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A garden, seen through a fence. On a white ribbon tied to the fence are the handwritten words: “Food is resistance.” (Image: Amy Gastelum)
We visit two distinct projects working with food to revitalize identity and ancestry:
Part one: In many Indigenous communities, there’s a gap in knowledge about growing and cooking traditional foods. On the Blackfeet Nation in rural Montana, Mariah Gladstone and Kenneth Cook are trying to change that. They launched an online cooking show called Indigikitchen and in this episode, we follow them into the field as they harvest a bison and film the process.
Part two: Dr. Keitlyn Alcantara studies the reason the Tlaxcala, an indigenous tribe living in central Mexico, were able to survive the expansive Aztec empire in the period just before colonization. Her analysis of their remains shows they survived in part because of the way they cultivated and shared food. So, with the help of the Bloomington, Indiana community, she started a Healing Garden – a place especially for members of a diaspora to connect with familiar plants, with the earth and with each other.
This show first aired in August 2022.
Like this program? Please click here and support our non-profit listener-supported journalism. Thanks!
Kenneth Cook, helps operate Indigikitchen Mariah Gladstone, founder of Indigikitchen Boyd Evans, rancher on Blackfeet Nation Dr Keitlyn Alcantara, assistant professor of archeology at Indiana University Margarita Martinez Osorio, PhD student of history at Indiana University Andre Bispo de Jesus, gardener at Indiana University
The Making Contact Team
Music Credits:
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Caslo – Freedom
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Jonny Ripper – Opening Credits
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Danny Bale – Grevillia Music
More Information:
TRANSCRIPT
Salima Hamirani: I am Salima Hamirani. And on today’s Making Contact…
Mariah Gladstone: I get to take foods that have been on this land for thousands of years and use them in both very traditional ways and reimagine them in fun 21st century ways.
Salima Hamirani: We visit the Blackfeet Nation and a Native food video blog called Indigikitchen as its founders harvest the bison for the community. And…
Keitlyn Alcantara: It felt kinda like family making, like just making the space for showing up and checking in with one another.
Salima Hamirani: We end at the Healing Garden at Indiana University where local immigrants find an oasis and a connection to home. Stay tuned to all that and more coming up. To start us off, reporter Kathleen Shannon takes us to the Blackfeet Nation to learn about bison and reclaiming native food systems.
Kenneth Cook: Right up the belly around the legs, pull it right around the neck. Once I get past the spine, we can start taking the legs off.
Kathleen Shannon: That’s Kenneth Cook.
Kenneth Cook: My name is Thaeaghoweñs. I come from the Onondaga Nation on the East Coast of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Kathleen Shannon: Kenneth Cook has a long day ahead of him. There’s a freshly harvested buffalo at his feet. And now he has to quarter it, break it down into sections small enough to fit in his minivan.
Kenneth Cook: So everybody’s gonna grab a leg. We’re gonna hold it spread open like this so I can get to the belly.
Kathleen Shannon: We’re just south of the Canadian border, and further south is Browning, Montana, a town of about a thousand people and the headquarters of the Blackfeet Nation.
Kenneth Cook: How much you think this one weighs, Boyd?
Boyd: Yeah, he weighs about 1100 pounds.
Kenneth Cook: Yeah. The last one you gave us was about that, I thought.
Boyd Evans: Yeah.
Kathleen Shannon: That’s Boyd Evans who raised the buffalo. While the animal is on its back, Evans and other helpers each grab a leg and pull, opening its belly. Kenneth cuts a long line down its center, then out towards the shoulders and hips where he’ll separate the legs from the body. This buffalo was harvested for a few reasons. First, the Blackfeet food pantry will give away the meat to local families.
Boyd: Yeah, this is a meat wagon. This is a grocery store on legs.
Kathleen Shannon: But there’s also someone here with a camera filming the whole thing and telling me which recipes call for buffalo fat.
Mariah Gladstone: Most game animals are pretty dang lean, so you’re gonna get most fat, of any of your game animals that are available, from bison. And so that technically predominantly was what was used for a binding agent just to keep everything together so that you could pack it into like little discs or something. Kathleen Shannon: Mariah Gladstone will post this how-to video on a platform she and Cook run called IndigiKitchen. That’s short for Indigenous Digital Kitchen, a Native food education hub. They post video recipes using traditional ingredients on YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms.
