Seeds And Their People - EP. 31: Mohegan Food with Sharon Maynard and Rachel Sayet

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

This episode features a conversation in early July 2024 with Mohegan tribal members Sharon Maynard and Rachel Sayet about traditional Mohegan food.  Sharon Maynard is a Mohegan elder and a Tribal Nonner. Retired after serving 12 years on the Council of Elders, Sharon’s interests include food sovereignty, seed saving, and decolonizing our diets. She has a BA in anthropology and an AS in food service management.  Rachel Sayet (Akitusut) is a Mohegan writer, teacher, and indigenous food specialist. Rachel has a BS in restaurant management and an MA in anthropology. She has spent her adult life trying to cultivate awareness of Native New England. She worked for the Mohegan tribe for 8 years in their cultural department spearheading grassroots efforts in revitalizing traditional foods and diabetes prevention. FOOD AND MEDICINE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Maple, Birch Blueberries, Strawberries, Fiddlehead Ferns Milkweed, Sassafras, Elder, Boneset Corn, Beans, Squash, Sunflowers, Tobacco Succotash (Corn, Beans, Salt Pork, Salt and Pepper) Johnny Cakes (Journey Cakes) Yokaeg (traveling food made of dried, parched corn which has been ground finely with a mortar and pestle). Clams, Quahogs, Scallops, Shad, Salmon Fry Bread, Indian Tacos, Buffalo and Alligator Burgers Rachel's Johnny Cake Turkey Sandwich on America the Bountiful, PBS LINKS: Mohegan Tribe Rachel Beth Sayet, Indigenous Educator, Lightworker, Chef, Herbalist Wikôtamuwôk Wuci Ki tà Kihtahan (A Celebration of Land and Sea): Modern Indigenous Cuisine in New England by Rachel Sayet in Dawnland Voices 2.0 Tantaquidgeon Museum Gladys Tantaquidgeon - in Memorium Makiawisug, or the Little People at Mohegan Hill Eastern Woodlands Rematriation Sherry Pocknett, Mashpee Wampanoag chef, Sly Fox Den Restaurant The Man Who Weeps, story by Dale Carson, Abenaki cookbook author, in Dawnland Voices 2.0 Strawberry Thanksgiving, by Paula Dove Jennings, Narragansett  Sioux Chef, Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota Sioux Yazzie the Chef, Brian Yazzie, Diné Rowen White, Mohawk/Kanienkeha:ka, seed keeper THIS EPISODE SUPPORTED BY: YOU! Please become a Patron for $1 or more a month at Patreon.com/trueloveseeds The No-Till Market Growers Podcast Network (which includes our friends at the Seed Farmer Podcast) Scribe Video Center and WPEB, West Philly Community Radio   ABOUT: Seeds And Their People is a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. Hosted by Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden. trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio   FIND OWEN HERE: Truelove Seeds Facebook  |  Instagram  |  Twitter   FIND CHRIS HERE: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden   THANKS TO: Rachel Sayet and Sharon Maynard Elissa Fredeen of Scribe Video Center

Oh my goodness. Bring a bunch of little kids unshelled beans, beans that you haven't shelled yet. Now, when they see beans that they see is probably like when you see out of a can, you know, hot dog beans and those kind of beans, baked beans or whatnot. But boy, you give them a variety of shelled beans to open up. And each one is a surprise. You know, each different kinds of surprise. You know, they don't expect it. You know, they'll open up a dried shell and then there is like this big beautiful purple bean and they're like, Oh, look at this. Ooh, isn't that beautiful, you know? I was just lacking at normal. Welcome to Seeds and their people.

I'm Chris Bolden Newsom, Farmer, and co-director of Sankofer Farm at Bartram's Garden in sunny southwest Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, seed keeper and farmer at True Love Seeds. We're a seed company offering ancestral seeds grown by farmers who preserve their beloved tastes of home for their diasporas and beyond through keeping seeds and their stories in community. This podcast is supported by True Love Seeds and by you, our listeners. Thank you so much to our Patreon members at patreon.com slash true love seeds, including our most recent supporters, Cheryl, Sana, Katie, Rowan, and, Greta. This episode features a conversation I had in early July with Mohegan tribal members,

Sharon Maynard and Rachel Sayett. I had been visiting my family in northeastern Connecticut and drove down the Chetucket River to what we call the Thames River to Sharon's House in New London by the mouth of the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. I grew up in and around Willamantic, which is considered a Mohegan Pequot name, though it could be Narragansett or Nipman. muck, and the area, while bordering all these tribes, was home to several Mohican villages. We were taught about indigenous people in the past tense, and while I grew up grazing wild blueberries in the woods, slathering pancakes with maple syrup, fishing in the rivers, climbing the larger sassafras trees, and going strawberry picking by the carton, I never thought of

it as mohegan food and medicine. About ten years ago, my cousin Claire, Houston, who had moved to Maine, introduced me to her friend Karen Marden, a Wabanaki gardener and seed keeper. Karen connected me to Rachel when I was looking to learn more about mohegan foods. And that's Rachel's focus, native foods and food sovereignty. We became friends and collaborators, and along the way she introduced me to Sharon as well. Here are a couple sentences about each of them, but you'll get to know them much better from our conversation. Sharon Maynard is a Mohegan elder and a tribal nunner, meaning respected grandmother.

Retired after serving 12 years on the Council of Elders, Sharon's interest include food sovereignty, seed saving, and decolonizing our diets. Sharon has a BA in anthropology and an AS in food service management. Rachel Sayit is a Mohegan writer, teacher, and indigenous food specialist. Rachel has a BS in restaurant management and an MA in anthropology. She spent her adult life trying to cultivate awareness of Native New England. Rachel worked for the Mohegan tribe for eight years in their cultural department spearheading grassroots efforts in revitalizing traditional foods and diabetes prevention. When we spoke, Rachel was the Native American Community Engagement Fellow at the five colleges in Western Massachusetts,

and she just began a new role at UMass Amherst as research assistant for Native Presence, I believe, this week. So now's the time for our reflections on this episode, our brief reflections before we dive in. I know there's a few things that stood out to you. I think there was so much in this interview with Rachel and Sharon. You know, I'm not from New England. I'm from the Deep South, as most people know. So the Native American culture and history that we grew up with is very different. It's not in the past tense. So I was struck by how much of sort of this fighting spirit to still be acknowledged as living, thriving people that so many natives in the Northeast seem to have to do.

That's really different than Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas where I grew up. you know, that was also something that really made me proud, you know, to hear how that, how that, the culture was still going on, particularly, you know, with these two sisters. Blueberries, which are, you know, growing up would have been kind of foreign food, to me at least. Like, we had blueberry flavored things in the South, but we didn't really have a lot of blueberries, at least not when I was growing up in the 80s. And so to hear that that was such an active part and bought so much Joe I could really taste them as she was talking about, you know, the different recipes that are people, made with these blueberries. And I know there's some food, some other foods that you do have a relationship with that were brought up like Sassafras and Boneset. I wonder if you wanted to talk about that at all.

