North Star Lane — The Welcome Table

A series of regional stories with your host Michael Goldberg.

In our first episode of North Star Lane Michael welcomes two storytellers who talk about their connections to food. 

Foster Hogan talks about his work with the NDN Collective to defend, develop, and decolonize sovereign nations.

Writer Matthew Miltich looks deeply into a bowl of soup. 

Music provided by Sam Miltich.

For more information including links to accompany this discussion see:
https://ncdn.work/northstarlaneE0001.html

Transcript

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Michael Goldberg 0:00

Hi, I'm Michael Goldberg with two stories for you about connections to food. Writer Matthew Miltich looks deeply into a bowl of soup. But first, we'll hear from Foster Hogan, our guest today on North Star Lane. He talks about his work with the NDN Collective to defend, develop, and decolonize sovereign nations.

Foster Cournoyer Hogan 0:21

My name is Foster Cournoyer Hogan. I am Sichongu Lakota, a tribal citizen of the Rosebutsu tribe. And I live uh on the reservation, and I am the bison coordinator at Indian Collective. My role and the work that I get to do, it's it's pretty awesome, honestly. My journey with bison started about seven-ish years ago, mostly with cooking. My background is in like farm to school, a little bit of nutrition, but mostly with within the realm of indigenous food sovereignty. And so it taught me a lot about my own culture, my language, etc., and also the importance of bison as a keystone species for our traditional territories, our treaty territories. And so when all of this chaos was happening with the government shutdown and the SNAP benefits being paused, that created a lot of uncertainty, fear, chaos, etc. All these all these feelings and emotions. Because for my tribe, our land mass is larger than the state of Delaware, and over half of our tribal citizens that live on reservation utilize SNAP benefits. And a lot of those are are children under the age of 18. That shows kind of where we're at as a nation with regard to our food systems, and it's by design, you know. Across Indian country, all the tribes, all the reservations, their food apartheid imposed systems that we didn't ask for. And you can trace it back in history for for the Lakota, for the Great Plains tribes. It goes back to the 1800s when the US government and the military intentionally sought to destroy our food systems by killing the bison. They knew the importance of bison to us, that it was our staple source of protein meat, what it meant to us culturally and spiritually. And it was Colonel Dodge during the Black Hills um exploration, he said kill them all. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone. That was their mentality, and that was that was the order to shoot all the buffalo for game. That was kind of a pivotal moment in our history because that shifted the paradigm for our our food systems. That with boarding schools, displacement, you know, reservations, uh the ration system, etc. All of those in conjunction with each other really just set us set us back. And so fast forward to today, that's why we are food insecure, we're not food sovereign. And so when that happened, a lot of tribes, nonprofits, grassroots, just community leaders, everyone stepped up, and it was very fascinating to me to see how many entities and individuals stepped up for bison. Because as you know, South Dakota is big in cattle and beef industry, and that really struck me. I was like, this is really awesome to see how much bison is being promoted, how much is being done working with our bison relatives. That's what they are, they're relatives to us, they're not domesticated animals, nothing like that. And so what we did at Endian Collective, our headquarters is based in Rapid City, South Dakota, and there's a huge native population there within the area, and so we started a campaign called Feed the People, and it was a response to the snap crisis. We didn't want our people to go hungry, and we raised money to purchase buffalo meat from Sacred Storm Buffalo, which is a native bison meat processing unit, but also a storefront right there in Rapid City. So we purchased meat from them about 5,000 pounds worth and assembled boxes, and in the boxes was 10 pounds of ground bison meat and two pounds of stew meat. And we distributed that to 456 families. Each family got one box, and also in the box it shared a little bit about why bison is important, not only for us culturally, but what it does for the earth, the aerated soil, carbon storing, it's etc. You know, all these different fun facts, and also shared two simple recipes. You know, we we preach indigenous food sovereignty and uh being sustainable, but with that that dismantling of our food systems, it's really surprising how many people don't really know how to cook and the way processed foods is pushed at people, you know, convenience is is the thing now. And so we we shared two simple recipes that they can use their their bison meat. Very simple, very modern. I like to say go low and slow because it's very lean, it doesn't have a lot of fat on it, so cooking it at a medium high temp like you would beef is is gonna burn it, it's gonna make it tough. And so I just like to just take a roast, put it in a crock pot low and slow for like eight to ten hours. Start in the morning, you're be ready by dinner. It's nice and tender, even it's pulling apart, and it's pretty versatile. You can use it for sandwiches, soup, and so we wanted to showcase like this is a a food security moment, but it's gonna have an impact further along in our in our food system. This is why bison restoration is important. This is why land back is important, because the bison need land to roam, do what they do as land stewards, and in turn they're gonna take care of us by providing us with adequate nutrition from their meat, their bone marrow, everything. And then that doesn't include what they do for us culturally and spiritually as well. And so it's it's a pretty big, big moment. The campaign is still active. If people are interested and willing to donate, you can see it on Indian Collective website or Facebook page. No one should go hungry, right? And then in Lakota Tha and also this indigenous peoples philosophy in general, you know, food is not a just a commodity, uh it's medicine because it's it comes from the earth, um, it's animals' life as is plants, you know, you you're taking plants' life when you harvest, and it takes energy for those plants and animals to produce the food for us to consume. And so you think about it in a holistic perspective, it's medicine, it's what you need to nourish your body, your spirit, to take care of yourself and your family, your community and your nation.

