Ologies with Alie Ward - Indigenous Cuisinology (NATIVE COOKING) with Mariah Gladstone of Indigikitchen

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Shoving elk into a dorm room freezer. The wildest tasting rice. Flower bulbs, acorn whoopie pies, frybread debates, mushroom foraging tips, corn magic, puffball mythology, decolonized diets, squash lasagna, bison harvests, small worlds, Instapots and – most importantly – food sovereignty with the WONDERFUL Indigikitchen cooking show host, environmental scientist Mariah Gladstone, who reminds us all that native foods aren’t a part of a past, but an essential and exciting aspect of the future. LINK PARTY, SO MANY LINKS HEREMariah’s website, Twitter and InstagramA donation was made to FASTBlackfeet.orgSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey. Hi. It's that mechanical pencil that's out of light. Oh, wait. Click, click. Wait. Oh, look. There you go. Alley word. This episode's great. There's no screaming like last week's, but it's just a wonderful romp through time and identity and history and culture and food with someone who you may know as Indigikitchen online. Indigenous digital kitchen, online cooking lessons. Indigikitchen. Can you dig it? You can. So its founder grew up in Montana and got an environmental engineering degree at Columbia University in Manhattan and has been on the board of the Native Youth Food Sovereignty Alliance, is a Sloan scholar who just a few weeks ago graduated with her master's at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry via the

Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, which you may remember. We talked about in Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's biology Moss episode. Hello, everyone there. But this guest is of both Pagani Blackfeet and Cherokee Heritage and is based on the 1.5 million acre Blackfeet reservation in Northwestern Montana. And you may have seen her TEDx Bozeman talk. You may have seen her on the Today Show perhaps also, kind of a big deal. So I heard about her work and I've been wanting to have her on for years. And knowing she was also from Montana where my dad was born, where I have a ton of family, I was so excited to get to know her and I was nervous because she's very cool. And I had a bunch of questions and I didn't want to be annoying. And you know what?

After all that worrying, I was annoying. And I did ask embarrassing questions, but she rolled with it because she's awesome. And that's what I'm here for. Thank you for being here, by the way, especially you patrons who have made the show possible since before day one. And a few days ago, I asked what episode patrons wanted to hear and a bunch of you said, please, please, this one. So here you go. Also, thank you just to anyone listening to the show, recommending it to friends and sending such sweet notes. Thank you to everyone who leaves a review such as this one from Seago One who wrote that they liked that allergies has donated to dozens of charities chosen by herologists. That's the cherry on top of an already five star show that hooked me.

Seago One, thanks for the review. Hold on to your butts. Because of Patreon support and sponsors of the show, we were able to do our biggest ever donation, $3,067.79 worth for this episode. Why that weird number? It's a good story. Okay, but let's get on with it. Indigenous Cuisinology. I wanted to call this Cullinology, but it turns out that that term is a registered trademark of some cooking school, but a word that has been in usage since at least 1911 is Cuisinology, which is the study of a culture through its food. And Indigenous comes from a Latin root for indigenous, which is sprung from the land or native. You're gonna love her. You're gonna love her work so much. Okay, so belly up. Stuff a napkin into your collar, boy,

howdy. Get hungry for stories involving New York City elk meat, mushroom dibs, fallen stars, food sovereignty, squash, acorns, flour bulbs, bison, the wildest of rices, acorn pies, pre-contact nutrition, meditations on fried bread, and how cooking with native foods isn't part of a past but an essential aspect of the future with environmental scientist, engineer, cooking show host, and advocate, Mariah Gladstone. My name is Mariah Gladstone. She, her. And now you're based in Northwest Montana? Yep, I'm on the Blackfeet Reservation just south of the Canadian border. I'm about five minutes outside the Eastern entrance to Glacier National Park.

Yeah, okay. I was just there this summer. Awesome. Yeah, I have relatives that live on that reservation in Browning. Okay, very cool. Oh, hey, what's up, Evans family. Lila is of the Blackfeet Confederacy, and she and my cousin, Boyd, have raised a lovely family plus a bunch of beautiful Harry Bison on their ranch. And if they seem familiar, you heard their voices during the Bisonology episode of last year, 2020. I don't know. Love y'all, fam. That's a cool connection. Yeah, it is. Yeah, my dad's from up there, and then I have cousins up there as well, so we just got to see them this summer.

But I wanted to ask a little bit about your background. So you graduated with a degree in environmental engineering, and you also cook. Can you tell me a little bit about how long you've been interested in cooking? Oh, so my mom was taking an early childhood development class when she, when I was, I don't know, probably three, four years old. And in it, she was told that kids that grow up cooking have a better understanding of math because they learn how to do fractions and things become much more hands-on. And so she would have me cooking at home. And so we'd just make banana bread because we'd have overwrite bananas or cookies. And so I learned what went into food. And it kind of got me started on coming up with my own recipe ideas. So even

when I was really, really little, I would wake up and go, I had a dream. I have a new recipe for cookies. And my mom would let me experiment with making cookies. And so she made me write down everything I put into the recipes. And so I have these things that are handwritten in marker with weird spellings. And sometimes my recipes turned out and sometimes they didn't. And as long as I would supervise the worst case scenario was that we lost a little bit of flour and sugar and butter or whatever. So do you still have those handwritten recipes? I do. I do. You do? Where do you keep them? I have them in my file folder cabinet. Yeah. That's great. They should go right next to your degree. Just haven't framed. Now I have an engineering degree. I don't use things to

the great math knowledge. Did it help in STEM? Did it help with math? I mean, probably because, you know, those things become very intuitive. If you know how to visualize those things, you can divide one half into half. I don't know. I'll credit that. Not to mention that we're so behind on the metric system that it's even more work to try to figure out when you're actually cooking. But if you just, if we went by like grams, things would be much more straightforward. I've been following recipes that are written in a metric system. And I'm sitting there with my little scale and I'm like, yeah, this is pretty cool actually, but it feels more like chemistry class. So I'm cool with it. When it came to deciding what you were going to pursue for college,

how did you pick environmental engineering? I've always been really interested in sustainability and finding ways to give back to my community. And for a while, because of my interest in math and science, I thought that the best way to do that would be through engineering, specifically through sustainability and looking at renewable energy. And so that's really what I studied. I did work on green energy building design in school and looked at wind power systems and solar power systems and things like that. You know, that work has translated a little bit to what I do now because I still have a strong sustainability focus, but it's definitely not the true mechanical engineering side of things.

So after Mariah graduated from Columbia, she said she was in rush to find a job and she went into engineering management, but didn't find it really had enough to do with her degree or what she loved in life. That's okay. As Rose Evelis said in the futurology episode, the future isn't written. It just hasn't happened yet. It's okay to change course. If I realized, if I looked back, I probably should have taken like a solar installer tech course instead of going for a full engineering degree. But it was definitely, you know, part of that journey in going to school, being in New York City, being away from my home community and our foods and struggling in New York City, where you are supposed to be able to find any

food you want to find the foods I wanted. And contrasting that to being back home during the summer on the reservation and having all of these ancestral foods around me, but of course, being 40 miles away from a grocery store and having to think, now, if I want to make a curry, what am I going, what am I going to use for that? And I'm like, I'm going to make moose vindaloo because we have moose meat in the freezer. And that's what I have access to right now. So it kind of became this adventure in different foods. And it was, it was that contrast in New York City life and reservation life that really led me to start relearning so much of my own indigenous food knowledge. So ultimately, I'd say that I am

very, very content with the field that I chose, though I'm fortunate that I do have that engineering background now, so that I have a better understanding of how, how all of those things work together from this really sciency perspective. I'm wondering when you talk about ancestral foods, I'm sure this, this must come up a lot too, that it's based so regionally. And by nation, I'm sure, when you set out to learn more about it, did you start really, really locally or did you have mentors or people that you looked to in other places? Yeah, that's a great question because there is this very regional focus in indigenous foods. You know, there are the foods that I have access to walking outside my door next to the mountains in Montana. And there are foods that

folks in the Great Lakes region have access to or folks in the Southwest and they're all very different. But there has been a common thread of trade that has united us in the past. And now, of course, there is a lot more interaction, easy interaction, whether it's through Facebook or conferences or however natives get together now, that kind of continues and allows us to share our foods, even when we are from different regions. So I was lucky that when I started, I got to know some of the foods around my area, both from botanists and elders working within our community. And then I also got to know folks that work with foods from different areas. And sometimes those were chefs, folks like Sean Sherman, who runs the sous chef organization.