Well, yes, Sassafras I grew up with. My daddy would take us out into the woods. My dad, who's also our Scoutmaster, you know, for our Boy Scout troop, would take us out into the woods and we would go foraging specifically for Sassafras. We use the roots. We also use the leaves because the leaves, when they were dried, we used them to make gumbo. You know, the roots of the sassafras tree were just awesome for us. That was just something, particularly, I think, in the fall, I think it's when we were going hunting sassafras. And daddy taught us how to identify them, how to look for the mitten-shaped leaf and how it was green when everything else was turning brown. And then he would cook him up on the stove and we enjoyed the tea with a little.

lot of sugar. Of course, now they say that it's carcinogenic and all of this other stuff, but I don't buy it. I think they say that about a lot of people's traditional foods. You know, the things that really are harmful are the things produced by the industrial food system, I think, and I can really hear all the multiple ways that these two sisters, these two beloved sisters, were pushing against that because I can see the damage that it's done to their people. I can see the damage that's done to my people as well when she talked about, you know, diabetes and diabetes prevention. That is a major problem in African American communities. And where I'm from, everybody has a relative who's lost in limbs or digits to diabetes. So just hearing how

colonization continues and echoes in these different waves, you know, it's no longer a gun, a reservation, or force cutting of the hair or any of these things in the same way, right? But now it's the food systems that are still having us enslaved. And these tastes, when she talked about fried bread, I remember going to powwows as a kid. And Indian tacos, what we called them, you know, we just loved them and had no idea it was not Native American at the time. You know, we just didn't think about the fact that white wheat flour did not come from the Americas.

So I can see how we become addicted to these tastes, these flavors, that even though we adapted them, they were the fruit of colonial imperialism that still continue to wreak havoc on our bodies and our spirits. So, I mean, just hooray to these sisters who are pushing our traditional foods, you know, their traditional foods, you know, I can really relate to the African diaspora food, food traditionalists. well. It's just dawning on me that, you know, they mentioned suck attached several times in the episode and it's actually kind of have vague memories of that being a thing growing up around, but early on in getting to know Rachel and her mom, though I don't think me and her mom have ever officially met, her mom commented on a post about the Borlato Bean, which I first came to from a recipe that Rachel shared with me from her great-uncle, Harold Tanta Quijian. And I saw that the bean mentioned was basically the burlado bean. And then I dug deeper and found it to be an Italian

take on this Native American bean. And I started growing it because it connected the story of where I come from, you know, mohegan land and where my people came from before me in Italy. And her mom mentioned that she thinks it entered their recipes because of the proximity to Italian immigrants who were farmers near the Mohegan tribe. And so you'll hear Sharon mention that she's growing that. I'm growing that because of this recipe that Rachel shared with me. So I just thought that was an interesting point. Okay, well, one other quick note, I wanted to mention that Mohican medicine woman Gladys Tantiquidion, who lived from 1899 to 2005, and who has mentioned many times in this episode, is Rachel's great aunt.

Rachel didn't mention that, but it's kind of implied. She studied anthropology at 1919 at UPenn, here in Philly, and went on to do many big things to preserve native cultures, like many big things. People should look her up. In 1942, she wrote a book that was reprinted in 1972 under the same name, or under the name, folk medicine of the Delaware and related Algonquian Indians. It's out of print, but very important, and I'm glad to have a copy. See, I'll look her up. I'll put links in the show notes. Okay, here's Brian with...

A quick word from our sponsors. Hey, everyone. If you're enjoying this show, you may also like the No-Till Market Garden podcast with co-host Mimi Castile, Natalie Landsbury, and yours truly, Alex Ball. We interviewed growers, researchers, and other. and sustainable ag community about everything from soil first farming practices to foreign business management in the wild world of soil biology and health. So head over to your favorite podcast platform today and subscribe to the no-till growers network. Okay, transporting you now to Sharon's

kitchen table in New London, Connecticut on a hot summer day with Rachel zooming in from Western Massachusetts. My name is Sharon Maynard and my indigenous name is Akamak, which means across the water. I'm an elder in the Mohegan tribe. I'm all of 71 this year, so it doesn't seem possible where all that time went, but here I am. I began my food journey, probably like most of us have, when we were children, you know, so coming to the dinner table, and particularly in the summertime, with the families who got together a little bit more, people in our family got together more and enjoying the gardens that both my mother and father had my father had a terrific garden so i became probably interested in growing food from my father's gardening but my um my mother and

my mother's people who are the mojigans when we came together on that side of the family we'd get together with my grandmother and her sisters and some of my cousins my cousin elaine and And we'd go out and we'd pick wild blueberries this time of year. And I think one of the things that I always remember about indigenous food, Mohican food as a child is what we did with our blueberries. And my mother, my mother just would also, she knew how to make succotash. And she would make succotash often during the summer. She would do that.

She would take some, what we would call green corn. the kind of corn that you would get at the local farm stand or whatever just time of year you know so anyways she'd have a bunch of that and we'd all sit around and we'd husk that i don't know if she used like a big metal kitchen spoon or whatever but you would scrape that you would scrape the corn off of the cobs into the pot so you'd scrape and it didn't have to be pretty in fact as you scraped it if it started to get like really juicy and let off its juice that was fine that was great so you'd do that put that all in the pot you'd throw the cobs in afterwards too throw a few cobs in afterwards because

those cobs when it's cooking in the water thickens it and then you throw your beans in there too of course this is probably this is post-contact but a lot of people would throw salt pork into it you know for flavoring they throw salt pork in it's a very simple thing to do and you just let it sit there and you'd let it simmer for as long as you wanted it to

you know until it became thickened and very rich probably salt and pepper it to taste and that's it She made a great clam chowder. We'd go out and we would tread for clams with our feet, claw hogs, sometimes the smaller ones, cherry stones and sometimes steamers, bring those home, eat those. Because I grew up in Nianic, we would go out into the bay

and we'd gather scallops. We'd have those to eat as well. And a variety of fish, whatever our fishing poles could do. But there was always corn and squash and beans. The three sisters, there was always that in the family. garden so we always had those things to to eat during the summertime and my mother was big at putting food aside too she would do a lot of canning and then eventually freezing and drying and my father would smoke fish he had made himself a little smoker and he was smoked fish to go along

with that I'm kind of oriented more towards the water than I am towards the land and and I realize that more and more as I get older. So the next time that I became closer to indigenous crops as an indigenous person wasn't that long ago. I would say probably about 25 years ago or maybe 30 years ago. And there was a garden. Some of the Mohegan people had come together. And I think Rachel's mother was one of the people. And they had a garden up at Fort Shantock. next to one of the outbuildings up there and they had made a nice three sisters garden up there and they were also growing tobacco and as the season went on I remember asking permission if I could save some of the seeds so that I could plant them at my house so I started out planting things in containers

because we always lived in an urban setting and we always lived in apartments or duplexes And so I started growing things in containers, and I realized that I could grow corn. I could grow some nice traditional corn in containers in large pots, actually. And I had very good luck with that. Of course, that leads you, of course, all the way to the food and to our parched ground corn, which we call yo keg. And also our different squashes. And I actually dabbled in growing some tobacco as well. And then, of course, our beans are – some people call them cranberry.

beans. Some people call them bear claws. There's these big beautiful purple speckly reddish pink beans that are just, they're just gorgeous. And I was instructed by an elder from another tribe to always plant some of those every year. So I do that out of respect for her. So those went into the garden. And the thing is, here I am, and I feel like I'm doing this all myself. I feel like this is something that I'm just doing, not realizing that there are other people in the tribe in their homesteads, okay, that have their own gardens, and they're also, you know, dabbling in, you know, restoring these different plants or carrying on, and a lot of families still carrying on. Our community is small, and we don't live all on a reservation. Our housing on the reservation is limited.

