Indigenous Cuisine:
A Mode of Reconciliation & Redemption

0:00:08
Hello, everyone. My name is Jack Betts. I’m here with my project partner, Charlotte Abrams, and today we are interviewing Indigenous Chef Freddie Bitsoie on the topic of Native American cuisine and using it as a practice of decolonization.

0:00:21
Before we begin, we want to provide a little bit of context about this interview. Jack and I are taking a class called Indigenous Books and Art with Professor Vigil here at Amherst. And in this class, we’re talking about the effects of colonization as well as different decolonization practices in museums, art, and education. For our final project, we are creating digital contributions to the Boundless exhibit here at the Mead Art Museum on campus. Jack and I are working with the Indigenous Food and Recipe section of the museum for our project, and we are interviewing Indigenous chefs with a focus on how cooking can serve as a form of decolonization, as well as a form of education, about the effects of colonization. 

Freddie, thank you for joining us today. We’re going to go ahead and get right to it.

0:01:04

Question

Question number one. In your own words, what significance does food and the act of cooking have within Indigenous cultures?

0:01:16

Answer
It has everything to do with not just specifically with Indigenous culture. It has everything to do with everyone’s culture. Because food is the relationship between ourselves and the earth as far as understanding where we get our food from, how we acquire it, how we plant it. You know, I always want to tell people that culture is not tangible. It’s not a noun, it’s a verb, it’s a process. It’s how we’re taught to live, how we’re taught to be. And so, eating is such a primordial aspect of being alive, meaning that we’re not taught to eat. It’s something that, as babies, we know that we need something, we need nourishment. Having that primordial concept of eating, teaching one’s offspring—or if one’s responsible for other individuals—to teach them how to be in that particular environment, that is the way that the process of culture works, as far as the food is concerned. Therefore, how we acquire the food and how we prepare the food, whether if it’s from emotion, whether if it’s from need, whether if it’s any possible way to kind of get our innate sense of emotion in our hearts and our brains, how we relate to those ingredients and how we prepare the food has everything to do with it. That’s just kind of the connection. There’s no way people who grow up in families, tight families—even if they’re disassociated from their families—they’ll always have this food that will connect them back to their upbringing, to where they come from. And that’s the beauty of food, and I think that’s how and why it just became such a big part of how we relate that to decolonization, because there’s always this sense of understanding, okay, so we have the structure of this colonized world, but we need to find that way to reflect ourselves from just being so structuralized culturally—how the United States is today—and then just kind of find that way back of something more organic, more innate, more emotional connection to our food.

0:04:01
Very well said. Thank you.

0:04:02
Question

Thank you. The next question, we’re wondering in what ways you view cooking as a form of education.

0:04:08
Answer

These are great questions. The way that I do my work, is I’ll set up a demo and we’ll do, say, for example, the Three Sisters Salad or Three Sisters Soup or, maybe even if it’s a clam soup from New England. And I’ll start off with the—just pretend that I have a demo table in front of me, and we’re going to do a Wampanoag clam soup. And I’ll tell people this soup was made over 600 years ago from just clams, sunchokes, and seawater. And the ocean was a lot more cleaner 600 years ago as it is now, so most likely I’m not going to use seawater to make soup with. So, these types of explanations, starting to demo, talking about how much cleaner the sea was back then and how it wasn’t done purposely. There was just no need to pollute the sea back then, as opposed to what’s going on now. But just kind of going through that process. And then when we talk about how the English came in the early 17th century—around 1620—and they were accustomed to the clam soup that the Indigenous people made in that particular area, and the English were kinda like “Hey! Let’s add some flour and butter and cream into this and then let’s make it more hearty!” And that’s how New England clam chowder was created. So, it would be a story process of talking about the dish, talking about how to cook the dish, and then the history of the dish. And then we talk about the interpersonal communications between the English and the Indigenous people of that particular area. It’s not just a story. It’s an education about the history of how the food evolved, how people evolved. And it’s everything to do with education. You know, it’s how telling the stories of food come about. And, I always tell people that chefs are the natural history tellers, the natural anthropologists, the natural historians, because we have to know these histories about these foods and how we prepare them and how we can make the meal more enjoyable for people. And, unfortunately, education comes with the whole storytelling, and I think that’s the beauty of what it is that we do as chefs.

0:06:41

Question
Brilliant. When we looked you up, we saw that you had an extensive resume of catering in locations from way up here in Western Massachusetts at UMass Amherst, all the way out in California. We were just wondering, when you cater for events on college campuses in different geographical locations, do you adjust your cooking in relation to that region?

0:07:05

Answer
Yes and no. I do it based on the event. For example, the last big event I did was at UC Davis, and that was a Native American-centric menu, but the beauty of that was I put pozole on the menu, and it’s a very old dish. It’s a very frequently made dish from Central Mexico on up to New Mexico. The ingredients are different, the stories are different, but the dish always was continuously made for about 7,000 years. And the one really nice thing was—I usually like to be in the public when the food is being served—and there was this one young lady who was really excited. She was like, “Oh, my God, there’s pozole on the menu!” And it wasn’t just the fact that she ate it or anything in that nature. She was far away from home in Northern California, and she had a chance to experience what her possibly aunt, grandmother, or mother made, and she found that connection. So, when I choose these menus, it’s not purposely based on anything. The ingredients you come into play…like, for example, I had more abundance to get salmon in Northern California as opposed to, say, if I was in Amherst to get some salmon from Alaska, the ease of acquiring the product would be easier in California as opposed to Massachusetts. But when I’m in Massachusetts, I get sunchokes readily. I get specific ingredients based on these different locations. So, yes and no, but at the same time, I try my best to do local as much as I possibly can.  So, I’m on the fence with that question as far as what people want, because my job is to help dining services with their catering and to try to please the masses as far as what we can do for the event and how the event is supposed to serve its purpose. So, yes and no.

