AC Discussion | Gathering: Native Food Sovereignty
On October 18th, Mi’oux Stabler and Lydia Cheshewalla sat down with Casey Welsch for a conversation about food sovereignty’s role in confronting generations of colonial dispossession and revitalizing community health and cultural autonomy.
Read through an abridged transcript of their conversation below, and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Title of Discussion: Gathering: Native Food Sovereignty
Panelist 1: Mi’oux Stabler.
Panelist 2: Lydia Cheshewalla
Moderator: Casey Welsch
Date of Discussion: October 18th, 2024
List of Acronyms: [MS] = Mi’oux Stabler; [LC] = Lydia Cheshewalla; [CW] = Casey Welsch; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PF] Hi everybody. My name is Peter. Welcome to tonight's panel discussion marking the closing of Gathering, a collaborative exhibition, organized by Valerie St Pierre Smith. The exhibition considers the act of gathering–gathering kin, gathering medicine, gathering songs–as an embodied practice that uplifts Indigenous lifeways and ancestral healing practices. To help expand on those themes, tonight, we'll be talking about Native food sovereignty with Mi’oux Stabler and Lydia Cheshwalla during a conversation moderated by Casey Welsch.
[CW] Thank you, Peter. My name is Casey Welsch. I'm a writer and Chef working here in Omaha, and it's my pleasure to welcome Mi’oux and Lydia to this panel this evening, and I will let them introduce themselves.
[LC] Thank you. My name is Lydia Cheshewalla. I'm an Osage ephemeral artist working and living across the Great Plains ecoregion. I'm originally from Oklahoma, specifically Pulaski, Oklahoma, one of the three districts of my tribal nation, the Osage Nation. I’m Deer Clan, my family is the Cheshewallas. I lived in Nebraska for seven months, for a season in 2021, as part of my prairie pathways research. I'm really fascinated by this ecosystem that expands through the whole center of the country, primarily because it is a man-made ecosystem that was made by the Indigenous population of Turtle Island through the repeated and intentional application of fire to land in tandem with raising animals and pollinators, and it's one of our major migratory pathways for birds and pollinators. And so it's really important that we see these things as connected, because they become disconnected and risk collapsing migratory paths, which are super important to food ways as well.
[MS] My name is Mi’oux Stabler. I'm from the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation, which many of you know as the city of Omaha. This is our ancestral land, and our reservation is about an hour north of here. I reside here in Omaha. I’m into a lot of urban ag, prairie scaping is what I like to call it, where I introduce native, indigenous prairie plants back into urban areas, and try to restore little bits of the ecosystem bit by bit.
[CW] Thank you. To get started, can you talk about what sovereignty means to you?
[LC] There's a few ways to define it, and they each have their own layer. In the most basic, stripped down sense, sovereignty is just the right to be, the right to being, the right to the expressions of your cosmology. When we kind of scale up into the complexity of being Indigenous in the United States of America, sovereignty really comes down to a legal term, and to have sovereignty is to be acknowledged as existing people and independent nations and cultures. To maintain your claim to sovereignty, you have to be able to prove three things: that you have your ancestral land or that you have land as a Tribal nation; that is that you have a language and religion, you have practices that are unique to your people; and that you have people who are federally recognized as members of a Tribal nation.
And so we're talking about blood quantum. Blood quantum is obviously a very complex issue that imposed a definition of sovereignty onto Native people. The realities of settler colonialism are such that they continue to cut off options for us to really have independent sovereign nations as opposed to dependent sovereign nations. So it's a tricky thing because we're finding this legal framework to have our sovereignty, but then there's this other reality that we're individual tribes and we're all approaching sovereignty on these different fronts, for different reasons, and with different resources. For me, It's really just about maintaining a connection to practicing our belief systems, living in those ways, revitalizing our languages, going to ceremony. Sovereignty is about maintaining those connections. It's a lot of things. I don't know if there's one good way to define it, because it is so entrenched in what's called Indian Law.
[MS] Yeah, I guess when I think of sovereignty, I think of an agreement, nation to nation and what it means on paper versus what it means in action. In reality, those are completely different things and that has always been the issue for Native people since settlers arrived here. I think sovereignty gets divided into these segments, like food sovereignty, but there's a lot of different aspects of sovereignty, and it's such a big topic that we can focus on something like food sovereignty, but that's just one point on a broad spectrum. Even within the realm of food sovereignty, what kind of sovereignty are we talking about? Are we talking about the sovereignty to grow and eat our traditional foods? Or, are we also including the sovereignty of our kin, our plant relatives? They, themselves have a right to be here. There's sovereignty in that.
[CW] You both mentioned that a lot of your work involves stewarding land. Can you talk more about growing traditional foods? What are some more traditional food practices that you’re working to bring back?
[MS] I wouldn't say I'm necessarily trying to bring anything back. Indigenous food and land use practices have evolved so much over the centuries that we can talk about the past 250 years, thousands of years, five years. It depends on what you want to include. For me, it's not necessarily about just the food. We have plants in this region that we'll never, ever see again. And we have a lot more that are very close to extinction. And if we can help some of them live and thrive, to me, that's a win. Now, some of those plants are traditional foods, like milkweed, for instance. Introducing that back into the diet is pretty cool, but I think the big thing I've been focusing on the past couple years is helping people change how they see our food systems.
