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The Editors' Desk
In our first issue of The Deep Dish in 2024, guest-edited by regular contributor Kate Nelson, we focus on Indigenous Foodways, a topic Civil Eats has long covered. Nelson, who is an Alaska Native Tlingit tribal member, reports on the deep connection between Indigenous food sovereignty and the Land Back movement, and traces the historical underpinning of the long fight for ancestral homelands and the revitalization of Native foodways.
We follow up on previous reporting on efforts to advocate for tribal issues in the delayed farm bill, the aftermath of a recent Supreme Court ruling on Navajo Nation farmers’ water rights, and an updated opinion by Jeanine Pfeiffer and Ron Montez, Sr. on the work to save the Clear Lake hitch, a culturally important fish intertwined with the destiny of tribal peoples. Nelson also interviews Indigenous ethnobotanist and food sovereignty activist Linda Black Elk about decolonizing our palates, foraging as an act of resistance, and developing relationships with dandelions.
We strive to cover Indigenous foodways year-round and seek to work with Indigenous journalists to report on a wide range of food-related stories. And we hope that our readers will learn more about Indigenous foodways and begin to decolonize their own experiences with food and agriculture.
Be sure to check out our special section below for members, including announcements, updates, and questions specifically for you. Thanks for reading, and for being a Civil Eats supporter. If you'd like to increase your support for our work with a tax-deductible donation, please click the button below.
~ The Civil Eats Editors
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Member Updates |
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Happy New Year! We’re looking forward to another great year, and to celebrating our 15th anniversary with you. We have some great things in the works for 2024 that we are excited to share with you in the coming weeks. Thank you for supporting Civil Eats as a member!
Help Us Plan Upcoming Issues of The Deep Dish
We’re curious what you want to learn more about in our future issues. Would you like an update on any stories we’ve previously covered? Is there a trending topic you think others should know more about? We have links to every past issue at the bottom of this newsletter, so check them out and email us if you have ideas for additional topics we should consider.
Share Your Experience With Civil Eats
We will be shining a light on members this year in multiple ways. To start, we’d love to hear one special food-related thing about where you live that you’d like to share with the member community. Please send 1-2 sentences along with your name and affiliation, if you have one, to members@civileats.com and we may highlight you and your response in a future newsletter. (Please note: Responses may be lightly edited prior to publication.)
Connect With Other Civil Eats Members
Join our members’ Slack Community to connect with others who care about food policy, alternative approaches to food production, and food justice while getting first-to-receive and behind-the-scenes access to our reporting. To participate, please review the Community Rules and Agreements and accept this invitation link, which is good through February 21. Here are some instructions if you’re using Slack for the first time. |
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First Look |
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Nick Tilsen during the Mount Rushmore Land Back Protest. (Photo credit: Willi White) |
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The Land Back Movement Is Also About Foodways |
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BY KATE NELSON
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In 2020, just months after George Floyd’s murder, then-President Donald Trump visited South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore as part of an Independence Day celebration and used it to rally his right-wing supporters with a “dark and divisive speech.” Complete with a showy fireworks display and fighter-jet flyover, the affair satisfied his longtime desire to mark the Fourth of July standing before the “Shrine of Democracy.” But the occasion served as another rallying cry as well.
For almost three hours before the event, about 150 protesters—many of them Native Americans—blockaded the road that leads to the controversial national monument. Carrying signs reading, “You Are On Stolen Land” and “Honor All Treaties,” the activists were contesting Trump’s policies, standing in solidarity with the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, and calling for the return of land to Indigenous peoples—namely South Dakota’s sacred Black Hills. They faced off with local law enforcement and National Guard soldiers in riot gear, eventually disbanding following the arrest of 21 people.
Among those apprehended was Nick Tilsen, the Oglala Lakota president and CEO of NDN Collective, a Native-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power, which has been on the frontlines of the fight to return land to tribal communities. (The charges against him were dropped in December 2022.)