0:09:25

Question
Thank you so much. Actually, you’ve touched a little bit on this, but, as a chef, what do you feel is your responsibility to talk about the tradition and the history behind the food that you are cooking, and are there certain contexts in which you would choose to include or exclude this information?

0:09:46

Answer
Oh, you know you guys are asking the best questions. I did a lecture at Penn State on this idea that, for Native chefs—Native American chefs— there is a higher responsibility and a higher bar for what it is that we do. Because if you were to talk to French chefs, Italian chefs, Asian chefs, it’s just kind of like, hey, let’s open a business. Let’s get our ingredients. If you’re going to open an Asian restaurant, you’re going to get some fish from the South Pacific, the South Atlantic, you’re going to have a huge carbon footprint to get all these different ingredients to the restaurant. French food as well, Italian food as well. But with Native American chefs, we’re kind of given this responsibility of being more adherent and more sustainable. We have to have this cultural acknowledgement, we have to do land acknowledgement. There’s so much responsibility that we have to do, and it’s not purposely placed on us, it’s just kind of put there like a cloud. And if I make a mistake and if I don’t acknowledge a specific ingredient or a specific group of people, I would be the one who would get a lot of backlash because of  it. I don’t know why that is. The majority of my business deals with commercial, dealing with huge companies and universities where we can acquire that cultural knowledge of native foods. But when I get to a university or when I get to a big establishment, people will say, “How is this food in relation to the sustainability of the culture that you’re a part of?” And I kind of stand there like, “Well, I’m just here to cook food and serve food.” But when I deal with French chefs, Italian chefs, Asian chefs, East Indian chefs, nobody approaches them. Nobody asks them, “How are you being socially responsible and environmentally responsible with your food?” It just always seems to lay on the Native chefs. And sometimes, as far as professional ideas, I wish that never happens. But it does. And, hopefully, the other genres of all the other mother cuisines in the world, mother cuisines being French, Italian, Asian, East Indian, they can take that responsibility as well. As far as my knowledge and my research, that’s kind of trending now with all the other cuisine…people are being more mindful about where their food is coming from. For example, when I used to be the chef in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum of the American Indian at Smithsonian, people wanted salmon from Alaska, people wanted choyabas from Arizona, and the only way to get them there was to fly them there. So the carbon footprint that I was selling was enormous. There had to be ways to reduce that, to be more responsible environmentally and also economically because when people wanted wild salmon from Alaska, the price tag to buy it was extraordinary at a customer level. These were things that I had to balance as far as dealing with ordering foods. And then, at the same time, your question is, telling people this is how Native people are more responsible with our food and how we eat and how we’re more “at one” with the planet. So there is that responsibility that I enjoy, but at the same time, it’s kind of a bane, because there are times when I just want to put the plate down and say, “Enjoy the food!” But I’ll take it, because if that’s what the job entails, I’ll do it. And I know all my other Native chef colleagues are happy to do it as well, because that’s what we pride ourselves on. 

0:14:23

Question

Incredibly well said. And actually, your mention of the National Museum of the American Indian plays into our next, and final, question, which is: After having worked as the executive chef there, how can you imagine an Indigenous food section in a museum that embraces decolonization practices. Is there a certain messaging that you think is important to convey in that practice?

