My great-grandparents homesteaded near Flathead Lake, Montana. They farmed their food according to the bountiful resources nature provided. The topsoil was deep and rich like chocolate mousse, ready to accept any seed that landed upon its freshly tilled surface. The homesteads in the area were diverse, providing for a full diet. Bees, vegetables, milk and beef cows, pigs, and chickens all coexisted on the homestead, to be consumed by the family or sold at the farm store. The need for survival and a comfortable, independent life drove the decisions. America held promise of limitless bounty for immigrants of the early twentieth century, like my great-grandparents, who came from County Cork, Ireland. America was a place where virgin forests still stretched out beyond the horizon, and game was so plentiful that what was not raised on the homestead could be easily hunted on the surrounding prairie.
The homesteaders, such as my great-grandparents, who were seeking a better life and the Indigenous people who were faced with racism posed a juxtaposition which marked the era. I loved the simple way of life my grandmother would speak of, yet I knew the dark history the Homestead Act was founded upon. Prior to homesteading, smallpox outbreaks ravaged Indigenous populations; the Salish and Pend d’Oreille bands of Montana, where my family homesteaded, were reduced by one-half to three-quarters. Other Indigenous people in the Northwest who were infected with the smallpox disease were even forced by police to return to their villages, carrying the disease to the rest of their tribe in an act of genocide by the settlers (Lange 2003).
The racism continued, and prior to the land on the Flathead Reservation being offered to white homesteaders, treaties were written and broken, bison were massacred, and Indigenous lands continued to shrink. The Flathead Reservation allotments went to the tribes first, with each family getting a set amount of land. That allowed the supposed surplus lands to be opened up to white homesteaders, which resulted in a loss of 60 percent of the reservation land (Juneau 2010).
My grandmother’s parents had been some of those waiting in line for the reservation land to open up for settlement. I listened to my grandmother as she would proudly tell me all about her life growing up on the Montana homestead. Her stories about the plot of land at the base of the Mission Mountains were vivid, and when she told them to me, as we sat drinking lemonade, I felt I was there with her. Her parents had moved from Ireland during the potato famine to Butte, Montana, to work in the copper mines for $3.50 a day. She would speak of the mining work that eventually led to her father’s sickness and death.
“He worked all day in those hot mines, sweating in his clothes. When he would surface at the end of the day into the below-freezing temperatures of Montana to make the long walk home, his clothes would freeze to his body,” she told me. “When your great-grandfather saw an announcement in the paper that land in the Flathead Indian Reservation was going to be offered to homesteaders, he jumped at the opportunity to own his own piece of land in America. Your great-grandparents filed for 120 acres and started homesteading in 1912. They gathered up a horse, a spring wagon, two milk cows, household goods, and everything they thought they would need to get a start on a piece of land.”
Grammy looked lost in thought, as she was reliving another time. I listened intently, wanting to hear every detail, and also wondering if her parents knew of the broken treaties they were benefiting from. “They took a train nearly two hundred miles from Butte to a little town called Dixon. From there they loaded everything they could in the spring wagon and drove the cattle eight miles from Dixon to the homestead.”
It was hard to imagine. “What did they do once they got to the homestead?” I asked Grammy.
“Well,” she said slowly, “they had five years to prove up on the land. That meant they had to put a fence around it, build a shelter, and make improvements. Your great-grandfather would leave in the winters to go to British Columbia to work in the mines to make extra money, while my mother, your great-grandmother, would stay home to take care of the children and the homestead. We would sell the raw milk from our Holstein cows to the nearby towns to help pay the bills.
“Nine children.” Grammy paused and put a hand on my knee. “My mother gave birth to four boys and five girls. When my father was hospitalized, she held the family and homestead together. I was the youngest and it was my job to do the milking in the early morning before school and in the evening when I returned home. I could never miss a day. We also had a vegetable garden, honeybees, some beef cattle, and horses. I walked out our front door and we had a store to the left of the steps where we sold what we did not eat from the homestead.”
