University Place

Native American Foodways

– Lea speaking Oneida: Shekoli swakwe-ku. Hutkahuni niykyats n-n ukwehuwene-ha, ohkle Lea Zeise ni ykyats n-n o:sluni:k-ne. Wakkwho niwaki?tal-ta onayote:a-ka niwakyuhntsyo-ta. Hello, everyone. I just introduced myself in the Oneida language. My Oneida name is Hutkahuni and my English name is Lea Zeise. I’m Oneida and I’m Wolf Clan, and I’m from the Place of the Ducks. – Shekoli swakwe-ku. Yostayowaluts niyukyats Onayoteaka Ni’i.

-My name is Laura Manthe and I’m also from Oneida Nation.

– And she’s my mom. [chuckles] [audience laughing] We’re gonna talk to you today about Ohelaku, the corn cooperative that we collectively put together in Oneida, and then also just Native foodways in a broader sense. And then, before we get started, I just wanna make a recognition that we’re on Ho-Chunk ancestral land, and we’re walking with our ancestors, and that this is really their place that they took care for a really long time. So we’d just like to make that recognition before we get started. So that’s us, the star there. And then you can see number 20 over in what’s now New York, that’s our original territory for the Haudenosaunee or the Iroquois Confederacy. So that’s where our people are originally from.

– Laura: So we’re going to give you a short history lesson, and then we’ll get to the rest of the program about growing food.

– Lea: So in a broader sense, we’re from this place called Turtle Island, which is North America, and this is where corn first made its appearance according to archeological records 10,000 years ago, and that’s about when food started being grown in the Fertile Crescent. So just to give you an idea of time and when we’re starting in this historical timeline.
So these two major developments had a really big impact, right? There was a really big impact in Europe and Eurasia from the Fertile Crescent, and then also a huge impact in the Americas as that corn spread across the continents. You wanna talk about–

– Laura: Sure! So this is the Hiawatha flag. This is our original way of recognizing each other in the Confederacy. So what this wampum belt signifies are the five nations that are part of the Confederacy. So there’s– Seneca is one box, Cayuga is one box. The tree in the center is the Onondaga Nation, and then this box next to it is the Oneida Nation, and then the last box is Mohawk Nation. And the Tuscarora people are also part of our Confederacy, but they came after this belt was created. – Okay. So the Oneida people, originally in our language, is the Onyota’aka, which means The People of the Standing Stone. So you might you hear us use those terms interchangeably, you might hear us use Haudenosaunee and Iroquois used interchangeably. Iroquois is the French word for us, and Haudenosaunee is our word for ourselves. And our Haudenosaunee identity is really tied to our corn and our foods. So she shows up in our creation story, many of our other oral traditions, and our ceremonies with her two sisters, the beans and the squash.

– Laura: So here’s a beautiful depiction from an artist called Dawn Dark Mountain. And what she’s showing is how the corn, the beans, and the squash grow together. So you may have known of this system. So we plant the corn first, and then we wait for it to grow up a little bit, and then we plant the beans to grow around the corn stalk as it’s growing, and then last, the squash seeds go in, and what they do is provide shade to the plant; they keep the morning dew in, they suppress the weeds, and the little pricklies on the vines keep the raccoons away.

– Lea: Yeah, raccoons have really tender little paws, so they don’t like to touch those prickles. So this system might, in modern day, be called companion planting, might also be called low-till, organic, biodiverse, and harmonized. So we’re basically the hipsters of regenerative agriculture. [audience laughing]

– Laura: So here’s another beautiful painting, and this one hangs at the Norwood Hill Center at the seat of our government, the Oneida Business Committee, and this is a depiction of the turtle. We have 13 ceremonies that we practice throughout the year and there’s 13 spots on the back of the turtle, and then there’s 28 little pieces of the turtle shell around the outside, and that would be the 28 days, and that is the calendar, the ceremonial calendar that we follow throughout the year.

– Lea: So our calendar starts mid-winters, which would have just happened, and then it moves into maple season, and then goes around the seasonal calendar. So strawberries come in, that’s my favorite ceremony ’cause we have a lot of strawberries, and then it goes all the way through to the fall to hunting season, harvest season, and then back around again. So we have a really strong connection with the turtle. The turtle is one of our clans. You might remember also Turtle Island is where we’re from, and then there’s Bear Clan and Wolf Clan. So we’re Wolf Clan. We inherit that through our mothers. So in our world view, we are what our mothers are.

So my mother is Oneida and she’s Wolf Clan, so I’m Oneida and I’m Wolf Clan. – So here what we have is a beautiful picture of village life. So I want everyone to close their eyes for a minute and imagine a place that. . . [clears throat]
– Lea: We forgot to warn you she might cry. Yeah, it happens a lot when we talk about this stuff. We think it’s the ancestral memories coming back. It can be really hard to talk about this.

– Laura: Don’t make me cry.