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Nick Tilsen during a Land Back march in Rapid City. (Photo credit: Willi White)
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“The Land Back movement is much older than 2020, but that was a catalyzing moment,” he says. “We had the entire White House press corps here, and we wanted to amplify this authentic Indigenous narrative at that very specific time in history when we were seeing statues getting toppled and Confederate flags being lowered around the country. We see Land Back everywhere now, and that’s because this is a decentralized movement that isn’t driven by just one organization or leader. It’s truly a movement.”
In so many ways, the Black Hills—known as Paha Sapa in Lakota—serve as a striking symbol of the Land Back movement. As detailed in the popular 2022 documentary Lakota Nation vs. United States, the western South Dakota mountain range is considered sacred by area tribal nations and was long a key hunting ground for bison, pronghorn, elk, and deer. Its unlawful seizure nearly 150 years ago remains a major point of contention.
As colonialism swept across what would become the United States during the 19th century with blatant disregard for the land’s original inhabitants, Native peoples fought off settler and military encroachment of their hunting, fishing, and gathering territories.
Their lifeways—and foodways—were hugely altered and restricted.
Deadly clashes on the Great Plains prompted the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which created the Great Sioux Reservation spanning 60 million acres around the Black Hills. But after gold was discovered in the mountains, the federal government redrew the treaty lines and seized the Black Hills in 1877, an act the nine tribes comprising the Great Sioux Nation have contested since that time.
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“We see Land Back everywhere now, and that’s because this is a decentralized movement that isn’t driven by just one organization or leader. It’s truly a movement.”
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In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the land had been illegally taken and awarded more than $100 million in reparations (though the land was not returned). The tribes refused to take the money, even as it grew to a value of more than $1 billion, because the Black Hills were never for sale.
Native peoples have lost nearly 99 percent of their historical land base in the U.S., according to recent research. With it, they lost access to important hunting and fishing grounds as well as myriad places to gather and prepare food.
For Tilsen and other Native thought leaders, the contemporary Land Back movement is about championing Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and economic opportunity while pushing back against long-standing discriminatory policies that continue to cause tribal communities undue hardships, including disproportionate poverty rates, outsized food insecurity, marked health disparities, and lower life expectancies. But it’s also about a powerful yearning to rebuild relationships to actual places—and the countless living things that inhabit them.
In Montana, for example, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes now oversee 18,000 acres where bison roam once again. In Nebraska, the Ponca people have been growing their sacred corn on farmland signed back to them in 2018. In New York, the Onondaga Nation is cleaning up the polluted waterways, once abundant with fish, on 1,000 returned acres.
In Minnesota, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe recently secured 12,000 acres within Chippewa National Forest, an important area for hunting, fishing, gathering, and harvesting wild rice. And in California, the Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council (made up of 10 area tribal nations) is stewarding coho salmon and steelhead trout within a 523-acre property managed in partnership with the Save the Redwoods League.
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“I often choose the word rematriation over Land Back, because I hope that it can transcend the narrow Western/imperial concept of land ownership and tenure.”
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Mohawk seed keeper and farmer Rowen White prefers to think of this revolution as rematriation. “I often choose the word rematriation over Land Back, because I hope that it can transcend the narrow Western/imperial concept of land ownership and tenure,” she wrote recently on Instagram. “Rematriation is in service to restoring relationality with the land and the countless more-than-human kin held within that land. Relationships-back. Loving interspecies reciprocity-back. Caring songs sung to the land that holds the bones of our ancestors-back.”
For White and many other food sovereignty activists, the movement to return ancestral homelands to their rightful tribal communities is inherently intertwined with the movement to revitalize Indigenous foodways. She points out that the massive land loss Native peoples experienced due to settler colonialism—more than 1.5 billion acres across the U.S., according to eHistory’s Invasion of America project—has hugely impacted their abilities to hunt, fish, forage, and farm.
As Tilsen mentions, Land Back predates that 2020 catalyzing moment at Mount Rushmore and the many modern-day grassroots efforts taking place across the globe. Alvin Warren was studying history at Dartmouth in the late 1980s when Santa Clara Pueblo tribal leaders tapped him to help resolve a decades-old Indian Claims Commission claim to regain some of their traditional homelands in modern-day New Mexico. Upon seeing his 221-page thesis paper on the history of his people’s homelands, the tribal council asked him to start a land acquisition program.
