Still Here
A companion to What Gives
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Food and drink are something that all types of people can connect with ... They are tools that can be used for all kinds of different types of people to be able to get along better ... What the land gives ... What the seasons give ... What remains ... What remembers ... What heals ...
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Why is Thanksgiving complicated?
If you look at the history.
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Gentle gentle.
The way you have to be when explaining the obvious to people who have never seen it.
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More families here have abandoned the modern myth of Thanksgiving.
Not because they hate America.
Because they love the truth.
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Can you provide us a quote that is also like a daydream?
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We are right outside of the Mississippi River.
There used to be a massive waterfall just outside of this window.
Owámniyomni.
Turbulent waters.
The only major waterfall on the entire Mississippi.
Sacred.
The Dakota came here for thousands of years.
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The original waterfall is no longer here.
What does this mean?
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They quarried the limestone.
They harnessed the power.
They built the mills.
The falls began to collapse.
They poured concrete to "stabilize" it.
The thunder is gone.
The water still moves.
But it is not the same water.
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What does this mean?
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We do not need the Pilgrims' poisonous narrative.
We have our own stories.
We have our own foods.
We have our own reasons to gather and give thanks.
We were giving thanks here for ten thousand years before anyone landed on any rock.
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gentle gentle
the patience required
to say this
again
and again
and again
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To take away all colonial ingredients.
No wheat flour.
No cane sugar.
No dairy.
No beef, no pork, no chicken.
No processed anything.
What remains?
Everything.
Everything that was here.
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What does this mean?
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Is Indigenous food considered to be ironically foreign in some way or another?
Yes.
On our own land.
The colonizers' foods are "normal."
Our foods are "exotic."
The Thanksgiving myth is "tradition."
Our actual traditions are "alternative."
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This is the inversion.
This is what they don't see.
This is what we live inside every day.
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We believe that there should be Indigenous restaurants everywhere.
All over the place.
In our territory.
In our region.
Not one or two.
Everywhere.
Because this is our territory.
Because this is our region.
Because the food that grows here belongs here.
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What does this mean?
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The Western diet ignores the bounty.
Botanical gardens full of food — but people walk through looking, not eating.
The wild plants along the roadsides — food.
The lakes full of manoomin — food.
The prairies where timpsila still blooms in June — food.
Ignored.
Paved over.
Forgotten.
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Consuming plant diversity for better health.
This is not new knowledge.
This is the oldest knowledge.
Thirty plants. Fifty plants. A hundred plants across the seasons.
Vitamins, minerals, medicines, fiber, variety.
The body knows what it needs.
We used to listen.
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What does this mean?
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Western diets are industrialized.
Foods bought at grocery stores and big box chains.
The same twelve vegetables.
The same four meats.
The same corn in everything — syrup, starch, feed for the animals, ethanol for the cars.
Monoculture on the plate.
Monoculture in the body.
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and the diabetes
and the heart disease
and the obesity
and the inflammation
and the cost
and the cost
and the cost
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What does this mean?
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The river outside the window.
Still flowing.
The falls — gone.
The flour mills — gone.
The industry that killed the falls — gone.
The river remains.
Wounded.
Still flowing.
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We are still here.
Wounded.
Still flowing.
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Wonderful.
Someone says that when you give them their first taste of wild rice.
Real wild rice. Hand-harvested. Wood-parched.
Not the cultivated paddy rice from California.
Not the black stuff in the box at the grocery store.
The real thing.
Wonderful.
They didn't know.
How could they know?
They were never taught.
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Gentle gentle.
This is teaching.
One plate at a time.
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What does this mean?
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A quote that is also like a daydream:
There was a waterfall here once. The Dakota came in spring to fish at its base, the mist rising, the thunder constant. The women gathered at the sugar bush nearby. The river gave and gave. Ten thousand years. Then one hundred fifty years of industry. Then this — a restaurant, a window, a plate of food that remembers what the river has been made to forget. We eat. The river flows. Something is restored. Not everything. Something.
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What does this mean?
What does any of it mean?
We keep asking.
We keep cooking.
We keep feeding people.
We keep telling the story.
Gentle gentle.
The truth is patient.
It can wait.
It has waited this long.
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Poetically speaking.
What is food with story?
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Every plate is a sentence.
Every meal is a paragraph.
Every season is a chapter.
The whole year is a book that has been written and rewritten for ten thousand years.
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The wild rice on your plate —
it remembers the canoe
it remembers the knocker sticks
it remembers falling into the water and becoming next year
it remembers the hands that parched it
it remembers the feet that danced on it
it remembers the wind that winnowed it
it remembers the grandmother who taught the granddaughter
who taught the granddaughter
who taught the granddaughter
You eat the story when you eat the rice.