– Lea: Okay. So this depicts agricultural way of life in our villages. The food was always made and readily available, so we had the one bowl, one spoon concept. So the food was there for you when you were ready to eat, it was available to the whole community, everybody ate, everybody had shelter, everybody got medicinal care, everybody had a place within the community. We also really valued individual gifts, so whatever makes your heart sing, there was time for that to be expressed as well. So everyone’s gifts had a place within the village. Anthropologists now estimate that we worked about a 12-hour workweek, which sounds awesome! [audience laughing] And the rest of the time we spent, recreation, art, politics, on taking care of our families, and cultivating those gifts that we had. So the women were largely in charge of managing that agricultural system. They essentially ran the economy because the corn was our economy. And so, you can see here this longhouse, that’s who we are, The People of the Longhouse, the Haudenosaunee.

This longhouse would have been run by the matriarch of the family. She’s the eldest clan mother. The clan mothers then decide who the chiefs are, the chiefs sit on a council, and they make decisions for the community. If they’re making bad decisions, they get de-chiefed. It’s not as complicated as impeaching someone. You just tell them they’re not the chief anymore. [audience laughing] So this council, the separation of powers was actually the basis for the U. S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers spent time with us, recognized our democracy and the power in that, and that is what we ended up with today.

What they forgot about was that balance between men and women, and that’s what we’re starting to see now is our returning to that balance, ’cause we’re always gonna return to balance no matter what. Harmony is the direction that the universe goes towards. So this village, every 20 years, would pick up and move to a new location. So three years out, they would go site a new village and start preparing it for the people to move, and everybody would relocate to that village, allowing this area to rest and return to its natural state. And so, we would make a circuit around our territory and by the time we made it back around to that original place, we would start over again and build a new village. So that was what you would maybe call today as sustainable development and thinking about the future.

– So here, what we have is another picture of our cornfields. And you see there’s some youth up high on this platform. And what everyone in the village had a job. Teenagers like to stay up all night, so give teenagers a job, and their job was to go up there and sit and watch over the cornfields and warn if there’s any danger coming, or if the raccoons are coming, they could use their bow and arrow and get rid of ’em, or a slingshot.

They could chase the deer away. And then everyone worked peacefully in harmony, and everyone owned the food. So there’s no ownership. This is not my field. This is not my seeds. This is not my anything. It belongs to everyone together. What I learned from this is when we started our group, we’ll get to that in a little bit, but I had to decolonize my mind. I had to stop thinking that this part of the field was mine, and this corn was mine. My friend had to remind me that we’re gonna pool our seeds together, we’re gonna grow this corn together, we’re gonna harvest together, and we’re gonna eat together.
So that’s just a different way to think about it. So there’s a community garden and then there’s a communal garden. The work that we do is communal.

– So the word for that we have for corn is onaste, which means “she sustains us,” and it’s very similar to the word that we have for mother’s milk. So we really have this really close-bonded relationship to the corn, and it’s said that the health of our people is reflected in the health of our corn. So what we try to do is make sure that we’re doing right by the corn so that we can continue taking care of her and she can continue taking care of us. And the corn could not survive without us. If a corn cob fell to the ground and started to grow, all of the seeds would sprout at the same time and choke each other out. There’s over 100 seeds on each corn cob. So she needs us to keep going and we need her to keep going.

“She Sustains Us” is her name. So this is a picture of our trade routes back in the day and today. And you can see, from our little area up here in what’s now New York, it stretched all the way down through what’s now Mexico and into South America, and all the way West and up into Alaska, even. So this is the extent to which that we had abundance to trade. And this was how we collaborated with our neighbors the Cherokee, and our distant brothers the Seminoles. We all shared the same games, and even we practice the alligator dance. Well, there’s no alligators in New York. We learned that dance from them when we were trading with them all the way down in Florida. So this just shows the extent to which the economies were here and thriving prior to colonial contact. And these same trade routes were then turned into what we now have as the U.S. highway system. So those same trails became our highways.

– Laura: So then, there was disruption to our steady state, and we had to deal with the introduction of a foreign religion: guns, germs, and steel. And that was really detrimental to our community. So what happened was when people lose faith in their traditional teachings and they go to another way of practicing religion, they lose their faith in the government and they lose their faith in the medicines. So one reaction. . . One action had many, many reactions in our community.
And so, our group is trying to get back to our steady state.

– The second major disruption was relocation. We fought on the side of the colonies in the Revolutionary War, yet after the war, we did not have territory in our original lands and had to move. So some of us moved to Canada and some of us moved to the Michigan territory, which is now Wisconsin, in this boat called the Walk-on-the-Water. That boat, on its return journey, sunk. So that tells you the conditions that we were in when we made that journey over. Nonetheless, we saw the need to bring our foods with us, so we brought our seeds with us, we brought our ceremonies with us, we brought our language with us. All of that was still relatively intact throughout this relocation period.

– So now, we’re reduced to 65,000 acres from a 5,000-acre area that we negotiated with the tribes that were already in Wisconsin. That would be the Menominee, the Potawatomi, and the Ho-Chunk.

Through land deals that were made without us included, through treaty process, we reduced to the current 65,000 acres that we have now. That was further reduced after the land allotment process, and land was taxed when we didn’t have money to pay the taxes, and people were able to sell their land. So Oneida, Wisconsin was reduced to 22 acres of land.