“I was 21 years old and had no idea how to even do that,” he recalls. “But I took it on, and we spent the better part of a decade collectively doing things we had only dreamed of. We were able to get three pieces of legislation through Congress, raise nearly $5 million, and get back more than 7,500 acres. That might not sound like a lot, but it was transformational for us because we had been hitting up against the same wall for well over a century.”
Warren helped the people of Santa Clara Pueblo regain more than 16,000 acres of their ancestral homelands, then answered the call from other tribal nations around the country to assist in reacquiring titles, entering into co-management agreements, and otherwise protecting their traditional lands. He went on to become the director of the Trust for Public Land’s tribal land program, the lieutenant governor of Santa Clara Pueblo, and eventually New Mexico’s Indian Affairs cabinet secretary.
His passion was reignited with the Biden administration’s historic appointment of Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) as interior secretary. She has ushered in a new era for a department that was once responsible for the systematic removal of Indigenous communities from their land. On her watch, thousands of acres have been returned to Native oversight, co-stewardship programs have been developed to protect sacred sites, and important species such as bison, bighorn sheep, and salmon have been restored to tribal lands.
Warren acknowledges this significant progress, yet he remains unsatisfied with recent state and federal efforts to return land to Native groups.
“Yes, we’re seeing a steady trickle of stories about land coming back into tribal control, but by and large, they are tiny bits of property,” he says. “We’re talking about 1.5 billion acres that have been taken from Indigenous people; we’re not going to get to anything remotely just if we’re doing this at 50, 100, 1,000 acres at a time.” He adds that tribes often have to repurchase these pieces of land and are often constrained by conservation easements, which place restrictions on land use and development.
Tribes have also been invited to co-manage land, which both Warren and Tilsen view as an insufficient end point. “It’s Land Back Lite,” Tilsen says with a laugh. “Co-management is a pathway for us to be able to manage our lands in better ways, but my worry is that it locks us into a longer power dynamic relationship with the federal government. What I’m really interested in is returning public lands and their titles to tribes or Indigenous cooperatives and coalitions.”
Though the Land Back movement is obviously uplifting Indigenous communities, they aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from more land being in tribal possession. As the climate crisis intensifies, so too does the clamor for real-world solutions. Increasingly, experts are turning to Native knowledge keepers and recognizing the power of traditional ecological knowledge, including practices such as agroforestry, fire stewardship, regenerative agriculture, and holistic wildlife management. |
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“We know that countries that have made commitments to address climate change and biodiversity loss are falling short. The restoration of land to tribal nations would help many countries get back on track.”
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Recent research backs this approach. A 2019 ScienceDirect study showed that Native-managed lands foster as much or more biodiversity than protected areas, which could be key in mitigating the negative impact of extractive agriculture. Additionally, a 2016 World Resources Institute report determined that securing Indigenous forestland tenure in the Amazon basin could yield economic benefits up to $1.5 trillion over a 20-year period through carbon storage, reduced pollution, and erosion control.
“We know that countries that have made commitments to address climate change and biodiversity loss are falling short,” Warren says. “The restoration of land to tribal nations would actually help many countries get back on track. We have more and more researchers who are making this connection between the restoration of land to Indigenous peoples and the protection of our Earth, which ultimately is the protection of all people on this planet.”
Despite this compelling call to action for collective benefit, very real resistance remains due to misconceptions about the movement. “Land Back triggers people’s white fragility; they think we’re coming for the house, the picket fence, the 2.5 kids, and the dog,” Tilsen says. “But we as Indigenous people are not trying to repeat the history that was done to us. There’s also this misconception that white people don’t play a massive role [as] allies, when the reality is that Indigenous peoples’ fight to return our land is bound up with the very future of this country.”
Tilsen has concerns about what a presidential administration change could mean for Native representation and progress, but it’s not just about party lines. “The Nixon, Obama, and Biden administrations have been responsible for more actual Land Back than any other administrations,” says Tilsen. “Does it matter who is in office? Hell yeah, it matters. But our success doesn’t depend on one political party. We need to build power around this year’s historical election and develop solutions and strategies no matter who wins.”
