She is part of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe and her mission is to revitalize indigenous food systems, as well as raise awareness of the transformative potential of these forms of food.
For me, it just became a study in the history of what happened to us as indigenous peoples, the history of naming what colonialism is and how it affected us here in the United States.
Basically, we removed the European colonial ingredients. We took away things that did not exist on the continent before, such as wheat flour, cane, sugar, dairy products, beef, pork, chicken, and focused on the immense diversity of indigenous communities. It doesn’t matter what colonial borders were imposed in America or who speaks Spanish, French or English, because those are all European colonial languages. It’s really about understanding the land and the cultures that are still here, despite extreme efforts to try to remove them. And it’s about looking at the positive and understanding how we can all be better together.
Most cultures survived with communal food systems where everyone worked to gather food.
Food is powerful and we have to find better ways, we have to be better humans, than take care of our environment, because our food comes from the earth.
