Food is Culture

Food is needed to live. Here in America food plays a special role in our everyday life. Fast-foods quickly come to mind when convenience is more important then nutrition. Some search for the finest quality around just to satisfy their appetites. Almost anything can qualify as food these days. Food is just as diverse and rich in history as the kitchens and their recipes. Almost any flavor can be produced . . . for a price. The issue of hunger has always faced the Native Americans.
Many traditional foods are disappearing much like tribes have, much like our languages and culture. The skills needed to use, grow, prepare, and even identify these foods are dwindling. Global warming causing melted ice caps to make hunting certain animals more difficult. Changing weather patterns, increasing sea levels, and pollution has taken and continue to take its toll on our food.
New understandings of GMO’s (genetically modified organisms) has started a back-lash movement away from the companies that use them. The masses are divided by the use and posed regulations on GMO’s. TED talks and other programing continue to educate the public on these matters.
Native Americans use of traditional foods can be seen here at Haskell Indian Nations University. And I’m not just talking about fry bread, a newer food staple. I’m talking about salmon, and the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash. The importance of these that provide energy and nutrition is stressed with stories, songs, dances, and feasts. And our food changed us.
Our food changed us into what we are today. It was a slow process. My tribe, the Muskogee, has started an agricultural program using the exercise needed to maintain a garden, and having a steady diet of home-grown vegetables and berries to combat illness like diabetes. In this program they would tell stories how our early ancestors had plots of land growing corn for miles. Imagine a there mile long corn field, a corn field that would feed an entire town.
This agriculture initiative a way of increasing food supplies and being sustainable. I see food as a way for a people to be sovereign. If you can feed your self, you might have more respect for yourself. The benefits of spending more time outside has been positive.
Food is many different things. Food does many things for us. Food is fragile. Food is the most important issue facing Indian Country.

Rewriting Ancient People’s History

Rewriting Ancient People’s history
September 4, 2014 by tcbuck85 in Uncategorized | Edit
In Paulette Steeves’ article, “Clovis is Bogus: Archeologists Blocked Truth About Native Settlement,” she expresses her anger toward what seems to her as proof of anti-intellectualism within “faked” Clovis sites. I put quotes around faked because this is a perfect example of he-said-she-said that can be found within hard hitting schools of science. Finding a clovis site, or arrow head making place, is as some conclude as evidence of native peoples and their hunting habits. Like: “Ancient people weren’t around before then”, or “this is proof that ancient people only used clovis to hunt food.”

Paulette Steeves is a Doctoral candidate and is teaching American Indian Studies at Fort Peck Community College. She would know and experience sweeping generalizations about her field of studies. She might be looking for any minute details that could send up a red flag as to if historical claims are misleading or totally falsified. This time it is Clovis sites. Is she wrong? What does it mean to find a clovis site?

If the door is open for us to rewrite history then give me a try. It seems that the majority of people are leaning toward the Bering Straight Land Bridge theory. It’s a theory. I am pretty confident that some people decided to take the path of least resistance and acquired food in a different place. I am confident that those people needed different ways, not just one, to kill and obtain food. but there is another theory. Mesopotamia, the cradle of life and civilization, the garden of Eden is home to us all, as some would believe. No, for me it’s a formula for which all life can be formed. The rivers there, Tigris and Euphrates can be a birth place and center for evolution like so many believe it to be. I can’t hold on to the thought that is was the only one. Take the Yellow River in China. Large enough to sustain life, sure. But the birth place of a people, why not? I thought the same with the Niles and Congo and Mississippi rivers.

Can it be too much to imagine a people being here in the “new world” from the beginning of life? Is it too hard for us to come to terms with native origin stories and creation myths. If we can stretch the truth to fit how some imagine ancient civilization could have been, can we stretch our minds to fit the myth?

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

-Albert Einstein