And back in the day, like in the 1800s, when they broke up the reservation, people received their own allotments. And so the community was still there, but that's where I think it started to become more focused on the family unit, rather as much as the community. So that kind of taught me a lesson in that it's all about land. you know once you lose your land base once you lose your land you know you lose that opportunity to garden in the way that your ancestors would have gardened and your ability to feed a whole community at once you can't feed your whole community with a dozen pots of corn you need that land you need that space you know so that you can all come together to grow enough to feed your community so I think we kind of lost a bit of that through our history so I went on with that and I learned

how to cook various different items and every year I would try something a little different and became very interested in heirloom seeds and 20 years passed a little bit longer and eventually somehow I became I came in contact with Miss Rachel I know when I came in contact with her. And that's another story. It was at the museum when she was a docent there. I remember one day going in there and it was very interesting because I also like to make basket of basket maker. And I went in there and she and I were in one of the older rooms and we were standing talking. And as we were talking, this little tiny basket fell off the shelf. It just fell right down and fell right down in front of us. And we were inside. There was

no breeze there was no vibration there was just her and I talking and I just went I don't know how Rachel reacted but I just went whoa you know there's something going on here so eventually I was elected to a position on the council of Velders and while I was there Rachel came in and she became a regular employee in our library archives and she introduced and she'll pick up this story she introduced the whole concept of food sovereignty to the tribe and she did a lot for introducing decolonizing our diets about decolonizing our diets and and how important what important cornerstone that is to our tribe but all tribes to your culture is is your agriculture and your food, your food ways. And of course, along with that comes a lot of stories and a lot of

history. She formed a food club and we'd all get together and we'd explore all these different foods that she brought in for us. And sometimes we'd have things like Johnny Cakes or maybe some tea or maybe some greens, things that not just could be grown but also gathered. And it just And that really opened up a new world to me because she introduced me to my community garden, Fresh New London, which is in downtown New London. And so I'm still there, Rachel, I'm still at Fresh. Picking away, we're still there. So from Fort Chantock, from that garden there, we went over to Fort Hill, which is where

our elder community is, but there's some pastures there. And we had a very, for a few years there, we had a very nice Three Sisters Garden, and we were able to use the produce from there for our gatherings like during Culture Week and that sort of thing. And that worked out really well. There's a very nice garden right now at the museum. Corn is growing really nicely there, Rachel. And we had a fellow that worked in our culture department for a little while. And he worked with the kids. He worked with the kids to grow a nice patch of corn that year. They made a nice three sisters garden for themselves. And we also now, we have a small garden, community garden that's up on the hill near the government center. There's one raised

bed that is dedicated to three sisters, and I'm able to go in there and do that. And that's doing really well this year, Rachel. We're finally coaxing corn out of that spot, you know, so that took a while. But along the way, I learned all kinds of stuff, learned about sunflower, sunflower seeds, you know, before we had corn, we ate a lot of sunflower, sunflower disease, before we had corn as a cornerstone of our diets, not just sunflower, but we ate a lot of pumpkins. Next to corn, we ate a lot of pumpkin. You can take pumpkin and you can dry it and you can use it for later and you can thicken your stews with that, but you can also pound pumpkin. You can pound it into a flower, you know. So when I would learn these different things, I would come home to my own kitchen and I would

try it all out, you know. And then of course, I started to meet all kinds of people. people paling around here with Miss Rachel. Well, I met you, Owen. Okay. But then I started to meet a lot of different people that were involved in the food movement and not just indigenous people either. You know, I always tried to teach my grandchildren how to make things. I always try to teach them.

And they're getting good at it. You know, they can make cornbread. They know how Johnny Cake is put together. They know how to parched corn and grind it. They know how to do that. And they understand that that's a real important component to our health, too. And not just our physical health, but our spiritual health as well. Okay.

I've probably all done now. Oh, no, I have plenty of follow-up questions. I'm sure Rachel does too. You're never done. Well, one thing I was just going to ask Sharon was what plants you are planting this year. So Sharon and I were both involved with that. community garden, she mentioned in its early phases of getting it started. There was a garden committee, which I think still exists. And at the time, Lynn was very involved. Our chief, I would say she's

been one of the biggest supporters from tribal leadership, always like doing an opening blessing for the garden, always making sure that, you know, she was a nurse and she's always interested in health. So she's even doing now that she's the U.S. creditor, I did a whole interview on her and she's helping with other tribes of the same types of issues. You know, we needed some support is my point. We kind of, it was just me and Sharon for a little while and a couple other people. Before the food group even started, we were just kind of doing things, but we didn't really have a committee. We didn't really have any of those things. Once the health department started getting involved, then things started moving forward.

in a different way and I'll get more into that in a little bit. But yeah, Sharon, what were the crops you're planting this year like the three sisters? At the government building we have the blue corn, the sapsing, that's growing there and we have Borlado beans

and then there's some Nanticoke squash. That's our squash, our winter squash for this year. The Borlano beans were kind of just like little brown smaller brown bean and Harold, I learned Harold Tantaguin used to use it when he made his sacriotash.

So I thought that would be not appropriate for that. Can you tell us who is Mohegan? Like, where is Mohegan? Just like help place the listeners where we are? Well, primarily Mohegan is located in an area in Uncasville, Connecticut, which is located in Montville, Connecticut, and that's on the western shores of the Thames River. We were once part of the Pequot tribe,

and then I think about 1634, Uncas had a falling out with some of the leadership over in Mashantucket, and he took his followers and came across the river and settled in what is now Uncasville, Connecticut. But from there, Mohegan's, their homelands expanded and shrunked and expanded and expanded into all different parts of Connecticut, north and west, and then at times were not quite as extensive.

So eventually most people, you know, I want to say most people, but not all people, has settled there in the general area of Montville and Uncasville. You know, but by the later 1800s, people were, where they were moving away, not necessarily that far away. I mean, my grandma and her folks, you know, lived down here in Waterford and New London area, which is right next to Mount Phil and Uncasville. But they were going to look for places to work, you know, rather than the general community. When you look at the census, the census looks like we're shrinking at a lot of points.

But in some ways, the census is taken. right there at Mohegan, you know, and not necessarily including, you know, the cousins and brothers and everybody that's living in all the other different areas. But over the course of history, where our lands were, you know, our lands, you know, as the greater culture would call their lands, but our lands were throughout Connecticut. it. Anyways, Rachel, the librarian archivist, I don't know if that was a good explanation or not. That was great. No, I'm not good with directions, so that's what I'm going to do to you. We need to know who you are, Rachel.

So, Akwai, greetings. My name is Rachel Say it. My mohigan name is Akitu, which means she who reads. And I have always been a foodie my whole life. I grew up. with parents who were very interested about food, but more so dining out and things like that and eating home-cooked meals as well. But it wasn't necessarily an indigenous focus, except for as Sharon kind of mentioned, in the summertime, it, you know, it became more so because I think, as I've mentioned in some of my writings, the corn has been a centerpiece, you know, for thousands of years here in New England, as well as throughout Indian country, even though it's not originally from, you know, the continental U.S., it's from Mesoamerica,

but once it's made its way up here, it became a staple of all of our diets. And so during the summer months, I remember making the flags to celebrate the Sukhattash season that they then put in the museum. So we walked around. I said, it's Sukhattash time. It's Sukhattish time. And we have the flag. And there is probably still a flag somewhere in storage or two.