Or even the first recipe I ever put out in DigiKitchen was a recipe that my friend Lakota Pachedli, who is citizen Pottawatomie, used to bring to Potlucks in college. And so I messaged her and asked her to send me the recipe for it. And it was a wild riceberry and maple syrup dish. And so she sent me a newspaper clipping from her home tribal paper. And so that's how we swap recipes. So even when it's not something that's specifically from our region, we have ways of interacting and learning more about those things. Was there anything when you were in New York, you were really craving from home? Yes, wild game meat for sure. I definitely, after a fall break, I think I flew back to New York with frozen deer and elk packed in my carry on and like

wrapped in clothing so that it wouldn't thaw out on like the flight back to LaGuardia. And I was like, well, if my, if my checked baggage gets lost, I don't want to have rotting meat in there. And so I was like, I'll just wrap this in here. And TSA is like, what is, what is this? And I'm like, it's frozen meat, it's a solid, it's fine. And they're like, yeah, I guess that doesn't violate any rules. It's got to be hard to have freezer space in New York too. You know, like the chest freezers, there's not a lot of those in New York. No, not a lot of chest freezers in New York. And of course, all I had access to was my little basic dorm mini fridge, but it did have a little freezer on top that was separate from the fridge part. So I had enough

room to put my frozen game meat in there and thought out when I, when I needed it. Native chefs always swap stories about TSA and the things that we've carried through TSA. And I know that every time anyone carries blue cornmeal through TSA, it gets opened and it has to be, you gotta swipe your hands for bomb residue or something. And we're all like, it's just blue cornmeal, um, mesquite flour, same thing. One time I flew to New York city to do a cooking demonstration at a college and it was one of those fast turnaround flights. And so I had to fly in in the morning and fly out in the evening. And so all I had was my carry on. And in it, I had just packed an Instapot that was filled with all the ingredients and tools and stuff that I

needed. And so that's all I had on the plane with me. And I'm like, this is going to go through, it's going to set off the alarms, guys. It's just an Instapot. And so they, of course, like had to open it and everything. And they're like, it's just filled with like, my little cooking spoons and stuff in there. And I was like, see, it's fine. They're like, what are you doing? You know, when you're flying around or when you're coming up with recipes, are you really kind of basing it on, rather than maybe hyper local, are you looking for seasonal types of foods that might be traditional to whatever season is coming up? Or how do you plan the recipes that you're going to film and shoot and disseminate?

That's a great question. Yeah, it's a combination of regional things, especially when I'm doing really old or ancestral recipes, things that would have been made very similar to the way that I'm showcasing them. And in that case, of course, you're looking for a whole bunch of ingredients that would have been found in the same area. And by the by, we actually recorded this episode in late November. And to be honest, I didn't feel okay releasing this during Native American Heritage Month, when all the editors of all the magazines and all the producers of new segments like scramble to put up some relevant content is kind of a nod. And having one 12th of the year to have your history recognized, and your customs appreciated,

and your injustices acknowledged seems kind of like more patronizing colonizer shit. So it's coming out in January, which is still winter food season and still a good time to care about indigenous people. So wow, look at this evergreen content. We're thinking of foods that are in season right now. So of course, it is the time of winter squashes. And it's the time of pumpkins. And it's hunting season. And there's all of these wonderful foods that are available now. It's after ricing. So people have fresh parched wild rice. And it's fun to incorporate those all at the same time, even though now, of course, we have ways of preserving foods. So I have picked berries from August, but I can pull them out at any time and use them for things because I have them in the

freezer or have them dehydrated or whatever that may be. But also I recognize, you know, indigenous people are living in the 21st century with everyone else. And we have always used the tools that we have access to. And right now, maybe that's a big chest freezer. Maybe that's an instant pot. Maybe that is a coffee grinder that can blend sunflower seeds into flour at lightning speed. PS, while we recorded this, I was like, oh, what recipe uses sunflower butter? So I didn't want to interrupt her. But if your stomach just gurgled in curiosity, I looked it up. She has a sunflower butter popcorn recipe that involves honey and maple syrup and the note that this stuff is addictive. I'm willing to take the risk. I'm going to link

so much stuff on my website for this episode. It's going to get absurd how many links I mention are on my website. I'm sorry, please do a tiny and perceptible butt dance every time. Whatever it is, we are able to recognize that ancestral wisdom and the indigenous brilliance of agriculture or harvesting or foraging or hunting or whatever it may be, along with our presence in this day. And you know, on the topic of agriculture and foraging and the work that you do to educate, how do you start to educate people about hunting and gathering and foraging versus land stewardship and where indigenous food sources really come from? How much of that would you say? Do people really understand?

That's a good question. When I talk to non-native audiences, I think I approach things quite a bit differently than when I talk to predominantly native audiences. And it is all based on setting this foundation. And so I start with a history lesson that talks about the really intentional work that has been done to dispossess native people of our food systems, the targeting of indigenous food systems that has occurred, whether that be through intentional hunting of bison, almost to extinction, whether that be through the burning of native crops and fields and storehouses of food, whether that's through the damning of rivers that stopped irrigation or stopped fish migrations, whatever that may be, we have to frame the work that we're doing with indigenous foods

within this larger historical context. Because I think part of the issue that we have when we talk about native people in our food systems are all of these diet related illnesses. But it's rarely talked about in terms of this bigger context, which explains why we're at where we're at with diabetes, right? There's been intentional work to shift our diets into these highly processed, subsidized food systems. And so the work to restore that information and restore our access to those places also has to be really intentional. And so I frame this within this why context, not just what we're doing, but why we're doing it and reminding people that it's not just about, you know, trying to regain physical health, like, that's cool to not have diabetes that's harming your body, right?

But it's really, it's really cool to be able to look at ancestral wisdom and the ways in which our ancestors recognized that need to, you know, really steward the land. This traditional land management that's been practiced. And I know a previous podcast episode talked about indigenous fire ecology, and that as a tool of land management, and that intersects with food in so many ways. Black feet people, for example, traditionally practiced prairie burning that would not only clear off the old dry grass from the top of the prairies, but that blackened patch of grass would warm much faster in the springtime, would encourage new shoots of grass to grow, and of course become a big, like, homing beacon for bison and other grazing on the prairies.