Mariah Gladstone: The goal is to revitalize the knowledge systems around Indigenous food to help people connect with traditional food ways and to be able to restore that information as we work on restoring access to those foods in our communities. This is for the benefit of our health and our physical bodies, but also for our emotional wellbeing, our sense of place, our connectedness to the landscape.
Kathleen Shannon: Mariah is a member of the Blackfeet Nation, and she grew up nearby.
Mariah Gladstone: My name is Mariah Gladstone, and I am the founder of Indigikitchen.
Kathleen Shannon: In the mid-19th century, somewhere between 30 and 60 million buffalo roamed North America, according to the National Park Service. Buffalo was a keystone species in the prairies, fertilizing native grasses. They were a vital resource for tribes until settlers systematically drove them to near extinction.
Mariah Gladstone: Indigenous knowledge was taken very intentionally from our communities through boarding schools, disconnection, forced adoptions outside of our communities and a horrific genocide and population decline. We’ve been raised on commodities and on rations before that. And the work to restore that knowledge has to be really intentional too.
Kathleen Shannon: So Mariah started thinking of ways that she could do exactly that.
Mariah Gladstone: I remember thinking we can’t just put traditional foods back into our communities because people haven’t known how to cook with them for multiple generations. We need like Rachel Ray of Indian Country or something.
Kathleen Shannon: In 2016, she started Indigikitchen. Now it features recipes using ingredients like wild rice, blue corn, elk meat, wild onion, and more. A crowd favorite? Her butternut squash and ground buffalo lasagna.
Mariah Gladstone: I get to take foods that have been on this land for thousands of years and use them in both very traditional ways and reimagine them in fun 21st century ways that can recognize that traditional wisdom, but also recognize that cultures are not stagnant and our history and our connection to the landscape shifts over time
Kathleen Shannon: And buffalo weren’t just used for food. Here’s Kenneth again.
Kenneth Cook: They built their homes from their hides. They made clothes and shoes, and they would get enough materials from that animal to survive throughout the coldest, harshest climates that this world could throw at you. And they were thought to be different types of beings that you just respected and shared this planet with.
Kathleen Shannon: Back on the ranch, it’s time to remove the guts from the bison so the meat can cool down and stay clean.
Speaker 1: Are you gonna eat liver?
Speaker 2: No, the heart.
Speaker 1: Oh, raw?
Speaker 2: No, he’s asking dude. [laughs] No, no.
Kathleen: Getting this buffalo from a ranch was actually Plan B. Plan A was to drive nearly 350 miles south to the border of Yellowstone National Park, the only place in the US where Buffalo have lived continuously. Buffalo are built for the harsh winters there, and their population can reach nearly 5,500 after calving season. But that’s actually more than the park can sustain. One way to downsize is for Native tribes to hunt them, which is only legal outside park boundaries. So there’s a narrow window when hunting is possible, a few weeks in spring when the buffalo leave the park to graze grass not buried under snow. This spring, Kenneth and Mariah had snowmobiles and volunteers ready to go. They were just waiting on the buffalo.
Mariah Gladstone: And it’s like, nope, it’s not yet. It’s not yet. And then you’re watching the snow pack levels. And you’re watching the weather forecasts. And you’re looking at the snowmobile reports outside of the park, which says it’s low snowpack, which means that the bison are able to get their food in the park. They don’t have to come out of the park and drop to a lower elevation to get food.
Kathleen Shannon: There’s a contentious history behind the Native buffalo hunts. In the mid-1800s, settlers coerced tribes to sign treaties that created reservations and limited their access to lands they’d always used. The 1855 Lame Bull Treaty set aside the Blackfeet Reservation and some traditional hunting rights. But the state of Montana only officially recognized those rights a few years back in 2018.
Mariah Gladstone: You know, it’s more than just making sure that people are fed. It’s about restoring food sovereignty, recognizing that when my ancestors signed these treaties, they were thinking of our ability now in 2022 to be able to feed ourselves as a community. And to be able to have that right restored and that knowledge restored as well is super important but also something that is deeply personal.
Kathleen Shannon: So in 2022, Indigikitchen was ready to hunt buffalo, but then the buffalo never left the park.
Kenneth Cook: So what that’s gonna do for the future, I’m not sure. With climate change and everything, we don’t know what’s gonna happen next year.
Kathleen: For now, Indigikitchen is using what’s available: ranched buffalo. If next winter plays out as normal, they’ll have a plan for hunting outside Yellowstone. But drought in the Mountain West is shaping up to be a thousand year event. There’s just no guarantees.