And so that was, you know, the time where there was the beans coming up and the corn coming up. We celebrate it. So Tanda Quijian Museum, the oldest native run museum in the country, founded by Gladys Tantiquidion, her father, John Tantiquidion, and Gladys's brother Harold Tandiquidion. Harold was a chief. There's a historical fiction book about him, Mohegan chief. And Gladys did a number of things, many of which I accidentally follow into her path throughout my life. She was a medicine woman herbalist, ethno botanist, and anthropologist. And she even, when I was going through, when I was working in the archives, I did notice

that there were some dinners that she ran, which I had no idea of any of this. Oh my God, like, who knew this? And so that was kind of exciting to me, too, to see that she was also promoting indigenous food ways. I do remember her boiling the milkweed. That's the one native thing. I remember as a very little kid, seeing the milkweed being boiled, trying the milkweed, something that now, you know, many native people and others are getting into, right,

as it's so good for pollination and everything else that people are starting to go and cook milkweed and try different recipes with it. But because of the displacement and the land loss and all of these things that happened, my grandmother would say we kind of turned to farming a lot earlier, I think, in our tribe. A lot of us were farmers. and that's what I remember. They weren't really farmers on the hill at the museum, but they had a pretty decent side garden

when I was growing up at Tanaquidion Museum. You know, again, vague memories that was little, but it wasn't really a focus on indigenous crops, but they definitely were gardening, and they had tomatoes, lettuce, all different things, and then a big storage cellar in the basement. During the summer, I would go to Powwows, you know, and growing up, I had, you know, also an Narragansett stepfather as well.

So we spent quite a bit of time at Narragansett, as well as Mohegan and traveling around the powwow circuit. So the powwows, though, they always had interesting food. And so things that, you know, maybe I wouldn't have tried in a restaurant like alligator, burger, or, you know, Buffalo burger, even at that time. I would try them when I would go to a powwow. Oh, this is so interesting, right? And there wasn't anything that I remember, like Sherry Pocknitz, like her vendor. It wasn't available, at least at the powys I was going to at that time. I don't remember when what year she actually started vending in her capacity.

Her uncle might have done it a little bit differently. Her uncle Earl Mills had the restaurant on the Cape. But it wasn't anything of that level of indigenous foodways. It was more like, you go, you get your fry bread, you get your buffalo burger, you get your Indian tacos, you get these things. And they're indigenous foods, but they're kind of more of the, the, you know, like fry bread having a complicated history. You know, it's a symbol of Indian identity, but it has a traumatic history, things like that, you know, from stemming from

reservations and the things we were given, right, like the lard and the flower. So it wasn't so much things like, you know, Yokeh, the dried parched corn or Sakhetash at the Powwow. Although at our tribe's culture week, you know, we would have the Sakhetash, which we usually have right before our powwow. So it was just like exploring those things, but not really understanding much more about it until I was an adult. It was when I was in graduate school that my mother introduced me to Dale Carson. She was an Abinacchi woman in Madison, Connecticut, who also grew up like Sharon doing a lot of the quahawk harvesting and all those types of things. And she and I met, We just bonded. We had a bond right away. I think it was around 2009. And she started teaching me things and talking to me about the indigenous foodways. She had written a couple of books. She wrote new Native American cooking and Native New England cooking in the 80s and 90s before this was really a big trend like it is today. And she spent a lot of her life going out and teaching about these things. We have records in our tribal archives of some of the dinners she did. In 2012,

I had just graduated and I was asked to be on a panel for the Native American Indigenous Studies Association, a food panel in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. So my topic was Native Foods in New England. And that paper really just emerged for the panel. So I was able to kind of piece together, you know, the paper with a lot of help from other tribal members who knew Dale and knew the festivals. And, you know, Dale also connected me with the chefs. She gave me contacts for Sherry Pocknet, the Mashpee Wampanoke chef that everybody now knows

because she won that James Beard Award, which is she was very well deserved for best chefs in the Northeast last year. And we all knew for many, many years that she was one of the best chefs out there, right? But I presented at two places. And then it just started kind of blowing up as something people wanted to hear about as far as a presentation. But at the same time, a lot of tribes were doing real groundwork and their communities. And I talked to Sharon and I said, okay, so what have we been doing? You know, she told me about the project with the three sisters at the elderly housing.

We weren't really coming together around except for at powwows and things like that. We had a heavy focus at that time on the Mediterranean diet. There was a lot of workshops at my tribe on the Mediterranean diet, which is great, right? We all know it's a really healthy diet. But the health department wasn't being run by native people so much. or at least that section of the department. But Scott Sojess, who ran the department, the executive director, he really saw something in what I was doing.

So I would read a traditional story such as the Strawberry Thanksgiving. We have many versions of the Strawberry Thanksgiving story. One author is Paula Jennings over at Narragansett. And so I'd read the story and then we'd make like a strawberry drink, a traditional Iroquois, Haud and Ashani strawberry drink with the youth, something simple. And then we made into popsicles. The nutritionist would be there.

I would be there. I would read the story. We'd partner on the drink or the recipe. And it was just a really exciting time because it just felt like nothing like that was really being done, at least at our community. At that point, I had attended a few different conferences. I had gone to the Red Lake Food Summit with, you know, many indigenous chefs, including the Sioux Chef team, Rowan White, teaching some seed saving, a lot of really big people in the food sovereignty field. And then bringing that home to Mohegan was when I came up with the idea of a food sovereignty

working group. And the health department folks were like, well, let's call it something different. It seems like a little bit too wordy. So we called it the native food discussion group. And the concept was to bring together knowledge and to record knowledge of what people were doing throughout the tribe, whether it was planting indigenous crops or, you know, maybe somebody had a farm, an animal farm bison, or maybe it was even just cattle, like trying to figure out what people were doing. And when we had our first meeting, it was the time of the maple moon. So it was the maple season. And, you know, people think of the new year at different times here in New England. Hwampanoke folks will say it's, you know, really time when the herring come back to the

river, which is common. I sometimes think, well, maybe it's the maple because the maple's the first thing that comes out. Animals are eating the maple, licking the maple. But also we've been having gatherings in those early, early, you know, not even spring months, right? We would have these gatherings traditionally. So unintentionally, that was when our first meeting happened. And I remember, you know, that day, fate had, I don't even remember the amount of maple knowledge that came out, but there were so many different types of maple I was learning about. I brought a couple books with me. and we were just sitting there learning so much from each other in that first day. I think I might have brought a couple bottles of syrup.