0:14:47

Answer
When I got to the museum, it was an honor. I remember more than 10 years ago—like about 2007—when I got into the food business and also the history of Native foods, I thought, I would love to be a cook at the museum, just to experience what it is that they’re trying to convey. And luckily enough, I was called years later, not to be just a cook, but to be the executive chef there. And when I got there, I didn’t know exactly what to do… I was kind of at a loss because I was given something so immense. And I spoke to one of the museum members, and they told me that we think of the café as an exhibition of the museum, but the only thing is each exhibit is food. That gave me a very clear direction on how to create the recipes. Because prior to me being there, there was a non-Native chef who was French trained, and there was an African American chef who was French trained. So the idea of what Indigenous food is and Indigenous preparation is was completely foreign to the both of them. So I had to change the way the kitchen worked, I had to change how the cooks created the food and the techniques that they used. They were just at a loss as anybody else trying to figure out, okay, well, what’s Freddie doing? Because, for example, there was a dish that I put on the menu that’s squash and corn. It is just simply summer squash, zucchini, corn, and onion—that’s it—and salt and pepper to taste. I remember having our meeting when everybody was together, and they were looking at the recipes, and they were thinking, why are there so little ingredients instead of having like a cumin, paprika…a whole laundry list of ingredients to put in the dishes. And I was telling them we need to create these dishes the way Indigenous people create them at home. And I got a lot of backlash…What I found interesting was there were a lot of Indigenous people in the kitchen—they were from Guatemala, Mexico—and their response to me was, “We’re overcooking the vegetables, we’re over cooking the food. This is wrong!” And one cook told me, “This is how I cook my food at home.” And I said, “So, you’ve been cooking wrong at home your entire life, and you’re cooking right at work?” So, the French concept of food preparation—of the way we deal with the food industry—it’s all French-centric, it’s all created from Francophiles many years ago. So bringing this Indigenous concept of food preparation, of how we serve the food was completely foreign, even to Indigenous people in the kitchen. And so I found that very fascinating. I thought it was something that they would embrace a little bit more. But it was a very strange rift between professionalism of how we cook in kitchens and then how we cook at home. And then, eventually, they embraced it and thought, this is really cool that Freddie’s cooking the way we cook at home. But there was something very isolated about it. It seemed a little bit more exotic…When I was in anthropology—when that was my main field—when we classify things as exotic, it’s like a hidden derogatory form of expressing something, saying, oh, I don’t know. Because if we say “different,” it’s more argumentative. So if you just say, oh, it’s exotic, it has this mysticism, it has a better way of just saying it’s different without causing argument with one another. That’s the way it was kind of classified with people at the museum. It’s like, “Oh, Freddie just has a more exotic way of cooking,” when people didn’t have this more defined way of saying, “Hey, this is Native food, and this is how Native food is prepared. It’s a little different than French food, it’s a little different than Italian food, and we just have to embrace it a little bit more.” And so it was a true labor of love for me to change that idea. About probably a year after I started, people started to understand the food a little bit more, and people started to understand the flavor a lot more. When it came to the food preparation and getting people to understand what Native food is, I would be in the café and smile all the time and think, this is how people should probably be eating Native food because it was more enjoyable. Furthermore, it also taught me a lot working at the museum to understand that Native food is a progression. When I first started out cooking Native food, I would open Native American cookbooks, I would open Native works of writings, and then everything was always “was” or “were,” or “They did this,” or “They did that.” Everything was in the past tense. And I just kind of thought, wait a minute. Food is always this progressive notion and culture where we eventually end up not liking a certain thing, or we progress more to different ingredients. That’s what Native food is happening to right now. We have like more than a handful of chefs nationally who are promoting the ingredients, who are promoting the food, who are promoting the cuisine. So when one were to open my book, it doesn’t say “were” or “was,” it’s where we’re going. And that’s what working at the museum taught me, is that it’s more of a genre of food that is progressing, that has always been there, that’s kind of been ignored from the beginning of the 20th century to the late 20th century. And then now, with the amount of chefs and books and resources that are out there talking about Native American foods, it’s coming back, and the resurgence of it has just been wonderful, and I’m so happy to be a part of it. So, that’s kind of how things are with talking about Native foods and the history and the education of it all. And it’s just funny how it all encompasses in one job that I do and I love that, you know.

0:00:00
My mentor for this work, her name was Dale Carson, and she was an Abenaki woman who lived in Madison, Connecticut. She passed away a couple years ago, and she wrote a couple books on Native cooking, one called Native New England Cooking, and one called New Native American Cooking, or New Native American cuisine. And so she mentions a lot of what I’m going to talk about because she’s my inspiration and things like that. She was kind of really early at the forefront of all this work doing this in the 80s and 90s, writing these cookbooks and doing dinners. So for me, I’m Mohegan, right? And a lot of our work here is revitalization. There’s also foods that have been living amongst us forever because we weren’t removed from our homelands. So there’s that piece too. Some of that’s in my paper too, explaining how, you know, certain tribes are removed from their homelands, so that’s going to alter the cuisine. We weren’t necessarily removed from our homelands. However, we lost the majority of our land, some of it being sold, some of it being taken from us, and we were told to be farmers with the little land left. Because of the early colonization here in New England, we made that shift very early from growing traditional plants and foraging— hunting—to kind of the assimilation tactics the Puritans were kind of trying to get us to do. So when you think about the significance of food and cooking and Indigenous cultures, again,  each tribe is different. There are some overlaps between tribes, whether it’s here, in what is known as the United States, or what is known as other areas. But we all have certain things in common, right? We think about food in a spiritual way. We think about the reciprocity of the food. We think about giving back to the land, making sure that you use every part of the animal, those basic things. But also, the little things like leaving tobacco and giving back in some sense, associating food also with ceremony, whether it be a sweat lodge or other ceremonies. And I know Dale mentions in her work, if I refer to her, just start with talking about her, just that it has that spiritual significance. To us, it’s not just food. And when we are cooking the food, we’re thinking about that, too—putting the good energy into it, the spiritual significance of that. The revitalization and the cooking of these Indigenous foods also provides mental health benefits, spiritual benefits, emotional benefits, and physical health benefits. So it’s all of those different pieces of the medicine wheel. And those were the overlap between different tribes occurs. But then, when you look at the different tribes throughout the country, we all have totally different types of food, different types of ingredients that grow in different climates. And then there’s again, maybe some overlap between tribes that are near each other, such as my tribe, the Mohegan, and the Narragansett—I’m also part Narragansett—we’re only an hour away from each other, for instance. So those, for instance, our corn, our white flint corn is called Narragansett white cap corn. It’s the same corn grown at both tribes.

0:04:03
In the exhibit, I think they mostly used Faith’s recipes.  Faith was an elder who I worked with very, very closely. Again, she passed away recently. I spent eight years working for my tribal community before coming to this position, and, slowly but surely, these elders passed away and that’s what happens. Dale was not from my community, but again, someone who I built a really close relationship with through us having a similar interest of her being a cook and a writer. I, myself, my undergrad was in restaurant management, my master’s was in anthropology. So I worked in kitchens all through my undergrad, and then I combined some of my interests in writing this paper and now continue to teach about this subject. 