– Lea: Then the boarding school era, and this concept was to kill the Indian to save the man. And this took place from 1860 until 1972, when parents finally gained the right to not send their children off reservation if they didn’t want to. It was mandatory for over 100 years. So in that time, those children who were essentially kidnapped from home did not have any contact with their parents, so they could not be taught the traditions and the teachings, they could not speak their own language, and they were converted to Christianity. So when they returned back to their communities, there was this gap of communication and of knowledge and of understanding, and that gap has continued on, and what we’re doing now is trying to close that again.

– So now, it’s 1976, and some amazing women decided that they needed to figure out a way to keep the lights on at our new civic center that was created through grant money, but they didn’t have a way to keep the utilities running. So they started a bingo game because they were Christian women and they went to church, and their church had a bingo game, so they figured if churches can have bingo and they’re sovereign, then tribes should be able to have bingo too.

So there’s a really great book out there if you wanna learn more about that called The Bingo Queens of Oneida, and that’s how gaming started in Wisconsin. So with those gaming dollars, we were able to invest in our infrastructure, invest in our people, invest in our land, and really recreate an integrated food system.

– So I’m just gonna take you on a little virtual tour of Oneida. This is our apple orchard. We also have a bison and beef farm. We have Tsyunhehkwa, which is our organic farm that grows white corn and other organic fruits and vegetables and raises chickens. And then our cannery is in the middle there. You can see some youth getting together to learn how to make apple chips and dried strawberries. They make a whole variety of different products that end up at our Oneida market. Here’s our aquaponics project that we got started, and that’s the farmers’ market that goes on–

– Thursdays.

– Every Thursday. So this has taken a lot of work to develop, from having just four employees in 1976 to today, having this huge integrated food system, and it was because those gaming dollars created a cash economy where there was none. There was essentially no employment and no cash on the reservation prior to that. So that’s really been our success is taking that money and investing it back into our people.

– So a lot of folks have had backyard gardens ever since we moved to Oneida, and it was a really great way for us to survive, especially when the Depression came along, people had to survive and grow their own food. So we still have people that backyard garden in Oneida, and they’re really small plots. And the difficulty is when you’re trying to grow corn, you have to have at least 100 corn plants so that they can pollinate each other, but the raccoons are vicious in our community, and they will come and take your entire plot out in one night. So we decided that maybe we should grow together and go back to the old way of growing so that we would grow more corn, the animals can eat, and the people can eat too.

– The other issue with a backyard garden is that if you’re growing in a really small space, it’s really hard to keep your soil vital. And so, we started out with doing a white corn and soil health workshop just to get some understanding in the community about how to build that soil back up ’cause corn is very nutrient-intensive.

And so, we had this little soil workshop. We were surprised when over 70 people showed up from the community. We sent this mailer out to everybody. And at the end of that presentation, we asked if anybody was interested in growing corn together because all of our backyard plots kept getting wiped out. And 10 families stayed, and that was the beginning of a Ohelaku, which means “Among the Cornstalks,” which is our cooperative.

– So my husband and I were at the gas station one day and Bill Vervoort who runs the 4-H Program in our community said, “Hey, I heard you’re getting some community members together “to grow some corn, and we’d really like “to offer some land for you to use. ” And we were so excited because we had no land to grow on, and he just solved a huge problem that our group had. We were able to get together as a group and really just figure out how are we gonna grow corn. So our first meeting was in March and we were planting in May. We had to get a tractor, we had to get a plow, we had to get seeds, we had to do all these logistical things before we could plant. And we pulled it off, and we’re a very strong group to this day.

– So we quickly outgrew that first plot of land, and were looking around the nation for some more land. We went to the Oneida Land Commission and we asked them if they had any more land for us, and they said, “Well, yeah, but you have to enter “in the bidding process just like everyone else.” We have thousands of acres of land that get leased out to farmers every year. The bidding starts at 150 an acre, and we were thinking, “We don’t have $150 an acre every year, “and we’re not even gonna sell the corn. “So we’re not gonna make any money to pay that 150. ” And once we explained that we were a community group and that we were growing for the community, they completely changed their story. They allowed us access to another 18 acres, and that’s what we’ve been growing on as well. So we have two different plots, and they completely changed the laws at land access. So if you are a community group, you’re growing traditional foods, you can access land at Oneida for free now.

– Laura: We’ve written many grants together, and the first grant that we wrote together was the SARE Grant. And what we wanted to do was a modern application of a traditional fertilizer. So when we were living in village life and we did the Three Sisters mound system: the corn would be planted on top of a fish that’s buried underground. And we wanted to replicate that, but we couldn’t figure out how to get the fish into the ground because we knew the raccoons would come back and take out the fish. So we came up with an idea to use fish emulsion instead. We got a big 500-gallon sprayer and we put five gallons of fish emulsion in, we filled it up with water, and we just sprayed the fish emulsion right onto the corn. And I can tell you, from the backyard demonstrations that we did and the health of the corn when we did the demonstration in the field, some of the corn didn’t get any fish emulsion. The corn that got the fish emulsion was tall, the stalks were dark green, the leaves were dark green, and the cobs were really big, and where the corn did not get that extra fertilizer, they were light green and spindly, and a lot of them didn’t even throw a cob. So when a corn plant is about this big, it sends its little feelers out and it tries to figure out how many nutrients are around it, to decide if it’s even gonna throw a cob or not. And then, even if it doesn’t make a cob, it’s still doing its duty because it makes the pollen that another corn plant will need.