To safeguard present and future progress, Warren implores policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels to take action in creating institutionalized mechanisms for tribal nations to acquire publicly managed and owned land. On the private side, he highlights the need for legitimate funding sources, since Native communities are typically asked to buy back stolen land, and urges individuals to consider donating unused lands to local tribes and including them in their estate planning. |
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The ceremony to return the Bruce's Beach land back to its original stewards.
(Photo credit: Starr Genyard-Swift)
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The powerful impact of the Indigenous-led Land Back movement has sparked similar action among other marginalized groups. Reparative justice advocate Kavon Ward is driving the Black Land Back movement. She helped steward the 2021 return of Bruce’s Beach in California, a once-thriving Black community that was improperly seized in 1924 through eminent domain.
Today, Ward leads the advocacy organization Where Is My Land, which helps Black people discover and reclaim U.S. land taken from them. “I’m of the belief that you can’t have equality until there’s equity,” she says. “True remedy is returning what your ancestors stole from my ancestors.”
Much like the dispossession Native peoples have experienced, Black farmers lost about 13.5 million acres from 1920 to 1997, according to a 2022 AEA Papers and Proceedings study. That equates to roughly $326 billion of acreage. (As of the 2017 agricultural census, Black farmers operated 4.7 million acres, up from 1.5 million in 1997.)
In the end, the Land Back movement serves to not only support Native sovereignty but also safeguard our environment and strengthen our food systems.
“The future of conservation in the United States is Indigenous,” NDN’s Tilsen affirms. “There’s a massive opportunity to fight climate change and increase biodiversity while also achieving justice. Let’s hold a mirror up to America and find a path forward that includes Black reparations, the return of stolen Indigenous lands to Indigenous hands, and the changing of systems that perpetuate violence and oppression. The future we’re fighting for is not just a future for Indigenous people—it’s a future for people everywhere.” |
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Photo courtesy of the Native Farm Bill Coalition.
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For the Next Farm Bill, Tribal Nations Are Stepping Up Their Advocacy Efforts |
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BY LISA HELD |
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In 2017, Indigenous advocates formed the Native Farm Bill Coalition (NFBC), a first-of-its-kind effort to represent the interests of Indian Country in the negotiations leading up the country’s most important food and agriculture bill. And the members achieved notable successes during the 2018 cycle, counting 63 provisions in the final bill that benefitted Native communities.
Now, as the 2023 Farm Bill season stretches into 2024, they are laser-focused on building on that progress.
“This quarter, in the new year, we’ve really got to reinvigorate the House [of Representatives],” said Kayla Gebeck Carroll, a member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians who represents the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (as their attorney) on the executive council of the NFBC.
Because 2023’s gridlock in the chamber didn’t leave a lot of space for inroads, she said, advocates spent last year making significant progress on the Senate side. They hosted fly-ins for representatives of various tribes to meet with lawmakers in D.C., helped individual Senators write marker bills, and met regularly with the Senate Agriculture Committee to discuss the priorities outlined in their 2022 “Gaining Ground” report.
Gebeck Carroll said there’s a lot of bipartisan support for what NFBC members call “parity.” Essentially, it means advocating for members of Congress to add the word “tribes” wherever state and local governments are listed. For example, they’re hoping language that dictates how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) implements conservation programs that pay farmers to adopt environmentally friendly practices will be updated to include tribes wherever state and local governments are involved.
Another big area of focus is on tribal self-determination. A 1975 law referred to in shorthand as “638” made it possible for tribes to contract directly with the government to administer certain federal programs themselves. But unlike other agencies, the USDA did not engage in those contracts until the 2018 Farm Bill set up limited pilot projects for food aid programs, and about a dozen tribes are currently participating. “We've heard that the committees at a minimum want to keep the pilot 638 programs going and, if possible, expand them,” Gebeck Carroll said.