But also, those low intensity prairie fires helped certain seeds, like our prairie turnips, germinate because it broke their seed coat. And that was enough to really help them grow and create this wonderful, basically a prairie potato with a relatively low glycemic value. I had never even heard of a prairie potato, but apparently they're in the legume family, and they're also called bread root and scurf pea. Also, Topeka residents, capital city of Kansas, Topeka's thought to mean, in the language of the kinds of people, a good place to dig prairie turnips. So look around. And so it was through those land management techniques and that recognition of our place within this work that we could help recognize not only how our food

takes care of us, but also how we can take care of the places where our food comes from. You mentioned a little bit about how the diets veered off based on what was available and cheaper, less healthy foods. See, Mariah's Ted Talk. Government rations turned into the commodity food programming, issuing a limited number of staples, like flour, sugar, lard. Thus was born fry bread. Delicious and absolutely devastating to Native people. Side note, fry bread is this pillowy, oil-bathed white flour comfort food, and it's used as a taco base or even as like this honey drizzled dessert, but it's been in the hot seat and was even the subject of a 2021 New York Times article titled, fry bread is beloved, but also divisive, which quoted Cherokee writer

Art Coulson as saying fry bread is, quote, kind of like what one of the Supreme Court justices said about obscenity. I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. So how does an expert feel about its place on the food landscape? People hear indigenous food and they think fry bread. Does that just make you want to rage ever, to be honest? You know, as it's funny because fry bread, of course, came from a period of time where Native people were dependent on government rations, which were like shelf stable, processed boxes of food that were distributed to households and they weren't things we recognized as food. So we made something out of them because survival. And that's, that's where fry bread came from. So I will say that fry bread is a

traditional food in that it's part of our history and it got us through a period of time that what have otherwise meant starvation. But there is a tendency of oppressed people to mistake our oppression for our culture. And I think that's kind of what people do with fry bread or commodity cheese or whatever thing that has become part of these subsidized food systems. And so I don't spend, I don't spend a lot of time trashing fry bread, right? People, people know that fry bread is not good for you nutritionally, right? But people also have deep family connections to fry bread. You know, don't attack fry bread, you're attacking my grandma, right? And so rather than focusing on all this negative stuff, which I feel like is what a lot of nutrition educators do within

our communities is they come in and they say, don't eat that, it's bad for you. Like, yeah, we know that, but also this is what we know how to make. And so rather than doing all of that, we just focus on all of the resources that we do have, the things that we do have access to, whether it be in our grocery stores or in our communities or in the lands that we can forge or the things that we can grow in our soils, whatever it may be, those are the things that I focus on and really tie it all back to the incredible wisdom that has put those things in place that has helped us recognize, you know, corn, corn's edible, right? But the ways in which we eat corn now are not traditionally how they were eaten. Our ancestors recognized that corn had to be treated with this process of

niche tamalization. What is it? Nix tamalization. It's called nix tamalization and it comes from the indigenous Nahuatl portmanteau, meaning lime ashes and tamal for corn dough. So, nix tamalization. This process of treating corn with a highly alkaline solution that you make from adding wood ash to water and that chemically dissolves the hull of the corn and that transforms the bound niacin into free niacin and you have amazing indigenous chemistry happening while also recognizing that you've now added way more nutritional value to the corn and the wood ashes added calcium, which is way more absorbable than the calcium in dairy, for example, and all of that has taken generations of indigenous knowledge to put in place. And so, I get to talk about all of this

really cool stuff and I really don't have time to trash fry bread. But I mean, I think fry bread has its place in our culture because we can recognize it as something that helped us survive. Mm-hmm. It doesn't need to be put on a pedestal. It's kind of a trash food, but that's, you know, there's like, there's also ways that we can reindigenize fry bread, right? We can make our fry bread using blue corn meal instead of white flour and we can use, you know, bison tallow as a frying medium and we can add bison burger and make cool Indian tacos with these things and we can we can change how we imagine these foods. It doesn't need to be like lard and

dry milk and white flour and white sugar and, you know, cooking oil. So there are ways that we can recognize that as part of our history, but also work to recall some of that knowledge that had been really intentionally taken from us. And when you were finding out about how food was processed and cooked and used, what kind of sources do you usually go for? Are you like pouring through biochemistry journals? What is it like when you when you find out something new that you hadn't known before? Oh, it's it's funny because I'm, of course, I'm living on the Blackfeet Reservation. So I have cultural connections here. I have Indigenous botanists that are super informed and have a lot

of information themselves. But I also, I'm a graduate student and I occasionally approach things from an academic side. And so I remember reading through old ethnobotany journals from folks that had studied with Blackfoot peoples up in Canada. And it was really interesting because I was reading through and I found someone had written a note about Blackfoot peoples using choked cherry wood, like just the branches, the twigs of choked cherry and putting them in a roast as it cooked so that it would infuse it with flavor. It's kind of like people would put cloves in a ham or something. And I was like, wait, this is so cool. Because I'm like, you're taking a hardwood, a fruit wood, and you're infusing it as it's slow cooking. And I

was like, it's basically a cross between cloves and a ham and smoking something with a hardwood. And I was like, this is amazing. I have to try this. But I had found it by digging through old journals from ethnographers and stuff that had lived with the Blackfoot for a couple of months. And I was like, this is crazy. Because no, I hadn't heard that before. And so occasionally I get information like that. Sometimes I get information just by reaching out to native chefs and asking questions, especially if it's from a community that I don't have knowledge of. So I've reached out to a Navajo chef friend of mine when asking about blue corn mush recipe, like how much wood ash, how much juniper ash are you actually supposed to add to how much water, how much blue corn

meal, you know, whatever it may be. I'm like, I know the ingredients. I don't know the proportions. If you're talking with plant folks, they might say, oh yeah, this plant is edible. Great. What part of the plant? When do you harvest it? You know, camis roots, for example, camis bulbs are edible. What are these? Okay, I'd never heard of them, but they are plant friends in the asparagus family and their flowers sometimes carpet whole last beautiful meadows with these lilac or white or deep violet blooms. And then the root, the bulb, tastes like a freaking baked pear. So go find them just by blossom spotting, right? No. But it is more traditional for people to wait until after they've bloomed, which makes them a little

bit harder to identify. And of course, none of the plant identification books are going to show you what the camis is looking like when it's not blooming. And then you also have to know what it could be mistaken as like death camis, which is a white flower versus a blue flower. But if they're not blooming when you're harvesting them, that's hard to tell. And then you have to know, of course, how to cook it. And for camis, it's really, really high in inulin, which is the same thing that's in Jerusalem artichokes or sun chokes. Okay, inulin is a fiber. And I'm going to read between her lines here and break the windy news. She's talking farts, people. Delicious, creamy, sweet inulin has a price,

and it's ripping hot once for days. And so you have to basically slow cook these or roast these for an extended amount of time. And traditionally, that was done in a big pit underground, and they'd be roasted for up to 48 hours until basically the sugars are caramelizing and all the inulin's been processed down, so your body can digest it. That's not something that it says. If you're like, camis bulbs are edible. So all of that information has to go along with it, or else the resource is incomplete. You know, just knowing that something is edible doesn't necessarily help as a resource all the time, because sometimes it could be dangerous. So for example, choke cherries are edible, but the pits in choke cherries contain cyanide. But the pits

were traditionally eaten by blackfeeds and Lakota and other people that have traditionally eaten choke cherries, because we took choke cherries, smashed them with a rock in their entirety into little choke cherry pancakes, right? We basically made little fruit patties, and then we dried them until they were dehydrated. And then now they're dried out. They're very packable. They keep for a long time. But that drying process neutralizes the cyanide in them. So you can eat the pits, because now they've been smashed into oblivion, and also the cyanide is not going to harm you. Wow. And some people will be like, oh, the Indians are magically immune to cyanide. Not quite, but it's just, it's the preparation method. And otherwise, if you make choke cherry

syrup, right, you have to remove the pits. So, or I mean, the cooking process will also neutralize the cyanide, like it does in elderberries, but just the fun things that go along with knowing something's edible. Yeah. Yeah, it's like saying in New York, like, how do you get there? You take the subway and you're like, well, which direction and what train and where do I get off? Which direction, what line? Also, why is the line always closed? No, it's okay. What about some, some myths that you commonly encounter that you love to, to bust, like some flim flam, that native folks or non-native folks think about indigenous cooking? That's a great question. Thank you. I need to think about that one.

