When Food is a Right, Not a Ration
As SNAP benefits face new political threats, millions of families are being pushed deeper into food insecurity—including many of our Native relatives whose communities already navigate the long-term impacts of colonization on food systems.
In this special All My Relations + Old Growth Table podcast collaboration, Matika Wilbur and Temryss Lane sit down with Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot), a leading Indigenous food systems expert and advocate, to unpack what these proposed cuts mean for Native nations and why food sovereignty is central to our collective survival.
Together, they explore how federal policy shapes daily access to food, the ongoing fight to restore Indigenous foodways, and what it means to nourish our people when systems fail us.
This episode also features on-the-ground field reports from Gray Fox Farm, Suquamish Seafoods, the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA), and a professional forager Chai Tobar-Dupres (Cowlitz), offering a rich, real-time look at the work happening across our communities to reclaim sustenance, land, and autonomy.
This is a conversation about power, policy, kinship, and the future of how we feed one another.
Resources:
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Credits:
Film Production by Francisco “Pancho” Sánchez
Edited and Field Reports by Francisco “Pancho” Sánchez
PA & Field Reports Mandy Yeahpau
Produced by Matika Wilbur
Co/hosted by Temryss Lane
Social Media by Katharina Mei-Fa Brinschwitz
Episode Transcript:
Hello, relatives. Welcome back to All My Relations and Old Growth Table.
Hey, hey. I'm Matika Wilbur. I'm from Swinomish and Tulalup. I'm a mama of two beautiful girls.
I'm a wifey. I'm the co-host of All My Relations and the executive producer of Old Growth Table. I'm a photographer. I'm a filmmaker. I'm a storyteller. I do all these things, but really talking story. getting to be in community and be here with you two fine ladies is really one of the highlights of my life. Truly. Hi, everyone. My name is Temryss Lane from Lummi Nation.
I am a co-host with Matika on All My Relations. I am a mother of two little boys and a communication strategist at Pyramid Communications. I'm an ex-professional athlete and sports broadcaster really at the core, a storyteller. So really happy to be here telling the stories or sharing stories that matter. Welcome to the show, ladies. I'm so excited to sit with you again. I think we did this in the first episode, so it feels real full circle for me.
My name is Valerie Segrest. I'm a Muckleshoot tribal member, a native foods nutritionist, a mom of two wild little girls. We all love to forage and harvest and make medicines together. We're better people when we're outside. So we like to be. outdoors as much as possible. And yeah, it's such an honor to have this conversation with both of you today because it's like you just, we stoke the fire and really there's a lot to talk about when it comes to what's going on in the world. It's totally related, like an old growth table being a place to learn how to harvest traditional foods, to help people gather knowledge about traditional foods.
And then the work that we do at All My Relations, you know, we think of ourselves as a space for relations. And I think right now, particularly our podcast coming together to talk about food in this current political moment is really important. In the global context, we just... have been witnessing the live stream genocide and the starvation of the Palestinian people. We know it's happening in Sudan and Congo, where famine is real. And I think part of this myth of American exceptionalism is that it won't happen to us, but look, here we are. And by us, I don't necessarily just mean Native people.
We know it has happened to us. I mean, the American general population of American people have felt probably... from this, but here we are. Yeah, and that's why we're gathering today, right? Because something incredibly urgent is happening, you know, not next month, not something that's coming down the pipeline, but something that's happening right now.
Thousands of Native families are going hungry, and so, you know, to understand what's happening, we have to start by naming what SNAP really means in Indian country, because for our people, it isn't just a line item in a policy debate. food, it's survival, it's how you feed your children, your babies, your elders, when everything else is stacked against you.
It was important for all my relations and Old Grove Table to come together for a joint episode, you know, on food insecurity in Indian country. A, because when I called you and said, who do we talk to about this? And you rattled off all of this information. I was like, oh, you, we talked to you. It's a really good time to come together to think about how we can be good relatives, how we can think about this in a larger picture, in the larger narrative of food sovereignty, in the larger narrative of how we got to this place in the first place, and then thinking, what do we do? What's the pathway forward?
Right, so in this episode, we're going to hear community voices who are working on the front lines of food justice from Native American Youth and Family Center. Naya in Portland, Oregon, and professional forager Haim Tobar Dupree of the Cowlitz tribe.
Yeah, the core of this episode too is really food sovereignty, you know, like talking about what that means as an inherent right of a people to... choose their own diets and therefore shape their own food systems. It's a movement that I really centered my practice in as a nutritionist and have watched grow, you know, into this really strong response to some of these federal programs like SNAP and the Federal Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, a.k.a. the COMMODS program.
COMMODS squad on Lemmy.