When you look at succotash, for instance, as a New England recipe. It’s usually corn and beans and water, and then some variation thereof. So it’s generally a New England recipe, you’re generally using the corn that’s actually a sweet corn, at least as long as my great uncle was writing the recipe, which is not the recipe of the exhibit. That’s what I’m saying. That’s Faith’s family’s recipe, not my family’s recipe. And what I do with some of my work is I compare the different recipes. And so that’s where I’m kind of talking about this. Usually you’ll see some type of corn and the beans are different in those two recipes. The corn is just, I think, both sweet corn. But the beans are, one is calling for lima beans, one’s calling for the red shell beans. And so there’s different Indigenous versions of those. And that’s what I like to tell people, this isn’t even just nation to nation, like the variation, right? It’s also family to family. There’s recipes that were held on to. And then there are ingredients that were changed throughout the years, like we always used, traditionally, before my great uncle’s time before the 1800s, we’d be using the more arid varieties of corn, the Indigenous varieties of corn, like the white flint and things like that. So we weren’t necessarily making something that was what you would see as a succotash nowadays. You know, we might have a corn soup with a dried corn or corn meal. And so when we look at those things, right, when we look at the overlap, corn is obviously…there’s a whole class, right, that Kiara taught about the corn, it’s obviously something that there’s overlap. 

0:07:30
The different varieties of corn amongst different Indigenous people throughout the country, and again, you know, America and everywhere else. And I look at it as a food that wasn’t always Indigenous to this area. It made its way up here. We have stories, we can mention stories now and later, but we have stories about crows: One Narragansett tale of a crow taking an ear of corn in one ear and a bean in another year and carrying that up north. Different stories tell these traditions of how corn got here.

0:08:11
And there’s variations throughout the world. And how that looks. And here we had…I’m not sure exactly how many varieties. Same thing with squash. I just grew this year the Algonquian squash, which is an Abenaki 10,000-year-old seed. And I was gifted one of those squash when I presented it for some Abenaki folks a few years back. And then there are various people who’ve been growing it, we’ve been perpetuating it in different ways. And so that’s another example, right? The squash as being overlap. But then, people try to grow Indigenous foods that aren’t necessarily from their tribe anymore. A lot of people growing amaranth these days or maybe other, you know, other herbs like, you know, something more from Mexico, like Mexican peppers or cilantro or different things that aren’t necessarily from our territories. And that’s because [of] the cuisine and the diet these days. We have access to these things, and they can add flavor to the food. But there’s also the benefit of eating your ancestral food, and again, the spiritual benefits, the health benefits of that, that have been studied. You can learn more about these kinds of things, even at that conference I was just at. And so you look at my tribe, for instance. We’re in New England, we’ve got fiddleheads here—everybody in New England’s got fiddleheads they go all the way up through the coast—and they are this delicacy that we only have for a few weeks of the year, so they’re kind of this exciting time in the spring with the wild edibles. But then you look throughout the country, everybody’s got their different wild edible seasons. And there is some overlap. Strawberries. And I know you say recipes. When I say recipes, I would say, you know, things like cornmeal, ground corn. Those are, I would say, the overlap broader than just New England. But when you look into the Northeast, too, there’s going to be more overlap right throughout the Northeast, not just New England, but broader. Cornmeal, things like that. My tribe, we have close relations with the Iroquois, too. Some traditions come from Iroquois, we lived amongst them for a time, so we have different things like that within our foodways and also within our designs. So like we have a lot of strawberry designs here, then you might see a lot of strawberries designed by Iroquois. Also, even up through Minnesota and that territory, they have strawberry plants. So there’s overlap when it comes to celebrating the strawberry, picking the strawberry, strawberry ceremonies that take place in certain tribes, things like that, that may not be the same. Again, some of it’s revitalization, some of it’s perpetuation, depending on the tribe, depending on the family, all these things. For me, I wasn’t raised with any strawberry ceremonies, for instance. Again, we’re being colonized so early on, and the history here, there weren’t really holidays per se other than powwows or ceremonies that I was really exposed to—except for maybe a pipe ceremony growing up—and, until I was an adult. There’s a lot of work being done to revitalize these types of strawberry ceremonies in New England, specifically. I went to an event and ceremony up in Passamaquoddy, Penobscot Territory, in June, that was specifically through Eastern Woodlands Rematriation—which is an organization I’m part of—which helps to revitalize, rematriate, bring back the plants and things like that, and spiritual ties. We were learning about that actually from an Ojibwe woman. She came all the way out to kind of bring back some of those things. 