– So we had a lot of success that first year we grew the three acres. It’s really hard for animals to wipe out three entire acres, so we got a good harvest. The following year, we planted six acres, we got way in over our head, and then we had to go hand-harvest that six acres. So it took a lot of hard work from everybody to go out there and do that, and now we’re back down to four acres. So this is us out there weeding in our low-till field. We hand-weed after the corn is too tall to cultivate. Initially, when we set it up, we said, “Okay everybody, go out and weed the field,” and then you walk out there and there’s 90 rows of corn, and you’re like, “Where do I even start?” So then we decided, okay, everybody gets to adopt a couple of rows, you go out there, you see your little name tag on the row, you know that’s the one you’re supposed to go out and weed. So that was really successful. We had an extremely clean field. An integrated pest management person came out to look at our field, he had never seen a cleaner corn field in his life.

So we put a lot of hard work in that year; we harvested 10,000 pounds of corn. This is a little joke that we have that there’s no child labor, it’s just passing on traditions. [audience laughing] So this is Delilah, she’s out there helping us pick the stones out of the field. This is how we spray the fish emulsion with the tractor and the tank, and then, let my mom talk about it.

– Laura: So this is an example of a really good year, where Mother Nature is agreeing with us, the animals are agreeing with us. We have enough nutrients in the ground and the corn stalks are about 16 feet tall. That’s my husband standing next to them with a ruler. We have friends in Mexico, so we have to show off about how much corn that we grow every year. Some of the cobs had four

— Our stalks had four cobs on them, which is really unusual. Usually, they only have one cob on them.

People ask us how come we don’t use a combine, because our corn is heirloom variety open-pollinated, so that means that that corn can throw a cob at any height. Wherever she wants to put it is where it goes. So when you drive down the highway and you see the fields of corn that may be genetically modified or it may be a hybrid variety, all those cobs are saluting you at the same height, all the way down the field. So that machinery can come through and collect that really easily. Our corn’s soft when it gets picked, so if you put a machine on it, it’s gonna crush the kernels. It has a very high moisture rate. It’s about 50% moisture coming off of the field. So we really have to do things with traditional foods the traditional ways if you wanna have a successful harvest. So we can’t put this in a corn crib and we can’t put it in a dryer. We have to follow our traditional ways.

– Here’s some pictures of us harvesting. We put about 75% of our time in the year is in this of one month of harvesting. So we hand-harvest everything, we load it up in our baskets, put it in the truck, and then bring it back to the barn. That’s where we husk it. You have to husk it the same day ’cause it’s so wet. If you don’t, then it all molds, and then you did all that work for nothing. So we husk it all, we lay it all out, and then we get to braiding. And we braid sometimes 65 cobs on a braid. This year we had a really bad harvest because of all the rain, so we only did 35.

– Laura: Yup, 35 cobs. Our yield went from 10,000 pounds of corn down to 1,000 pounds. We took a gigantic step backwards. We have to figure out how to work with all this water, and our group is trying to figure out if we should go back to the mound system and make a mound about six feet round and maybe a foot and a half tall so that the corn can still grow, but the water won’t be invading the fields. We had a really hard time even getting into the fields this year. My husband broke the axle on his truck twice trying to get back there. We just have to work with what we have. And a lot of the farmers in Wisconsin had the same problem. I think all the hemp fields failed this year ’cause there was too much moisture, so knowing what we know about the water, we got 43 inches of rain and snow last year, they’re expecting us to beat that this year. We have to be flexible and we have to be able to work with what we have.

– So this is an example of a corn braid. You can see this was one of our good years. They’re nice and long and beautiful. The corn braids from our first year were pretty sad. But if we give it the right love and we take care of her the right way, she definitely returns the favor. When we’re going through and husking and handling all of these cobs individually, we’re selecting out the seeds. So this is a really good example of a seed cob. It’s got nice, straight rows, it’s got eight rows, there’s no dents, there’s no discoloration or anything like that, and we store these seeds in jars in different people’s houses all over the community so that if a catastrophe happens, there’s some redundancy there. And then, we also make sure we put the year on there because seeds become more resilient. If you stress them, they become more resilient, so the seeds from this year who made it through all that rain, they’re gonna be more resistant to rain the next couple of years, so we’re making sure that we’re making those good records so that we know which seeds are able to deal with different conditions.