What we would do a lot of times since the health farm was giving us some funding, and we didn't have our own maple farm or a big farm or a big, you know, planting ground, was we would order things from other tribes. So Passamacquoddy maple was a big one that we would order stuff from, Red Lake Nation foods. I would order, you know, some wild rice or some wild rice mix for wild rice pancake mix so we could do some, you know, maple syrup on the wild rice pancakes. I remember Sharon helping me with that. So all these different things, but we were making sure to uplift our fellow tribes

since we didn't have our own big, you know, big place to harvest the maple. There is a note in Gladys's book. I don't remember the exact year, but this really hit home with me when I did read that was something about the last maple tree on the reservation being lost in the 1800s. And when I read that note a while back, it really also just made me think about my work and the direction of the work that we all do here with food sovereignty. When you look at the festivals that are happening around maple today, you don't see native people having maple festivals because they don't have the land. So that's all a big part of why land back is important and all these other things and even just regrowing the trees and things like that. You know, nowadays, yes, like there are

some maple, you know, around oncusville and in different pieces, but on the reservation. But that was just an interesting note. I just wanted to let you know. I didn't know if you may not have known this or not, but this year, Greg, who works at our museum, he tapped some trees. And we had our own maple syrup this year. So that was very exciting. And we did come together. We did have a little gathering around it and we had a little maple syrup time. And I thought that was just wonderful. I was just so pleased to see that, to see that being restored. That's awesome. Where were the trees? Were they on the museum? Yes, they were. They were on the museum. ground there was a few there and i think surrounding there were a few as well you know so um he

he was able to gather quite a bit of it and and to boil it down up at the church you know use the um uh the kitchen there up at the church and boil it down into syrup so so it was really good and and you know because we we had to have people watch it all the time it had to be watched all the time you know so he had a host of volunteers to come in and watch when he couldn't watch had to go home for something. So I thought that was pretty interesting too. See, that sort of thing. That's what brings a community together because you need those people in order to complete the task, you know, so. This is, and that's supposed to be an Nishinaabe story, but a quick version is just that, you know, there was a young boy and his parents sent him out to harvest something

else. I don't remember exactly what it was. And he hit a tree and it started dripping. He tasted it and he said it was a sweet water. So then he filled up his basket with with the sweet water, brought it home. And his parents were like, what are you doing? This wasn't what I asked you to do at all. You know, you have this water. This is not helpful to me. And so the parent threw it into the deer stew that they were making. And the next day, it turned out to be the most delicious venison stew because it had cooked down into maple syrup, basically, and it was a sweet flavored stew. And that's just one story, right, of how maple may have came to be. We used it for everything.

You know, we didn't have sugar. So maple, not everything, but it was a very common ingredient, you know, that we would use in different dishes and things like that. We have the birch trees, too, that have syrups and other things. fruit also we use as a flavoring agent and still do. And, you know, I always tell people we'd probably use the sugar a lot more because the sugar was more shelf stable, the maple sugar, and then the syrup back then too, which is even more processing involved, but we were able to keep it longer. So when I think about the maple season, you know, I do think it's a really powerful time.

And when we first came together as a group, it was just so exciting during that first maple moon. Us at Mohegan, too, having the history of coming from Lenape and then living amongst the Iroquois for a time, we have a little bit of a different history. And I always feel that some of our traditions are a little bit more in line with the Hauden Shani, some of our beadwork, even with the focus on strawberries, the basket focus on strawberries. There's a lot of focus on strawberries. So moving into that plant, if you look at Harnashane, Iroquois Museum's like strawberry everything, right? There's just strawberry and even some of the other local tribes people people look at that again is that season is just such potent medicine spiritually emotionally physically um so you know june the time when

strawberries come out generally it's the first fruit of the season and you've gone the whole year with really no fresh fruit at that point right we've been drying things we've been saving corn and fruit in different things, in different ways, right? So we would have something for the winter months and then eating that. And then all of a sudden, you have these amazing little berries come up and just the, you know, the way it makes you feel even nowadays to pick a strawberry, a fresh strawberry, a wild strawberry, the flavor of it, the sweetness of it, versus even something at the supermarket today, right?

I mean, multiply that times 100 where you couldn't get a strawberry. So it's just such good medicine. Strawberry specifically, you know, again, they have a lot of health benefits, as do all these indigenous plants, but that spiritual medicine is recognized by many of our communities. There's many tribes who have ceremonies around the strawberries, a lot of women's ceremonies and things like that, and some tribes are trying to revitalize these things, and that's part of what the work that I've been trying to do alongside the food has been, too, is thinking about the ceremonial aspect.

So last year, I went to a gathering up in Maine through Eastern Woodlands rematriation, which is an organization I'm part of who tried to bring back traditional foods and ceremonies. And they actually had a woman come in from Canada, from Ojibwe to help them bring back some of these strawberry ceremonies for the girls, for the young women. And so that was something really amazing to see. and again, all connected to that, you know, that first fruit. Yes, and from when I understand, strawberry season, that time of year, there was also a time for courtship.

And so, geez, with somebody from Narragansett that told me that during their strawberry season, they would participate. The young men would participate in foot races and dug out, you know, canoe machine races. and did different things of that sort in order to impress the girls, in order to impress the young ladies and their families, you know. So it was kind of like a renewal in a lot of ways, you know, life returning, life of returning, fertility returning to the earth again. What I love about plant stories is it's so much bigger than the plant.

Like I just got a very vivid picture. of life you know at that time of year you know with the races the young love the the what might they might be racing with i'm wondering if there's any other plant stories sharing that you could tell us that might open a similar window oh my goodness whether it's corn or or even seafood okay so not necessarily seasonally focused you know i always liked i always like the tradition of the story that tells us that the corn was brought to us you know the crow brought the corn to us and so that when we planted our hills traditionally we would plant it with with five kernels of corn one for each sacred directions and then the fifth one in

the middle of the hill it's to honor the crow you know to honor the crow and its gift but also to realize that and to acknowledge that we're not here by ourselves we have friends in the forest that are going to take advantage of our gardens as well you know so i i always like that a little bit piece of um you know what i love about that what i love about that is i often have to cover my corn plants to protect them from crows when i first plant them so i like the idea of thanking the crows you know like and recognizing the connection between the two like it's interesting that that's the one an origin story for crow and it's one of my main corn predators Well, the reason why I started to garden downtown, the community garden, because I couldn't keep the squirrels out.

You know, I couldn't keep the squirrels out of the garden. And something interesting that I learned. And I'm trying to think of his first name. Last name is McCumber. We all know him. Silver Bear. Yes, Silver Bear. I went and listened to him talk one day.

And he was instructing on the best way of making the Three Sisters Garden. and I realized when he was talking to me he told us about putting the squash in when you put the squash in and the squash starts to grow well squash has like a prickly it's all prickly on its stems you know and on the underside of its leaves and everything like that and the small animals really don't appreciate that so if you have enough squash growing in the surrounding your garden surrounding your pot it kind of helps helps to keep down the little invaders. And that when you walk through the garden to your corn, you don't walk a straight line through the squash. You don't make a path. You kind of go from like side to side and step here and step there and maybe not in the same place every time.