I mentioned milkweed. I’ll also mention sunflowers for a little context before what I say next. For the past couple of years, The Unceded Native Artist Garden that is located at the Joslyn Castle, our main source of funding came through UNL’s Extension Office. If any of y'all work in academia or universities, you know how hard it is to get things funded. And their biggest thing was that they wanted to see numbers. I was really pushing forward the use of the funding to expand to include traditional food sources. And so over the past few years, I got UNL to accept milkweed and sunflowers as a food source. It's a small win, but it's also a huge win, because they really pushed back and they really fought it, and it took two years. It’s about building relationships with these plants that are almost at extinction, and caring about them just like you would any other endangered creature.
[LC] I think it's important for me and my work to really express that no, this isn't embodied practice. This is how I live. These are the conversations I'm having that extend beyond talking to humans. I really am coming into relationship with the environments around me. When the settlers first got here, this place was considered a living garden, and that’s because it was cultivated and lived with in such a way that everybody had food, not just humans. There was food for the bison, there was food for the deer, there was food for the pollinators. There was more because we weren't taking so much, because we were attempting to live more in balance.
I'm trying to live in those ways with my art practice. When I take work into a gallery, I explain that this is not work. These are my relatives. You're hosting my kin and I hope that treat them well. I hope you understand what you've gotten yourself into, because we might not ever work together again if you can't treat them right. And you know, I think that can be like a hard concept for people to understand, but these beings, whether or not we classify them as living, hold spirit and energy. There's this deep interconnectedness. It's not just one thing. It's all these collective things that work together to make a mutually beneficial system when you treat it as such. It’s a different way of thinking too, in a place where big agriculture and industrial food systems skew how we think about the biodiversity of food.
[CW] Can you talk more about coming into balance with the land? Is that even possible under current conditions of modern industrial production? Can it be achieved or reimagined?
[LC] Ask your heart. There are people who are still living that way. We never stopped. So, ask your heart. Do you think it can be that way? Do you think that you could begin to see things that way? Do the people in this room think that they could begin to see things as all connected and care for them in that way? Are you willing to take the time to both unlearn and to relearn how to be in relationship with other beings? I don't think I can answer that question for anybody. I think everybody's got to figure that out for themselves. We do our work, right? Everybody does their part, but Indigenous people aren't going to save this world. That's everybody's job.
[MS] Did anybody watch the news this morning? There were a lot of fires here yesterday, because it's so dry out. I found a free news channel on my smart TV, so I've been watching it the past week, and it was really interesting to hear about this freeze and heat wave and the dryness. All on the same day, there’s a freeze warning, a burn warning, a drought. A combine harvesting beans got so hot it started a fire. They went to the neighboring fields and plowed every rim of those acreages near the road, because they didn't want the fire to travel. When you look at this plowing, you see this beautiful black soil. It wasn't burnt soil, it was just really deep tilled soil. And I was thinking, Lydia does a lot of work on the prairie applying fire, and I get to see her today in this place burning up in flames, where I can see good soil underneath it all. There's a deep thought for you. It's like the earth is telling us we need to come into balance with the beings around us.
[CW] What does your ideal meal look like? Where does it come from? Who cooked it? What kind of food system produced it?
[LC] I guess my idea is that we have to emphasize the local. We’re all global citizens, because we can get stuff from almost anywhere. Maybe we don't have that anymore. Maybe we make deeper relationships with what we do have and appreciate it. I think it's also about locality in the sense that you have to know who's growing, with what, and where.How are the animals around responding? It's getting much more intimate with your food systems by making them localized.
I think it’s also possible for urban gardens or community gardens to happen really anywhere. We can lean into that more, even in this world where access to land not equal or equitable. Who will grow in a small patch. Part of that is also having access to knowledge, much of which has been stolen from the world, frankly, not just from Indigenous people. Those knowledge pathways have been stolen from the world, from our future generations, and I think that that has a lot to do with large food systems. I mean, why do you need to copyright a seed? A seed has its own meaning. It doesn't belong to anybody that way. It belongs most to those who take care of it, and also who understand that it belongs to itself. It just comes back to what are people willing to do and what are people willing to give up to come into balance.
[MS] I like this question, and I kind of take it differently, like, what would be like my dream? It didn't really take me long to come to the conclusion that I would want Buffalo stew with milkweed shoots. It wasn't just about the food, but it was about that whole system that provided it, right down to gathering salt from the river banks. The experience of being eat real buffalo meat that ran across the plains and ate indigenous plants. That is the ultimate and I'll never have it. None of us will ever get that. We can experiment and come close to it, which I think is cool, like Casey, my buddy over here, recently made some milkweed capers. I love modernizing traditional foods too, but my dream meal is definitely something that is just a dream now.
[CW] Let’s open up the floor for questions and comments.
[Audience Member] What it would take for people To learn or unlearn, relearn how to be in balance with a place. What does it take to cultivate an awareness that you and your landscape are so intertwined?