Is it flim flam that the North American indigenous diet is mostly acorns? It's not all acorns, maybe. Acorns. Acorns are all edible. I was gonna say, I mean, I don't come from, I don't come from any acorn eating people. That sounds weird. Okay, so I grew up in California and its golden foothills are studded with oak trees. I love them so much. I grew up collecting acorns for school projects. So I thought it was a national teaching that indigenous foods were all acorn based. So that must be a myth. Turns out, it's incredibly regional, of course, like, der, Ward. Did I embarrass myself? Sure, a little bit. So go text your crush, cut some banks,

ask the questions to the stuff you don't know, because we're all just gonna turn into ashes one day, or fungus. Worry for Lucky, an acorn. I need to get my friends in Northern California slash Southern Oregon to send me some acorns, because I have been meaning to do recipes with acorns. Because the process of actually making acorns edible or delicious is kind of complicated. It has really high tan ends, and so you have to leech it out, and there's like a hot leaching process versus a cold leaching process, and there's a whole way of getting the tannins out so that your acorns taste like flour instead of like the bitterest thing on earth. And of course different acorns have different flavor profiles. But I have a friend that does indigenous food work

in Northern California, and she has a recipe for, I think she calls them Indian whoopee pies, but they're these whoopee pies that are made with acorn flour, because that is a traditional food for her people. Okay, I searched around. I think she's talking about the very cool Sarah Calvosa Olsen's squash whoopee pies with maple cream, which are made with acorn flour. Sarah has a ton of great recipes, including things like deer stew and beet-pickled quail eggs, acorn bread. So for some beautiful photos and recipes, you can follow Sarah on Instagram at The Fry Bread Riot. It's a great name. Also, Sarah runs acorn leaching workshops, and her website says, this workshop is free to native peoples and $300 for non-natives,

which as a non-native, I have to be honest and admit, I think it's pretty awesome. So well done. But it's funny because ironically, of all the foods I've worked with, I've never done anything with acorns, and I have an elder that gave me a recipe for using acorns and making an acorn soup, and I'm supposed to film it, and I haven't done it yet because I need to get my hands on some acorns. Well, I've got, I have an oak tree in my backyard. If you need me to send you any, let me know. I'd be forever grateful if you had the priority box full of acorns. Absolutely, yeah. I've got one in my backyard and one down the street that I've never seen it have so many acorns. But I think that's, in California, maybe a part of one class that's just like

acorns, and then that's pretty much all we get to learn. That's really interesting to me because I think that obviously in Montana, so much of our education is buffalo, bison, right? I just finished helping write the harvest of the month material from Montana Farm to School to add bison as one of the foods, and so of course it's all about bison as an original food, and we really wanted to approach it and make sure that this material that was going out to Montana Schools was also culturally appropriate, and so we're adding bison to that material, but of course it's all about bison and then all the other things that bison was used for besides just food, you know, of course clothing, shelter, tools, all of these other things. Again, see that bisonology app which will be linked

on the episode page in the show notes do a butt dance. And then on the east coast, where my partner's from, he's Haudenosaunee Onondaga from New York, and so a lot of their discussions about indigenous food are about the three sisters, which is of course corn, beans, and squash coming from a very different agricultural community, which is similar to how my mom's people, Cherokee, traditionally grew food as well. There's a lot of corn, beans, and squash, and then up in the Great Lakes region, it's probably all focused about wild rice and rice and culture. And then, you know, down in the southwest, you get more corn, beans, and squash, but also there's sunflowers all over that people have incorporated as and bread specifically to have very large edible seeds

and cactuses, like cactuses don't get talked a lot about unless you're in Mexico, in which case everyone's like, oh yeah, no polis, but then we have prickly pear cacti in Montana. And those produce the same edible fruit. And that is a treat for Blackfeet people. But I've never heard that talked about in our school system, for example, as a traditional food, besides when I show up and talk about eating cactuses with the kids. But yeah, that's interesting, because it's so regional. And that's the fun part of it. But there's also been so much ancestral trade that's taken place. And there are anthropologists that are brilliant that have mapped out traditional trade routes based on archaeological finds. They know, you know, how did this food get in this place,

because the climate would have made it impossible to grow? How did they get it? And so, of course, Native people used drying as our primary preservation technique. So drying, Mariah says, made it possible for different foods and resources to be carried long distances and then traded. And there's a great article in Indian Country Today that states that, quote, much of California's highway and thoroughfare system dates back to before European contact. And they were indigenous routes long before settlers arrived. And that's true for so many routes in colonized lands. And the paper also quotes a study in the journal American Anthropologists that traces trade connections across the whole continent. And they dispersed California shells

and oil tar and obsidian to the east, while textiles and pottery came west, it says. And on other continents in Australia, so-called bush food, things like nuts and grasses and kangaroo meat, turtles, emus, fruits and nuts, those have become gourmet items. But Australian historians echo what Mariah is saying, and that trade among indigenous folks was widespread and still is, just in case anyone ever doubted that. I don't know if people have a lot of misconceptions about native food. I think probably most people think potatoes came from Ireland, for example. And that's a big South American indigenous food, regardless of your type of potatoes. The Incan Empire had a massive agricultural knowledge about potatoes, and there

were, and still are, thousands of varieties of potatoes. Tomatoes, of course, aren't indigenous food. Italians didn't have tomatoes until they were traded back to Italy with Columbus and future generations of folks. I can make spaghetti. You know, for a long time, just the smell of marinara sauce reminded me of my Italian grandparents, who, frankly, were assholes. Nah, I'm good. So given that food is loaded with so much emotion, I wondered if Mariah notices the opposite effect, like if this work makes her more excited about the things that she's eating. It's made me more conscious of the things that I'm eating and trying to think about the ways in which I can, you know, put good things into my body, whether those be from the land or whether

those be from farmers in my area or from fish out of the lake or whatever it may be. And so that gets me excited too. I have to be careful because I talk about food all the time and good choices, but also, you know, one shouldn't feel guilty about eating. So that is, I think, something to just be aware of when approaching anything with food, is that you should be excited about the foods that you're eating and you should be eating them because they make you happy. And eating traditional foods and foods that come from the area and I get from other native harvesters and producers, those things make me happy. And I'm not doing that to try to feel skinny or to try to, you know, look a certain way or any of that. So I think that's important to emphasize

too, just because so much of our society is caught up in diet culture and the succession with food. And I think that's something that I want to be very careful to avoid. I'm trying to eat for health and wellness, but also not just for myself, for my community and for the ecosystem around me. I'm not sure if this had ever happened to you in the past, but I'll get in ruts where I'll just maybe eat whatever is around or available or I won't spend much time thinking about what I'm eating, but I get so much more excited when I actually am doing something intentionally that I want to eat, that I'm excited to eat, that I'm learning about, that has more value to me. You know, I think context can be so important when you're excited about what you're eating as

opposed to just like, I gotta do, I gotta eat something and whatever is easiest, you know what I mean? Oh yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, I get ideas all the time about things that I want to try. I keep thinking that now that the water is mostly out of the wood for the year, it's transitioning into winter, I want to go harvest some wood and specifically serviceberry wood and cut it into wood chips and let those dry and then put them in the smoker and see if we can make like, serviceberry smoked elk or serviceberry smoked fish or something like that and try smoking with wood chips that I make myself. I think that would be super cool. So that excites me. I'm excited about trying traditional drying methods for preserving squash about all these different things.

