The story of food is interwoven with power on this continent. Colonizers used food as a weapon of control as Native people were pushed from their homes and their lands were taken. In the early days of the United States, George Washington initiated a military campaign to march against the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (the six Nations of the Iroquois), burning their food stores, fields, and gardens. This strategy continued across the West. Speaking about Native peoples, in 1850 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs Report wrote, “It is cheaper, in the end, to feed the whole flock for a year than to fight them for a week.” With this motivation, the US encouraged and openly promoted the eradication of bison on the prairies. Bison populations plummeted from over 20 million to less than a thousand. Nations that relied on buffalo were forced to change their diets to government rations. Native people were forced onto reservations and the land further partitioned off in an effort to destroy their community food systems.

Families were also destroyed in this process. Children were stolen from their parents and put in government and church-run boarding schools. Though this was considered the progressive option at the time, the children were subjected to sickness, extreme violence, and sexual abuse, and were forbidden to speak their languages and practice their culture. The oft-repeated goal was to “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Traditional knowledge was taken from them and Native peoples were left in new cycles of trauma.

Despite all of this, traditional foods and the information about them still hold the key to restoring wellness. Native people know that while our food nourishes us, we also have a responsibility to take care of the places where our food comes from. Growing and harvesting our own plants connects us with the water, soil, air, weather, and all the other life that surrounds us. We learn reciprocity through our caretaking. The knowledge that was stolen can be regained in the same way our ancestors learned it: on the land. With a better understanding of the web of connections that weaves our ecosystem, we can realize ourselves as a part of that system.

Take time to learn about the landscape on which you live. Learn about the animals and plants. Learn about the waterways and the mountains. Find the gifts that they have been offering and start to perform the caretaking you have been neglecting. Learn about the people whose lands you inhabit and how they were taken from that place. Finally, recognize that trauma can be healed through connection. Perhaps you will find that healing in a garden, in a berry patch, or around a table filled with family and friends.

Bio: Mariah Gladstone (Blackfeet, Cherokee) graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Environmental Engineering and completed her Master's Degree at SUNY - ESF through the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She developed Indigikitchen (a portmanteau of Indigenous, digital, and kitchen), an online cooking show dedicated to re-indigenizing our diets using digital media.

Connection—our human need to be with one another, with community, with love. We say “keep in touch” when we are at risk of losing connection with someone. Losing a connection can become grief. For indigenous people and other peoples who have endured genocide or forced loss of connections with their peoples, languages, lands, and cultures, the need to reconnect with all these lost aspects of ourselves can be incredibly difficult, painful, and life-changing.

For most indigenous peoples, we know that every child is born to a family, a mother, a father, to aunts and uncles, to grandparents and grandparents’ grandparents, a clan, a people, the land. Their tiny vulnerable bodies fed and nurtured and loved by their whole family. Named in their cultural traditions, spoken to in their languages, loved with indigenous knowledge and practices.

Yet, in this country, for shameful motives, indigenous children as young as three were taken away by the government for generations. Sometimes by force, often by threat. Known now as the boarding school era, tribal children were taken away from communities and family so that the government could “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man.”

Talking about genocide is difficult and uncomfortable. History has been clearly documented that the idea to make tribal people more white, rather than literally wipe them out, was tactically and explicitly decided by the government as not only cheaper but likely more acceptable in the world’s eyes. The more blatant and obvious tactics of child taking later became less plain and more nuanced, and arguably still applied in the spirit or rhetoric of benevolence. The boarding school era was followed by the adoption and assimilation eras. Tribal communities and families continue to make efforts to reconnect and heal where it is possible. In so many cases, the loss has been insurmountable.

The children taken to the boarding schools were taught to lose all their Indian-ness. Children who were intentionally adopted out to white families learned similar lessons. When tribal children in foster care are placed in a family or home that is not connected to the child’s family, culture, or tribe, the risk of loss continues....

The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed into legislation in 1978. In simple terms, this legislation is meant to help protect Native children from the U.S. government and white Christian churches. In 1819 the government started paying white Christian churches to forcefully take Native children from their parents and bring them to boarding schools. In these “schools” Native children were not allowed to speak their language, practice their own religions, wear traditional clothing, keep their traditional long hair, eat traditional foods, etc. These children were starved, beaten, and forced to become Christians. An estimated 50,000 Native children were killed in these “schools.”

As a result from bad publicity, the “schools” started to close. Although the government’s plan of forced assimilation through boarding schools failed, they found other avenues to eradicate Natives. They encouraged social service agencies (by offering additional funding) to remove Native children from their families and place them with “good Christian families.” Often children were removed even if social services had no evidence of abuse or neglect.

Generations of children grew up in boarding schools, group homes, and church-run homes, which has led to mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and complex PTSD. These disorders manifest in ways such as alcoholism, drug addiction, poor life skills, and broken communities. A lack of resources and willingness by white society to acknowledge the core of these issues has kept these problems persisting in tribal communities....