– So it’s not all just work. We also use the corn husks to make crafting items. We make corn husk dolls, we make moccasins from the corn husks, we make masks for ceremonies, and mats for the longhouse. Everything is really important for us to teach the youth that are working with us. This year, Lea and I wrote another grant through the Native American Agriculture Fund, and we’ll be working with youth in our community to teach them not only how to grow the corn and care for it, but how to cook it as well. So when I meet with the kids this last couple of weeks, I’ve been meeting with all the youth groups, I bring a bag of shelled corn and a bag of hardwood ashes and I say, “If I give you these, what are you going to do with ’em?” And they always tell me, “I’m gonna give ’em to my grandma “’cause grandma knows how to cook the corn the old way. ” And I said, “When you’re done at the end of this year, “you’re gonna be able to cook for your grandma. ” [claps]

– Okay, so at right about January-February, we start checking the moisture, make sure the moisture is down so it’s ready for storage so we don’t have any of those mold issues. We wanna get it down to 11%, and then we weigh all the braids. And then we start talking about distribution. So we’re this cooperative of people, everybody puts in different amounts of effort, and then we also have the community to think about.

So every year, we decide together how to distribute that corn amongst ourselves and then also provide it to the community. So this is the corn all dried up, then we shell it, then we winnow it, and then it’s ready for cooking. So this is like the slowest food ever. [Laura laughs] You boil the corn with hardwood ashes to nixtamalize it, and that takes off the hull and also fortifies it with niacin. Down South, they would use cull for the same process, so that same technology stretches across the Americas to cook a flint corn to be able to eat. So once it’s in that cooked, then you can put it into a soup or a salad and things like that.

– Laura: So we like to dehydrate the corn for long-term storage. So we have a cannery that has commercial-grade dehydrators, and we can do 80 pounds of corn in one day and get it and dehydrate it all night. And then when you put it in the jar to store it, it’s good indefinitely. You can use it for a really long time.

So we use the corn in a variety of ways. I’m gonna show you the next slide. So the top looks like tamales, and those are actually wedding cakes. One of our group members got married, and that’s white corn mixed with strawberries and it’s boiled. It’s very delicious. It’s like a strawberry tamale, if you can think of that. Then next to that is something called corn mush. You take the corn and you put it on a cookie sheet and you bake it in the oven at 250 for 30 minutes, and then you grind it up, and you cook it like oatmeal, put it in some boiling water and stir it up a lot, add your fruit to it. You can put nuts and maple syrup, and it’s delicious. We also make a flour out of the hulled corn, and we can make that to make banana bread.

Then you have some corn soup with the beans and the pork meat, or you can use smoked turkey. When you eat the corns and the beans and the squash together, you’re making a perfect protein, and you’re getting the good amino acids that you need for your body. We’ve also came up with a corn fritter recipe, and then in the bags is some corn dumplings that you could use in soup.

– So on the rez, the reservation, my mom’s cornbread and corn soup is famous, and people will ask her for the recipe, and she used to just write down the ingredients. And now, when people ask her for the recipe, she says, “Well, first, you have to plant a seed. ” [audience laughing] So it’s changed our relationship beyond just a bowl of food to all of those processes that we have in our ceremonies and our teachings, where now we’re carrying them out, and so our spiritual relationship with the corn is that much stronger.

– So this is our lovely friend Twilight, and we rent our barn from her. This is some bead work that we all made collectively, even had all the men put a few stitches on this project. So these are cuffs and a collar. So we’re recreating trade, we’re bartering with each other, and we’re meeting each other’s needs with the gifts that we have.
So beyond our own community even, we’ve been participating in something called Braiding the Sacred, which I have the honor of being on their coordinating committee. And basically, it’s just gatherings of Native corn growers. In this picture, we’re down in Black River Falls with the Ho-Chunk. And so there’s Ho-Chunk people there, there’s Ojibwe people there, there’s Oneida people there. There must have been 10 or 20 different tribes represented. We showed them how we braid our corn, they showed us how they cook their corn in a pit underground, we had all kinds of different traditional workshops pop up just organically, just by getting together and having that space to share with each other. And then in the lower right, you can see all of the different corn. So that’s actually all Haudenosaunee corn varieties. There’s more than 20 varieties of Haudenosaunee corn. We’re just growing the white corn right now.

Actually, last year, we tried to grow the calico blue and it was really hard because of the rain, but we’re gonna try it again. And all these varieties have different purposes. They have different medicinal needs for us, and we use them at different times of the year for different ceremonies. And so, having all these varieties maintained is really crucial to not just having that food, but having that spiritual connection as well, because if you have a song for something but you don’t have that food anymore, you don’t have that connection anymore. So the Braiding the Sacred is about bringing the sacredness of the people and the sacredness of the corn together and re-braiding that and reminding ourselves of that relationship.

– Oh, sorry. One of those corns, the yellow one, is a sweet corn, but it’s not the sweet corn that you’re thinking of that you get at the farm stand or that you can grow in your backyard. It doesn’t have the high sugar content. It’s a earlier corn, but it is our version of sweet corn, so it’s the original sweet corn. And there’s also popcorn in there, and there’s a flour corn, a flint corn, and the last one, I can’t think of it.

– Dent.

– Dent corn. And they’re used in all different ways for cooking.

