I happened to get introduced to you via IACP and your presentation on “The Traditions of First Nations and Native Cuisine” which was a very interesting discussion. I'd like to continue that to learn a bit more about you and your culture as presented.
Where are you currently located?
Right now I'm actually in New Jersey.
Is this where you currently reside or is this just for a visit?
I go back and forth between here and Toronto. My family is here. So I like to see them and check in, but I still do a lot of work based in Canada as well being Canadian working in Toronto.
Can you give me a bit of background history on Quebec, which was part of the discussion on indigenous people and the different tribes? Because, I've always associated Quebec with being French-in particular, with Montreal being one of the major cities located in the region of Quebec. Toronto feels to be leaning toward being more American, with a close resemblance and feel to Chicago-in my opinion.
There's such a different education in the U.S. versus Canada about these things. My family is Canadian and my tribe is in Canada, but I grew up in the states. So it was always like this funny thing, where I think in Canada there is a much more visible indigenous population in every major city. So much so, it would be hard to assume that you didn't know these people existed. Where in the United States, unless you're in specific pockets with a lot of reservations-in parts of the Great Lakes or Dakotas-where standing rock infamously is located; and other parts of the Southwest and California where most reservations are you may not come in contact with native people. If you went to New York City you wouldn't be able to say that there is all this native presence here, and the same goes for Chicago and LA.
The East Coast was first area of colonial contact, and were obviously where native groups of people spent the most time with the settlers. They intermarried. And they were forcefully removed from their lands sooner. The West Coast was obviously last. A lot of Eastern Tribes who moved up into Canada were pushed there forcibly, against their will and into other places. So a majority of the Canadian population lives within a certain mileage range from the border, where in the U.S. people live more spread out. And so you have a much more dense population of Native Americans found in these regions of Canada in relation to where everyone is living. So that's why I think, first nations people have a visible presence in Canada.
As well, the language is a bit different in how we refer to ourselves. Indians is the term the settlers used because initially, Columbus thought he discovered India and thought he had arrived to India when he arrived in North America. So this is what the indigenous people were called and the name just kind of stayed. But we would have collectively called ourselves by our different nations, so I'm Anishinaabe, which is my tribe. I'm an Anishinaabe person and there is another tribe the Algonquin and I have family members from both. So I say I'm Anishinaabe Algonquin, because those are the two tribes that I come from. Just like there is Dene-which is Navaho, or the Sioux or the Cree or Mohawk-these are how we would call ourselves because there wasn't one pan term for it.
But now post settlers, we have these umbrella terms. In the United States I think it is American Indian or Native American. And in Canada, there is more precise terminology, which is where we say First Nations, because we were the first nations of this land. Then there is also the Inuit-which has been accustomedly called 'Eskimo' which is actually considered a derogatory term, so we say Inuit. There's also the Métis in Quebec and Alberta, which is a group of people that recently got a special designation by Canada. Those are specifically people who are French and Scottish fur trapper men, who married First Nations indigenous women and they started their own culture, which is blended of Scottish French influence; with the men definitely having embraced the way of living of the indigenous people-developing their own culture and history with the United States. They do a lot of fiddling and have certain dances and wear these sachets-so their culture and customs are uniquely recognized as such.
Every part of Canada, the United States and Mexico had indigenous peoples living there thousands of years before the settlers arrived. And recently there have been discussions to acknowledge there were sophisticated and thriving societies that existed within their own cultures, which was understandably erased as part of history.
Indigenous peoples were also enslaved. The problem with enslaving these people who had been on the land for multi-generations is that we were able to escape often, and then once we ran into the woods they couldn't track us or find us because we knew the woods better than they did. Enslaving indigenous peoples also didn't have the same effect because of this, and many of those who were enslaved-chose to move on to the afterlife due to their religious beliefs. The result of which brought on the reservations-which limited freedom of movement and required a permission slip to leave and you couldn't trade and barter with other people. Then the next came the residential schools, where kids where removed from their families and put into until they were eighteen and were forbidden to speak their language and practice their culture or religion as part of assimilation, with the last one closing in 1996. So it's only been in the last twenty years that descendants have felt it's safe to be native and something to be proud of. People are now in the process of trying to bring back the culture through language, through food, through history and through art.
Recently, with climate change a lot of the ways the people lived in harmony with the land, in a non-extractive way-is why people have focused more attention on indigenous practices because of it's ability to sustain and help the natural environment flourish.
What regions can you speak to with respect to indigenous peoples and gastronomy? Locations where people can go and educate themselves on native foods and experience it?
There are a lot of places. I will say that Canada does a really good job of promoting indigenous tourism to Canada which is nice because I do think people want those experiences-which can be hard to access. For example in Victoria and Vancouver, and even Quebec-they have established an indigenous tourism agency where you can find restaurants, and experiences like visiting the Kahnawake Brewery and there is a Native owned winery in Vancouver-called Nk’Mip Cellars-which is very cool.
In terms of the Pacific Northwest, through some of my work and research I've have become very knowledgeable about foods in that area. But also in the Great Lakes region where my tribes are from which is very cool too because you have wild rice-which is an amazing staple and accessible-which can be bought and used easily. A lot of indigenous foods are wild foods. These are things you have to forage, you can't necessarily go and find them in the supermarket-so that sometimes is an issue. Then we're talking about your weeds where you have dandelion and nutgall, things that people maybe wouldn't see as a culinary but were food staples.