The field of work that I do…I do multiple different things. I am an educator, also I do some healing work. Some of it’s not Native—more like modern-day Reiki and things like that. But it’s following in the traditions of my ancestors, my great aunt being a medicine woman. There was some sure energy work that she was doing, too, that may not have been passed down in that specific type of training way that these other modern cultures, such as the Reiki culture, do it and like certifications and things like that, right? We didn’t really do that in traditional times. And this is a whole separate conversation, but that’s where it can get really crazy with the world we live in right now. And, just being in the space that I’m in as a medicine family, but also a healer. And so food tends to be a way to bridge topics…make things a little bit easier to talk about. It’s not necessarily a sensitive topic when you’re speaking to a general audience, but it can get into a spiritual discussion and then there may be taboos or something like that, depending on the tribe. When I look at decolonization work that I do, when I was at my own community working there, I was looking into, okay, let me first write this paper on Indigenous foods. And this was for actually a conference at Historic Deerfield, originally, of all places. I wasn’t even living out here, but they asked me to propose something. It was right after I graduated with my master’s. Someone else asked me to be on a Native American Indigenous Studies Association panel. All in the same year, I said, I’m going to write this paper, and that’s what I did. So the paper just started as that. The paper then turned into learning a little bit more about these things. And I just grew up with succotash or a few different foods and powwows, right? And not a ton of different stuff was happening in terms of this movement in the 90s. There were foods that were being made, but there weren’t as many restaurants and things like that. Native restaurants are having this boom now. And, so, I looked at the paper, and then I started to realize…I looked at what I was doing and started to see what other people were doing throughout the country. As I was working in the library at my tribe—that’s where I was working at the time—I started thinking, okay, how can we do some of these other things like food sovereignty—go towards food sovereignty? And so the first steps were really some revitalization and things like that, and just even reintroducing certain things. In 2017, after I had attended the Native Nutrition Conference a couple times, or at least once at that point—I think it was once—I had started partnering with my tribal health department. I was kind of doing this grassroots thing on my own, where it was kind of like they saw there might be a benefit in this, the things they were teaching were mostly modern-day diet type activities, like “Do the wellness diet for Mediterranean, like Mediterranean diet, like do this diet.” Like it was all these things they were doing. And some staff is Indigenous, some isn’t, but it was just not their focus. So they started supporting some of these initiatives that I was doing, sending me to this conference, funding some of the work. And so I created this group with these elders that we called the Native Food Discussion Group, but it was really like a working group. We started talking about these different foods, sharing information, sharing knowledge. We had Faith Damon Davison, Sharon Maynard, who’s a master gardener, our tribal linguist at the time, Stephanie Fielding, who’s also in Draw My Own Voices, and Bruce Chapman, who recently passed away. It was a core group of myself with these elders. There was a couple other people who would pop in and out that were maybe in their younger ages—20s through 50s—but it was mostly this really amazing core group of us exchanging knowledge. And Faith was one of these people who could just…things would just come out like she just had everything, like every book memorized. She was our former archivist. I worked in the library under a different boss, but she was the archivist up until he was there, and so she would come in all the time when I was there after retiring. But she just remembered all the things about all these foods. Some of it I have recorded, might not be the best recordings, and I have to go through… I actually am going to be starting working for a Native wellness magazine that I connected with in Minnesota called Native Wellness Life, so I’m really excited about that. I’m hoping to get some of these old materials together and start  kind of cobbling those together for articles and different things like that, especially as these people continue to pass on to the spirit world and generations shift. I feel very honored, again, Dale Carson really passed on her work to me in a lot of ways. So I just look at that as the passing of the torch, although it’s been hard to not have her to call when I needed advice on a recipe or something. 

All these things contribute to decolonization, like when you start with, okay, what are the foods? What are the foods we still eat? What are the foods that are Indigenous to this region? Those are the bare bones. And then you look at… what do we still have here? What can we still grow? What can we forage? What do we have access to? What do we not have access to? And you kind of have to take it step by step, depending on where you are, again, like where tribal government is involved or not involved, and all those other pieces. You know, are you working with a health department like I am? Then you’re focusing more on the health route of it than the actual farming route because we don’t have the land to do so. So when I was working for the tribe, we started a garden committee, so that was all part of these initiatives that kind of started. They still have a garden committee. I see what’s going on when I can. And it’s not all Indigenous foods, but a lot of it’s through diabetes grants and different things. They do education for kids. I went out there and told some stories at one point a few years ago about corn, beans, and squash—all sorts of fun stuff. And then there’s that piece, right? There’s the reintroduction. Some people are just so used to the American diet. And this is something [that] going to those conferences really helped me to get my head around, especially in those early days when I was so focused on getting to food sovereignty quickly and just saying, “Oh, how do we get here?” I recognize that really every tribe just does what they can. Some tribes are going to have massive productions of farms, and some tribes are going to have a small garden, and it’s going to depend.