– So that’s a good example of a grassroots system of working with each other. These are actual businesses, Native-owned businesses that have traditional foods. So Micmac Farms up in Maine, they do fish and all kinds of different produce. Gakwi:yo:h Farms is Seneca, one of the other Haudenosaunee tribes. They have an amazing farm project. Cherokee has a fisheries and wildlife, they have a hatchery down there. Seminole actually has the 10th largest cattle operation in the United States.

O-Gah-Pah has a bison herd, and they’re the first tribe to have their own processing facility and tribal meat inspector. So just to add on a layer of policy to this, when you have beef and you bring that to get slaughtered, you can bring that to any USDA facility and you’re good to go. If you wanna slaughter a bison, that’s an exotic animal, which is ironic, [audience laughing] and you have to pay extra money to have a special inspection on that exotic animal. And so, by them having their own tribal food inspector, they can reduce the costs on that processing. Lakota Popcorn, Tanka Bar. If you have the chance, always buy Tanka Bar over Epic Bar. That concept was actually taken by Whole Foods and turned into Epic, but Tanka is the original, and you’re supporting buffalo getting back on Indian lands when you buy a Tanka Bar. Seka Hills out in California has amazing wine and olive oil, and then San Xavier Co-op down in Tohono O’odham also grows a lot of different kinds of foods. So this is just a really small sample size of all the different tribal farms and operations out there. There’s over 570 nations just in the U.S. , and almost all of them have food being produced and food for sale that’s culturally appropriate. And the difference there would be our corn is not for sale. So you won’t find our seeds in a seed catalog. If you do find our seeds in a seed catalog, you better tell us ’cause we’ve got problems. So it disappoints me every year when I open the Baker Creek seed catalog and I see these Indigenous seed varieties in there. I don’t know how they got in there, but I know that several people have written open letters to them to let them know that these are sacred foods, they’re not for sale. They’re for sharing with each other. And so, when we see those for sale, that’s like seeing our children in that catalog. It’s very hurtful and it’s very offensive.

Now, if a tribe wants to sell their own seeds, I got nothing to say about that, they’re sovereign, they can do whatever they want, but we would never do that. So I encourage you if you’re traveling, if you’re out there in the world, to look up the tribal farms in your area and look up the tribal businesses in your area and just see what’s going on because a lot of them have tours and a lot of them are very open to having visitors. Come and check them out. Spirit Lake Native Farms is also on there. My friend Bruce Savage runs that farm, and we trade wild rice and corn with him. We also trade with our buddies up at Keweenaw Bay for wild rice and maple syrup and maple vinegar. So we’ve got all kinds of barter going on. I brought a bunch of corn over to Gakwi:yo:h Farms and came back, flew with a cooler full of bison meat. So we’re rekindling that. As we start to grow our own products again, we’re remembering those trade routes and remembering those relationships, and we’re making sure that that continues on.

– So funny story about the trade routes. When we were back in the steady-state and we had trading all the way up to Arctic Circle, the story goes that somebody brought back a polar bear hide, just one, and all the ladies wanted to have a polar bear hide. [all laughing] So the one guy that brought back one polar bear hide got in a lot of trouble because everybody wanted that. This is a new worksheet that I found. I can’t see the site on it, but this is new to me, and I really wanna encourage people to think about this. In our community, eating the white corn was the most relationship that we had with it. It was only available during holiday time, so if it was Thanksgiving or Christmas, that was the only time that we could eat white corn in our community because there wasn’t enough to go around. So what we’re doing is we’re challenging ourselves to learn how to cook it, how to preserve it, how to harvest it, tool-making, and techniques. So the further you dive into this project, the more you learn and the more knowledge is rekindled. So we’re all like little puzzle pieces, and when you put us all together.

– Yeah, so we wanted to show you here that this isn’t just about eating for us. Trust me, we do eat, we eat a lot, but we do it because we’re preserving a way of life. So we’re preserving the traditional cooking methods, and those cooking methods, using clay pots and using hot stones, actually embed nutrients back into the food that we might not have in our soils because our soils are so sick right now. So that’s really important for us to maintain our health. And then you get into preserving, and that’s thinking about the future. So in the old way, we would have these huge underground caches lined with birch bark, and our corn would be dried and put into these clay pots with a leather covering, and they could stay down there for decades. And so, when we experienced a catastrophe or we experienced a harvest failure, we would have that food as a backup. Our teaching is to have seven years of food saved up just in case. So we’re working towards that now. And then the harvesting, which is not just about harvesting the corn, but to harvest the corn the traditional way, you have to have a harvest basket, and you make a basket from the black ash tree.

And so, we’re maintaining those relationships with our plant relatives as well. And then, you get into that toolmaking, you’re gonna make that basket. Maybe you’re gonna make a hoe from a moose shoulder, you gotta know those teachings, and that’s really important for youth to feel like they’re connecting to themselves, and then you get down into the teachings, and that’s what we’ve been talking about as far as our identity and really who we are. And it’s been shown that if you connect youth to their identity in Indian country, their rates of suicide drop, and their self-image improves. And that’s crucial when you live in a very hard place to have a positive self-image of your community and to feel connected to your identity and to be proud of that. So that’s really what we’re doing. We’re growing corn and we’re eating it, but it digs down deep into those teachings and that identity.