So that you keep that cover. You keep the cover even. There's no parting in that. So I thought that was interesting how that repels the little small animals. So the offerings, you know, that we leave the monkey alo, so oh boy, I hope I didn't disturb them by mentioning them. But the LPs, which stands for little people, you know, so I try to be delicate and say LP. But the LPs, yes, please forgive me. But, you know, leaving little baskets full of parched corn, you know, yoke out.

for them in the woods and those sorts of things. Here Sharon is referring to the Mohegan legends of the little people who live hidden under Mohegan Hill in Unkisville, knee-high with moccasin flowers for shoes, they can grant favors and protection and bountiful harvests, but you shouldn't make eye contact or talk about them, especially during peak activity in the summer. Luckily, it is just turned fall here when we're releasing the same. episode. And the care that was taken when we were planting our gardens, you know, to always thank Mother Earth and always, you know, give a pinch of tobacco and put some tobacco down

and to always treat those plants like you would, anything else in nature, you know, as a being, you know, the women would sing to their plants. The women would go out while they were got when they were gardening and they would they would sing to those plants and just nurture them just like they were their own and I know my husband doesn't I I know I have a similar feeling towards plants and it gets more intense as I get older too you know I go out I talk to my plants I worry over them if something dies I grieve you know something I wouldn't have probably thought or felt about maybe 40 years ago or whatever but I really believe if you put a seed in the ground and you give life to it or you help it to bring life forth that you have a responsibility towards it after that

you can't just abandon it you have to do whatever you can do to keep that alive and part of that keeping that alive is through saving your seeds as well you know once you've once you've accompanied it through its life cycle something that we can't take for granted you know the dominant culture takes plants for granted and they take you know it's just something i don't know how they feel about it but it's not like it's something that has a soul or a spirit you know like they do and and so anyways but um yeah i think that's very important it's a very important part of the process is to keep that spiritual component in there you know that's that's what i think the big difference is i think that's probably the big difference one of the bigger difference between

the indigenous farmer and the non-indigenous farmer is that spiritual component. Have you found yourself singing to the plants? Oh, sure. I really do. You know, and sometimes I even named them, you know. Oh, when I open the door in the morning and I step outside, I go, I go, oh, good morning, everybody, good morning, everybody. And then I make this little voice and I make this little voice, says, good morning, mommy, how are you today? you know, like they're talking back at me, you know. I know it seems kind of silly, but really, but that's how I feel towards them. That's how I feel towards them, you know, and I get so annoyed when people waste food,

when people waste the plants, when they take more than they need, and they just waste it and it ends up in the garbage or whatever. And it's like, you know, that's just like taking a life and just wasting it, you know. So, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a spiritual journey. It really is, you know, it's not just this physical thing, but it's definitely a spiritual journey. It brings you close, it brings you close to your ancestors. You know, your ancestors are smiling.

They're smiling because we're talking about it right now, and they're just like, oh yeah, this is good. We're going to survive. These people are going and carry on. You know, we have a, we have a summer camp for the kids, but we also have an after-school program. and I used to love, love, love, when my regular job was done during the day at the tribe,

I used to go downstairs and talk to the kids. And I used to have what I used to call unadvertised specials. I just called advertised specials. The poor person running the program, I would call them and say, hey, I got such a thing, can I come down this afternoon? And they were happy, you know, because of something to occupy kids with. So I would come down. But I loved bringing them unshelled beans.

Oh, my goodness. Bring a bunch of little kids, unshelled beans. that you haven't shelled yet. Now, when they see beans, beans that they see is probably like when you see out of a can, you know, hot dog beans and those kind of beans, baked beans or whatnot. But boy, you give them a variety of shelled beans to open up. And each one is a surprise. You know, each different kinds of surprise. You know, they don't expect it. You know, they'll open up a dried shell and then there is like this big beautiful purple bean and they're like, oh, look at this. Ooh, oh, isn't that beautiful?

beautiful, you know. So we would do that. I'd do that with the kids. And then when it was spring green time, when people would start gathering greens, I would find fiddleheads. That's a yearly process too. I finally planted some in the backyard so I can gather my own fiddle heads in the spring. I was going to take a while, but I'll have plenty pretty soon. But I used to bring those down to the kids, and I cooked them up. And they said, well, what are these? And I told them what they were and everything to go, ew, you know, so then I'd cook them up, and then I'd serve them to them. I said, do you don't have to eat them? I said, if you taste them, just taste them, see what you think. And you know what? Sure enough, I bet you two-thirds of them liked them enough that

they would eat them. A few of them loved them and asked for seconds, you know. Some of them didn't care for them at all because they couldn't get over the whole thing of it. So it gave them that opportunity though to see how those things were done and how they were prepared and that's important because that's the point of it you know if we don't pass it down to the kids it's just not going to go it's not going anywhere it's just going to stop you know and the corn i would take it down i'd ask for some volunteers i'd get them to parching it we'd set up something so they could partch the corn and they would parch the corn and then some of them would grind it up i'd bring my mortar and pestles and they would grind it up and then another workshop we would take and we'd make

Johnny cakes and they learned how to do that. Johnny cake, you can use straight up ground corn, flint corn, actually, your eight row flint corn. You can grind it up fine into flour, but doesn't have to be exceedingly fine. It can still have a little bit of grit to it. That's okay because you're going to add water to it and it's going to sit and it's going to absorb the water. So you put some of that into it. We put water into it. And it makes, it gets to be like play dough, which is interesting. I wasn't expecting that, but it gets to be like play dough. And so you take and you make cakes out of it, little cakes in between your hand. Now, at this point, you can put, you can put dried berries into it, or you can put some dried meat into it, or you can put both, you know,

so you can put different things into it if you want, or you can have it just plain. And you, and you take that. And these days, we usually just put them on the griddle and cook, them like that. In older times you would just throw it back into the ashes and have it finished clicking up like that or on a stone on the side of the fire. But that's our Johnny Cake. And you trace that, you trace the word Johnny Cake back and the next thing you come up is with Journey Cake. Before Johnny Cake, it was Journey Cake because that was a lot of indigenous people and then eventually some of the colonials too. They would take that with them while they were journeying because it was very nutritious and it would fill you up and then before journey cake

of course you had you had yo keg you know which is where journey cake comes from yokeg and then if you trace it back even further back in the in the language algonquin language it's yukukuk so yukuk became yoke for us at mohegan it was yokeg why dialect dialect dialects um In Narragans, it was no cake, you know, with the end, a little bit different dialect. You know, but it was the same goods, the same goods. And it could be parched or not parched. If you part your corn, you part you in ashes, and you part it, those ashes help to bring the niacin out of the corn. They enhance the niacin that's in the corn.

So it makes the corn a little more nutritious. So we weren't as prone to diseases like Pellegras, you know, nutritional diseases. because of the way we cooked our corn. But that's Johnny Cake. And my mother didn't use the white flour. She didn't use the white corn flour. She always used, you know, the Quaker owes yellow stuff, you know. But she would make Johnny Cake from that.