Kenneth Cook: Oh, I’ve never had anything dull my knife so quickly. Not even carving hickory.
Kathleen Shannon: It’s now afternoon on the ranch. Kenneth scrapes the meat from the buffalo hide so he can tan it and auction it off. He’ll use that money to buy the next buffalo. He and Mariah hope this will kick off a cycle where there’s a steady stream of buffalo meat moving through the Blackfeet food pantry.
Mariah Gladstone: I heard the Blackfeet word for bison translates to “thing that is peeled.”
Kathleen Shannon: What is the Blackfeet word for bison?
Mariah Gladstone: Iiníí.
Kathleen Shannon: Thing that is peeled?
Kenneth Cook: Thing that is peeled. Thank you.
Kathleen Shannon: Making an Indigikitchen video in the field is unusual. Typically, one person runs the camera over a kitchen counter while the other preps food. The videos are streamlined, under a minute long, and time-lapsed. There’s no narration, just high energy electronic music and simple instructions appear on the screen. Mariah says this format keeps videos accessible, especially for people who don’t have good internet access and watch on their phones. Traditionally, this knowledge was passed down by word of mouth.
Mariah Gladstone: Obviously as millennials, we use the tools that we have access to like every other generation has. And for us, that is this tool of social media. And I think that that can be so essential for reaching folks that have yet to become interested in that knowledge, but may need a place to find that knowledge later.
Kathleen Shannon: It is not that different from how Mariah learned about this landscape from her grandfather, something she says she didn’t fully appreciate until after he passed.
Mariah Gladstone: When he was sick with cancer, my dad recorded hours and hours and hours of him telling stories. And I still have a place to go and sift back through that. And so we use the tools that people have access to. When I go to learn how to change spark plugs in a vehicle, I will look on YouTube. And I think Indigenous food knowledge and Indigenous sustainability knowledge should be just as accessible.
C&C Meats: So what are you wanting out of ’em?
Kenneth Cook: I think just some bones. We need some bones to make sure we got broth, and everything’s going to the pantry, whatever they usually get.
Kathleen: After they quarter the buffalo in the field, they pack it up in their minivan and bring it to C&C Meats, which is just a few miles down the road. This meat is staying on the Blackfeet Nation, but Indigikitchen is spreading resources far and wide, even beyond Indigenous communities.
Mariah Gladstone: All right, go ahead and stick it right there. We’ll cut that leg off.
Kathleen Shannon: Mariah says that part surprised her.
Mariah Gladstone: I think that there is a sense of disconnection that settlers have on the landscape, and they want to feel more connected with those places. Indigikitchen and the platform that we have is a tool for truth telling. It is something that is used for both teaching about the truth telling of how you can have healthier soils when you plant the three sisters and build sustainable polycultures. But also there is no hiding the dark history of the destruction of Indigenous food systems, why we have to do this work today. And so we remind folks about that. And I think that it is a good thing that people are able to look at that history, not hide from it, and work to make amends for that as well.
Kathleen Shannon: So Indigikitchen serves up a plate of buffalo lasagna, a simple recipe with complex side dishes: historical injustice, climate change, and a healthy dash of food sovereignty. Reporting from Browning, Montana, I’m Kathleen Shannon.
Salima Hamirani: You are listening to Making Contact. And today’s show, “The Way Home,” is all about food and connection to ancestry. You can find out more information about today’s program online at radioproject.org, or visit us on social media and leave us a comment. And now back to the show.
You are listening to Making Contact. I’m Salima Hamirani. In the last segment, we learned about what it means to reclaim Native food ways once practiced on ancestral lands. But what if you don’t have access to that land anymore? How can people living as members of a diaspora connect with identity on foreign soil?
In the second half of our show, we head to Bloomington, Indiana and a story from the newest member of our team, Amy Gastelum.
Margarita Martinez Osorio: We have Mint. That’s chia, chia.
Amy Gastelum: I’m walking through a maze of flowers and vegetables. Bright zinnias lean on stiff okra stems. Everything spills onto mulched walking paths.
Margarita Martinez Osorio: in Colombia, we use the seeds. For example, we mix it with rice. Yeah, we use the seeds.
Amy Gastelum: Margarita Martinez Osorio and Andre Bispo de Jesus are my guides.