20:32

 I got to also do a lot of different things like introducing some of these recipes to youth. We did a strawberry drink for tribal youth through partnership with the health department, then I got to work with a nutritionist, all those types of things. It’s all part of decolonization because, as I mentioned, many of these recipes, or foods, many tribal members may have never used. So, when I started this food group, one of the elders… she had never had a fiddlehead. That was really meaningful for me for her to say, “Oh, this is delicious.” And she was a vegetarian, too. So, I was like, “Oh, my God, you never had a fiddlehead.” So, really, really exciting stuff. The other things that my family and myself have worked on have been revitalization of other things such as spiritual traditions that was, and is, a big piece of just my life, not necessarily just my work. Right now, I’m not working for my community. I’m doing more of these educational things on food sovereignty, on food justice, and decolonization, and still partnering with different organizations, whether they’re a Native organization or like a BIPOC organization or different things like that. But I’m not so much involved in the day-to-day activities at my community anymore. But a lot of the things I was doing in my last job at the Tribal Museum were trying to connect some pieces on some different topics on…I try not to go into it too much because it’s a little bit more sensitive…but basically just a lot more spiritual nature things involving sacred objects, let’s just put it that way. Ceremony and things such as like what we’re talking about with the strawberry ceremony—there’s so many ceremonies—and many of them are very well retained at Iroquois, in that territory, that relate to food, like that the corn is part of the ceremony, or things like that, or like the corn gets put into the burial. And this is also something that’s overlap throughout the country, too. But sometimes because we didn’t always have those seeds, those bits and pieces might not have been hung on to as much as we would have wanted. Because we’re eating standard American food or whatever other people are eating, and we’re not growing those crops. So the growing piece…I started working on some of those things too, working with seed savers, different things like that. Delaware sehsapsing corn—my tribe is from the Delaware, Lenni Lenape, then moved up to Iroquois, then down to Southeastern Connecticut—that was a ceremonial corn. And the Delaware corn is something that my Great-Aunt Gladys had a hand in saving the seed. Basically, there is a seed saver who has some great books, non-Native, William Weiss Weaver, and he is also a culinary historian outside of Philadelphia, and he’s been growing heirloom seeds, rare seeds, for a long time on what’s called the Roughwood Collection. He has people he trains that grow and things like that, and one of my close friends and allies, Owen Taylor, he trained there before he started his own farm. And so back in, I guess it was the 70s, he said people were—I interviewed him briefly—and he said a lot of Native people were giving him seeds to keep and to grow when they were worried where are they going to grow them? Are they going to fall out of production completely? And so my great-aunt had a hand in saving that Delaware sehsapsing seed among others. So that was really exciting for me to learn as I started learning a little bit more about the seed saving piece of this and connecting with those folks. It’s all a process and, again, everyone is going to have their different skill sets, just like we all do, and in traditional Indigenous society, everyone’s really taking on, right? It’s more, okay, you’re going to be the person that does this role. These days, it’s a totally different world we live in. You have to apply for jobs and all this. But it was really like, what are you good at, right? Like, someone who’s good at basket making, they’re making the baskets. So the people who are good at farming, they’re doing that. Foraging, same thing, right? They’re training it in their family, they’re passing it down, and it’s still like that to some extent throughout the country, and again, it’s going to vary on the tribe and everything else. But that’s kind of how I look at it. It’s like I’m doing a piece, a lot of my pieces, like the education and the cooking and the kind of revitalizing and decolonizing in that sense. And then there’s people who are really good with growing out those seeds…which I got like two Algonquian squash in my small garden. There were a bunch more that had some blight or something—squash issue—but glad I got those two. They’re really these big pumpkins. And you try different stuff…I’ve tried wild onion and that was really tasty. I’ve grown all sorts of different herbs. I’m not an herbalist, but I’m learning a lot from my great-aunt, but also taking herbal classes when I can. Not so much right now—I have a one-year-old—but eventually I want to get back to some more. But during COVID, I was growing plants that Gladys Tantaquidgeon also grew and were in her book, and some of them specifically being used for the Spanish flu. I would hand out different herbs to any friends and family that I knew that were sick. I would mail packages just on my own. I know other people, like in Indian country, were doing stuff like that, like Linda Black Elk had a whole movement going on. That was like a bigger thing. This was just me doing this. And then some of them I was growing at my tribe’s garden at the museum. And again, I was exchanging with some other seed savers and different people. It was pretty neat. The bone set was one that, you know, like my naturopath also was using and different tinctures and things like that. So it was kind of one of these things that we were all kind of like using that particular plant for the first time in a while. If you’re reading Gladys’s book, it’s used to treat some fevers and other things, and it’s a wildflower. That’s not really something you think of often and you don’t think of growing like a wildflower. The interrelation with the teas and the foods and the herbs can get a little bit…food is medicine, right? And drinking tea is just a piece of that. I’ve been told by people that Gladys would brew a tea when they would come and whatever ailment…I didn’t know any of this until I started this work. Growing up, she was just the old aunt, and she was in her nineties already when I was like 12—she passed away at 106—so I wasn’t really asking questions of her. I was more communicating with my great-grandmother, who’s a little younger and some of the other aunts, and she was just kind of quiet. But, as I grew older and I started this work, a lot of the things that I do are similar and in her path, just following in her path. I found out when I was working in the tribal library that, for instance, at one point she was running Native food dinners. I had no idea. I don’t know how many, you know, I have no idea. So it was pretty neat to find that out. So again, you know, just looking at that, right, the food and medicine tie-in is always there.

0:29:07
I don’t know if I necessarily call recipes sacred, but I think they can be. Processes I think a lot of times are, too. And I think it all depends on what you’re putting into it and what you’re using it for, too. In terms of one item that we use at Mohegan, we make—and they make it at Wampanoag and Narragansett—is the yokeag, and that’s the dried, parched corn. It’s a little different than the regular cornmeal, and it’s basically sacred in nature, where they use the sword in diamond medicine containers. You’ll see a little bit of that like at our tribe’s museum. But it’s also because of the process of the grinding corn, which sometimes shifts nowadays. Sometimes we don’t always grind by hand. The sacred process of women grinding corn, from generation to generation, passing on the tradition of the grinding corn is a sacred act and medicinal act. And I let people know—I give them the option—right, how do you want to make this? It’s up to you. It’s stuff you can read more about. When I am teaching youth, I might do the actual mortar and pestle, versus making something for an event or something using a food processor for corn for the yokeag. 