And they were really good. And we would put, of course, you know, butter. Like we had, we would put butter on those and eat them like that. And then she would put them in the refrigerator. If there was some left over, she put them in the refrigerator. And we'd just nab them out of the refrigerator and eat them just like that, they're delicious like that and they're crunchy on the outside cold and they're just delicious like that yeah you don't have to do too much to it they're very simple very simple yeah i was just going

to say quickly just just the the yolk hag it's the dry so you let the kernels dry then you partch it and then ride it so it's just a cooked ground corn so both of the foods that sharon and i have been discussing today they're both warrior hunter travel food traditionally, Journey Cakes, Johnny Cakes, and Yokeg. So a warrior, a hunter would take these things on a long journey, Yokeg being like something quicker to make, in a sense, than the Johnny cake. But both filling and both nutritious, right? And, you know, both traditional foodways that have their own benefits. So I learned about, you know, quite a few things about the garden, about gathering and and then one of the women that I worked with Marie she would once a year they would

take the kids in summer camp they'd take them out quahogging you know and they would get their clams and when they came back she would make a big pot of chowder for them and show them how to do that or or they'd go out and pick blueberries and she would make a big blueberry like a cobbler or something like that from you know there's a there's a dish with blueberries because we're kind of in blueberry getting into blueberry season now I don't know Rachel if you've ever heard about my mother and grandmother definitely knew about something called blueberry slump have you ever heard of yeah blueberry slump yeah sharr makes it blueberry slump it's just awesome you need to have it growing yeah yeah take a bunch of blueberries boil it down you know get them into like a slurry

what you call it a nice hot slurry and then you make little dumplings you know and my mother would make um dumplings from like wheat flour but you can make you can make corn dumplings no problem and you would put those into that hot slurry and then you put a cover on it and just let it cook like that for a while and then you just scoop it out into the bowl and eat it you know of course we didn't we didn't have cows so we didn't have cream or um whipped cream or that sort of thing but my mother would always add like a little bit of cream to it you know it was just so good wild blueberries like that it's just so good you know it's gonna would you call that fusion would it would be like i call yeah i call it modern indigenous cuisine but i do i do think it's fusion

And even, you know, when you look at, you know, again, how, you know, for instance, Sherry Farkin, it has her stand, I believe she calls it something like upscale indigenous cuisine, but she does add, you know, so it's, it's however you want to call it. But I think just, just, just, I always just attribute things to where they come from. But I think I talk about that a lot when I teach people is that, you know, we've got different camps of indigenous food. We've got different chefs who do things different ways, just like, you know, in any kitchen

in any cuisine. You have the sous chef, Sean Sherman, as an example of somebody who's strictly pre-colonial. And that's, you know, Brian Yazee, too, who used to be on the sous chef team, who I know very well. He does strictly pre-colonial in a lot of his dishes. But then you have folks who, like Sherry, might add a little bit of white rice into the wild rice with the three sisters and things like that. And she makes fry bread because, you know, it pleases the audience and she makes a good fry bread. And so, you know, we have some folks who are really. really strict about it. You know, there's bumper stickers you can get. Some of these conferences

or order online, no fry bread zone because of the detriment that, you know, some of these foods has had on our communities with the high rates of diabetes and obesity and all these other things. And so what I always say is everything in moderation. I kind of walk the line of, you know, do that, you know, have fry bread out of powwow, don't eat it every day if you can avoid it. But there are some families where, you know, due to the history. of colonization and everything that's happened. That's what they're used to. And I remember even speaking with Brian about it one time feeling like he, you know, as somebody who was strictly pre-colonial and he was Navajo having a really hard time because a lot of tribe members just, you know, they don't eat

that way, right? And they have to relearn. And so that's actually brings me to what I was going to say to touch on your fiddlehead conversation too, Sharon, was that. So I appreciate you bringing those up because those are favorite of mine. And I remember that one time, I'm not sure if you were there that day at the food group where we were doing fiddleheads. And one of our elders, sister Betty Jean, she had never had them. And again, because, you know, our tribe had kind of adapted to the farming and, you know, land loss so early on, foraging had really, it wasn't something that I grew up with.

It wasn't something with a lot of people grew up with. Some families continued it, right? But it wasn't really passed down through everything. every family. And we didn't have enough land to really do it. So she said, I've never had this before. She was a vegetarian. And she's a vegetarian, too. So she was thrilled just to have a fiddlehead. And that brought me to tears, to have this elder. You know, and it's so important to teach the youth, too. But, you know, to be able to teach an elder, reintroduce a food that, you know, she hadn't had. And I just, I love that memory. And I, I love fiddle heads for, you know, obviously we all know, we got to,

you're supposed to boil them and be careful. and all those little things. I guess another one on that note, more of a medicinal, right, would be sassafras, sassafras tea, common medicinal plant in New England that we use. It also comes out in the spring. We use the root as a blood purifier. And I have stories about that of searching for that in these early days of indigenous food. But I do love that tea and I love that we use it, but also it gets a bad wrap like a lot of these other indigenous plants like fiddleheads where it's like if you don't boil it this long, which you should do. But, you know, some of these things, you know, not going to get into the details too much. But, you know, like people saying

is carcinogenic and they won't touch it, but they'll take a medicine that has all these side effects. This is some of the issues in our society that we as people who are working with plants, working with indigenous foods, right, growing, are trying to not only teach ourselves, but the broader public, trying to educate as best as we can when it's not always easy because we're kind of being stopped a lot of the time from doing some of this education work

by some of this stuff that's been perpetuated these stories of, you know, don't eat that plant, right? It's bad or because people didn't cook it the right way or something, right? People don't know that. A lot of plants, you have to pick them at a certain time in their life cycle. especially in the springtime a lot of the things that are coming up poking out of the ground

that you can eat during that time when there's young like that but you can't after they mature that's when you start getting into trouble and a lot of people think that fiddle heads are you know you just can go out and you can just harvest them off of any fern and you can't there's a certain fern

that you use for fiddled heads it's not just any fern that you can go out there and gather those from you know so there's a little bit of education to that and there's a little bit of disconnect to that when elders don't remember those things anymore. And so they're not, they're not passing that along to kids. We have to re-educate it. Like you said, we have to

re-educate ourselves and then others, you know, on those issues. Yeah, I think that's beautiful what you were saying about the moment with the elder who had never tried fiddleheads and it made you, you know, tear up. It makes me think of what Rowan White calls rehydrating. I think she says rehydrating our memory our memories um and that makes me think of them and that's just so powerful right to have a moment like that of reconnection that's so profound that it brings us to tears um and i also think of what you said about the ancestors smiling you know and the both of these kind of point to the deeply spiritual work with plants and emotional work with plants and what i've been thinking of as like transcendental moments with plants you know that you kind of transcendent

and time and space and time travel, you know. And I wonder if either of you could speak to any moments you've had with other moments you've had with traditional plants that have kind of allowed you to transcend, you know, and have a spiritual moment with, or just like a profound moment with plants that was meaningful to you. I would give one example when Sharon and I did the cooking in the wigwam. I love this festival. They have an Essex, Connecticut's non-indigenous run, but they have the shad bake. And so I was doing some of these events with the Native Food Discussion Group. I was bringing people out to things that maybe we couldn't get the shad, you know,

but we went to the shad bake in Essex and we could eat this indigenous fish that was only available for a few weeks of the year. And so we were watching how they were cooking it over the fire and all these things with the, you know, with the stakes. And so Sharon said, you know, let's do something like that in the wigwam. And it was, you know, a couple years in the making. and we had to get all these permissions and things to do that because it's a museum. And we did it with salmon because it was just easier. And it was also, you know, an indigenous fish. We used to have a lot more salmon in our rivers than we do now.

But we made, you know, salmon on the stakes. And Sharon was really the one doing a majority of nailing the down and cooked it over the fire. And had a bunch of us from, you know, a bunch of us from the group, but also some other folks, you know, other tribal members joined in. We just had a really nice time. And it was just, you know, a moment of being able to use, you know, the traditional fire and make the fish over the fire. And it was just a beautiful day. And I look back on that as one of my favorite memories. Lately, I've been growing the Algonquian squash and that it's such an old seed that, you know, how can it not, you know, over 10,000 years old? How can it not transport you, right, to thinking about older times? So I gave some of that to my son.