Margarita Martinez Osorio: Yeah, I have, I haven’t been here since like one week ago, and everything has changed a lot.
Amy Gastelum: The Healing Garden is a triangle spreading over the top of a soft hill. On two sides it meets other garden spaces managed by Indiana University’s Hilltop Garden Nature Center. But on the third side, just below the hill, construction vehicles tear down an old apartment building. When the bulldozers aren’t there, Margarita says the garden is full of birdsong.
Margarita Martinez Osorio: So I’m Margarita Martinez Osorio. I am a PhD student in the history departmentr of IU. I am from Colombia originally, Bogota, Colombia.
Amy Gastelum: Margarita started to volunteer in the Healing Garden when she saw a post on Instagram asking for helpers. It was winter 2020.
Margarita Martinez Osorio: So I was very isolated. And the pandemic was really, really hard for me. So I decided to come, and that’s how I joined the Healing Garden team. I’ve never worked in a garden before, and I didn’t know anything about gardening or plants.
Amy Gastelum: Andre, on the other hand, knows a lot about plants. He’s worked in gardens since the late 1990s and even managed a team of 20 workers in his native Brazil. Here in Indiana, he’s worked at Hilltop for over a decade. For Andre, working with plants is a spiritual practice.
Andre Bispo de Jesus: My first time I come here, I walk in this gate over there. I feel the energy. The soil here has a very strong energy.
Amy Gastelum: Andre and Margarita are just two of the many folks that have made this space so beautiful. But the person behind the idea of the Healing Garden isn’t here today. She’s doing research in central Mexico, so we talked via video chat.
Keitlyn Alcantara: I am Keitlyn Alcantara, and I am Mexican American and grew up kind of between Mexico and the United States. And I studied archeology and anthropology because it was something that helped me understand all the different cultures I was growing up in and ended up becoming a professor of archeology
Amy Gastelum: As a bioarcheologist at IU, Dr. Alcantara studies scientific minutia: dietary isotopes and plant microfossils. Specifically, she’s hoping to understand how an Indigenous community living in central Mexico survived the expansive Aztec empire in the period just before colonization. She’s come to believe through her research that Tlaxcala survived, at least in part, because of the way they grew and shared food. Everybody ate and everyone was stronger for it.
Keitlyn Alcantara: And that is a tradition that continues to be a part of Mexican culture, that it continues to be a part of what keeps people able to survive really difficult things. And so taking that both from an archeological perspective of survival in the deeper past and then taking that to the present of survival and different difficult cultures and even for myself just to survive in new places and new systems.
Amy Gastelum: Dr. Alcantara moved to Bloomington at the height of pandemic lockdowns. The isolation from Covid, coupled with a white rural community, proved harder than she’d expected. Meanwhile, as a professor, she needed to create curriculums she needed to produce. She envisioned a place where her work on Indigenous food systems could meet a contemporary need for people like her, members of a diaspora.
Margarita Martinez Osorio: US universities are very, very hostile places for women, for Latino women, for Black women, and from many communities in general. It’s difficult to adjust to the culture. It is difficult to adjust to a town that is mostly white, where you don’t find often people who speak Spanish or you don’t find often people who relate to your experiences back home.
Amy Gastelum: In the spring of 2021, Alcantara got to work on the garden. At the same time she built a website. The front page makes clear the intention of the project, referencing a workbook from the group, Dismantling Racism. The site states, “We work together with the garden to unlearn practices of white supremacy, urgency, perfectionism, homogeneity, hierarchical decision making, defensiveness, and create space for multiple ways of knowing, relating to land, and relating to one another.”
Margarita Martinez Osorio: Wow, there is a lot going on in here: potatoes, blueberries – those were awesome. They were delicious.
Amy Gastelum: Recruiting university students like Margarita has been as simple as posting to social media. But inviting members of the Latino community beyond the school had to be different. It had to be personal. So the garden volunteers knocked on doors, gifts in hand.
Keitlyn Alcantara: Yeah, and giving away plants. That was the kicker. People can’t turn away free plants. We had epazote and I think we had some chile plants and some manzanilla, which is chamomile.
Margarita Martinez Osorio: I think seeing plants that remind you of home, it’s a really nice way to connect with your memories, with your identity, or with that identity that you are trying to build here.