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The bison —
it remembers the prairie
it remembers the wolves
it remembers the jump
it remembers the tobacco offered before
it remembers the tobacco offered after
it remembers giving itself
You eat the relationship when you eat the meat.
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The maple sugar —
it remembers the freeze and thaw
it remembers the birch bark makuk
it remembers forty gallons becoming one
it remembers the children waiting for candy
it remembers the first sweetness after the long winter
You eat the patience when you eat the sugar.
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Food with story is not a menu.
Food with story is memory made edible.
You take the ancestors into your body.
They become you.
This has always been true.
We just forgot to say it out loud.
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How do the restaurants change meals around the two equinoxes?
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Ziigwan — Spring Equinox
The menu lightens.
the winter stores are low anyway
the body is ready for green
fiddleheads uncurling
ramps pushing through
the first wild onions
maple everything — the sap is running
fish — the runs have started
walleye, sturgeon at the river mouths
the plates get brighter
the portions get smaller
the body wants to wake up
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Dagwaagin — Fall Equinox
The menu deepens.
the harvest is in
everything is abundance
wild rice — fresh, new, this year's
squash in every color
corn dried and ground
the late berries — cranberry, lingonberry
game — the animals are fat now
bison, venison, duck
the plates get heavier
the colors go gold and red and brown
the body wants to store
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The restaurants that remember —
they don't serve the same menu in March that they serve in September.
The land doesn't.
Why would they?
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The equinox is a door.
You walk through it twice a year.
The food on the other side is different.
This is not a gimmick.
This is ten thousand years of paying attention.
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What is wild?
Told through the stories of the plants.
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Manoomin speaks:
I grow where I want to grow.
Shallow water. Soft mud. Slight current.
You cannot make me grow somewhere else. You have tried. Your paddies in California grow something, but it is not me.
I am not domesticated. I am not controlled. I am in relationship.
You tend the water levels. You protect me from the carp that dig up my roots. You take what I offer and leave enough to become next year.
This is not farming.
This is conversation.
I have been talking to your grandmothers for ten thousand years.
I am still talking.
Are you still listening?
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Timpsila speaks:
I bloom blue across the prairie in June.
You see my flowers and you know my root is ready.
I do not wait for you. I do not depend on you. I was here before you and I will be here after.
But I let you find me.
I let your digging stick pull me from the earth.
I give myself.
Do you understand what that means?
I choose.
Every year, I choose.
The prairie is wide. I could hide. I don't.
This is wild.
Not uncontrolled. Unchosen.
Choosing.
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Maple speaks:
My sap rises when the conditions are right.
Freeze and thaw. Freeze and thaw.
You learned to read me. You learned when to tap. You learned not to take too much.
I am two hundred years old, this body. I have fed six generations of your family.
You think you harvest me.
I think I raise you.
Every spring, I call you back to the sugar bush.
Every spring, you come.
Who is domesticating whom?
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Chokecherry speaks:
I am bitter until I am not.
You learned to dry me. You learned to pound me. You learned to mix me with fat and meat.
I became your pemmican. I became your survival.
But I did not change for you.
You changed for me.
You learned what I required.
This is wild.
The wild does not yield.
The wild teaches.
You are the student.
Always.
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Labrador tea speaks:
I grow in the bog where you do not want to walk.
Wet feet. Mosquitoes. Muck.
You come anyway.
For me.
I heal your coughs. I warm your winter nights. I taste like the north itself — cedar, pine, cold water, survival.
I am not easy to find. I am not easy to harvest.
Nothing wild is easy.
That is what makes it wild.
That is what makes it worth it.
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What is wild?
Wild is the plant that does not need you but allows you.
Wild is the relationship you have to earn every single year.
Wild is the opposite of ownership.
Wild is the thing that can always say no.
And sometimes says yes.
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Food and drink are something that all types of people can connect with.
This is not a small thing.
This might be the biggest thing.
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You can argue about history.
You can argue about politics.
You can argue about whose land this is and who owes what to whom.
But you cannot argue with delicious.
You cannot argue with a plate of food that makes you close your eyes.
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Food and drink are tools.
Tools that can be used for all kinds of different types of people to be able to get along better.
Sit at a table together.
Eat from the same dishes.
Something happens.
Something older than language.
Something the body understands before the mind catches up.
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This is why we cook.
Not just to feed.
To connect.
To show.
To offer.
To say without saying:
This is who we are. This is what the land gives. This is what we know. Taste it.
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Indigenous nation or culture erasure dates back to the beginning of colonization.
This is not opinion.
This is history.
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During the early 1800s many Ojibwe and Dakota people didn't even see any European people.
Think about that.
1800.
The Seasonal Round still intact.