So I guess it depends on if you want something maybe cool that a lot of people don't know about but wouldn't be able to go and just buy then make at home, this will determines the access point for people to go and engage somehow.
Are there certain dishes that are unique to a particular area or region? Or would you find restaurants that are only offering certain dishes that you can find due to ingredients that you can only in that particular area?
In terms of that, there are only three restaurants in the U.S. and more in Canada where you can go and get an indigenous meal. The big one in the U.S. is Owamni By The Sioux Chef. He's like the big person because he has two cookbooks, a James Beard Award, been featured in the New York Times and on NPR-so he is a well-known entity. His restaurant is amazing and based in Minneapolis, and his whole menu is pre-colonial. He uses all of the ingredients that are what you would have found before the settlers came-so there's no wheat, there's no cane sugar and it's only what was there before-so that's an interesting culinary experience.
Then there is Wahpepah's Kitchen in Berkeley, California. It's also a restaurant that's mostly pre-colonial food run by a native woman-Crystal Wahpepah. She partners with local farms to bring in native ingredients and that's also an important thing to do-because the biodiversity of certain crops went down due to industrialization. At one point there were 40 or 50 different types of squash and corn and potatoes, and now we eat like two. So a lot of these restaurants and food people are partnering with farms or working to farm themselves, when they have seeds that are really old and can bring back a squash that's thousands of years old. There's such a cool tie-in to the past when you can bring back an ancient heirloom tomato. And it's encouraging a new seed saving culture-being brought through these restaurants. So even if it's a dish that's familiar to you, it's being created from a vegetable that hasn't been actively grown for like 600 years and it's quite exciting in that way.
There's another restaurant in Oklahoma that is tied to a new native museum in Oklahoma City called First Americans Museum featuring the 39 Restaurant and Chef Loretta Barrett Oden.
And in Canada, you can find quite a bit more offerings in terms of these types of restaurants in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver
With indigenous food again, is that with the ingredients or would you say you can have an indigenous lasagna or fruitcake or beef stew for example?
I think it's a little bit of both. For me the exciting part is the evolution of indigenous food. If you think about it, there has been a very long and abrupt pause in how our culture developed. I find it interesting to think about how our culture of food would have developed in terms of cross-cultural exchange, without the interruption the settlers brought. During that time native people were just trying to survive. But even with all that to say, I think that Chefs and indigenous people today are sort of figuring out for themselves-what is indigenous food, because there have been periods where we were eating things like wheat and fried bread-which is a huge food for us-that came out of struggle. It came from those times when people were starving, having to do the death march from the trail of tears-thousands of miles from where they originally lived. So a lot of foods were improvised based on what was available in unfamiliar geography-post colonial, which now included lard, sugar and salt- and this is how the fried bread came about.
Fried bread by the way is delicious and you can do quite a lot with it like make Indian tacos, but it is also unhealthy. You can find places that sell it like Tocabe in Denver, which is a fried bread native restaurant where you can have the tacos and many other interesting things served with fried bread. So, you'll hear people say that this is native food and you'll hear other people say that it's not native food-it's become this interesting thing where among ourselves we're having the argument of what actually is indigenous foods and how do we work with ingredients from different cultures and make them our own.
Now you do have a background as a writer, curator and filmmaker. How did you get involved with these artistic disciplines?
I would go into these academic spaces and often be the only indigenous person and listen to people who would talk freely and have no idea about the true history of our cultures. And it was not necessarily their fault because of colonialism, and people would not even think about what they were saying. So I felt a need, to truly tell these stories that show-native peoples still really exist. So that was of the big part of my motivation.
Can you speak about your upcoming film project, “The Botany of Nations”?
“The Botany of Nations” is a film and video work I’m doing in collaboration the The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. They have these original plant pressings of Lewis and Clark. When they did their expedition, they were also asked to collect plants from the native communities they encountered to see what each plant contributed in terms of culture, as natural resource and being edible. The museum wanted to use the plant pressings in a more critical way of investigating, to help determine what the plant pressings really mean. So the film that I’m working on is de-centering Lewis and Clark, and really looking at the plants themselves and the native communities that like to grow them and still use them.
We’re focusing on three plants, one of which is Camus root found on the West Coast in the state of Washington and on into British Columbia. During that time, this bulb was the second most traded food besides salmon and was very valuable. I just had some after we filmed it and it tastes like cream of wheat. It is a very healthy starch that doesn’t spike your blood sugars and is safe for diabetics. We’re also focusing on Red Cedar, which isn’t necessarily edible but is used to make a lot of things like pots and pans. You can treat the cedear it so that it’s water tight, where you can transport water with it and it’s also a medicine from a spiritual sense and from an actual sense because when you burn the leaves it will help clear your lungs to help with breathing. And you can make a tea with the roots and this is helpful for a host of other health issues. And then the last one is Tinpsila, which is like a wild potato root harvested in the Dakota/Great Lakes area. So with those plants in the film we want to present indigenous botany and show how this is different from western botany along with the people who are using these foods-which offers a sense of food sovereignty-with a chef component perspective as well.