Amy Gastelum: The Healing Garden is a respite for folks exhausted by living a diaspora, but the pressure of white supremacy pushes in on its borders. The garden lives inside Hilltop Gardens, a space started in 1948 by botany professor Barbara Shalucha. Referred to as the Bobby Knight of gardening, Shalucha believed gardening led children to discover dignity and work, a noble quality for today’s living. Hilltop Gardens itself sits on university property and all of that is surrounded by a small town in rural southern Indiana.
Andre Bispo de Jesus: What’s this one here, Margarita?
Margarita Martinez Osorio: Oh, I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know all of the plants that are growing, but I take care of them. There was chamomile here, a lot of chamomile, marigold. Calendula. There is also calendula.
Amy Gastelum: Andre says when he was a kid, his grandmother organized a community food garden on an unused lot.
Andre Bispo de Jesus: One day, my grandma say, “We need to make a community garden.”
Amy Gastelum: Everyone in the neighborhood pitched in to help. There were no separate plots. If somebody showed up, they weeded everything. They watered everything. And they all ate the produce. This is how Andre thinks a community garden should be.
Andre Bispo de Jesus: You’ll have a big space, so a lot of people go walk together.
Keitlyn Alcantara: Like, I felt a little bit wary at times ’cause we have this garden. And then people kind of have to walk through the other spaces. And I’m always kind of crossing my fingers and hoping that like – I hope that they’re as welcoming as we were trying to be and trying to lead by example and hope that people can see how successful that is and what the difference is and embrace it as well.
Amy Gastelum: The garden team have hosted dinners and family days, even art projects. But the bulk of what happens in the garden is just gardening: watering, weeding, composting, eating from the vine. The maintenance itself pulls community together. And as people gather, the garden becomes what they need it to be.
Keitlyn Alcantara: One day when it was a volunteer Saturday, and it was rainy and people still showed up. And we went into the hoop house, which is like a plastic greenhouse. And it was still chilly outside. And we went in there and we sat on the ground and were listening to the rainfall. And I decided to just have everybody kind of journal what they would like the space to become ‘cause we’re still in the early spring where we hadn’t fully decided everything. And I just remember the feeling of calm contentment. It felt kinda like family making, like just making the space for showing up and checking in with one another every week. And I think that that kind of collective experience of just creating that team was really powerful.
Margarita Martinez Osorio: I feel for me it’s a space where I can breathe and where I can learn from the plants because I’ve learned a lot from the plants themselves. So for example, there was a storm, a heavy, heavy storm in Bloomington like one month ago or so. And when I came to the garden that day of the storm with my mom, the milpas, the corn, was broken. And I was like, “Oh my God, the milpas are ruined.” I was like, “Oh my God.”
So we spent like three hours trying to support them with other plants and we created a space of healing for the milpas. And it was beautiful because in terms of my personal life, I was having a hard time making sense of the PhD and of what am I doing here.
And seeing the milpas growing and seeing how we help them grow and seeing how other plants in the garden are helping them grow, I think they help me to recognize that vulnerability, but also the power of community and the power of other people’s care in our own growth. So I know that sounds really, really cheesy, but that is a lesson I learned from the garden, for example.
Keitlyn Alcantara: I think one of the things I’m most grateful for in the garden is that it grows no matter what. I was real anxious those first few months of March, April, May because it was just brown. And then we had all of a sudden all of these plants showing up that we didn’t even plant. And then the things that we planted just took off. And you know, this year when we started again, I kind of had that memory, a reminder, of like stuff will grow here. It’s going to look beautiful whether you are right on top of everything or if you miss some things or if you need a break.
Margarita Martinez Osorio: So we are trying to put labels not only describing the plants, but also like fun labels, like “If you were a plant, what plant will you be?” So we have this quote about the fragrance of strawberries and how strawberries give us hope when we smell it.
Amy Gastelum: You wanna read it?
Margarita Martinez Osorio: Yep. “A great longing is upon us to live again in a world made of gifts. I can sense it coming like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze.”
We planted these flowers in May – no, April. I think it was April. So that is gonna be like my legacy with the garden. So those flowers I planted. Yeah, those.
Amy Gastelum: From the Healing Garden on the Indigenous homelands of the Miami, Shawnee, Potawatomi, and Delaware people, I am Amy Gastelum.
Salima Hamirani: And that does it for today’s show. If you like what you’ve heard, please join us online and leave us a comment. You can visit our website at radioproject.org. Our reporters today were Amy Gastelum and Kathleen Shannon. I’m Salima Hamirani. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