This episode is going to talk about what it means to feed ourselves, how it's part of our healing journey truly, and to feed ourselves without federal permission or that superimposition of a diet that really does not have any kind of relevance to what our ancestors were eating. That's what we're looking at these days. There's so many. Instances are just this reclaiming that's happening.
And then we'll take you on a little field trip, too. Right. We're going to see some native food producers. I get to visit Suquamish Seafoods, my good buddies over across the water here and Gray Fox Farms out in Chimicum. There is a movement happening out here. And these types of challenges are what fuels us, too. We've been readying ourselves for this moment. And I just hope people remember that. Like we're ready. We're so ready for it. So it's a good reminder. And it's scary.
And there's a lot of like bait out there to be, you know, worried about it. But the reality is we have one another. We have a very strong community and people who are producing food with deep rooted values too that want to feed us.
All My Relations is not corporate funded or corporate sponsored. We are… Listener supported. So if you love our show, think about supporting the show by going on Patreon.
Same for Old Growth Table. Also listener supported. That doesn't mean, however, that we don't want to become corporately sponsored. So if you are an Indian corporation that does good things in the world, consider sponsoring us. Reach out. I love that for us. We are interested.
Tribal enterprise. We are interested. values aligned organizations. We are interested. Live reads is a thing. And for those of you that aren't going to give us money, you can share, like, subscribe. Tell everybody. Or just come over.
Just come over. Come to Tidelands.
Let's just start by telling us what SNAP means to Indian Country, to the community, and to the work you've been doing. Yeah, and I think that's really important to talk about. What is the system and how does it work, right? So these are federally administered funds that go to states, and then states administer them to... their citizens. The amount of funding that comes to states is based on a formula, like how many citizens they have, how many people qualify, and Native people are written into that formula.
Do we know when SNAP, like when it started, and has it been successful? Did you look at the ways that these programs are working or not working for tribal communities already? Here's how those things happened. We're removing Native people from...food systems right this is like a loss of land a loss of rights the lack of knowledge transmission because of the boarding school era and removing those children from homes that would have been receiving traditional food knowledge right there's all these interruptions that were strategies to remove us from a food system and then one was superimposed onto our communities the commodity foods program and what did it consist of it was like Canned meat. Spam.
Yeah. Or even sometimes just cans that had a picture of a pig on it or something like that, right? Like the white, it came in like a white can and it had a picture of a cow on it. Or it came in a white can and it had a picture of a chicken on it. Flour, bags of flour. Bags of flour, processed sugar. Big blocks of cheese. Processed cheese. What decade are we talking about?
The commodity foods program, I would say started around like really the 1850s, like as, you know, treaties were happening. part of treaty negotiations were that you would be able to uphold your cultural lifestyle, right? The food rations were part of those negotiations.
We had to stay where we were and the government would give us food. Bring us food, yeah. And I think that's an important pinpoint to hold on to in this moment because it's not always about anti-hunger or poverty relief. For tribal communities, it's really about treaty rights.
It's about upholding the deals that were made when lands were ceded to the government.
Part of it is... sure that we are fed. And yet we're the last in line when it comes to several of these emergency food programs. And they're written into the laws at the USDA that way.
And to get back to that question, though, Matika, the SNAP benefits rose out of this sort of like testing the waters with Native people. You know, what happened to us? And this is true for the health system, for the environmental system, for capitalism, everything. What happens to us, it's like we're that first research model. You'll see what's happened to us happens to everybody.
First, you remove people from their land. Basically, you impoverish them. And then you sell back to them the systems that they once had for free. That's the crazy thing about colonization, right? Now you have to buy all these things that were once free before the colonizer got here. Childcare. Childcare. Food. Food. We used to trade for all those things. And then these federal programs come into play. So talk a little more about SNAP-Ed. Well, so SNAP is actually administered by the
Federal Nutrition Services. And so as nutritionists, you have to get to know SNAP and SNAP-Ed and what's going on in that world. be able to help folks navigate through building their own diets.
And so from right out of the gates, you know, when I was studying nutrition, we were assigned to go actually be SNAP educators in schools for a couple of weeks. And they assigned it to us,
I'll never forget. And like my senior quarter at school, and I went and worked in schools, third and fourth grade, we taught the SNAP-Ed curriculum. And one of the lessons was to play a game. name a green vegetable. And every time we said, name an orange vegetable, every single kid, every single class would say cheese.
What? And as a nutritionist, he was like, you're in your bubble studying nutrition. You're going to go out there and save the world. You know, it was like such a reckoning in that moment to be like, oh, my gosh, kids think cheese is vegetables. So to me.