The rice still growing.
The buffalo still running.
The sugar still flowing.
The knowledge still passing.
Grandmother to granddaughter.
Unbroken.
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From approximately 1800 to 1900.
One hundred years.
Contact was extremely aggressive.
Violent.
Racist.
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A long list of awful things happened during our government's push to expand westward.
To gobble up.
To steal land.
treaties signed and broken
signed and broken
signed and broken
forced removals
death marches
concentration camps they called reservations
the buffalo slaughtered
deliberately
to starve the people into submission
twelve million buffalo in 1850
less than a thousand by 1890
this was policy
this was strategy
this was intentional
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What does this mean?
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During this push and settling Indigenous children were physically forced to be assimilated into European ways.
Kill the Indian, save the man.
They said this out loud.
They were proud of it.
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Mothers had to cut their children's hair before they attended Christian schools.
Read that again.
Mothers.
Had to cut.
Their children's hair.
the hair that was never cut
the hair that carried prayers
the hair that connected them to their ancestors
mothers
with scissors
with tears
with no choice
Before they attended.
Schools where they would be beaten for speaking their language.
Schools where they would be starved.
Schools where they would be buried in unmarked graves.
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gentle gentle
this is not gentle
this cannot be gentle
some truths do not soften
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Even though these schools no longer exist many children are living in segregated places.
Experiencing the same kind of poverty.
The buildings closed.
The legacy didn't.
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These things were manufactured.
The poverty.
The health crises.
The erasure.
The forgetting.
Manufactured.
Deliberately.
Over generations.
So that people could say:
Look at them. They can't take care of themselves.
While standing on stolen land.
Eating stolen food.
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What does this mean?
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Today.
Is there a way that Food Sovereignty can change the narrative?
To a much more positive future outcome?
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What is food sovereignty?
the right to define your own food systems
the right to grow what your ancestors grew
the right to harvest what your ancestors harvested
the right to feed your community what your community needs
the right to say no to commodity food
the right to say yes to wild rice
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Food sovereignty is not nostalgia.
Food sovereignty is not a museum.
Food sovereignty is:
We decide what we eat.
We decide how it's grown.
We decide who has access.
We decide what the children learn.
We decide.
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This is revolutionary.
After generations of being told what to eat.
After generations of commodity cheese and white flour.
After generations of food as weapon.
To say: We decide.
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one garden at a time
one food forest at a time
one wild rice restoration project at a time
one cooking class at a time
one school lunch program at a time
one restaurant at a time
we take it back
not the land — they won't give that back
but the food
the knowledge
the seeds
the stories
the relationship with the land they thought they severed
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Can food sovereignty change the narrative?
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A child eats wild rice for the first time.
Real wild rice. Hand-harvested. Wood-parched.
She asks: What is this?
Her grandmother tells her.
The whole story.
The canoe. The knocker sticks. The parching fire. The jigging. The winnowing. The spirit of the rice that chooses to give itself.
The child listens.
The child eats.
The child remembers.
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This is how it changes.
One child at a time.
One plate at a time.
One story at a time.
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The narrative they wrote:
The Indians are gone. Their food is gone. Their knowledge is gone. This is American land now. Eat American food. Forget.
The narrative we write:
We are still here. The food remembers. The knowledge survived. We are feeding our children what our grandmothers ate. We are telling the stories. We are not gone. We were never gone. We will never be gone.
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gentle gentle
but also
fierce fierce
the gentleness is a choice
beneath it
ten thousand years of survival
one hundred fifty years of resistance
and now
a table
a plate
a meal
an invitation
sit down
eat with us
let us tell you who we are
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Every day that we are alive we can think about how to change the future to make it better.
Every single day.
This is not optimism.
This is practice.
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Unfortunately.
Right now we are living in a time period that is very political.
There are leaders who are trying to erase further people of color.
And their very difficult histories.
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as if the first erasure wasn't enough
as if the boarding schools weren't enough
as if the stolen land wasn't enough
as if the slaughtered buffalo weren't enough
now
erase the memory of the erasure
so no one knows what was taken
so no one knows to ask for it back
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What does this mean?
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To reduce psychological suffering.
For everyone here who have overlapping histories.
It is important to talk about this history.
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Overlapping histories.
the Indigenous child on the reservation
and the Black child in the redlined neighborhood
the Japanese American family who lost everything to internment
and the Mexican American family separated at the border
the refugee who fled violence
and the Native family who survived it here
overlapping
not the same
but overlapping
enough to recognize each other
enough to sit at the same table
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It can be very painful.
Yes.
It can.
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But identifying the trauma.
Facing it directly.
Gaining a better understanding of what actually went on.
Is a way to begin a necessary healing process.
