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The Lakota Food Summit gives hope



Our tribes, like many others in America, have been the children of dictatorship and have for two hundred years been taught that TRIBALISM is the enemy of well-being. Our fellow writers talk of the hopelessness of it all even suggesting that the enforced assimilation of those ideas of western opinions have somehow worked. In despair we look around at the chaos, the injustice.
Then, what may be called The Lakota Spring happens right here in our city and it is called The Lakota Food Summit and we begin to know that for the last half century and before, we have been the children of revolution, not dictatorship.
Our languages, while endangered, are still spoken, learned, revived. Our lands are still occupied by its original owners and governed by survival tribalism which says our demand that we be allowed to be ourselves isn’t a crime. Our survival in our own environment is not the cause for turmoil as the white occupiers have told us.
For three days in this cold February month, a communal presentation called The Lakota Food Summit drew hundreds of us together in a local hotel to talk of how to eat, how to cook, how to pay attention to the environment of The Northern Plains, how to engage in plantings and harvesting of foods that sustained our ancestors for centuries. Such a presentation is a kind of Revolution of Tribal Intellectualism.
A young Indian chef from Rosebud Reservation, Sean Sherman, started the February event with a rather thorough introduction to the history of how much of the Siouan knowledge of the culinary and food past has been lost. Sherman is based now in Minnesota and has a restaurant of native culinary arts and skills from which he writes books, lectures and teaches on indigenous food knowledge.
He introduced to our community a cadre of young native food scholars who carry his ideas of recall and sustainability that has re-created the past, and they served up their dishes as samples of how to eat and cook indigenous foods.
He tells us we are the first-born and rightful sons and daughters of this land from which we and our ancestors have learned survival. It was a repackaging of how food can bring stability to our lives. Or not.
Everybody should pay attention especially in this era of fast foods that attack our ailing bodies with untold numbers of illnesses brought about by what we eat.
The highlight of the entire event, for me, was the talk given by Alex White Plume from Oglala Sioux Tribe who for most of his life has championed the understanding and use of Hemp, one of the major indigenous crops of the Northern Plains, how it has grown all along the Missouri River for centuries and how it has always sustained life and health for the Dakotapi.
He, too, gave the history of the eradication of this crop and the many thefts of indigenous knowledge which probably started over 500 years ago resulting in, for him and for all of us, a life-time restraining order on tribalism. Like the destruction of salmon in the northwest, and like the killing of the buffalo in the North Plains, he told us, it has meant a life time of revolution for our people. And for him.
A man eloquent in two languages (both Lakota and English) he has never forgotten the torture, the denial of rights, the plundering of wealth, the fraud, corruption, and the political police.
He didn’t talk out of vengeance, but his eloquent narrative was a reminder to all of his listeners that when a colonist regime creates a country that refuses people freedom from its own knowledge, you know that it destroys anything that might lead to transcendence and when that happens all you have is a regime with a talent for policing, and a regime which creates prisons and predators.
Knowing that doesn’t give all of us the right to excuse ourselves for our own sins, (we all have responsibility) but it does allow hope to thrive.
When you listen to the White Plume story, you know that he didn‘t just have a large family of his own children, he has produced many descendants who today are the children of revolution.
That is the lesson to be drawn from the presentations of Sean, the chef, and Alex, the man who saves hemp seeds for future generations.
It is my hope that this Summit will be a yearly feature for our needful community.

(Contact Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at ecooklynn@gmail.com)

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