And last jury was not even one. So it's just exciting, right, to pass that down to kind of another way to kind of transcend time thinking about the agency, but bringing it into the future, which is what we're trying to do, right? I think also one experience that I had is at one point, my husband and I, we ended up at a seed exchange, like a seed conference. And there was a seed exchange there. and there was a person there and this person knew this person who knew this person who had passed away and this he had collected all these seeds from all different indigenous communities he would go to all different indigenous gatherings and whatnot and people would give them these seeds and he held on to him and he saved them and they were all on the table and they were all lined up and they were all they were all

labeled with what peoples that they came from etc and um there wasn't anything marked mohegan but there were some marked Wampanog, there were some marked Piquot. And I said, would you trust me? And what they were trying to do, they were trying to rematriate these seeds, you know, to their original homes. And I said, would you allow me to see if I could take these seeds and get them back to the people, you know? And she did. And so I took the seeds and I was able to. returned them back, you know, to each of the tribes to see if they could grow them out again.

And that really, that really moved me, you know, to think about that, you know, that I had been just like the right person at the right time to be there. You know, the universe was moving again, you know, so it is all the time. You know, we just never stopped to listen to it, you know, to see. what's going on, what our purpose is. But, yeah, that was another moving moment for me, you know, when it came to seeds and plants. I think that's a beautiful way to end,

but I want to have the space if either of you have another important thing. You either want to ask each other or share that you hope people can have as part of this episode. Oh, Rachel. Rachel, where are you going on from here? I'm here for maybe, if I'm real lucky, I'm here for maybe 15 more years, maybe. you know so so where are you going so my work on this has mostly been education and a lot of cooking my background's more cooking I learn gardening I know how to garden I'm not an expert like the two of you but as you both know so I am working on a book I've been asked to write so that's one big thing

about you know a lot of the things we're talking about today it probably won't be out for a few years I've been, you know, doing some presentations and I just had a cooking demo on Johnny Cakes on PBS, so feel free to check that out too. It's a new show called America the Bountiful, where they have an episode on cranberries. And so I make a cranberry Johnny cake, and then I make a Johnny Cake sandwich, which is something I created for an event a couple years ago, which is turkey, cranberry sauce, dandelion greens, which are one of the things that we, you know, as Native people, we incorporate into a lot of the foods because they've been naturalized for so long and, you know, they're good for us, the big multivitamin. So, yeah, try out that Johnny Cake sandwich and check that out. I did talk to some folks over here at Hampshire

College who are interested in possibly growing some things out here. And, you know, so they have some land. So I'm going to maybe work with some seeds there and help them. There are spaces to do it. It's just hard when we don't always have the space at our home. That's part of but we've been kind of discussing that, you know, that loss of land is huge when it comes to revitalizing these plants, especially things like corn, where we need so much space to separate them out, right? And things like that. I've been studying, you know, more and more about herbs and learned so much from Gladys's book and other herbalists on plants. I work closely with the Penobscot herbalist out here. So that's one piece that I've really, you know,

dealt deeper into the past few years is the herbal, the herbal side of things. We did used to do teas at the at the native food discussion group. Speaking of the food moons, we were trying to build a calendar, which many tribes have now kind of started doing too. And there's some books out. And it's a great thing to see what different tribes and different, you know, seasonal foods and plants. But we were always kind of focusing on the teas in the winter, you know, for the health. So there's so many, so many herbs, you know, elderberry being the one that's most popular, right? But there's so many indigenous herbs that we use for health. health benefits and really just growing out some of the things that Gladys loved during COVID was

really powerful to me too. So I guess I'll bring up that memory of growing the bone set at the museum specifically, which was Gladys's favorite plant, you know, that I think brought a lot of good energy to the space during that time. And it was, you know, it was something that was used during the Spanish flu and, you know, kind of bringing that back and just seeing, you know, even just getting to know the plant, getting to know that plant, kind of put me in touch with her more. As a child, I spent time with my great-great-aunts and my great-grandmother, but she was kind of the quieter one. And, you know, it wasn't really like I was sitting there learning, learning about plants. I was kind of learning things from my other family, and she would kind of just be doing that stuff in the

background. So I was learning it in a way that I didn't always know. Just like when I first worked at our museum, for instance, my mother would say, not going to teach you anything, just sit here with the objects. That's the way, you know, traditionally we learned the objects. And I guess that's kind of how we're talking about here, how we learn the plants, is just working with the things and recognizing that they're alive and have a spirit. Your son is going to be absorbing all this because he's with you all the time and he's going to absorb all this wonderful information. you don't even have to you know like you said you don't even have to pull them aside and talk to him he just is going to observe he's just going to observe what you're doing and it's it's just such a wonderful thing he's going to learn the people that you know too and that that's so

important as well you know so anyways in our tribal future in a couple of weeks we're going to have our very first farmers market which i think is a step forward it's going to be intertribal for Mohegan tribal members because it's our first one and we're going to see how it flies. And I know my husband and I are going to put a tent up and try to glean whatever we can. Things are a little slow around here. They're not ripening as fast as I thought they would, you know, to bring in. Last year I thought, oh, I got so many tomatoes we could go to them to market, you know. But this year is a little bit different that way.

So for us will probably be mostly herbs. And I had a, I had this epiphany. What I did yesterday is I started making up big batches of yokeg. And I'm going to take it. I'm going to bag those up and have those available for tribal members so they can have that ground-parched corn. You know, so I thought that was unique. But don't tell anybody. I want to make it a surprise.

You know, the notes, you know, of yokeg being stored and sacred. medicine containers in more ancient times as being a sacred medicine food, the way, you know, the way they even displayed at the museum right with the diamond shape on it. We have a diamond is used for good medicine. And so it's something to think about. I mean, we do, we do honor it when we make it. And Sharon and I, you know, have done it in different ways where we do it traditionally with the ground, you know, grinding it with the modern pestle, which has the spiritual significance. But then you can do it in the modern food processor, which, you know, does take some of that away, but it's still an important food for nourishment, right?

It's just being done in a quicker method. But I do find that, yeah, the sacredness of it is not always talked about. And I'm curious how you're going to approach that. I'm excited to see that, Sharon, to see your makeup bags of yolk keg. Well, well, I've done it before, but not like I am doing it. And I'm glad that I'm glad that you did bring that up because I have been rolling that I round in my head, you know, how to present that. You know, I may not, in fact, I may not put a price tag on it.

I may just want people to have it, you know, just because I'd like them to have it and to taste it and try it and have that in their household. And it will give me a chance with people coming by, it will give me a chance to talk to them about it, you know, individually. So I think it's going to be kind of an interesting opportunity. awesome well thank you both so much for this time and everything you've shared i appreciate both of you so much thank you so much to rachel say it and sharon maynard thank you also to elissa fredine of scribe video center and w p eb west philly's community radio for helping with editing suggestions on this episode and getting our show

on the radio on thursday afternoons in west philly and thank you for listening and sharing this episode seeds and their people with your loved ones. Please share this episode with someone you love and subscribe to our show and your favorite podcast app. Thank you also for helping our seed keeping and storytelling work by leaving us a review and also

ordering seeds, t-shirts, and more from our website. Trueloveseeds.com. And again, if you'd like to support our podcast for $1 or more monthly, please join our Patreon at patreon.com slash true love seeds. And remember, keeping seeds

is an act of true love for our ancestors and our collective future.