Senator Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) has introduced marker bills that would permanently allow tribes to operate both the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on their own. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma) introduced a bill that would allow tribes to handle meat-processing inspections. On the forestry side, the 2018 bill also expanded the ability of tribal nations to manage forests on federal land, and the NFBC is now pushing for technical fixes that would make that program more effective.
One major hurdle for advocates working on farm bill priorities in any sector—including Indigenous advocates—is the fact that D.C. lawmakers are working with a set amount of money and are currently unlikely to move dollars around.
Gebeck Carroll said that while allowing for self-determination doesn’t technically cost money, it can be challenging to make that case. Meanwhile, other requests do come with specific costs. For example, Civil Eats has reported on how Indigenous farmers lack access to the same level of technical support available to non-Native agricultural producers and that giving the Federally Recognized Tribes Extension Program (FRTEP) a boost could remedy that. Many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree, Gebeck Carroll said, but they see paying for it as a political impossibility.
The political dynamics are more challenging this year than they were in 2018, she added, but unlike five years ago, Indigenous producers are not starting from scratch to advocate for their food and agriculture interests. “This time, the coalition started a lot earlier, and as a result, we have more marker bills introduced,” she said. “Even if the politics prevent us from getting as many wins as we did previously . . . we can continue to work on [these issues] when the time is right.” |
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The Follow-Up |
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Center-pivot irrigation watering corn on Navajo farmland. (Photo courtesy of NAPI) |
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Navajo Nation Farmers Are Still Navigating the Future of Their Water Rights |
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BY TWILIGHT GREENAWAY
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Last spring, Civil Eats contributor Virginia Gewin visited Navajo Agriculture Products Industries (NAPI), a 110,000-acre farm at the northeastern edge of Navajo Nation, at a time when a high-profile case was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court focused on the federal government’s obligation to secure water for tribes in the Southwest. Navajo Nation has been negotiating with the state of Arizona for decades to secure the kinds of water rights that would allow the farm to grow more food, while also making it possible for the Nation’s residents to stop relying on trucking water in for their basic needs.
In a 5-4 ruling against the Navajo Nation in June, the court said the treaties that have existed for over a century “do not impose a duty on the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the tribe.”
The decision wasn’t exactly surprising, says Heather Tanana, a Diné member and law professor at the University of Utah. “For a lot of us, especially Indigenous folks, we viewed [the case] as a big opportunity to see forward progress. And then it didn't happen. And many people were like, ‘Well, I'm not surprised, because government always makes promises and doesn't hold up their side of the deal.’”
However, experts were concerned that the Supreme Court case had the potential to overturn the Winters Doctrine, a legal precedent that serves as the foundation of tribal water rights across the country, but the ruling didn’t do that. That means that the Nation’s ongoing negotiations with the state of Arizona to settle water claims to the Little Colorado River, Colorado River, and other tributaries are still in play. Those negotiations, years in the making, involve the Department of Justice and are continuing behind closed doors.
Tanana added that the court’s decision may ultimately lead the Navajo Nation to decide to reopen Arizona v. California, a Supreme Court case that was decided in the 1960s and led to the development of the Lower Colorado River and shaped the current water distribution in the Colorado River Basin, largely leaving out Indigenous communities.
She also offered another reason for optimism in the executive order that President Biden signed in December, which is designed to usher in the next era of tribal self-determination, and promises to require federal agencies to take action to “ensure federal funding for tribes is accessible, flexible, and equitable.”
Although state and federal funds to incentivize farmers to save water either by fallowing fields or changing their crops or practices are still inaccessible to Indigenous people in Arizona without quantified water rights, she’s cautiously optimistic that the order could result in some new pathways for increased water rights.
The NAPI operation, which grows a range of crops but is largely producing corn and alfalfa, has never had the water it needs to operate at full capacity—a clear example of the lopsided way laws have been written in a region with other large, monocrop operations run by non-Native folks.
But Andrew Curley, a Diné member who studies water governance and Indigenous geography at the University of Arizona, points out that NAPI is the only large-scale monocrop operation in the Navajo Nation, and he doesn’t think that kind of water-thirsty farming will make sense there as the climate continues to change and the region stands to become even more arid.
