Native America

(rap music) - [Man] There's a contemporary phrase that we have (foreign language) frown turn to stone but the world is still alive.

You know, we're in the midst of all this urbanity, we gotta make sense of our world.

We are doing what we can with have available, and sometimes that means creating a cafe space in the back of a bookstore.

- [Man 2] Just so everybody knows what our menu is today, to start off, we have a rosehip tea and an elderberry tea.

A native green salad, and a dressing of walnut oil and blackberries.

We have soft-boiled quail eggs, acorn soup, one of them with wildflower honey, one of them is left unsweetened, acorn flour brownies.

We have venison, that's currently being smoked, with bay moral and bay salt from San Francisco Bay shoreline.

So, (foreign language) welcome.

(foreign language) Now let's eat.

- [Vicent] Luis and myself started Mukwekma which in (foreign language) language in means art food.

- [Luis] Is an organization we started in order to return our traditional ohlene foods to our families who haven't experience in at least two generations.

- We just got to do what we have to do to make this foods stay in our lives on a regular basis.

Even when it seems like we are going against a lot of odds.

This very place right here could be where our direct ancestors gather 400, 500 years ago.

(low beat music) - So right here this is the (foreign language) which is the yerba buena.

This is an herb we make it into a tea, is that essential taste of home.

(birds chirping) (low music) It makes us feel really good to be able to make this kinds of food, you know.

To be able to use this ingredients and then see how happy they make people also.

People I don't think understand, how decadent and how rich our diet is, you know.

We always saw that our food is inherently bochi.

(laughter) because of their ingredients on their own This is a blackberry yerba buena bay moral dipping sauce.

And we add al little of acorn flour to this ethicana This the bay moral we gather yesterday, this are quail eggs (foreign language) in our language.

This are going to be soft boil for three minutes.

And we are going to have roasted medicine back strap that is wrap in yerba buena.

We going to have Luis's acorn flour, brownies.

- Which has something that we made to introduce acorn to our young people.

We adapted a brownie recipe to include acorn flour, and to use coconut oil rather than butter.

- You know, for me our contemporary foods that we are making, are foods that our people would recognize.

Because they are rooted in everything that is traditional.

We do not cook with anything that wasn't here in those pre-contact days.

There is always room for creativity, but we also know that there are rules we have to follow too.

With those rules, that means that we have to be steed fast and making sure we don't change things too much.

Because that changes the nature of what our food is.

By having ohlene foods here today, it makes it inarguable that we are here.

(low beat music)