When she spoke of the homestead life she had a look of pride on her face—a look that I realized much later in my life, when I became an adult, comes when hard work and perseverance result in great accomplishment. I was in awe of the subsistence-based way of life my grandmother lived.
“When the Great Depression came in 1929 and the stock market crashed, it did not bother my family much because we didn’t own stocks,” she told me. “We were able to make do with what we grew on the farm and made money selling the surplus. Your great-grandfather was always coming up with new ideas. He started a cream delivery route, picking up the cream from the nearby farmers and delivering it to the creamery. He got paid one cent for each pound of butterfat from the farmer and the creamery.” The far-off look I saw in my grandmother’s eyes when she spoke about the homestead made me wish I was born in a different era, so I too, could experience what she had. “Every day we would walk two miles to school. In the winter there would sometimes be three feet of snow on the ground.”
Even though my grandmother had traded all the harsh winters and hardships of the homestead for a comfortable life as a nurse married to an air force pilot, the values and work ethic of being raised so close to the land, with the constant reminder of where her food and shelter came from, were instilled deep inside her being. As I sat there listening to my grandmother, the idea of life on the homestead, having milk cows, horses, and the great expanse of Montana foothills, conjured up a desire inside me to live close to the land and grow my own food where rivers and mountains were met with endless sky.
This abundance of food was not a result of the lack of humans. It was the opposite. The tribes that occupied all the land across the west prior to settlement did not just passively reap the benefits of plants and animals. They intentionally pruned, weeded, seeded, selectively harvested, and tilled. They learned from the grizzly bear who, when digging for and eating mature bulbs, scattered the bulbets that were propagated from the larger bulb, thereby aiding multiple new plants in the process of harvesting others for food. They learned from the scrub jay, who helped oaks reproduce by losing track of some of the acorns they buried. The ingenuity of the Indigenous people of the region stewarding the land directly benefited the homestead families.
For settlers like my great-grandparents, living rurally and knowing how to grow food to feed a family was freedom, a way to escape the bondage of the coal mines or manufacturing plants. No longer working for the benefit of another man’s wealth, the homesteaders gained their own salvation by staking their claim. But that claim ended up becoming an escape from one source of greed and extraction toward another. Early twentieth-century farmers and ranchers were driven by an agriculture ethos of expansion and accumulation of land and wealth. The original sense of autonomy and freedom from having to earn money eventually led to the tilling of expansive prairies for wheat, with the dollar as the main motivator every time.
As agribusiness grew profitable, the well-intentioned family homesteaders like my relatives got pushed out. Farms shifted from families growing enough for their own needs and sharing the surplus with neighbors, to much larger and, ironically, less productive farms. Export was on the rise. Wealth from the farm income was becoming centralized to fewer farm owners, which sent the next generation fleeing off the farm and into the cities. In the mid-eighteen hundreds, the majority of Americans were farmers. In the early nineteen hundreds, 40 percent were farmers. By the end of the twentieth century, 2.5 percent were farmers (“Historical Timeline” 2017). As the percentage of Americans who farmed dwindled, so did the soils—removed from the prairie as fast as a jackrabbit racing a grassfire. The world’s greatest grasslands were raped and pillaged of their protective coat of soil by the plow, killing the ecology of the microbes. These microbes, such as bacteria, fungi, and nematodes, form the relationships with the plants that allow them to absorb nutrients and resist drought, disease, and pests. Farming those bountiful lands first brought immense wealth, but those extractive techniques created the terrorizing dust storms leading into the Great Depression.
The homesteading life I pictured when my grandmother told me her stories was a far cry from the farm exploitation that eventually led to the environmental crisis of present and future generations. I yearned to produce, hunt, and gather the food I consumed, but I was separated by two generations from my homesteading family. Things had gone really wrong with agriculture during the age of industrialization, after the home-steading era. The native soil and the Indigenous people were removed, and I would come to find out that the two were interlinked. Indigenous peoples had been tending to the wild in a very intentional way. The plant life on the prairie depended on the intentional disturbance and tending from the large herds of bison and other hooved animals as well as the early humans who played a part in the predator-prey-plant relationship. Once the land tenders and herds were removed, the prairie languished. Over-hunting of bison and plowing the prairie by the settlers was in stark contrast to the natural cycles of life.
