When Covid-19 hit, intensifying hunger rates and limiting food access across the country, tribal communities drew on ancestral knowledge to mount a resilient response, said A-dae Romero-Briones, who directs Native agriculture and food systems programs at the First Nations Development Institute. People shared seeds and knowledge about hunting and planting. “These long-buried behaviors would come up, and it was like honoring our ancestors. Our ancestors had been through this before. Our ancestors knew how to feed ourselves,” she said. “To me, it was a renaissance.”
Speaking on Wednesday during the Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Health Symposium, organized by the Center for Indigenous Health Research and Policy at Oklahoma State University, Romero-Briones said conversations about food insecurity and health often lead to “supply chain responses” that narrowly focus on getting food from producers to consumers or increasing business opportunities or that emphasize nutrients and calories.
But food sovereignty goes much deeper than these “mainstream” metrics, she said. “We should never lose sight of the purpose of food sovereignty, which is to build our nations and to reclaim our children, and to take care of the lands that our ancestors have left for us, and those same lands we will leave for our children.”
Romero-Briones spoke of the need to “re-acculturate” children to eat traditional foods like blue corn flour, acorn mush, and poi — food traditions that were disrupted when young Native Americans were sent to boarding schools, a practice that began in the mid-1800s and persisted into the 1970s. “We are rebuilding our nations and our food systems, one taste bud at a time,” she said.
Taylor Thompson, a Cherokee Nation citizen who works as the food sovereignty division manager for the Yurok tribe in Northern California, said the concept of food sovereignty isn’t novel for indigenous communities “by any stretch.” They pointed out that Yurok people had a sovereign food system since time immemorial, and it has been disrupted only since the arrival of Europeans. “I think it’s definitely achievable for us to get back to a sovereign food system,” they said. “So that’s what we’re doing.”
Both Thompson and Romero-Briones said the idea that some Native American communities are “food deserts” ignores the myriad noncommercial ways that people get food — such as by hunting, bartering, and subsistence farming. The term “food retail desert” is a better fit, Romero-Briones said. Thompson agreed, but said that because of the pressures of climate change and overfishing, Yurok people were also facing increasing problems accessing food in traditional ways.
The tribe, which lives along the Klamath River in Northern California, is working on building several “food villages,” which will host gardens and orchards, community kitchens, and space for educational programming. Supporting traditional land management practices such as controlled burning is an important part of the tribe’s food sovereignty plan, since food sources like tanoak, mushrooms, and hazelnuts coevolved with indigenous people who used fire to manage the land.
But efforts to rebuild these food systems are hampered by things that are beyond the tribe’s control, Thompson said: Dams far upriver threaten salmon populations, and a lack of coastal access limits fishing.
Jann Hayman, of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, also detailed her tribe’s food sovereignty efforts, which include a 35-acre farm that grows vegetables, fruits, and nuts and an aquaponics operation that produces catfish, tilapia, and lettuce. The tribe also owns a meat processing facility that butchers beef, bison, and pork.
The virtual symposium continues tomorrow, and a recording will be made available here.