So I get to approach these from a fun science perspective, but also, you know, with that kind of culinary side where I'm trying to make things delicious too, you know, it's not just about the science and about making things food safe, but also it's all of these other connections that go along with it. And ultimately, I just want to eat delicious food at the end of the day too. Yeah. Okay, so we have questions from listeners, if I may ask them. Yes. Okay, but before we do, we always shout out a cause of the oligarchs choosing and this is the weirdest one we've ever done. It's this biggest single donation in oligy's history for fast black feet. It's food access and sustainability team, which is a group of community leaders and health professionals

and educators within the black feet nation who are dedicated to identifying food insecurity in their community, offering effective solutions related to access to healthy food and nutrition education and addressing food sovereignty. And so this week, the donation went specifically to them right after I hit stop on the record button. I asked Mariah, oh, where do you want the donation to go? And she mentioned this organization because she was on the board and she was helping arrange to buy and harvest a bison to feed families via the food pantry and to help other indigenous folks get to know quality bison meat. And I said, oh, that's great. My cousins I mentioned earlier have a bison ranch up there. And she asked their names and it turned out she had already arranged

to buy a bison from their herd. What? What are the fucking chances, guys? I'm so sad. I stopped recording because it was such a fun and sweet and weird moment right at the end. I was like, you're getting a bison from Boyd. So I hopped on the phone with my cousin Boyd. Do you think they'll get to do any high tanning at all with it? Oh, I think so. Awesome. Is that part of the process for some folks who come up to the ranch? They kind of harvest them themselves? Yeah. Yep. That's that's normally what we do. But we have a local guy that started the packing house. Oh, she she started it about three or four years ago, but she just finally getting to the point where she's got all of her equipment and

and everything looks like she can probably process so maybe six, seven animals a week. Oh, wow. So that's helped a little. Yeah, what's that one called? CNC meats in Duck Lake, Bab. Oh, cool. She's got two of our buffalo there right now and two steers. Oh, wow. So so we kind of filled her up for the next couple of weeks. But yeah, so that's kind of helped some. Do you have any recipes that Lila's gotten from previous generations that you cook with? We mostly just eat steaks and burgers. Nothing really fancy. Mariah's got a great one where she makes lasagna with like a butternut squash as the noodles and then layers it. It looks good. I'm going to make that. She told me about it. I was like, whoa. Oh, yeah. Anyway, we did some

number crunching and because of patrons and how great y'all are as an audience and the sponsors of the show, we were able to cover the cost of a whole bison and processing. So I got to call Mariah back and tell her because I was so excited. And I emailed Mackenzie fast to arrange payment to them. And it turns out she's a knowledgeite. So that was fun too. Hi, everyone there. And she just let me know Mackenzie did that their planned harvest went well in December and that their local butcher, Christina Flammant, was there teaching folks about the harvest. And Mackenzie says that that meat fed around 120 families and the hide will be tanned and auctioned to go back into the kitty with the oligies donation for the next bison. And then both hides will be auctioned

off. She wrote me and will hopefully fund another bison and keep the cycle going. So that is the story of this week's donation, which is like so exciting. I'm so stoked that this podcast and the community of folks were able to make that possible, along with sponsors of the show, who I genuinely like. And then we take some of that money and we give it away. Okay, your questions. I went back in my questions doc to see who else asked this fun, fungus question. And it turns out only one of you dirty birds did. Dirty Dan wants to know, what role do mushrooms play, typically in indigenous foods? Oh, that's such a good question. It depends so much regionally. But here, it's interesting, because, you know, as I said,

I'm up in Montana. And so we have, we're really fortunate we have morels that grow, especially in our old burnt forests. And so that's a really fun activity for folks to go out and do is harvest morels a few years after fires come through. But we also have puffballs. And puffballs are of course, these big mushrooms that grow mostly out on the prairies. But there is actually a story that goes back that talks about a earth woman marrying a skyman. And when she came back down to earth and gave birth, there was a rule that her baby wasn't supposed to touch the ground for five days. And on the fifth day, his grandma, the girl's mother, was watching the baby. And she wasn't really watching him that well. And so the mom came back into the lodge and was looking

for her baby. And she said, Oh, he's under that blanket. And she lifted up the blanket. And instead of a baby being there, it was a puffball. And the baby had been turned into a puffball. And that's how we got puffballs. And so now on some black feet painted lodge designs, you'll see these circles. And they're bright white circles on a colorful background. And real quick, so a lodge is what most non natives generally see and call a teepee, although a teepee is a word from a different nation, the Dakota folks. Now in black feet language, it would be called a Netawi or a lodge. But some individuals designs look like a band along the bottom with this graphic row of big polka dots. But their puffballs, their mushrooms

is what they represent. And of course, there's so many other indigenous peoples with different types of mushrooms. But we definitely have recognized mushrooms as part of traditional diets. I was just reading a Cherokee story from my mom's people the other day about a type of mushroom. And our Cherokee stories tell us, they say, once you see the mushroom, it will stop growing. But if you put a stick through it, then it will keep growing. But it was interesting because I was reading this translation of this Cherokee text. And they also said, in other words, if you see a mushroom with a stick through it, it means it's already been claimed and you have to leave it alone. But if it doesn't have a stick through it, then

you can claim it and you can come back when it's ready to harvest. Okay, I see what you did there. It's kind of just like putting a coaster on your beer, like BRB, thanks. And so I was like, oh, okay, that makes sense. But it's funny because they translated what that principle was. It was like, we don't actually think the mushroom's going to stop growing. This is just how you claim it. But like, that's what the story is. And that's why it relates. And so it's cool, but it's a delicacy. And then they talked about how to cook it up and fry it in a little bit of animal fat and bread it with a little bit of cornmeal or something. So there's definitely traditional stories with fungi.

That's wonderful to think of paintings of just big puffballs. They're so giant. It was a coloring book too. It was a children's coloring book that I was reading at it. And that was written in the Cherokee language. And I was reading these translations. And I was like, this is amazing because of course there's like a black and white sketch for children to color in that's like this mushroom. And it looked like a chicken of the woods, but I'm not really sure. I need to find out what the actual scientific name is of this mushroom because it just had the Cherokee word for it. But I had this big stick through it. And I was like, this is great. Okay, P.S. I asked Mariah later, and it's the Cherokee Nation Education Coloring Book. And

that's called Cherokee First. And yes, I will link that on my website. Also, I know a lot of indigenous nations' names were given to them by other people, kind of like gossiping about them. And then that name stuck. So if you're like, wait, why have I never heard of the Haudenosaunee or the DNA before? Well, your grade school textbooks maybe used Iroquois or Navajo, respectively, or rather, irrespectively. Because a lot of times they were like, what'd you call us? But there are 573 tribes within the U.S. each with their own history and traditions and culture and cooking. I wish this episode were 573 hours long, but we've got to get cracking. Okay. So a few patrons, including Alex Cowles and beloved longtime question asker Kelly Brockinton,

had healthy food questions. But one patron asked more specifically about symbiosis with your simmering intestines. One listener, Aral Shaul Peleg, had a great question. Has there been any research on indigenous diet in relation to gut health and bioinformatics? And does indigenous diet help improve gut health and thus indirectly help with mental health? That's a great question. So yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of research that talks more about indigenous diets on glycemic spikes and things like that. Gut health is still not talked about as much as it should be. But I think when we look at the foods that comprise indigenous diets, they are predominantly anti-inflammatory foods. You're looking at a lot