“I think there's a real interest in reviving traditional agriculture, and most of the farms that you see outside of NAPI are following those traditional models,” Curley told Civil Eats recently. The farmers Curley knows are intercropping with corn, watermelon, and squash on small fields, often in valleys, where rainwater stays in the soil longer. They’re using rain catchment and shaping the land with berms to catch as much water as possible. “What's interesting is that more people here know traditional agriculture than the monoculture model.”
He and others are holding out hope for the day when those ancient practices—combined with expanded water rights—will make living and producing food on the Navajo Nation less of an uphill battle. |
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The Follow-Up |
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A hitch restoration meeting with regional stakeholders from the county water department, the local land trust, and a geomorphologist. (Photo courtesy of the authors)
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Op-ed: The Clear Lake Hitch, and the Tribes That Depend on Them, Face New Emergencies |
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BY JEANINE PFEIFFER and RON MONTEZ, SR. |
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One year after California state and Lake County leaders declared an emergency for the endangered Clear Lake Hitch (known as “chi” to local Pomo Tribes), more than a dozen agencies are collaborating in an all-hands-on-deck approach to save this culturally important fish, one intertwined with our destiny as Tribal peoples.
For millennia, abundant spring spawning runs of chi filled 14 tributaries feeding North America’s most ancient lake. Thousands of Tribal members gathered at Clear Lake to communally hand-harvest and process chi into fish jerky that provided year-long sustenance. Following successive genocides of Tribal communities, countless generations of sustainable fish harvests were erased by five generations of environmental damage: water diversions, invasive species introductions, and habitat destruction. Within our lifetimes, the chi spawning runs diminished to only six streams, and throughout the recent drought, we didn’t witness a single run.
In 2022, fearing for the chi’s future, Tribal members drove hundreds of miles to testify at agency meetings in Sacramento, Eureka, and South Lake Tahoe. Our efforts inspired a series of historical firsts: interagency hitch summits at Big Valley Rancheria in 2022 and Robinson Rancheria in 2023 resulting in novel, cross-agency collaborations, resource-pooling, and data-sharing to address persistent threats to the chi.
Reversing the damage is a complex undertaking. To understand how to maintain water flows in spawning streams for chi eggs to survive and emergent fry to make their way back to the lake, the California Department of Water and the State Water Resources Control Board are helping to install specialized equipment to monitor surface and groundwater in creeks and creekside wells. Lake County Water Resources and the California Conservation Corps are clearing tons of debris from waterways to improve fish habitat and water flow and reduce streambank erosion.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) allocated millions of dollars to identify and dismantle hitch migration barriers, complete a hitch conservation strategy, and fund the Robinson Rancheria Environmental Protection department to track and remove invasive carp, a chi predator known to grow up to 25 pounds and “vacuum up” thousands of chi eggs and young.
As we wrote about last year, an exceptionally wet spring in 2023 mitigated California’s drought and brought the welcome surprise of tens of thousands of hitch to lakeside streams. Yet heavy water flows generated a new emergency: Chi were swept over streambanks and stranded in ditches and fields. Tribal staff, accompanied by CDFW and landowners who reported strandings, ultimately rescued more than 26,000 chi.
The sudden appearance of high numbers of chi has scientists scratching their heads—there’s a working hypothesis that adjacent water bodies provided a refuge for adult hitch—and has some local residents, including farmers whose water use has come into question, suggesting that the crisis is not legitimate.
In a public meeting co-sponsored by the Lake County Farm Bureau, the audience was shown graphics illustrating hundreds of sampling sites throughout Clear Lake and nine years of hitch survey data using seine nets, electrofishing, and stream observations by U.S. Geological Service and CDFW fish biologists—all clearly pointing to severe hitch population declines. However, some audience members accused agencies of creating a false crisis based on “faulty data.”
We know that one year of good fish runs doesn’t mean our chi have recovered. It will take years of juvenile recruitment—loads of healthy teenagers growing into reproductive adults—to ensure their future. This year, although another wet winter has brought several feet of rain to Lake County, we haven’t yet seen the kinds of consistent water flows that are needed for the annual upstream migrations of the chi between February and June.