I posed a question to myself. How was I to play the role of steward to the land and people while maintaining respect for all life and treating all living things as my relatives? The idea of viewing all life around as kin, that nature includes humans, describes kincentric ecology. The term, developed by Enrique Salmón, describes the Indigenous view that humans are an integral part of the complexity of life (Salmón 2000). Salmón is from the culture of the Rarámuri, commonly known as the Tarahumara people. They live in northern Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. This region remains one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world. The people have continued to flourish with their traditional lifestyle by following land ethics that restore abundance to their food source: they gather only a bushel of a plant and leave the rest, or avoid collecting plants if their numbers are sparse in one location, instead finding the right location for gathering. There is an understanding within the people that all life has breath and that breath is shared with all relatives—both human and non-human. Within this shared breath comes the caretaking spirit and the knowledge that health of one’s own mind, body, and spirit is directly linked to the health of the natural world. As Oren Lyons, the faith keeper of the Onondaga, so eloquently put it, “What you people call your natural resources, our people call our relatives.”
There are different ways to gain sustenance from the land. One way is regenerative and comes with an understanding that every time we eat, a life is taken, whether plant or animal, and we can give more life than we take. Soil and biodiversity thrive as a result. This life is treated with reverence, and the fertility is returned after the take. The nutrients not absorbed by a person are returned to the land. A bison eats this way, whether it knows it or not. The act of its biting the grass sword adds vigor to the perennial plant by keeping it free from rot and ruin. Enough of the plant is left to absorb the rays of sunlight for regrowth, like a coppiced willow that continues to shoot up new growth, absorbing water from the depths of the soil. As long as the plant is disturbed with a cut or a bite, it will continue to flourish. Once that disturbance is gone, that plant will languish.
The bison were perfectly adapted for life on the enormous prairie, having prehistoric relatives enduring for hundreds of thousands of years (Callenbach 1996). The bison in return became food for many predators, including humans. The hunted bison, which at one time roamed in such great numbers they could be compared to the herds on the Serengeti, returned minerals back into the soil in the form of blood, bones, feces, and urine. The humans and other predators gained healthy bodies from this nutrient-dense meat and also returned the minerals from their own excrement back into the soils.
Predators were necessary for the survival of the bison herds, weeding out the weak and sick in order to make the whole herd stronger. Predators were also necessary for the health of the grass. They kept the herds moving and bunched up for survival. The bison then arranged themselves in high density, yet only stayed in one area for a short duration, which excited all the life beneath their hooves. When they moved on for fear of being hunted, what they left was food for the life above and below the ground in the form of manure. The bison then did not return to that patch of prairie until that land and those plants had a chance to recover, before the dance happened again. It was as if a divine force were orchestrating the relationships between bison and grass, hunter and hunted, death and birth. I longed to bring back this sacred full-circle food system.
Unfortunately, most of us procure food in an extractive way. When I traveled the country as a teen I saw vast prairies plowed under to grow soybeans reliant on chemical inputs, making the farms toxic to anyone nearby. The chemicals transfer into the body through drift and dust, and children who live in proximity to crops sprayed with pesticides and herbicides show traces of the chemicals in their urine (Ward et al. 2006). I witnessed the torture of confinement livestock yards that stretched along the highways in Central California with excrement instead of feeding soil, creating limitless waste and pollution. This form of farming, driven by greed and heavily dependent on fossil fuels, government subsidies, and external inputs, led to a deep grief inside me. My own diet growing up had been supplemented with what our family grew in our garden or what I foraged from the wild plants, but it largely consisted of the foods purchased from a grocery. With the simple act of eating foods from a grocery store, I had been treating the earth as if it were a trash can that I could discard garbage into whenever I wanted. The consequence of this ignorance was out of sight, like when the garbage truck comes to take the trash to away. With this realization of my own tainted food source, tribulation beyond measure was brewing inside me. I longed to shift the destructive past into an optimistic future, where humans could once again give more than we received.