of, of course, fresh foods. There's very few grains. You're not going to see any wheat. You're not going to see any rice. Wild rice is actually a grass seed that's not related to other rice, if you were wondering. But it's interesting because of course, there's a lot of meats and proteins with relatively low ratios of omega sixes. And so when you look at like even bison versus beef, for example, the bison meat is of course lower in fat, even when you compare grain fed bison versus grass fed beef, you still have lower fats within the bison. But also your omega three to omega six ratios are much higher. So you're getting a lot of those really good fats with your wild game meat, with your bison. And that helped people's diets,

it helped brain health, it helped, of course, inflammation, all of these things that go into that. And then of course, we can look at, you know, your basic vitamins that people are consuming, because even when folks were eating predominantly dried foods, so you have things like rose hips, which have incredibly high rates of vitamin C, same for any type of pine needle tea, even prairie turnips have high rates of vitamin C. So there's documentation long before people knew what vitamin C was or had any cures for scurvy 100 years before the cure for scurvy was documented, there actually was a written account of someone interacting with native folks who told them to drink pine needle tea and cured their scurvy. But no one acknowledged it until

100 years later, it just interesting things like that. So none of that really relates to gut health explicitly. But there is a lot of research about that type of anti inflammatory diet and, you know, eating fresh foods, you're avoiding preservatives, things like that, and you're sticking to drying or freezing is your predominant method of preservation. So that's all really good. But I think the researcher that's probably done the most is Valerie Seacrest. She has a whole unit about healthy beverage choices and relating that, it's of course related to diabetes in many cases, but she's actually done some work on actual nutritional analysis, specifically for folks within her community around the Pacific

Northwest. But she works with the Native American Agricultural Fund, and she just came out with her own cookbook. So she's done some of the best actual research and numbers documentation that I've seen. Oh, hello. Valerie also had a TEDx talk. My name is Valerie Seacrest, and I'm a member of the Muckleshoot Indian tribe. I work as a community nutritionist and a native foods educator. And for the past several years have coordinated the Muckleshoot food sovereignty project. And as long as I was just Googling until my nails broke, another great voice in indigenous health is Abaki Beck, who is a St. Louis based writer and a public health researcher. And I will link her socials and her work alongside Valerie's on my website, also alongside the work of Sean Sherman,

aka the sous chef, who co-founded the North American traditional indigenous food systems with Dana Thompson. It's just put on deodorant, get excited. There's a link party in the show nose. But more and more folks are doing the work every day, and it's really, really cool to see that. I also just on a side note, the decolonizing diet project out of Northern Michigan University, which was ran by Professor Marty Reinhart there, actually did a project where folks switched their diets over to indigenous foods from the region. Not all the participants were native, but everyone switched their diets to foods that would have been found in the Great Lakes region prior to colonization. And I think they did an entire year of this. They have a cookbook

now that's come out. You can buy it through the Northern Michigan University bookstore. So it's called the Decolonizing Diet Project Cookbook, and I'm linking to that study on my site, of course. Also, the Decolonizing Diet Project just yesterday, Monday, January 24th, posted that the National Congress of American Indians is seeking applicants for its Tribal Food Sovereignty Advancement Initiative Fellowship. They're looking for applicants. Of course, I'm going to put the link on my website. Move your bottoms. So it's a six-month paid position for entry-level college graduates. Amazing. Link up my website. They just posted this yesterday. Okay. So back to Martin's work and the Decolonizing Diet Project. And part of it's just recipes that they were experimenting

with and trying to figure out what they were going to eat for a year. But it was interesting because they did the documentation on how their bodies felt and their vitals over that period of time and how that affected their own health. So that's, again, indigenous foods from the Great Lakes region. So they had corn, beans, squash, hazelnuts, black walnuts, hickory nuts. They had turkey, pumpkin seeds. I remember my friend who is Marty Reinhardt's daughter, Dobby, was telling me about having to eat some pizza that had turkey and pumpkin on it or something. And it was like, but there was no cheese on it, of course. And so she was like, that was not a good pizza. Never eat that. I remember she did not recommend the recipe. But they did have a ton of really

cool recipes in that book. And they did the documentation. So the Decolonizing Diet Project has also put that in place as an actual research project. And then in my home community on Black Feet, they will be doing a similar type of research project where they have participants switch to Black Feet diets and provide them with food and track their vitals over the course of, I think 90 days, I think it's a three month program. So there are things happening. There are definitely research projects that are taking place. And also it's like, how do we prove to the IRB that this is totally fine and people are allowed to eat indigenous foods? Hey, okay. The IRB Institutional Review Board under the FDA, they just need to make sure it's okay to eat a whole

food-based diet, all right? Got to be strict about it. And I looked around for this upcoming study and I reached out to Abaki back and she pointed me to the Pagani Lodge Health Institute, which is run by Montana State University and Black Feet member Kim Paul, who's done a ton of research on food systems. I'm going to link researchers, of course, on my website. And if you're like, less research, more foods, please. Well, non-indigenous patrons had some questions. Elise Hickman, Ali V, Konchetta Gibson, Ali Vessels, and... Arayan McCullough wants to know, how can we make sure that when we're buying indigenous ingredients and food, that investments are getting back to native communities? So for folks that are interested

in buying native foods from native producers, look up the American Indian Foods Program through the Intertribal Agricultural Council. They work with a whole bunch of native producers across the entire United States and they partner, they work with some really small producers that don't even have their own websites. So it's really cool because they help the market and sell their foods. Sometimes those are fish harvesters, sometimes those are folks making traditional teas, sometimes those are wild rice harvesters, whatever it may be. There's a lot of really great producers through that program. And if you're interested in buying foods, especially really, really traditional foods like wild rice, for example, and you want to make sure you're buying

hand-harvested wood-parched wild rice from native communities, rather than the commercialized version that looks black, you probably find it at your local health food store, we call that driveway rice because the only thing it's good for is paving your driveway. Ouch! But yeah, there are definitely ways of supporting native producers, so check out the American Indian Foods Program and I think that's a great resource. So the American Indian Foods Program is a platform for American Indian Food Businesses to showcase their products, show people what they've got. They also have some of Mariah's recipes up, including an Instapot or Pressure Cooker wild rice dish. And just shout out to native listener Sigwani Dana who asked, how do I cook wild rice

so I like it? When I have tried it in the past, the taste was overpowering, so do I need to cook it for longer or overcompensate with other flavors? So Sigwani, you might want to try Mariah's recipe with peppery beans and cedar smoked salt and some elk if you've got it or want it. So those recipes and resources are up at indianagfoods.org, which, yes, linked in the show notes. Do you need more recipes? Like a book of them? So patrons, Mackenzie Sear, Katie Panette, Rosario Nira, and R.J. Doidge, who's a member of the oligites who cook Facebook group wanted to know. Any cookbooks that you would recommend? Oh, there's so many good cookbooks right now. I mentioned Valerie Seacrest's cookbook. The sous chef came out with a cookbook a few years ago

that's still an awesome one. It's really, I mean, beautifully plated dishes. And I think that one won a James Beard award. Okay, I did fact check this. And Sean Sherman, aka the sous chef, did not win a James Beard award. He won two. Two of them, two James Beard awards. So in 2018, the sous chef's indigenous kitchen cookbook won the James Beard award for best book in the American category overall, which is giant. Big, huge, big deal. And then in 2019, Sean won the 2019 leadership award. So yes, look for his book, the sous chef's indigenous kitchen, Sean's nonprofit called North American traditional food systems and the indigenous food lab that he co-founded. So many links on the website. So many great people such as Tashia Hart just came out with a

