What Happens When Native People Lose their Traditional Foods?

Purepecha public health worker Abe Sanchez gathers chia seeds. | Photo: Deborah Small

The revitalization of tradition is much more complex than people can imagine. It really is a process that reaches far into the silenced knowing. Recovering from intergenerational historical trauma is something that continues to seep into the lives of California Indians today. Growing, nurturing, harvesting, and preparing native foods not only feed and renew the body-they feed the mind, the soul, the dreamtime of the people. Most importantly, our practices contribute to the healing of our common relative, our Mother Earth, and right now, she is sick and unable to attract all the beauty of the universe to come to her. And if our Mother Earth is sick, so are we, simply because we are part of her.

-Cindi Alvitre, Tongva educator, Chia Caf Collective

The native people I have worked with in southern California for the past 16 years have a profound spiritual connection to the land through their ancestors and their long history of living on the land. They pay homage to plants and consider them as their teachers. They're dedicated to passing on what they know to others. All stress our interdependence with other species. All have a fierce devotion to revitalizing their culture as part of the larger cultural revitalization sweeping California.

Cahuilla/Apache elder Lorene Sisquoc describes a reciprocal relationship with the plants and the land. The plants are waiting for us to come take care of them so they can take care of us. In Temalpakh, Katherine Saubel writes that the Cahuilla word for an oak grove, mekiiwah, means the place that waits for me.' It's our responsibility to take care of the land, to get out there and gather, to sing songs, tell stories, do ceremony, share our laughter and our language. To preserve our oral traditions by passing our knowledge to our kids and grandkids. It's important that they start learning very young. Taking care of the plants helps make our families healthy. We're working hard to heal our communities by deepening our connection to the land.

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Sisquoc is a founding member of the Chia Caf Collective, or CCC, a grassroots group of southern California tribal members and their allies committed to the revitalization of native foods, medicines, culture and community. Their work to revitalize native foods honors the vast traditional knowledge and spiritual relationship to the land, and explores the nutritive and medicinal bounty the land offers us.

Through workshops, classes, demonstrations, and native foods celebrations, the CCC focus on ways to re-incorporate native food plants into their daily diets to take back responsibility for their health and well-being. Their work helps others to reconnect with the land through gathering, gardening, and cooking native foods, and by preparing medicinal plants as teas, tinctures, salves, and soaps.

If you want to wreck a culture, hit it in the kitchen. - Tima Link

The goal of the CCC's classes and workshops is to inspire healthy eating practices for individuals and social justice for communities whose land management practices and native food traditions were disrupted when tribal land bases were taken away, native children sent to boarding schools, and traditional foods replaced by white flour, white sugar, and other unhealthy commodities and fast foods.

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Sisquoc teaches at the Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, a former boarding school created to assimilate Indian children into the dominant culture. Sisquoc relates that students were instructed: Forget about your traditional plants. Forget about the acorns and pine nuts and mesquite waiting to be gathered. You've got to get over here and make a garden and milk that cow. That's what the boarding schools were about. It was lactose-intolerant kids being fed dairy products and introduced foods, and taught cooking and home economics that were different from theirs. They were taught that their ways were wrong. Many of our gathering practices and our culinary secrets and specialties were not passed down because the boarding school students weren't home to learn them.

Shimwich Chumash educator and CCC member Tima Lotah Link echoes Sisquoc: If you want to wreck a culture, hit it in the kitchen. Boarding schools did that in one generation. Take away the kids, take away their plants, take away their knowledge of the kitchen. Parents and children no longer gathered their plants together. They no longer spoke their language or shared information.

Tongva educator and CCC founding member Barbara Drake also describes a shattered way of life: Our lives and our cultures were disrupted by colonization, and we became disconnected. The colonizers tried to eradicate us by severing our relationship with the natural world, with our plants and animals and the land. They took away the benefits of our traditional foods. We were no longer celebrating the seasons, caretaking our land, using digging sticks to aerate the soil, pruning plants, or thinning stands of trees. We were no longer spreading seeds or saving them, or helping plants to grow. We were letting them down. It was disastrous, but all was not lost. Today, we're asking elders what they remember. We're piecing together our traditional knowledge and sharing the benefits of eating our traditional foods.

The agave harvest | Photo: Deborah Small

Re-introducing native foods into people's diets has a remarkable effect, helping individuals and communities take back a large measure of responsibility for their health and well being, and for reclaiming their cultural identity. For the past 20 years, the Malki Museum on the Morongo Reserva

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