– So this is another one of our little movie stars. When we get together to have a meeting to talk about how much corn are we going to plant, how are we going to harvest, when are we gonna start, are we gonna take green corn this year, all these issues, we have consensus decision-making, which goes back to our original teachings. And we also have a rule that you can only bring up an issue three times.

If it doesn’t make it through by a third time, you can never bring it up again, and I highly recommend that everyone adopt this because it’s very, very good at settling issues. The impacts were also the land access that we talked about earlier and changing government policy to allow people to have access to land to grow on communally. The spiritual connection, we talked about the mental health issue, we talked about that, and the most important thing is connecting the youth and the elders together in the same place at the same time. So we have a lot of teenagers in our group. And you know teenagers, you can’t talk to them. They don’t listen, their answer is yes or no and that’s it, but when you get ’em in a circle and you get ’em talking, you can find out anything you need from them, they will tell on themselves. [laughing] So it’s really important that we keep the circle going, we keep the seasons going, we keep the talking going, and we keep the corn growing.

– And there’s one more thing I wanna add on to that, is that mental health aspect of getting together and working together, it’s not something that we get to do very often, especially on something that is a total passion project, and then you add on the spiritual side of that, and you add on your community side of that. It’s really improved the mental health of some people in our group because that loneliness factor comes out when you know you have a group that you’re working with, that you’re part of. And then the spiritual connection has improved for people who never went to ceremonies before working with the corn, and now understand everything that they were saying in ceremonies now makes sense. So they see the value in going back to those traditional ways, and that’s really awesome to see in the community.

– Also, growing the corn is a great equalizer. So we have elected officials that are in our group and they’re not any more special than anyone else that’s in the group. They have to work just as hard as we do. So there isn’t a hierarchy; we are all equal. And when we get together to harvest, nobody tells you what to do. You just jump in and do the job that makes you happy. So we have one guy who just cannot sit still and husk, so he goes around and empties out all the bins when people are filling up their bins with either corn or corn husks, and there’s another person who can braid like nobody’s business. So you find the thing that really makes you happy, and that’s the thing that you focus on. We have people that are great teachers, and they teach when they’re there, and it’s just really a great place to be.

– So the other impact that these traditional foods have is there’s actually been a lot of studies recently about this in different places, some in Northern Wisconsin and then some in the U. P. , but people start to lose weight when they eat traditional foods. They have improved insulin metabolism, which is a huge issue in Indian country. Diabetes is an epidemic in Indian country, so if we have, our foods are our solution to that, and not just to that physical body, but to the spiritual body and the mental body and the emotional body. And so, we have decreased blood sugars, blood pressure, improved cholesterol and triglycerides, and even reducing heart disease. So there are people who have gone from being on insulin shots to not being on insulin shots by eating traditional foods. So the study that we were discussing when we made this slide was a group that ate the USDA guideline diet and a group that ate the traditional food diet, these were elders, Native elders up north in Wisconsin, the Native elders that ate the traditional food diet, their health improved vastly. A lot of them went off of their medications. The people that stuck on the USDA diet saw no change.

We know that these foods are good for us and we know that when we eat them, we can commune with our ancestors. We’re eating the same exact corn that our ancestors grew thousands of years ago. We’re eating the same corn that saved George Washington at Valley Forge. This corn is historical. It’s part of us. And so when we eat it, it’s not just a meal anymore for us. We’re understanding more and more about what it really means to us. Questions?

– So the question was when we harvest our corn, do people from outside the community come and help? And the answer is yes. We have university students that come and help us harvest every year, we have something called the Wise Women’s Gathering Place, where people are going to get help for domestic abuse or whatever issues they’re dealing with, and they come as a group and they help us harvest the corn. We have a group of traditional people that are of a different clan that aren’t in our group and they need to get corn for ceremonies, so they come and help out.

And then, we have elders that just stop in. During the day, they see the barn doors open and they come in, they sit down, and they just love to visit. So recently, my husband and I brought some green corn. We didn’t feature that. We didn’t have any good pictures to show you, but green corn is the white corn that’s picked at an immature stage where the corn cob is still green, and the corn is like sweet corn, and we grilled it, we cut it off the cob, put it in the freezer. Well, we have a huge Thanksgiving dinner in our community that’s free. All the food is donated and we go every year. I usually bake apple pies. Ran out of apples so I said, “You know what, “we’re just gonna bring green corn instead. ” So we got out two gallon freezer bags full of green corn, put it in the crock pot, put in a pound of butter ’cause everybody loves butter on their corn, and we served that, and we had elders stop by our table and say, “I haven’t had that since I was a kid.
“I remember when my mother made that for me. “Thank you so much for bringing that. ” They knew who brought the corn.