[LC] I guess I don't really know what else to say about it. I think it starts with curiosity. It's also underpinned by the way I was raised, and the cosmologies of the Osage people, cosmologies that I've encountered in other Tribal nations. There's a precedent in our cultures for self-location–who's your family, who's your clan? Which district do you dance in? Where did your people travel from? Where are they going? What are your medicines? You know where you are and you know that who you are is composed of all the beings around you, the beings you're in relationship with. I was taught, as an Osage woman, that when I’m traveling through other people's territories, to carry myself with a certain kind of grace, and a certain kind of humility, because these are not my lands. These are not the people that I was around or the beings that I was raised with. To walk in a way, your presence in somebody else's territory becomes a blessing instead of a curse. For me, that means there's a lot of listening that needs to happen. I better start with listening, and asking what's here, and being mindful that the knowledge I come with does not supersede the knowledges that are present in a place.
[CW] Other questions from the audience or comments?
[Audience Member] I would like to make a comment. My name is Vida Stabler, and I direct the Umoⁿhoⁿ Language and Cultural Center in Macy, Nebraska, which is a home of our people. It's north of here, about 90 miles. I want to say something hopeful, because I'm seeing it. I've been in our district now for almost 30 years, and I've seen it go from a public school system that doesn't work, didn't work, wasn't working, to one that does. We got into plants, and it's been a real amazing thing to watch these last few years. We have an Indigenous garden up there now our kids planted just yesterday. And I'll tell this quick story. We had a little coffee shop there and the cooks are Umoⁿhoⁿ. They co-teach with the other teachers, and they brought me a muffin top like this, and they're all proud. And they said, that's from our pumpkins. So they had grown the pumpkins, and then they made muffin tops from those pumpkins, and it was delicious.
They can all of the food that they grow. We're the first ones, as far as I know, in Nebraska, where kids grow the food, corn, everything, squash, okra, I mean, all kinds of stuff. The kids plant it, weed it, process it. The first year, I think, we had 12 kids working. This past year, we had 50 kids, high school kids. So it's growing so much. Our food is served in the public school system now, and our kids are growing things, and selling things. When I give gifts, I go to the store and I find strawberry jam, or plum jam that we picked from our lands, and it's just amazing.
For all these years, I've been in a blessed position to be working with elders. And speaking of our traditional food ways, we picked our corn, our white corn, and this was probably 15 years ago, and there I am with the grandmas, and we're trying to figure out how we were ready to chaff off. And one grandma said, “Wait for a windy day.” When it came, we put the corn on a blanket and she had us out there in the wind going like this [gestures] and watching that chaff blow away. I would not have known to do that had it not been for my aunt telling me. She's told me and now I teach that to others and I make sure they guard that.
We're growing by leaps and bounds every year. Those kids love it. They're taking it in. And it's amazing to see this finally. We're doing it. We’re feeding and educating our people. I can't wait to see where we're going to go next. I hope I live long enough to see us actually have a grocery store that gives us something more than corn syrup, chips, and pop. This is our hope. Our kids are our hope. I wanted to share that with the people here. I want you to come up and see it. You have to see it. Believe it. It's amazing.
[CW] Thank you for sharing that, Vida. That’s a wonderful way to wrap up this conversation for now. Thank you to our panelists, Lydia and Mi’oux, and thank you to everybody for coming.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
About the Panelists:
Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Through the creation of site-specific land art and ephemeral installations grounded in Indigenous land stewardship practices and kinship pedagogies, Lydia engages in multivocal conversations about place and relationship. By working within a framework of change and collaborating with beyond-human kin, she rejects Capitalist reliance on scarcity, immortality, preciousness, and waste production in the creation of value and remains responsive (responsible) to the realities of shifting ecologies in an age of climate crisis. Her work has been shown at Generator Space, the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Comfort Station, Harold Washington Library, the Center for Native Futures, and EXPO Chicago (Chicago, IL) among others. She was awarded a 2020 Tallgrass Artist Residency, participated in the 2022/23 Chicago Art Department Think Tank:On Mending, and is a 2024 Spring Tanda Fellow through Chuquimarca Projects in Chicago. She has been filling the bucket with water to see if it leaks.
Mi’oux Stabler is a member of the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation whose tribal lands are located in northeast Nebraska along the banks of the Missouri River. She is a proud mother, artist, land tender, and a dedicated cultural advocate. For the past decade, her endeavors have been geared towards the revitalization of traditional languages and land stewardship practices. She has traveled extensively, but currently focuses her work in the ancestral homelands of the Umoⁿhoⁿ people.
About the Moderator:
Casey Welsch is a working class writer, cook, journalist, and organizer. Born and raised on a dryland Nebraska farm, he now lives and works in central Omaha. As a multimedia journalist in southeast Nebraska, Casey started a community news service at KZUM radio in Lincoln, was a founding member of the Dandelion Network mutual aid group, and was a regular contributor to Hear Nebraska and Perfect Pour magazine. These days he is focusing on his other life's work as a cook, working at Methodist Hospital, feeding the sick and those who care for them.