How old were the kids? Third and fourth grade. Wow. Yeah. And I think that this is a long time coming. This entire, you know, shutting it off actually began. when that big, beautiful bill was passed and quietly defunded SNAP-Ed.
So the SNAP Nutrition Education Program for all of the states went away.
Within two months, in Washington state alone, 140 SNAP-Ed employees lost their jobs.
And by December, of this year it will officially sunset snap ed which has been around since the like home economics era that was when snap was really stood up in the usda and for our younger listeners we used to have to take home ec in high school it was a class it was a class what do they call it now isn't it like i don't know they don't do it they don't do it they don't it doesn't exist yeah there is no home ec but it like it taught you useful skills Like how to sew.
How to sew, how to cook. I learned how to make coffee cake. You know, things like that. What did you learn in Home Ec? Did you take it? We baked cookies. Yeah. I don't remember what we baked. I mean, that's what I remember the most about it. I put a needle through my finger. I just remember wearing aprons, which felt very, you know, gender conformist, but okay. Yeah. Okay, so Home Ec, it doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't. Snap Ed, officially gone. In December.
In December. Whoa. Officially sunsets. Yeah. Why? I know. Nobody talked about it. It just wasn't in the bill. And then they just, overnight, no money. And because of that, the food sovereignty assessment I was working on with the state, which went another year, we were supposed
to wrap it up at the end of 2026, gone. We were just right on this precipice of change, of really reshaping something. What was the goal there? What would you have tried to reshape?
Well, the findings of the research so far, which consisted of just talking circles with 17 tribes in the state of Washington alone, and we were just at the beginning, like our goal was to hit every tribe, is really about shifting the intention of funds from being a dependent on SNAP funds to investing in food systems that looked like K-12 education that was grounded in traditional foods teachings. It looked like supporting these gardens, these food producers. we're going to talk about, it looked like purchasing from our own people, native food producers, clearing those lines of procurement where we were pushing our produce and our products right into our own institutions, our elder center, our health centers, our Northwest Indian College.
Right, Northwest Indian College. Because most of the public schools and tribal schools are stillrelying on Cisco. Absolutely. Yeah. And also like federal reimbursements.
The idea is to lessen federal dependency and rather keep the investment growing from within the community across generations. Yeah. So many folks had said like, let's revive ancestral trade routes. And when we receive those dollars, we keep them in our community and that strengthens our own tribal economies. Right. And they're for the state. and the state and people are fed culturally relevant diets that they choose to have you know not that something that's been dictated to them so that was right where we were at and now it's gone and I just want to go back to that because there are real effects that happen when just to say like if you're a native person you have to choose between snap or the FDIPR program. You cannot have both in the same month. The what program?
The food distribution program on Indian reservations, which is the commodities program.
No way. You have one or the other. And so what's happened in the month of November is all the folks who were on SNAP moved over to FDIPR. To commodities. have been left with that bill trying to figure out how to pay for the excess and the extra that's coming in. for those folks as well.
And because it's also our cultural value, right? So just like make sure people are fed. Yeah. So we have that extra layer on top of government shutdown and all of the government employees that have been furloughed and several reservations, especially in our area, Tulalip, Nisqually,
Suquamish, they all are right next door neighbors to military bases who have a high amount of their community population working as government employees who are all... receiving paychecks for the last month. Interesting. So we're seeing tribes really, like really, tribal communities are hit hard by these types of disruptions. So I'm curious, are a lot of those military families who are non-tribal members, are they being fed by tribes? Yes. I mean,
I just worked on a food distribution with the Suquamish tribe and the Suquamish Tribal Council last week, and they were telling me their cousins, their brother-in-laws, their sisters are... getting a paycheck goose egg on their pay stubs and living off of one income, quite often disability, and the SNAP program is not going to be providing their benefits this month. And so we were doing a quick food distribution to help just like get fresh foods and vegetables into their homes. And here in the urban centers where in across the United States, 70 plus percent of Native people reside in urban centers, places like Chief Seattle Club, which is a housing and human services organization that started off through a church literally feeding people and serving meals. They have a food program where they average 60 to 90 people per meal being served, but it ticked. Upwards to 160 meals being served to 250.
So they saw a major influx with the SNAP benefits being cut. We're also seeing states and cities.
Seattle announced that they were pushing $8 million into helping with this downfall. But that doesn't mean that $8 million go on to EBT cards. Those are funds that are going to these food banks, to Chief Seattle Club, for example, Food Lifeline, Northwest Harvest here in our area to help increase the food that they can give away. So it's still not dollars in the pocket, and it's still not food sovereignty for people who are wanting to go to the store and choose their own diet, right?