– So the question is about, he grows a variety of Guatemalan corn that’s black, and he grinds it up, or he roasts it and grinds it up and use it for cornmeal. So his question was does he need to nixtamalize it first? Does he need to go through the process with the hardwood ashes? No, that’s totally sufficient because you’re breaking the hull, so you’re allowing the nutrients on the inside of the corn to come out. You can nixtamalize it and then dry it and then roast it and then shell it if you want to, or then grind it if you want to, but it’s not necessary. Oh, one thing we forgot to mention was where all those hardwood ashes come from. So our friends up on the Menominee Nation heat their houses a lot of the times with hardwood, and they don’t know what to do with all their ashes. Well, we need ashes and they don’t have corn, so we got a little trade going on with them. They think it’s a great deal.

They give us a huge can of hardwood ashes for two little bags of corn. We think it’s a great deal ’cause we don’t have hardwood ashes. So that’s just another example of those bartering systems.

– So we do have backyard gardeners that use the fish emulsion in their small plots like you are, and you can get it at any garden center. They sell the fish emulsion. So you just put a tablespoon into a gallon of water, and you can directly pour that onto your plants, onto your roots, or you can get a backpack sprayer or you can get the kind that you hook up to your lawnmower and you can use a spraying wand, whatever works for you, but you stop spraying when you see the silks poking out because you don’t want your corn to taste like fish. [audience chuckling]

– Wild rice is a very strong tradition up north. I mean, it’s huge. So there’s a couple of tribes that have wild rice facilities where they go through the process of, you have to, what’s the word I’m looking for, when you heat it up?

– Oh yeah, roasting, yeah.

– Yeah, you have to roast it and hull it. It’s a lot of steps to making wild rice. That’s another one that’s really hard. So Leech Lake has a pretty advanced system. White Earth Land Recovery Project also processes wild rice. Bruce Savage actually built his own wild rice processing plant at Spirit Lake Native Farms, and some people just do it really old-school over a fire, and the old way is to dance on it with moccasins to get those hulls off

– And winnow.

–and winnow it, and get all the chaff off of the seed and then get all the little pebbles and stones that fall into your canoe when you’re harvesting the wild rice. That’s a very

– There’s a workshop. [both laughing]

– But yeah, that’s alive and well up north, definitely.

– The question is what is the ash bread? So there’s a way– That was it. Yeah, sorry. There’s a way to make the cornbread that’s in the plastic there. Yeah, those are called Conestoga breads. They’re white cornmeal bread with beans put together and then boiled, but some people can just cook them right in the fire. So you just take the loaf of bread and you put it right into the fire, it gets burnt, and then you just knock the ashes off and you eat it that way. It’s kinda like a baked potato in the campfire, only it’s a Conestoga bread.

– Yeah, you can put the ashes in a lot of things. You can put ’em in your beans. When your beans are soaking, mix some ash water with that, and that’s really good too. Ashes are really good for you. Yeah, you could add some hardwood ashes to your mush when you’re making it after you grind it up.

So where did our seeds come from? So when we started, we were like, “Great, we’re gonna go three acres, “who’s got seeds?” And everyone was like, “I have this much seeds, “is that gonna work?” And, no, it’s not gonna work. So we connected with Angie Ferguson over at Onondaga, we had a plan to meet at this food sovereignty summit, and we were gonna bring the wild rice and she was gonna bring the corn seed, and we made a trade there in Michigan. And that night, there was a moon ceremony and the woman was talking about a prophecy where that trade from the West and the East would start to happen again and that wild rice would get traded for that corn. And Angela was like, “I just did that!” [audience laughing] So it came alive right there at that ceremony. It was really cool. So this is just one of our varieties of corn. This is the most common variety. We use it in soups, we use it in salads, we use it in the Conestoga bread. The other corns are also really good for you, the other varieties that we have. But they’re just, seeds are not as common, and so this was what we could get our hands on.
We started growing the blue calico corn last year, and we’re gonna keep growing that. But there’s dozens of varieties that as Haudenosaunee people, we could be growing, but it’s a matter of keeping the seeds from crossing with each other ’cause they’re all open-pollinated. But we’ve been talking about how we can maybe do some succession planting if the climate agrees with us and do that, plant more corn.

– This was the corn that sustained our community since we moved from New York, just this one variety. – And this is called the Tuscarora white corn. It’s not Oneida corn. You’ll hear it called Oneida white corn; we adopted it. [both laughing] That time of harvesting and braiding, even though it’s a lot of work, it has a lot of other benefits to it. So it brings the community together, we get to sit across from each other and work together and share those stories. So even though it’s a lot of work, we really value those hours that we get to spend together.

– So my husband and I actually got married in our cornfield, and all of our company came to come to the reception and we had them work. So it was a working wedding reception. [audience laughing] So they picked some of the corn with us and then they sat in big circles and he directed where everybody was going to sit, and a lot of people who were non-Native said it was the best wedding reception they’d ever been to because they didn’t just sit at their little dinner table and just chat with people with them and then have a few drinks and leave. They got to learn everything about everybody that was there at that wedding, and it really opened up their minds. And so, one of the ladies who’s a friend of his, she was really crabby about having to do this work. She was really put out by it, but then she put her hands on that corn and she said she just totally felt relaxed. So this corn works for everyone, not just Native people. When you get your hands on it, it has a real spiritual feeling to it.

Lea: I guess that’s it. Yawako.

[all laughing] [audience applauding]