PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTINA RAHR LANE
As an Indigenous woman and a chef, our country’s 250th anniversary is an opportunity for me to reflect upon my personal history, how it connects to my food journey, and the deep love and respect that I have for our country, even though that can be very overwhelming and discouraging at times.
I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a child of the Anishinaabe/Ojibwe First Nation of Brokenhead Ojibway Nation and am a survivor of the “60’s Scoop,” where Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in white, Christian homes as part of a forced assimilation program by the U.S. and Canadian governments. When I was three years old, they took me, my siblings, and cousins from our community. There was no warning. I was displaced from my Indigenous family, culture, language, and foods. My three siblings and I spent a year in foster care before being adopted and raised by parents who, fortunately, supported my quest to understand the why, how, and when and what am I?
I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, and it was beautiful, just like Western Massachusetts; the farmlands, the woods, and the farmers markets were very much part of my life. Our family would go camping every summer to the mountains. I have cherished memories of being outdoors roaming the woods for hours. My family always had a home garden, and I loved to have my hands in the dirt and to grow radishes in the garden we planted every year. I still love them! I was very shy, but I loved to read about current events, politics, and history. My mother encouraged me to enter a pageant when I was 14. I won (my talent was classical piano), and that opened doors for me. I became more confident because I had to go out and speak in public. And that led to me meeting a Seneca elder who took me under their wing. I also had the opportunity to travel with Indigenous youth groups.
That’s when I began learning some of the stories of my people: The Trail of Tears, The Long Walk, boarding school graves, and steal-ing Indian children. Stories of displacement and violence. Up until then, I knew nothing except what I had learned in school, and that was hard because that history was not flatter-ing to me, a little brown Indian girl. More importantly, I witnessed Indigenous commu-nities feasting together, advocating to protect their homelands, their languages, their foods. We are still here. I was still here.
When I was 18, I moved to Washington, DC. I fell in love with the pulse of the city—it was magnetic. I was a nanny, student, then legal assistant at the Native American Rights Fund, and it was my dream job. I witnessed modern day Indigenous leaders pursuing jus-tice for our people, protecting land, water, and the environment. Activism was something I felt very passionate about. I wanted to finish college and pursue a career in Native law.
MOTHERHOOD CHANGES EVERYTHING
But everything changed when I became pregnant with my daughter. I was walking in Dupont Circle on my way to work, and I noticed a single tree growing in a little square of land. I felt so sad for that tree and thought “I cannot raise my child in the city.” Her dad was from the Pioneer Valley, so we decided to move there, and that is where my real food journey begins. Amherst was just beautiful, and that’s where I really began to learn about the importance of supporting local food. We were surrounded by family farm stands, produce farms, dairies, and maple houses. It was important that my daughter see the connection between food and where it was coming from. I learned to cook and prepare these ingredients for the benefit of our health and wallet.
In 2004, The Smithsonian opened the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. There was a café serving Indigenous foods by regions, and they served a wild rice salad. I took one bite and my spirit came back to me through my taste buds. With each bite, I remembered and yearned for the story the rice was trying to tell me. I immediately went and ordered another bowl to savor the deliciousness and try to figure out how to include this in my cooking repertoire (the recipe I offer here is my version of this very salad).
We moved to the Berkshires in 2016 and I worked at Berkshire Community Action Council, but I felt a pull toward food. With support from the BCAC team, I enrolled in Berkshire Community College’s fast-track culinary program, and things just fell into place. I attended the first Intertribal Food Sovereignty Summit held in Connecticut by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and met so many renowned and respected Indigenous chefs—Sherry Pocknett, Sean Sherman, Crystal Wahpepah, Elena Terry—who welcomed me into their kitchens. I gained confidence with the knowledge they shared.
I developed a cake, using cornmeal, sunflower, pumpkin seeds, dried fruits, and shagbark hickory syrup as a sweetener. I dreamt about that cake and how I wanted to do it, and I was thinking I’d decorate it with tulle flowers. But Hepsibeth came to me in a dream and said, “No, leave it plain.” So, I did.
It was at another Indigenous food event in Pokagon, Michigan, where, after food service to our Indigenous communities, I heard “miigwetch” which was “thank you” spoken to me in Ojibwe, from elders, children, and my community. Through Indigenous foods, my spirit was finally home. I found that balance personally. It changed my life. I started doing a lot of events, supporting other Indigenous chefs, and then Amherst College’s Mead Museum reached out to me to cater Boundless, an exhibition of Indigenous art and literature curated by Heid E. Erdrich, who is an Anishinaabe poet. It was at that time that I really felt I was coming into my own as a chef and caterer.
There was a painting of an Indigenous woman in the exhibit that really inspired me. Her name was Hepsibeth Hemenway, a Nipmuc woman who lived in Worcester at the time of the Revolutionary War, and she was a renowned wedding cake baker. That painting called out to me, and so I approached the catering menu as a kind of history dive. I looked at the history of markets and what kinds of ingredients she would have been exposed to. So, I developed a cake using cornmeal, sunflower, pumpkin seeds, dried fruits, and shagbark hickory syrup as a sweetener. I dreamt about that cake and how I wanted to do it, and I was thinking I’d decorate it with tulle flowers.
But Hepsibeth came to me in a dream and said, “No, leave it plain.” So, I did. I still make that cake and people really enjoy it. After that event, I went into cooking full-time.
HEALING THROUGH FOOD
Part of my calling has been to understand the haunted beautiful landscape in Western Massachusetts. History was calling me. I began to research King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the struggle for Indigenous Communities in the Northeast. Local historic places in Gill, Turners Falls, Deerfield, Stockbridge, Great Barrington, Williamstown were important in helping me understand the power struggle and the bloodshed in Massachusetts between the native population and the settlers.
When I moved to the Berkshires, I had a chance to have my own garden space. I felt that I needed to plant the traded and gifted seeds that I had carried with me from other Indigenous communities in order to have a healing experience, not just for myself but for the land that experienced these horrible massacres. And so every year, in my backyard in Pittsfield, I plant “three sisters” mounds in raised beds. Corn, beans, and squash. They grow together in one mound and it’s a metaphor for life.
They support each other. The corn acts as a trellis for the beans; the beans add nitrogen to the soil; and the squash leaves help the soil retain moisture and block weeds. Everything works together. When I’m in my garden and I’ve got my hands in my dirt, or my hands cooking something up— that is helping me get through this time and remain hopeful. As an Indigenous woman, I still love and hope and believe in the values of an America that I know is still there. My ancestors taught me that.
At the 250th anniversary of our country, I am reminded that as an Indigenous woman, it took almost 200 years to be granted citizenship as a woman and as an Indigenous person. The Declaration of Independence refers to the “Merciless Indian Savages.” When I celebrate the Fourth of July as an Indigenous woman raising an Indigenous woman, it’s been important to me to include humor while remembering the struggle and the hope. Our little family would be at the Cape during the Fourth of July, and we would get our “merciless Indian savages” on with boiled lobsters (what’s more savage than eating lobster?), accompanied by this salad.
I have so much more to say about the complexity of our histories, but for now, I will leave you with this recipe that for me represents balance in a dish. Manoomin, wild rice, is the food of my Anishinaabe people; with the purple potatoes, we symbolically smash the injustice that caused so much pain; with a Three Sisters sauté, we embrace the matriarchy; and the maple Dijon dressing and Indigenous glitter add sweetness and light. I think we are in a time where that patriarchal value of greed and extraction is not working. So let’s embrace the matriarchy. Let’s start growing, let’s start planting. When we heal and protect the landscape, the water, our foods, we heal and protect our hearts and future. We heal for our grandchildren’s children.