Right. I mean, these are absolutely cycles of dependency, too, that they're investing in, not cycles of being able to free yourself by being able to feed yourself and your family, right? Yeah, I mean, that's when I met food people. Food people.
Those food people. You know, the food people. What do you call them? Is that a tribe?
A tribe I want to be a part of. No, when I met the food peoples, you know, like the people that carry seed bundles, you know, like Rowan White or Jessica Greendeer or, you know, like Dr. Robin Wall Kimmer, some of these incredible people who are doing food sovereignty work, plant-based relationships. work when I was fortunate to go to their homes and go to their gardens and go to the community centers you know what they told me and what I heard over and over and over again is you know like America would have you believe this great big lie which is that we are living in a system where there isn't enough in a system of scarcity and the systems of scarcity are created by white men and by the patriarchy. When we switched from a traditional food system where women matriarchs were the seed keepers and we had matrilineal knowledge being passed down intergenerationally, we knew the truth, which is that Mother Earth is abundant.
There is always enough to give away. to spread the table, to feed the people. But it was really the patriarchy that made us believe that there's not enough.
And lack of land and lack of access to land has led people to become dependent. So then how do we... return to our truths? How do we return to a mindset of abundance?
How do we create abundance in our own lives? I think that food sovereignty is the answer. Of course, I'm going to say that. But in all of humans' existence, we've never been so disconnected from the source of our food. Get connected. Where does our water come from that you're drinking out of your tap? that's a really easy thing that you can assign yourself to learn. How do I grow a food? How do I be a champion for one food in the food system? I'm going to be the strawberry girl.
I'm going to be the, you know, the person that grows those delicious carrots, whatever it is. All I can grow is kale. Lettuce.
Kale or lettuce? Tomatoes. I'll take tomatoes. It's because it's a weed. I'll take tomatoes. You literally just put it in the ground. Gross. You don't have to do anything. Listen, I'm a lazy gardener too, okay? Literally just. My blueberries don't live.
And things eat my strawberries. I can grow pumpkins. Grow pumpkins.
Yeah, you grow the pumpkins. You don't have to do everything. You don't have to grow the pumpkin, the lettuce, the strawberries, and the blueberries. You can grow that, and you can grow that. And then we meet each other. Isn't that beautiful? The world doesn't fall apart because you have value and we love you for that. Over the pandemic, I went to my dad's and I'm like, dad, we're going to start a garden. I had some heratsa corn that I had been given when I went to visit their homelands. And he had an abundance of corn. Then he got so into it that he... built like a huge you've seen it he built this huge like farm on to lay la brez it's like this long you know garden that he grew and he grows so much and i'm like dad you have to put a farm stand out on your front porch because he just like if he doesn't give it away which he like sometimes forgets to like harvest it then there's all this abundant of food but i just think like returning to the wealth that we've known of what it means to be wealthy which is to give away is really that food sovereignty and that returning to being a village. Imagine for a second some tribes are going to do that.
What does it really look like? I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all. It looks like… creating a space for native food producers whether you're a fisher or a forager some of the businesses that we're going to hear about today in the episode making sure that they can scale up that they're supported that they have direct contracts and mous that their produce and product goes directly to feed their own people first and then also have the ability to move into larger markets because why not it looks like supporting gardens and lifting up food education and food curriculum that's grounded in our ancestral teachings teachings of the old growth table it's about food preservation and making sure that in times of emergency we're able to feed our people there are so many different like facets to it and we were just getting to the heart of it with those talking circles with folks in washington state well i feel strongly that you will pick that back up that is the data that we need to be able to reinvest in indigenous communities that are leading with food sovereignty and the real tangible outcomes of accomplishing the goal of food sovereignty.
Thank you. Thanks for believing in me. I was saying that to the folks. Let's manifest it.
Matika says it out loud. It will happen.
She's also a magician.
Well, I want to learn about the Suquamish seafoods and the gray fox farms. I want to hear a little bit more about that. Yeah, my little adventure began with heading over to Suquamish Seafoods and visiting their gorgeous little operation. It's small and it's mighty. Like they do so much work out of this. Really simple, fresh seafood store that's right on the highway between Paulsbo and
Bainbridge Island. You can swing in and get some fresh crab and geoduck and smoked salmon and salmon and halibut. It's all of the things. Clams, oysters. Suquamish has their own variety of oyster called the agate oyster. And so let's just go there and check it out. Yeah.
Hey friends, we're here at Suquamish Seafoods just across the bay from Seattle at the Port Madison Indian Reservation. Come with me inside and let's check it out.
Welcome to Suquamish Seafoods. My name is Melissa. I am the retail manager here. I am also a Suquamish tribal member.