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you cannot heal what you will not name
you cannot grieve what you will not remember
you cannot change what you will not see
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This is why we tell the history.
Not to make people feel guilty.
Not to make people feel bad.
To make people feel informed.
So the healing can begin.
For everyone.
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the colonizer's grandchildren carry trauma too
they don't know it
they feel it
the silence where the truth should be
the myth they were told instead of the history
the guilt they don't have words for
the disconnection from the land they live on
they are also wounded
differently
but also
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Healing is not a competition.
There is enough healing for everyone.
But it has to start with the truth.
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Gentle gentle.
The truth can be gentle.
The truth can be a plate of food.
The truth can be a meal shared.
The truth can be a story told while eating.
The truth can be delicious.
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What does this mean?
It means:
Sit down.
Eat with us.
We have things to tell you.
You have things to hear.
This is how it begins.
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It seems like a lot of the ingredients that grow locally weirdly often people think of as a weed.
Lamb's quarters — weed.
Purslane — weed.
Dandelion — weed.
Wood sorrel — weed.
All of them food.
All of them medicine.
All of them growing in the cracks of the sidewalk, in the edges of the lawn, in the places nobody looks.
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We spray them with poison.
We pull them out and throw them away.
We work so hard to kill the food that grows for free.
Then we drive to the grocery store and pay for food that was shipped from a thousand miles away.
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What does this mean?
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Is it because a lot of American citizens are nutritional food lazy?
Maybe.
But lazy is a symptom, not a cause.
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Is it because of the type of education that we have available to us?
Yes.
This.
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Who taught you what a weed is?
Who taught you that a lawn is supposed to be one species of grass and nothing else?
Who taught you that food comes from stores?
Who didn't teach you that the plant growing through the crack in the parking lot is edible?
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we are taught what to see
we are taught what to ignore
we are taught what has value
we are taught what is worthless
and then we think we're making our own choices
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If schools were able to spend a lot of time teaching children about plants it can go really far.
Because each botanical has its own meaning and purpose.
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Plants can be:
Food.
Medicine.
Clothing.
Shelter.
Tools.
Weapons.
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One plant.
the cattail
the roots — food, starch
the shoots — food, like asparagus
the pollen — food, flour for bread
the leaves — woven into mats, baskets, shelters
the fluff — insulation, wound dressing, fire starter
one plant
how many uses?
and we call it a weed
and we drain the wetlands where it grows
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What does this mean?
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Knowingly or unknowingly plants are part of our spirituality.
The four sacred medicines — tobacco, cedar, sage, sweetgrass.
But also:
the tree you climbed as a child
the flower your grandmother grew
the smell of cut grass that means summer
the pine that means the north
the sage that means the west
We are in relationship with plants whether we know it or not.
Naming the relationship makes it stronger.
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There is so much to connect to.
So much.
Right outside the door.
Growing in the margins.
Waiting to be seen.
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What does this mean?
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Something that is really special about plants and flavor.
It is tied to our memories.
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the taste of wild rice
and suddenly you are in your grandmother's kitchen
the smell of cedar
and suddenly you are in the sugar bush at dawn
the sweetness of maple
and suddenly you are six years old
waiting for candy
flavor is time travel
flavor is memory made physical
flavor is home
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Our own sense of home place and comfort.
This is what we lose when we eat food from nowhere.
Industrial food has no memory.
Industrial food has no place.
Industrial food cannot take you home.
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But the wild rice from the lake your grandmother riced —
that takes you home.
But the berries from the hillside where your mother picked —
that takes you home.
But the venison from the land your family has hunted for generations —
that takes you home.
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What does this mean?
It means food is not fuel.
Food is not calories.
Food is not nutrition facts on a label.
Food is memory.
Food is place.
Food is relationship.
Food is home.
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and when they took the food
they took the memory
they took the place
they took the relationship
they took home
this is what food sovereignty takes back
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The falls are gone.
We are still here.
The food remembers.
The plants still speak.
The children are learning.
The narrative is changing.
The healing is possible.
Home is a flavor.
One plate at a time.
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A quote that is also like a daydream:
The river flows past the window. Where the thunder used to be, there is silence. Where the mist used to rise, there is concrete. But inside this room, someone is eating wild rice for the first time, and their eyes are closing, and they are asking what is this, and someone is telling them, and the story is being passed, and the river keeps flowing, and we are still here, and the food remembers, and the children are listening, and something is being healed that was broken so long ago we forgot it was whole, and the plates are being cleared and refilled, and the conversation continues, and outside the window the river flows, wounded, still flowing, like us, like us, still here, still here, still here.
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For the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples — those who came before, those who are here now, and those who are coming.
Chi-miigwech. Philámayaye.