Goodberry cookbook, which is a wonderful cookbook, especially for folks in the Great Lakes region that are interested in learning a million ways to use wild rice for everything. That's an awesome one. So those are three that come to mind right now. And also that decolonizing diet project cookbook we mentioned earlier. Mariah suggested another one that was across the room on her shelf out of eye shot that divides recipes into different regions. And it turns out it was spirit of the harvest. Yes, links website. I thought this was a great question. This is from Stephanie Shirley, who is a first time question asker and dinner. How do you propose natives decolonizing our diet when most reservations are food deserts and lack of resources to fresh fruits and vegetables and

planting crops in a drought is costly in an already economically disadvantaged community? Also, what are your opinions on traditional foraging and herbalist knowledge being lost every day because of the increasing rate of elders passing away due to COVID, among other things, before teaching younger generations this knowledge because of language extinction? I asked because my grandma was an herbalist and that knowledge was not passed down because my siblings and I could not speak our language. Sorry, this question is so long, but I thought great questions. I know so many good ones. So decolonizing a diet in a food desert and also not being able to pass down knowledge in terms of herbalism and foraging because of

language. Okay, so many good questions. So food deserts, of course, are it's a term used by the USDA to define people's distance from a place where they can buy food like a grocery store. And of course, grocery stores on reservations have their own challenges within the food distribution system, including, of course, the last mile transport costs. So a lot of high premiums added to fresh foods like fruits and vegetables, for example. One article about the fast food pantry noted that a reservation the size of Delaware, like the Blackvea Reservation, can have two grocery stores like the reservation and that a box of tea or a head of cauliflower can cost 10 or 11 bucks, which is hardly accessible. Even like the whole foods organic moms I know would not spend $11

on a head of cauliflower. Who's going to buy an $11 head of cauliflower? So that in itself can be a challenge to navigate. That said, there are a lot of foods that folks likely do have within their communities. Wherever you're living, whether it's a true desert or not, there are foods that people have been eating there for thousands of years. And so sometimes it's just learning some of the plants in your area, even if it's just little plants that you know that you can harvest and dry and make tea out of later. That's something that can bring you connection to your landscape. It's relatively little investment and those things are native plants. So they likely do well in your climate because they're from that climate. So for example, here we have yarrow,

which is a great plant, grows all over the northern hemisphere, has a flavor profile similar to tarragon. So it could be used as a spice or it can be dried and made into a tea. Yarrow is also incredible. If you ever get cut and you won't stop bleeding, you can chew up some yarrow leaves and put that on your wound and it will clot your blood. It's the OG Band-Aid. It was said that's what made Achilles invincible. Really? The scientific name is actually Achillea millifolium. So it comes from that story, but it is common all over the northern hemisphere. So if you're lucky enough to live in a place with yarrow, that's super helpful and it's a good field medicine technique too. Lots of people grow in places that have wild mint. That's something to know. You learn to

identify whatever wild onions are in your area. There's so many types of wild onions that grow all around. If you have any types of fruit trees, berries, obviously, all blueberries are indigenous. We have indigenous raspberries as well. Wild strawberries grow all over, but sometimes you have to hunt for them because you have to look underneath the leaves. There are, of course, service berries or service berries which grow all over as well. Some people call them Juneberries. If you're in Canada, they're Saskatoon berries. So there's lots of different types of things. I'm not even going to get into the many other hundreds of types of berries because it varies so much based on where you are. Nut trees, whether they're black walnuts or hickory nuts,

those nice beautiful shelled tree nuts like pecans, those are all indigenous foods. Acorns, learn how to process them. So there's foods that are out there and I love folks getting out and just connecting more with our landscapes, learning to identify what plants in your area and what you can do with them, how to prepare them. So for more on that, you can see the foraging ecology episode with Alexis Nelson, aka Black Forager. Yes, I'm going to link her episode. So I think that's always great. I think that also we need to work on obviously institutional solutions to the status as food deserts. Work with local producers to find out what people are growing if you can buy directly from farmers in your community that are already practicing sustainable

food solutions. Talk about, you know, partnering and setting up a CSA, a community-supported agriculture where you can buy it directly from the farmer because they'll get a higher benefit for their food and they don't have to worry about transporting it to a major hub, things like that. So that could be really beneficial on my own community. We have, we don't have a lot of local producers. We have a really short growing season and so that in itself can be really challenging to navigate. But we also started a lot of folks this year through our local food pantry, actually growing native plants that we've traditionally used as teas because they're native, they grow easily even in drought years and we taught them how to harvest them and now they're selling those dried

plants back to the food pantry so they can be distributed back to community members as part of Blackfeet traditional beverages. And so it helps provide a healthy beverage to food pantry participants that are relying on an emergency food supply and it's helping provide an economic source for community members that are interested in growing native plants. So there's, there's ways to do things but it depends so much on the area you're from and what the resources are. I think that many of us are really fortunate to still have food within our communities but part of it's been the knowledge that has been lost and how not only, you know, when do we harvest those things, what do we harvest, how do we preserve those things

so that we have food throughout the year and then how do we ensure that we have a food distribution system that also makes sense for our communities. Also, there was a question about traditional knowledge in there briefly. I would just say that if you're lucky enough to know someone that has traditional medicinal or botanical knowledge, even if it's just someone that knows a few plants in your area, go learn those plants, go out with them and then share that information. They don't have to be an elder, they don't have to be native. If they can teach you to identify a couple plants, great, that gives you a starting point and you can go and you can network and you can work with other native folks who may have a little bit more information on that and you can just keep

building that knowledge. If there's a way for you to document it yourself, that's awesome as well, even if it's taking out your iPhone and recording what they're saying so that you can reference back to it. That's why I got started doing the work that I do, because people would share information with me and I'd want to share it on a greater level. So of course, I'd get their permission and then I am able to use that as a knowledge resource and really create a database where we can reference back to that over time and ensure that that information stays alive and people continue to add to it as well. Just a side note, this past week my native plant nerd friend David Newsom from LA's Wild Yards Project gave me a wonderful educational tour of the buffet of edible plants

in my yard. He left, I forgot every single one of them and then I stood in front of each weed asking myself, can I eat you? I don't remember. So I second the video taping with your phone machine so you don't have to sheepishly text your teachers later. Be like, what was this one? Last listener question we got from a few people, Allie Vessels, Consetta Gibson, Allie V. Elise Hickman, and this is for non-native folks, cross-cultural implications. How do non-indigenous friends do right by our indigenous friends when making and sharing your incredible food? Are there appropriation concerns we should consider? How do you feel is the best way for non-natives to appreciate and to participate in indigenous food?