What are some of the values? What are some of the exciting parts about your job that you really love?
I love working here because I get to engage with people, with customers. I also get to contribute to the economic growth of our tribe and offer our traditional seafood that is directly sourced from our tribal fishermen. How amazing is that, just to be able to support tribal fishers? I'm sure it means a lot to them to have a place to market their seafood.
We have a lot of regular customers who come in because they know they're supporting a good... good cause and they know that the seafood is properly kept and it's like when they're buying something from an establishment like this a native food business that's like inspired to support native people they're also investing in all these other things the tribe values the environment so it's like an investment really in a good purchase like a really full wholehearted purchase towards emulating and supporting the environment yeah absolutely i'm always so impressed with the way that this is grown from just like a let's literally see what happens and people driving by and understanding the value of what this community brings out in the world is so special.
And it makes your food that much more delicious, right?
So tell us about some of the products that you sell here. So we do our dungeness crab. Those come directly from tribal fishermen. Our manila clams, those are sourced from tribal members. We farm our own oysters, and then we also do salmon, sockeye, coho, king, and halibut.
I've had the halibut during the height of halibut season. It's so delicious. Is there like a story you can tell us around the oyster and how it was developed and what the name of it is? We have two sizes. We have our small, those are the agate pearl oysters. And then we have our larger ones that are also, we just, we call those the agate oysters. But those are $10 a dozen. The small agate pearls are $12 a dozen. And the name actually came from an employee. She was eating an oyster and actually found a pearl in it.
No way.
Yeah. That's kind of how the name came about.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
That's like the dream.
Yeah. Like eat a nice, delicious oyster and find some jewelry in there. That's amazing. Yes. and then our salmon those come in portion sizes we have anywhere from half pound portions to our bigger fillets which are a couple pounds each. Can you tell us a little more about how the business started?
So Squamish Seafood started down at our plant location. It started out of the bay door, just selling oysters, clams, maybe some crab, just a handful of things. Eventually, we grew into this spot, and in 2020, we opened up and have been going ever since. Well, thank you for opening up this place and holding the work in such a good way. You're welcome. Really are feeding.
Change into the world and that's important now more than ever. So thank you. Thank you I appreciate you guys supporting us as well. Oh my gosh anything I can do. I'm excited
How incredibly profound to be able to go there and get fish directly from the tribal fishermen themselves. An answer for food insecurity is food sovereignty and the work of food sovereignty is supporting native growers, native food businesses like Suquamish Seafoods.
And the money that comes from all of those purchases being directly reinvested back into that community. And it's not just like... the producer to the market level, it is what the tribe invests in as far as keeping the environment clean, the hatcheries, the development too.
You're purchasing all of that. In the systems that replenish and re-nourish or sustain, rather, the salmon that we eat, the oysters that we eat.
Right. And don't you want that food system to return? Yes. Right? In so many ways.
Yeah. Yeah. You also went to... I also went to Gray Fox Farms and visited Laray.
She is a dynamic farmer extraordinaire.
I don't even know how else to describe it. She's doing so many amazing things on her land. And she tells such a fascinating story about putting her whole self into transforming this land. and making something really beautiful out of it. She's got bees. She's got a greenhouse. She makes beautiful jams and jellies. And actually, while we were there, she donated $100. jams that were made out of native berries salal berry to the suquamish tribe for our food distribution so i just want to like say thank you loray for for all of that i've never had a beautiful gift jam i would love to have salal jam it's delicious and it dyes your teeth well actually you could go over there
let's go meet loray everybody is there a story behind the name gray fox I wish there was a cool story.
I used to live on Gray Fox Road when I first started farming, so that was, I was like, oh, cool. The one constant is kind of the name and the purpose. When I first, first started farming, it was actually in West Virginia. It was just a small little garden because one of my children at the time went vegan. and so i was like okay well we need some really nutrient dense food and even looking at the monoculture way in which we grow our crops now the nutritional value of those commercially available products are not the same as what they were 100 years ago right you know so we've depleted our soil and we have adulterated this this the produce so much where it visibly somewhat resembles what we started with but even nutritionally it's completely devoid so I was like you know what I could do better myself and so that's what I did yeah so then just with you know a lot of hard work and determination it just it grew and it grew and it grew and I packed my pantry and then I started sharing with all my neighbors and then it started going into stores and then that was that
My name is Laray Hughes. I am the owner and founder of Gray Fox Farm in Chimacombe, Washington, and I'm a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians in Newport, Oregon. I've been here about six or seven years. The first three years was almost just complete cleanup. And then finally, just as I'm getting to the point where I can start thinking about actually doing some kind of crop, that's when COVID hit and everything shut down. And obviously, like being out here on the peninsula. You know, we're like at the end of the supply chain to where everything, it just got real slim pickings. You know, when we talk about like food resilience, just trying to kind of figure out, you know, what I can be able to provide for the local market and the local economy should the bridge go out. Like, how do I increase my ability to provide?