Michael Goldberg 8:18

That's Foster Kornoyer Hogan with the NDN Collective. One of the leaders of the collective, Nick Tilson, tells folks something interesting about bison. When a storm is coming toward them out on the prairie, they run toward it to get out the other side. They have something to teach us, Nick says. This is North Star Lane, a place to share stories about our connections. Today we have another story about a connection to food. When I'm lucky, my neighbor in rural Itasca County, Matthew Miltich, invites me over for lunch. Here he is, sitting down to a bowl of soup.

Matthew Miltich 8:55

At noon, I drop the splitting mall, abandon my firewood chores, and walk to the house for lunch. I find a bowl of soup in the icebox. I made this soup last week, and what's left is just enough for just me. I heat it slowly in a pan on the stove, transfer it to a suitable bowl, and set it steaming on the table. The day is cool, but I'm heated up from my chore, and though I'm very hungry, both the soup and I must cool down. The steam is aromatic and spicy, and I try to imagine where in the world the spices came from that I sprinkled into this soup. Cumin is native all the way from the Mediterranean to East India. It's ground from the seeds of a member of the family Apiasia, but also I use paprika, roasted garlic, coriander, black pepper, fenigric, turmeric, parsley, and red pepper, these grown and harvested who knows where. I follow no recipe but my nose as I cook and couldn't say how much of this or that of any of these I threw into the pot. The source of the water, though, I know, it's my own well, yielding the coldest, sweetest water I've ever drunk from 240 feet below my feet. When I first began to live on this place more than three decades ago, I could not afford a well and so carted in water for cooking and bathing and washing dishes. Soon Lori came to live with me, married me, and my folks, long gone now, took pity on us and helped us put in a well. I've never taken for granted even a single sip of our good water from the day the fiddledye brothers drilled the well into the very bedrock below us until now. The onion I saw teed in the pan before I added water grew in our garden a stone's throw from the house. I remember the day in May my son Sam came out here from his house in town with a couple of brown paper sacks of onion starts. How we bent to put the baby onions into the newly turned dirt. This year's was a modest crop, but last year we grew an abundance of yellow onions that lasted through the winter. When the onions began to caramelize in the pot, I added the meat of a pheasant, boned and cut into chunks dusted with flour. These I browned. The wheat flour might have come from North Dakota. The pheasant did, I know. I brought it home from a hunt in the Missouri River country in the middle part of that state last fall. The night before the hunt, I played a gig in Bemidji, and after the last set walked out into the night to discover three inches of snow covering everything. I drove all night, eventually out of snow and under stars, to a little town tucked into a bend of the Missouri River, where I arrived just before first light to meet my partners, Chuck and Chris Nielsen, and I hunted that day without having had a wink of sleep. A cold prairie wind roared around us the day long, spitting snow that sometimes blurred into whiteout, and the pheasants we flushed caught that wind in their wings and sailed away, all but the few we took, and my soup today is flavored by one of those. Three National Geographic sized carrots from the garden went into the soup. I credit my daughter-in-law, Katie, a ruthless and effective root crop thinner with the size and quality of our carrots. We've gardened here for thirty years, but my thinning was timid compared with Katie's. We never grew such lust root crops before she stepped between the rows and started pulling excess baby carrots, giving the crop room to grow. A pile of pulled baby carrots beside the garden always looks forlorn to me, lives uprooted without a chance to grow to their potential. But the finished crop is proof of Katie's wisdom. Our rutabagas thrived likewise this year. I picked one nearly as big as a football and used just a portion of it in today's soup. Into the soup also went green beans from the garden and sweet corn from Katie's Uncle Dave's corn patch. I grew corn too, but it ripened without sweetness and I fed it to the chickens. So it was a failure on the one hand, but the chickens devoured it, and for our part we got fresh eggs. The last ingredient I added was wild rice, a good double handful, gathered on Goose Lake with my pal Charlie. Cooked in the broth, it plumped up so full that I was compelled to add another quart of water. Just as I can taste the wild woods in a meal of grouse or venison, I seemed to taste the freshwater lake in the rice, and I remember the day Charlie and I riced on goose. I stood and pulled the canoe through the rice of a modest year's crop, as rice years go, while Charlie sitting amidships knocked the kernels from their parents' stalks into the bottom of the canoe. On the lake I have the advantage of Charlie, from whom the wide world except for rice stocks and rice worms and spiders is hidden, while I, like a king, survey the far horizons, the blue sky, the white swans that trumpet from across the lake, airborne flocks of migrating blue winged teal and ring-necked ducks, little green herons, sororelles, eagles, bitterns. Hour after hour I pushed the canoe along as Charlie flailed away with his rice knockers, the two of us taking just the briefest lunch at noon, itching from rice beards caught in our shirts and socks, then pushed and flailed for all we were worth until legal quitting time, and talked as ricers will of next year. Next year we'll be better prepared. Next year we'll scalp more rice water. Next year we'll hit the rice the second it's ripe. We both know, of course, in spite of our talk, that the only sure thing about next year is we, who are no longer young, will be if we survive a year older. I intend to survive in part by eating this soup, now cooled enough to taste, which is full of life. Ah, it's better than it was last week, and I eat every bite.

Michael Goldberg 14:38

Thanks to Matthew Miltich and to Sam Miltich for the music. I'm Michael Goldberg collecting stories on North Star Lane, sponsored by the Northern Civil Defense Network, NCDN Radio. You can find more about the network and more stories at ncdn.work.