Northwestern Indigenous Tour: Food Sovereignty
By Maddie Jarrard and Luodan Rojas
What you can see right now is the work of Wild Roots, a campus organization started in 2009 dedicated to “connecting students to the earth and each other.” The garden features all kinds of vegetables, herbs and flowers planted as seedlings.
Sometimes the food is sold as an on-campus farmer’s market. Other times, it is sourced out to Evanston community through Campus Kitchens.
“The garden offers opportunity for the community to be involved in growing, harvesting and using food,” Ali Ruxin, former President of Wild Roots, said. “Everyone eats, and food is associated with a lot of cultural and communal practices, so a local garden can bring people together.”
Outside of Evanston, gardens have been connecting people to their communities and cultural practices.
In the past few years, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, a tribe located primarily in Michigan and Indiana, have started their own community garden to spread awareness about healthy eating and food production.
The Pokagon Food Sovereignty Committee works especially hard to educate community members about the health and cultural benefits of heirloom vegetables and ancestral seeds.
Gary Morseau, chairperson of the Food Sovereignty Committee and tribal council member, said, “Ancestral seeds are what a tribe has. We believe that they are gifts that were given to us, these are foods that should be in our diets.”
The Food Sovereignty Committee also partners with Head Start, a federal program focused on childhood education and health for low-income families, to promote knowledge about healthy eating in kids.
“Our younger generation wants to learn how to eat healthy and know what foods are supposed to taste like. It's in their DNA, once they get out there and start understanding what it’s like working in the gardens, they love it,” said Morseau.
Morseau comments on the problem that many tribal members run into with eating and cooking healthy foods. He says that he, along with many others, just do not have the time to cook when they get home, and that it’s easier to get fast-food instead.
Many native communities share this same difficulty of finding local and culturally appropriate foods.
Sean Sherman, also known as the “Sioux Chef,” started his own cuisine practices after being disappointed with the lack of local cuisine options. He could walk down the street and easily find Italian, Mexican or Japanese food, but found it difficult to find authentic “American” food.
Since then, he has studied what authentic Native American food would have looked like and how it would have been cooked before colonization. He tries to source whatever food he can from different tribes and community gardens.
“Sean re-introduces native food to members of the community so that they can celebrate and maybe recognize those flavors that are part of their heritage,” Beth Dooley, co-author of “The Sioux Chef,” said.
Dooley describes food sovereignty as about “self-determination” and bringing out the best of different communities.
Back at Northwestern, Wild Roots is looking to incorporate elements of food sovereignty and creating access for people to grow food that is relevant and important to them.
“This year I wanted to do an event with starting seeds,” Ruxin said. “So in some ways that’s an act of seed sovereignty, or at least the start of it. We can then save seeds and regenerate them next year.”
Although working to incorporate food sovereignty will take time, for now Wild Roots serves as a way to create community. Ruxin explained that different student groups come and work in the garden together, as well as community volunteers.
“It brings together different communities within Northwestern,” Ruxin said. “It also engages us with our larger community of Evanston.”