So what can, what can I do? far as blueberries it's blueberries it's eggs and it's honey and is that the goal for gray fox farms like moving forward ideally what i want to do is be able to share this with community like 10 acres is too much for me i don't need it so i want to share that with somebody else that wants that access that you know be like i can't afford land okay well cool you don't need to because i have more than enough like you go take care of it that's all i ask you to do just take care of it yeah i've had four for people that I've done that with.
And so there's this section of property and there's another little swath right there. So when I do like the land share access, that's the part that the renters get to do whatever it is that they're doing. And Ren and Dimitri, they did meat birds and rabbits. That was all just right here on this side?
Yep, on this side back over here. Do you want to walk around into the greenhouse? Sure, yeah.
Oh, that's nice and warm. With all the gifts that I've been giving and as many times as I've been smiled upon to be able to have the opportunity to follow my own passion and purpose in life,
I want to be able to be that bridge for other people. And then they get to try it out and see if they like it and develop their own relationship with farming. Housing is scarce across the board, like everywhere you go.
Affordable housing is unheard of. Accessible affordable farmland is even harder than that you know and all the farmers are aging out so then that's when you know we look at all these rich people that are buying up all this land it just makes it harder for us to take care of ourselves It makes it harder for us to take care of our community. It makes everything more difficult than it needs to be because we stop relying on ourselves. We stop relying on each other. And we start to rely on this massive supply chain to get us what we need. And then when that supply chain breaks down, we're all just kind of like sitting here staring at each other being like, well, now what are we going to do? So I don't like feeling like that. I don't like having to wait for some process. to give me what I need in order to survive. It's just rooted in that value of generosity and giving back. It's really important. Happy people are happy communities. Right?
Yeah. So I'm like, if more people want to play in the dirt, dude, great, because I got a lot of dirt. I got a lot of dirt. I love the indigenous worldview she takes of, I have this acreage that you can… plant on and care for, come plant, and she's now expanded. Not just that those vegetables are being grown with more sustenance and nourishment, but that the land is benefiting from being taken care of. Absolutely. And inspiring other people, like just to come in and test it out, see what they like, you know, grow a crop, see if you're good at growing kale. So easy. I mean, you know what?
You just put it in there. Just put it in the dirt. Sprinkle it on the ground. So like now we live in these urban spaces. The majority of Native people live in urban spaces. If you're so lucky to be a homeowner or even rent where there's a front yard, likely it's covered in grass. My friend,
I used to live in L.A., Jamiah Hargins started CropSwap, urban micro farms, where he started a garden because he had a baby and he was like, oh, I got to think about food security. Started a garden and started asking his neighbors if he could trade food with them.
So now he started a whole organization that has these urban gardens. They will literally go to neighbors and say, are you utilizing your front yard? If you're not. Can we actually turn it into healthy, growable dirt that we can just grow things in? They'll create these programs where they'll grow food in the same way that Gray Fox Farms does just offer the space and the land.
This is a solution that Jamiah Hargens, his family, and CropSwap has actually begun is these urban micro farms. And I love it. We have a little garden in our backyard. I would love to be able to trade. food with my neighbors. That's a really good segue for Haim, professional forager, who reminds us that food sovereignty can also mean returning to our relationship with the land. We can grow crops and we can share them and we can trade them or we can forage. So let's go to Haim.
My name is Neil Haim Tobar Dupre. I’m 34, born and raised in Oregon, I'm enrolled in the Cowlitz tribe and I'm a professional forager.
It's mushroom season right now and I'm picking a whole lot of chanterelles, lobster mushrooms, cauliflower mushrooms. chicken of the woods, hedgehog, yellow feet. Foraging is a way to uphold the tradition and culture of my people on my mom's side of the family. It's also wildly entertaining.
I'm very much so a self-sufficient and strive for independence. That's the type of person I am, and foraging plays a huge role in fulfilling that within me. A lot of the plants that I do harvest are non-native invasive species, and those are the ones that I like to pick. One, because they're damaging to our ecosystem and environment. And two, some of them are wildly delicious and they're abundant and everywhere. Some right off the top of my head are garlic mustard or allieria petiolata. It's a type of wild mustard that tastes like the name says, the name says it all, garlic and mustard. It's really good to be used as like an ingredient in pesto instead of basil.
Knotweed shoots, that would be another one. So fallopia japonica, that's Japanese knotweed.