We are still waiting, watching, and praying for our chi. And whenever we see them again, we will sing them home. |
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The Check-In |
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Linda Black Elk (Photo courtesy of NATIFS)
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How Listening to Our Plant Relatives Helps Build Resilient Food Systems |
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BY KATE NELSON
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Linda Black Elk grew up listening to plants. The Indigenous ethnobotanist and food sovereignty activist foraged with her mom and grandmother in the Ohio River Valley as a child, then made the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota her home alongside her husband, Luke. These days, honoring her Korean, Mongolian, and Catawba roots, she teaches others how to nurture their relationships with the natural world. Together, she and Luke have spent years teaching members of their community (and their three sons) about the importance of traditional foods and medicines through publications, seminars, and hands-on workshops.
After overseeing the food sovereignty program at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota, Black Elk recently became the education director for Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman’s Minneapolis nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS). There, she’s using her vast ecological expertise to develop curriculum for the Indigenous Food Lab training center and lead community engagement.
In addition to inspiring both Native American and non-Native students and her many social media followers, Black Elk has also earned the respect of fellow foragers such as author and natural historian Samuel Thayer. “Linda has such a broad knowledge base, and I have learned so much from her,” he says. “She is undoing the cultural shame that was instilled from boarding schools and the other ways that Indigenous people were pushed away from their food traditions. She mixes Indigenous traditional knowledge with modern science in a way that feels practical yet fun.”
Black Elk’s efforts go beyond education. In 2016, she was one of thousands of water protectors protesting the Dakota Access pipeline over concerns that an oil spill would contaminate the Standing Rock Sioux’s water supply and other resources. (The pipeline was ultimately built in 2017 and has been operational since.)
Civil Eats recently spoke with Black Elk about decolonizing our palates, foraging as an act of resistance, and developing intimate relationships with dandelions.
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What sparked your initial interest in ethnobotany?
My [paternal] grandma and I would go for walks, and she would point out all the plants I could eat and which ones I couldn’t. She was always picking wild onions and poke greens, which we would cook up with scrambled eggs for breakfast.
My mom was an Indigenous woman from Korea, and she grew up foraging and growing her own food as a matter of survival. Because her family was extremely poor, she needed to know all the plants she could eat because they were free. When she came over to this country with my father, it was a natural thing for her to carry over. She was surprised to find a lot of plants here that were similar to the ones she grew up with—amaranth, dandelion, goldenrod, lamb’s quarter, Solomon’s seal, tickweed—and she incorporated them into our diet.
In my family on both sides, we always considered plants as food and medicine. For example, if I had a sore throat, my mom would make me ginger and lemon tea with honey. I’ve never had a single year when I haven’t had a garden, even if that was a container garden. I grew up with a lot of really amazing fresh food that was both grown and harvested, and all of that family history led me to study plants in school.
Why is traditional ecological knowledge so important as it relates to both food sovereignty and climate change?
Let’s back up a bit. Everyone talks about decolonizing, but what does that even mean? In terms of food sovereignty, we’re talking about getting back to the foods of our ancestors. Unfortunately, our entire food system is determined by colonization, and our palates have also been colonized, largely by salt and sugar—so we believe that everything we eat needs to be salty or sweet. Our palates have forgotten how wonderful and healthful flavors like pungent and bitter can be.
For example, my husband’s people are Lakota, and during the cold winter months when there aren’t any bitter greens to eat, they would traditionally get bitter compounds from various parts of the buffalo. So they would dip pieces of meat in the bitter bile of the buffalo’s gallbladder. Similarly, one of my Ojibwe friends told me that during the winter, they would dip pieces of fish in the fish bile then eat it. |
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“Everyone talks about decolonizing, but what does that even mean? In terms of food sovereignty, we’re talking about getting back to the foods of our ancestors.” |
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It’s that kind of knowledge of the people who came before us—about not only what is good to eat but what keeps us going physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—that is going to lead us into the future of food sovereignty. Traditional ecological knowledge is different from Western ecological knowledge in that it includes and understands the importance of culture and spirituality.