Yeah, that's a good question. Regardless of the time of year, regardless of where you're living, I think one of the great things anyone can do is just learn more about the local foods that are accessible. So I reiterate, learn about your plants and that's just me as an ecologist thinking about how do you connect with your landscape? What do you know? How will you survive a zombie apocalypse or whatever it may be? But how do you really learn about the land that you're on? And obviously, a big part of that is learning about the plants and the animals and all of those things that are in the same space, that are sharing space with you. And I think that that's important whenever you get outside and you just learn a little bit more about those spaces,

it can help inherently build that connection. If you go out berry picking, you also see the birds that are out there picking berries with you, yelling angrily maybe, you might run into a bear, right? But you understand all of those other creatures that are part of that connection with the berries too. And if something threatens the berries, you suddenly know that it's not just your berry patch that's being threatened, but you know all of the other beings that rely on that too. And so you're more inclined to take care of that because of your vested interest in it. And that sounds selfish, but that's also kind of how people work. And then with my recipes, I think food is meant to be shared. I think that there is a lot of value in just recognizing

where those foods come from and knowing whether it's butternut squash that has been specifically bred by native people, but you picked this butternut squash up from your local farmer down the road and you're going to make it into a lasagna with some bison meat or whatever it may be. There's just value in recognizing that even if it's silently because I think that you're acknowledging these these connections and all of this role that we each have on this landscape. So I think that that's a good place. I'm not trying to like make people feel guilty when eating food for sure. There's benefit to eating local fresh foods from your community for anyone. I don't think there's a downside of that. Right. I think it's so much better for our mentality

to get excited about eating healthier foods than to feel bad about eating foods that are thought of as unhealthy. For sure. It's better to pick up a new habit than to shame yourself for an old one. And if you're eating foods that are native to your location, you're also inherently eating things that have lower transportation costs, lower input costs, are more resilient to your climate, all of those things. So there's a lot of benefit in that as well. But ultimately we get to eat delicious foods and share that with our people in our community. And I think that there's a lot of value in that. Last question I always ask her. The hardest thing about your job? Oh, the hardest thing about my job?

I'm thinking. I honestly, the hardest thing about my job is that occasionally I like really have to clean my kitchen so that it can be on Zoom for everybody else. No, it's I'm really lucky. I get to I get to create new things. I get to create recipes. I get to spend time outside. I get to garden and hunt and make it part of my career. And no one told me in high school that I could do that, that that was an actual job. And honestly, it's really funny. I think the hardest part of my job is maybe just dealing with people that don't understand that I have a real job. You know, despite it being full time work, and I get to spend all of my time educating and

teaching and working with foods, whether that be as a contractor that's developing educational materials, whether that be teaching cooking classes, or being in the community teaching folks how to harvest native plants, whatever it is, it is full time work. And it's varied. And I don't have a real schedule. And that works for me. But it's interesting because people go, What do you do for work? And they're like, And that you can like survive doing that. And I'm like, Yeah, I can't actually also, I'm just, I get to grow and harvest and hunt a lot of food. And that that also helps keep me fed. But with delicious healthy things from here, there is new and exciting things every day. And sometimes I get frustrated trying to learn

how to use video editing software and trying to clean my kitchen and all the other fun things. But honestly, it's it is the most fun and rewarding thing I could be doing. What about last question? I would usually ask what your favorite thing about your job is. But that was that was so beautiful already. What about your favorite dish? A lot of listeners want to know this too. Favorite dish. I'm a lasagna person. No, no, I one of my favorite things for any time of the year. And maybe it's because my family used to my mom didn't like making like a big turkey or ham during holiday meals. And so we would just get together and we would make a homemade lasagna for holiday meals. And we would make it with bison meat rather than

beef or sausage or something like that. And so bison lasagna became this holiday meal. And when I started doing a digi kitchen, I realized I could substitute butternut squash for the noodles in the recipe and actually just cut up the cheese. It wasn't necessary, but you could make a butternut bison lasagna with cheese if you really wanted to. I just I love the comfort food of eating lasagna for some reason. And of course, you know, tomatoes are indigenous and squash is indigenous and you could use any type of wild game, whatever ground meat you have access to works in lasagna. And you can add whatever veggies you wanted if you wanted to put a whole bunch of substitutions in. It's really easy to change up lasagna. And so that is probably one of my favorite recipes because it's

so simple. It requires, you know, a basic meat sauce and a butternut squash. And you just layer it and you bake it until everything's soft. And I'm excited now because that's that's a recipe that is going to accompany the harvest of the month materials for buffalo in the state. Oh, that's great. Yeah, but also it's just it's good comfort food. And every time I eat lasagna, I feel guilty because I'm like, I should be eating a vegetable, right? And then when I eat that, I'm like, I am eating a vegetable. It's the noodles. The noodles are a vegetable. This is fine. And I've seen pictures of it and it looks so good. It's really funny when I do gigs anywhere in the country. I run into someone who's like, I love the lasagna. And I'm like, cool, that's great. That's

the best news ever. So do I. Amazing. Any cookbook plans in the works? I have to finish my master's degree, which oh, that should hopefully happen in December. And then and then I can talk to folks and see if someone wants to publish me. Who knows? Publishers, lit agents, get at ya. Go for it. So ask generous people, not genius questions and just do it out of respect and curiosity and everyone will walk away better for it. It's a huge, huge thank you to Mariah Gladstone. I'm a giant fan of her and Indigenous Kitchen. She let me lob so many questions at her and shared so much knowledge and pointed out so many great people also working this space. Thank you to Lila and Boyd Evans and my wonderful cousins, Jamie, James, Crystal and all of you for raising bison

for the community and let me ask questions about it. For more episodes with Indigenous ologies, I will link those on my website. You can also always find more topics at allieward.com slash oligies-by-topic. Easy to find, whatever interests you. More links for everything I mentioned are at allieward.com slash oligies slash Indigenous Quasinology. That'll be linked right in the show notes. You can just go to that and then just an absolute wardrobe, deep and never-ending filled with links. For more of Mariah's work, you can go to indigikitchen.com. You can follow Mariah Gladstone and congratulate her for getting her masters a few weeks ago. She's at indigikitchen on Instagram and Mariah Gladstone on Twitter and

Instagram. Also, shout out to Split Sun Creations for their beautiful drums and riddles and crafts. It's her partner. They'll be linked on my page too because they make great stuff. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at leward with one L on both. Happy, happy, happy birthday to the dear Aaron Talbert, who not only admins the oligies podcast Facebook group, but also spent countless hours with me cracking acorns from the oaks behind our houses since we were four. Love you so much. Thank you to Shannon and Bonnie of the You Are That podcast for helping with the Facebook work. Thank you to Emily White of the Wardery for making our professional transcripts available for free on our website to anyone who needs them. Caleb Patton bleeps

episodes to make them kid-friendly. And then about every fortnight, we've been putting out a Smology's episode, which is a condensed, shorter, very classroom-friendly cut of classics. So thank you to Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas for handling those and Stephen Ray Morris for the assist. Thank you to Lead Editor, Head Cheerleader, Jarrett Sleeper of Mind Jam Media for putting these episodes and my brain together every week. Nick Thorburn, meet the theme music. And if you listen until the very end, I'll tell you secret. And this week, it's that. In my bathroom, we have a toothbrush holder. And one of them has been broken for about eight or nine months. And I tried to weld it back together. I tried to superglue it. And every day, I just look at it and I've got one

that works. Jarrett's side, his toothbrush holder is broken. And I don't know what is wrong with me. But I'm like, just order another toothbrush holder. Then I'm like, well, do I have to order? Should I order two? And just use one of them? Do I just scrap the whole set? I don't know. But every day, I look at it and I go, I gotta fix that toothbrush holder. Anyway, next week's episodes on ADHD, in case you've ever wondered, why can't I do this very simple thing? We'll dive into executive functions. And it's a great episode for everyone who struggles with ever doing anything ever, which is exactly all of us. Also, thank you to everyone who sent me such sweet, sweet messages after I ended last week's episode balling. You are great. And I love you. And I will be back

next week with another episode, of course, because I love doing it. Okay, we're by now. All right. Live off the land, mainly. Looks like you go to Sonics a lot. Why are you here?