There's also giant knotweed and Himalayan knotweed that all grow here, and they just completely dominate riverbanks, will completely take over entire habitats. So that's one that's really good to, even if it's just a nibble at a time, eradicate. If you're in an urban setting, little did you know, like a lot of people have this misconception about foraging, which is that you have to go far out into the woods to find wild edible plants. But really, in an urban setting, you get the most variety. and the most abundance of wild edible plants. A lot of those plants are brought in by cargo ships, trains, the bottoms of your shoes. Like humans are one of the biggest carriers of seeds out there. So in an urban setting, you get a ton of variety. And I mean, I could name hundreds of different plants, but like some namely that would grow in an urban setting would be like Everlasting P or Lathrys latifolia. that's a really tasty one.
But yeah, if you're just nibbling on everlasting pea shoots or pea flowers, like they're delicious, they're nutritious, they're everywhere. There's two different types of miner's lettuce. So we have perfoliated miner's lettuce, which has a circular leaf with a stem that pierces the center, hence the name perfoliated. And then there's Siberian miners lettuce, which would grow more in like a forested setting. But nonetheless, I mean, here in Portland, we have a lot of urban forests. You would find Siberian miners lettuce in those like Douglas fir forests. We have tons of different mustards. I already mentioned garlic mustard. There's field mustard, black mustard, hedge mustard, wild watercress, which is kind of an interesting one when it comes to seasonality, because a lot of plants, they have like one peak season, then they die off. But with watercress and many other mustards. They will peak in the spring, kind of die out into summer, and then as soon as it starts raining again, they bounce back. So like Watercrest right now is actually kind of, it's robust. It's ripe for the picking. If you really want to learn, the best way would probably be to take classes and to have that sort of expertise or knowledge, even just a little bit in your background. pocket would be very helpful i mean even learning like I mean other other really like common wild edible plants in a setting like this chickweed chickweed's a huge one um just certain plants like that just to know them maybe maybe 10 or so if you knew them and could identify them properly you could walk outside your door take a like 15 minute walk in your neighborhood and probably find all 10 of those plants like that's how common they are he knows so much about mushrooms i mean i don't The amount of knowledge is pretty impressive. And let's just be clear. He was fresh from foraging mushrooms. As you can see, he looks like he was digging in the dirt. I want to be fresh from foraging mushrooms. I mean, from hunting, mushroom hunting, I think is what the foragers call it. Yes. And I love a plant geek.
I love it. I love the like drop the Latin names after the common names. I also love like eating the things that are really annoying invasive species. Not weed. Hello. We got to get it out of here. Well, I want to be like that. Like I want to be able to walk around the neighborhood and know these things. I don't though. And I get scared that I'm going to eat the wrong thing.
I mean, the good news is it's your human superpower to be able to see something and identify what it is. We do it with logos and old dead white guys all the time. We can do that with plants in our natural environment. He said something that was really both kind of gross and interesting.
There's more diversity of both invasive and native foods in our urban environment than even out in... nature i found that hard to believe but i believe him at the same time um and i think is that true valerie i feel like what i heard him say is that yes But what I was picking up is we think that there's just like this concrete jungle out there, but you walk outside all over Seattle, and this might be true in other cities, they put in the planters kale. Like I see different types of lettuces, radicchio growing in planters around here. It's like an ornamental.
You walk into the malls. When I go to the mall, like when I go to U Village and I see some ornamental lettuce in their planter box. Make a salad. That's what he was telling you. There's so many edible foods and especially green leafy ones that I'm like, oh no, you just shouldn't eat that. And then I find out from my mother-in-law that like, yeah, you can eat that. I almost feel like it's more important to know what is poisonous. So back to our friend Haim, who is foraging mushrooms right before he shot the video.
I see all kinds of mushrooms in my front yard or wherever. And I'm always like, I wonder if we could eat these and I'm never going to test it. Yeah, right.
Some of these ideas, like growing these crops and sharing crops, the idea of foraging of these larger systems of food sovereignty, they are long-term solutions. What are the solutions right now? And that's exactly why I want to go to NAYA, because NAYA is a native organization that exists in Portland that's feeding people, right? They explain that they've grown over 4,500 pounds of food that have been given to community. And we do have organizations like NAYA, like the Chief
Seattle Club, you know, like Indian House, like these, you know, native-led community centers that are prepared to help our relatives who are facing food insecurity. We've seen a huge influx of requests for food, and whereas people necessarily didn't have to worry about food staples being accessible to them, now they are. My name is Liana LaVey. I am the Community Food Coordinator here at NAA Family Center. I use she, her pronouns, and I'm from the Abbey Mekong tribe from northern Canada. We're seeing a lot of people that aren't able to afford the things that they would ordinarily have in a single household. The challenges are really unique for urban people because we don't have those intergenerational systems that we would rely on. We can't go to our grandmother's house or we can't visit our aunties in a lot of circumstances because we've come here from other places. If we're able to do those things, there is some backup for getting by. But if you're a single individual or a single house or a single income household, you're kind of out of luck.