Adaptation—change—is just the constant. Here in New England, and throughout Indian country, here that process happened pretty fast. We had to quickly adapt to survive. That’s really the story here. We are lucky that we did, but again, there’s a lot of pieces of things that grow dormant because of that process of Christianity coming in so early and all these other factors, like us having to get a church so early. We have some of the oldest churches here—Narragansett’s the oldest Indian church, and then Mohegan’s one of the oldest, for instance. There were reasons why we were implementing those structures so that we wouldn’t be pushed off our land.

0:32:02
I mean, and there’s again so much to all of this. In terms of looking at the history, looking at where we are now, looking at even where we’ve come in the past—since I wrote this paper in 2013—the past 10, 15 years with the Native food movement growing. I think that it’s exciting. You know, the times we’re in, there’s complexities to it.

0:32:29
There’s obviously always going to be things that we have to think about as we move forward into this new world of Native food. You know, a lot of Indigenous chefs don’t like the idea of this trying to be as mainstream as Mexican food, for instance. That’s an issue that people are trying to figure out how to prevent. I’m not sure how preventable it actually is in the world we live. And so, I always tell people—when they’re asking about how to help, how to partner—I say, “Grow seeds. If you have the land, grow them far apart from each other so that they maintain their integrity and all those things.” But when it comes to Indigenous chefs and cooking, like really go to the Native chefs and the native cooks—and the farmers, too—but the seeds need a lot more…we need a lot more of the seeds too, right? These are all rare seeds still for a reason because they basically fell out of production. Losing land, all the other reasons for it, and the seed industry being a big reason, going from a place that saves seeds as what we did here in this country to relying on industrialized seeds. And I did a seed saving course with Rowen White back in 2017, which was just a two-day thing, but she talked a lot about that quick change from us actually saving seeds to purchasing seeds. It just gave me a lot to think about because most people don’t even really think about it unless you start doing this seed saving. And it does require a lot of learning, like anything. So I look at the foods—the decolonization of the foods—as an exciting thing, but also sometimes embracing the other ingredients from the other tribes is exciting. As I mentioned before, having those peppers or something or that sea salt that we may not have had, or a specific fruit that might be from another region. But we want to acknowledge that, too, that’s the piece that we, as Native people, always try to acknowledge—where something’s coming from. It’s even built into a lot of our languages and things like that, that we acknowledge where we learn something, we acknowledge who told us the information. And I always try to make sure to do that. That’s what a lot of my work is. A lot of my work is honestly going out, talking about other Native chefs and activists and letting people know about this movement and sharing information and then whatever else—like if people want to learn a recipe and different things like that. But there’s just so many different pieces of it. 

It’s exciting that we have also different grant funding sources for various tribes. We have the Inter-Tribal Ag Summit and the Inter-Tribal Agriculture Council, those different organizations—the Indigenous Seed Savers Alliance—those are all organizations that help Indigenous folks with saving seeds or with getting grants or funding to start food sovereignty movements and things like that. Again, things that were really pushed harder even during COVID as people started growing—not just Native people—as many people started growing more food. It seemed like those funding sources…they grew. And I mean, again, the conference that I was just at a couple months ago…it ebbs and flows at any community. Like the Shakopee Mdewakantons, who are the ones who run this Native Nutrition Conference partnering with the University of Minnesota. I was at the first one back in 2016, and then 2017, and I hadn’t gone back. But I get there thinking everything is so great here, they have these farms…and their Native health food store closed. That got shut down from COVID. It was these things that were so great. It was this amazing store…all different types of wild rice. I had gotten some of that wild rice and donated it to Standing Rock when I was there years ago—all these things that happened. And it’s just what happens. We’ll have a food sovereignty initiative in one community… some initiatives will keep going, like certain gardens. But you might lose funding, you might lose staff for one initiative—like whether it’s where you were growing the corn or whether it’s your health food store—and then that initiative just kind of takes a step back. And so we do the best we can, right? We can’t control all these external factors, who’s in charge of our governments, that’s a voting thing. You know, every tribe is different when it comes to tribal governments these days. We have, for instance, a lifetime chief and then an elected tribal council. So It’s all in flux. It’s really who has more power, who has more decision-making power and all these other factors that can affect where your food sovereignty status is. And is it something where you’re living in a food desert or a food apartheid? Or are you living somewhere like my tribe does between Boston and New York—in Southeastern Connecticut—with a successful casino where we have these high rates of diabetes and obesity that other tribes have because of historical trauma, because of eating the American diet, all these reasons. And, yet, we have access to supermarkets…we have these things. So it doesn’t always pop up on the radar of leadership so much if they know that their people aren’t starving. So if people are literally like, and even if they’re not starving, right, even if they just can’t get access to vegetables, like a food apartheid area, people are maybe not starving, but their healthy choices aren’t their choice at all. They have to drive however far to the supermarket, like the Red Lake Nation. I was at their food summit, that’s where I did the training with Rowen White, this is back in 2017. And at that time, they were trying to build a farm that would feed…I forget how many…3,000 something tribe members at the time. And again, a lot of it was because there were no grocery markets—there was a Walmart an hour away. Everything else was those little shops or those little shops near a res, that everything was bumped up crazy prices. And that’s what can happen, right? Especially in these remote areas throughout the country where people were pushed. And I guess that gets back to, okay, there’s some benefits in being able to retain your homeland, right? Okay, we might not have all the land we’ve had, but we have the same seafood that we had access to. Again, not the same quantities, right? We don’t have lobster just piling up on the shore anymore. But it’s still there. We could still make a lobster dish, but we might have some… there’s so much to it, right? And then it gets into these other topics like fishing rights and other things that some tribes have more of than others, depending on their history of everything that’s happened since colonization. To me, it’s exciting that all these processes are happening. It’s exciting that Native chefs are getting recognition. As part of the conference this year they did a[n] Indigenous food expo, so I got to meet a lot of people who I had either met or known of and try their food and just walk around. So that was really neat. Knowing people like Sherry Pocknett here, SciFox forever, she wins the James Beard award, Best Chef Northeast. That was this year—so these are all really exciting things for not just Indian country, but also for us here in New England where a lot of times we’re underrepresented in the public. The Native wellness people were even for the magazine they were like, “Oh, we don’t have anybody from the Northeast writing.” I’m like, okay, good, I’ll write about whatever you guys want like Thanksgiving or whatever. But you know it’s just not…there’s bigger tribes and we’re not out there. So it’s not that we don’t all try to connect, right? But it’s just the way it goes sometimes.