For instance, why is fry bread so popular as an Indigenous food? It’s not just that our palates now love gluten and sugary, salty foods. It’s also that people have watched their grandma make fry bread, so there’s this emotional and spiritual connection to that food. We need to rebuild those connections with our traditional foods, those really visceral memories of processing wild rice and cutting up bison meat to hang and dry. I have beautiful memories of making kimchi, a traditional Korean food, with my mom.
The fact is that our current food system pours herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides on so much of our food. Our meat is laced with all kinds of hormones and antibiotics. Not to mention that industrial agriculture is hugely destructive to the environment. In order for us to move away from that, we have to get back to foods that love growing here, foods that we have a long-term relationship with.
How can we improve our relationship with plants, animals, and the natural environment around us?
On an individual level, it is about getting out there, introducing yourself to the natural world, and being willing to speak and listen. Plants do communicate with us if we take our time and approach them in a respectful way. For example, one spring day I noticed chickweed had started randomly growing right outside my kitchen door, which seemed so strange because it had never grown there before. Then I found out I had a thyroid issue. Chickweed has historically been used for thyroid regulation, so I realized that plant was communicating with me, being like, “Here I am. You need me.”
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I do think plants come to us when we need them. But if you don’t recognize that plant, you might not know that it’s trying to communicate with you. I always recommend starting with dandelions and learning about their place in the world, since everyone knows what a dandelion looks like. They are a gateway plant, because they’ve been so vilified by Western culture yet they are an amazing food and medicine. Building these relationships opens us up to listening to the world around us instead of just constantly thinking about consumption.
Can you explain how you see foraging as an act of resistance?
In this society, food and medicine are expensive and inaccessible for a massive portion of the population. We are purposefully kept ignorant about and in fear of plant foods and medicines; we are indoctrinated into this idea that they are somehow dangerous or inferior.
Even the word “wild” has certain connotations and can bring up images of danger in people’s minds. So it is an act of resistance to stand against that indoctrination and decolonize our palates.
Nothing exemplifies this better than the pandemic. What did we find out were some of the major risk factors for COVID complications? Diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. We were seeing all these elders and knowledge keepers dying from COVID and complications that were exacerbated by these health issues that are very much associated with diet and air quality. How are we going to prevent this from happening again in the future? We’ve got to change our diets so we can break that vicious cycle of a poor diet leading to poor health, which then leads to higher risk factors.
In March 2020, our family came up with a grassroots project to feed people. We were seeing these food kits being sent out with bags of flour, sugar, potatoes, white rice, and powdered milk—basically commodities that were exactly what was exacerbating the problem. So, we decided to make food and medicine kits with traditional Indigenous ingredients and organic, shelf-stable items.
They contained items like hand-harvested wild rice from Dynamite Hill Farms, corn grown by Oneida farmer Dan Cornelius, tepary beans from Ramona Farms, Tanka Bars, real maple syrup, freeze-dried vegetable mixes, bone broth, and amazing medicines like fire cider and elderberry elixir. We put out a call on social media, and people rallied, sending supplies and donating money so we could support these incredible Indigenous producers.
So far, we have sent out more than 3,000 kits, and we’re still doing it today. It is really just about showing our kids that individuals can make a difference.
From your perspective, what will it take for our food systems to be resilient once again?
We have to build community. We do that by building each other up instead of tearing each other down. When we build community, we know who has the seeds. We know how to plant those seeds, because we have learned from our community members and they’ve learned from us.
Under our current food system, if a blight comes and affects [the main] variety of corn, we would have no corn and there would be millions of starving people. But when we build a community of growers who are growing 500 different varieties of corn, if a blight comes and takes out one variety, we still have 499 varieties to rely on. That’s what resiliency is—it’s about working together to make sure that no one thing can tear us down. |
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That's all for this issue of The Deep Dish. Thank you for reading, and thank you for being a member of the Civil Eats community. If this is your first time reading The Deep Dish (welcome!), be sure to check out our previous issues:
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