so forth to keep those traditions alive.

Erica Ayisi:
Twice a month, the Ukwakhwa team delivers their culturally relevant meals to seven different drop-off sites along the Oneida Tribal Department’s route. Webster and the Ukwakhwa staff and volunteers packed up his truck with dozens of hot and ready, preordered meals prepared by that week’s chef.

Stephen Webster:
Hello there.

Woman:
Hi.

Stephen Webster:
You going to buy one?

Woman:
Yeah, I am.

Stephen Webster:
All right.

Erica Ayisi:
Toni House picked up her three meals at the Ukwakhwa farm, reflecting on her childhood memories of food insecurity from colonization.

Toni House:
I remember what it was like to be hungry as a child, you know? And I remember thinking, how come people didn’t hand me good foods?

Erica Ayisi:
She says the program will help younger children have an appetite and desire for healthy Indigenous meals.

Toni House:
Nutrition right here impacts three generations automatically. Scientifically, we know that now.

Erica Ayisi:
Back in the Ukwakhwa kitchen, Powless says traditional Indigenous ingredients can be cooked with love and risk while exploring new recipes.

Eldon Powless:
You don’t have to be super traditional and make it a certain way. You can incorporate it however you would like.

Erica Ayisi:
Webster says “From Seed to Table” incorporates the past …

Stephen Webster:
Make sure that we, kind of like, go back as much as we can.

Erica Ayisi:
… for a healthier diet in the future.

Stephen Webster:
To what maybe our ancestors were eating to help combat some of that and address some of that.

Erica Ayisi:
In De Pere, I’m Erica Ayisi for “Here & Now” and ICT.