The whole fry bread debate, it’s become this kind of…camps where people are like the “No Fry Bread Camp” or the “No Fry Bread Zone” or the people that eat fry bread. I’ve had conversations with the different Indigenous chefs about it, and it can be hard for them, too, because if they’re over here cooking Sean Sherman style food—upscale pre-colonial cuisine—their community members are looking at them like what are you making? This isn’t something we grew up with and then they might get that look or that attitude when they’re trying to do something right but also it hasn’t been done for so long, right? And then maybe they’re doing it in a different way where they’re adding that little bit of fancy touch with that cashew cream or whatever. I just say with the fry bread, eat it in moderation. I explained to people that it’s obviously caused a lot of health issues, and we try not to eat it every day, but it’s also something that’s passed on through so many different families. And, right, it was a survival food, and it was a reservation food based on commodities, but, at the same time, it’s tasty, and so we all like it, and it fills people up. You can’t tell people what not to eat, but people can make small changes in their diets, and that takes a little bit of time when you’re used to eating certain things, as many of us are. I remember this one educator at the nutrition conference said that this one person she was trying to teach about eating Indigenous food was eating three Arby’s sandwiches a day. So she started with just getting him down to one Arby’s sandwich—that was the first step. And so that’s what I say, too. Sometimes, it’s just the introduction of those things—first you’re starting with even introducing vegetables back into the diet if you are living in a region that is food apartheid or far from a supermarket. It depends on the family and the location and everything. So one step at a time. That’s why the tribal gardens will have lettuce and other things so that there’s just more variety. But at the same time, the Indigenous foods have the most medicinal benefits and there’s just more and more information about the nutritional benefits, even of those certain squash like the Buffalo Creek squash, there’s tons of information on the density of nutrients in that particular squash. I’m curious about the Algonquian now because I bet it’s a similar thing just with the corn. The heirloom corns are nutrient dense versus our sweet corn. 

I think that with the recipes that have settler influence, again, anything that’s super fun and eaten in moderation…When you’re looking at just fusion, I love fusion cuisines as a person who grew up…my mom is the Indigenous side, the Mohegan side, my dad is the Jewish side, so I’m sure I could find a way to fuse those two if I wanted. I haven’t really worked on that, but I do enjoy the different types of cuisines. And then I…Every type of cuisine on the map and growing up going to school for restaurant management and stuff, I learned all these different techniques. I think that’s what a lot of Indigenous chefs are doing, too, trying to incorporate some of those French techniques like Sean Sherman. And that’s exciting. Right? It’s exciting. It’s just trying to educate along the way. You’re educating the general public or you’re trying to get your own people to be interested more in something like a cream cashew cream sauce, and it’s not going to be for everybody. When you look at someone like Sherry Pocknett, for instance, she does…I always forget if she calls it modern Indigenous fusion or…she has a little sign at the powwow. And she’ll do the wild rice with the three sisters—she calls it the Three Sisters Rice. It’s one of her most popular dishes. And then she adds the white rice to it a little bit, too. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think, again, as long as you’re telling people what you’re serving and as long as it’s not for a crowd who can’t eat those ingredients, I think it’s fine to do the fusion techniques to incorporate some of those ingredients, especially like a lot of the spices and herbs that we didn’t have that give the food a lot of flavor. I think those are a big piece of it. Traditionally, here we mostly had fruits, berries to sweeten, maple, some more bitter herbs. There weren’t a whole lot, but there was a lot of bounty, just of everything, land and the sea, where I’m from anyways, like in Southeastern Connecticut and throughout that area of New England. You’re getting salt that’s already on the shellfish, for instance, right? It didn’t need a lot, but it doesn’t hurt to add a sauce, right? That’s an exciting thing. And I think that’s where all of this is really exciting. Hyde Erdrich, the curator, has an amazing cookbook, too. And that’s what I originally knew about her from was her cookbook. It’s called Original Local. There’s just so much that people are doing with these, I’d say, the core Indigenous ingredients. Whenever they’re the centerpiece, it’s still like a take on an Indigenous food. So like a wild rice dish, but if you’re adding maybe a modern apple to the dish, it’s still an Indigenous food, but you might say it’s a modern Indigenous dish, right? 0:49:01

That was a fantastic presentation and we really appreciate you being flexible and being able to sit down with us. We just really appreciate your time and, you know, disseminating the knowledge that you’ve gathered over your work, and we appreciate all the efforts that you put forth as well.