My name is Ben Sanford. I use he, him, his pronouns. I'm a member of the Saponi tribe of North Carolina. And my role here at NAYA is part of the health equity team working in the Wapasnani Shaku Garden. Since my time here at NAYA in the food pantry, we've had the lowest amount of food that I've ever seen, that I've heard from my peers that have ever seen the amount this little.
We've been lucky enough to have relationships with different Native. families throughout Oregon that do provide us with salmon and elk and even refer us to different things like berries and nuts that are local to this area that we've been able to purchase from grant funding to be able to provide that to the NAIA participants and their families and their households. With elk we've been receiving donations for several years now of even non-native hunters hearing about NAIA And before SNAP or anything of these changes have been reaching out to us to be able to provide. And again, we've learned how to process that.
Some of us know from culture and family traditions and stuff. Some of us have to learn on the fly of how to process that stuff. But learning everything and being able to provide that is amazing.
Being situated along the Columbia River, salmon is very important in the Portland community. So being able to receive fish from... local fishermen regardless if they're native or not being bringing it in having those donations being able to receive that gift and then again re-gift it as soon as it comes in it goes right back out to our community our elders that are from the local area are very excited every time that comes in because they wouldn't likely spend money on these types of things because they have other things that are priority and we're able to gift that back to them which is something that's really special.
Well I think it's such a powerful reminder that food access is tied to care right not charity and that our communities are feeding each other with creativity and heart have been doing so for a long time that it's central to who we are as Indigenous people and that when we support Native organizations especially in urban areas they are going to do the work to take care of their people.
And Naya's program too, I just happen to know because we helped develop their food sovereignty strategy. They've really like put the time and effort into planning and understanding what's important and hearing from their people, their stakeholders, what's important to them and prioritizing that when it comes to strengthening food sovereignty in their program. So I think it does take a certain amount of like taking a step back, listening to your community and then like making that happen. They've done that in such a beautiful way. And delicious. Yeah.
And I mean, I think just the fact that this is the moment that we're all collectively experiencing, their cupboards are almost bare. It is a testament to the moment and the need for people to continue to give to your local Native organizations, connect with your local tribes, see. how they are supporting native people if you have abundance share it yes yeah in any community you live in there is an opportunity to help feed hungry people and reminding folks that urban native people who would otherwise have access to their village to their tribe to the abundance yeah and the world view of us setting the table of if If my uncle goes hunting and harvests like a dozen ducks, well, he drives around the res and make sure all the elders that he can think of have a duck, you know, that he's prepared for them. He's got a freezer full of fish that he's giving away to his family members. So that is part of the relocation project and the removal of Native people from their land. They don't have access to that. So if you are looking at the organizations in your local communities, it is one of the most impactful places that you... sharing your abundance I think also just remembering that we are all a part of the food system we're not just consumers of it we're also part of you know being a citizen being able to like look at the system and figure out where we can best support it and amplify the efforts of it. That is the way our ancestors have always cared for the land. We weren't separate from the ecosystem, outside of it, we were in it. And we were able to look at the functions and say, oh, well, we need to eat more of this, you know, invasive weed right now because there's scarcity over here. So we're going to shift our focus here, making sure that we preserve our foods and put them away or stretch what we have. your point like showing up and being generous with what you have when we when we go berry harvesting we come back and make sure that we give some of it to our community and when we do that we feed ourselves not to address the starvation but to like really truly feel that we're a part of the whole of society, and food gives us that opportunity to do that. Every community in this country has something to do with food sovereignty. There is a movement happening. I've been able to witness it for over a decade. It's strong. It's happening.
Now is your opportunity to just, like, get involved, you know?
Yes. Be a part of it. You already are. Yes. You are. If you eat, you are a part of it, you know? Yes. Well, we want to thank everyone who shared their stories from Naya to Hyde.
To Leray and Suquammer Seafoods. Thank you, everybody, for sharing your story with us. Thank you for doing Old Growth Table, All My Relations, ladies. What a fun thing to do.
What a nice collab, talking about what's most important. I appreciate having the company.
Thank you.
If you or someone you know is experiencing food insecurity, please check out our show notes for links to Native-led food programs and resources near you. We'll put a bunch of links and resources and places to check out in the show notes of this episode. And don't forget to share.
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