In this search I found myself drawn to Indigenous cultures, whose transition to eating foods cultivated in rows was not a welcomed change. Reservation lands in the United States did not provide abundant wild food so the food culture shifted for survival, not out of choice. In these tribes the shift was within the last two hundred years instead of my own ancestry, in which the change from hunter-gather peoples happened thousands of years prior. The history was similar across the world, whether Ireland or North America. People from another land came with the tools of extraction and conquered the Indigenous peoples. A dramatic shift in land use resulted.
I needed to go to a place where ancestral pride ran deep, where people did not hold themselves separate from the earth, but where their relationship with the earth determined the meaning of their existence, the peace inside their heart, and well-being of all their kin. I knew that those who settled this continent, my ancestors, killed or sickened the Indigenous peoples, leading to their massive decline. The Indigenous families who still remained were forced to conform to the settlers’ way of life. I felt a drive to recompense the victims of that destruction by learning from them and offering my help, in the form of hands ready to work.
My biggest transition with food came when I was sixteen and I was invited by a Lakota family to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. I drove into the reservation and saw poverty similar to what I had seen in Mexico and other poor countries. The streets were lined with piles of trash and junk cars. Broken plastic toys sprawled on the lawns, and many of the windows in the houses were broken and boarded up. At the entrance lay a casino, a large new building with bright lights and all the modern architecture of a wealthy California city. Yet within the reservation the infrastructure looked as if the people were on the brink of survival.
The land around was desolate. Grey, cracked dirt lay fallow with occasional bunches of sage and sparse grass. In the 1870s the Lakota had been forced away from their land in the Black Hills onto the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The land that was designated as the reservation was not the hunting ground that once sustained the people. It was not the fertile places where the Lakota once lived and harvested roots and plants. With the bison hunted to near extinction by the settlers, the Lakota could not feed their family in the traditional way. They were not farmers; nor were they looking to set a plow to the soil to plant crops. They were hunter-gatherers.
I was invited to stay with the Peters family in their house on a neighborhood street about five blocks from the small town of Pine Ridge.
The Peters family’s dwelling was a typical single-story house, with a small yard out front, a carport, and small windows. The design seemed less functional as I opened the door and the large family, including extended relatives, sat in every corner of every room. A young woman sat on the couch, only to jump up when she heard the cry of her baby down the hall. In the kitchen, separated by a wall from the living room, I heard the bustling of women and an earthy smell like garden soil wafting from the stove.
I rounded the corner to see a group of women chopping up potatoes. Lena Peters greeted me with a warm smile and a big hug. Setting down my pack, I got right to work. Knife in hand, I watched the women work rapidly as they chatted and I tried to follow suit, cutting the smooth brown potatoes just as they did. The chatter was lively and I had a difficult time keeping up with the conversation. A brown liquid simmered in a large pot on the stove, where I put the chopped potatoes once they were done. Large chunks of meat and bone emerged from the bubbling liquid as I scraped the potatoes from the cutting board. The smell permeated the air, drawing people in the kitchen to peer in to see what was cooking.
My cultural differences became overwhelmingly clear, especially over food. On my first evening in the house, the family was in the kitchen laughing and sharing a meal together. I was alone in my room eating my peanut butter and toast, separated from the stories I wanted to hear, from the family I wanted to be welcomed into. Why? I had never eaten beef. My mother had ingrained into my very being the images of cattle standing in a cramped feedlot filled with their own feces and urine, with no defense from their incarceration. I could not bring myself to stab my fork into the flesh of an animal who was subject to mistreatment due to the greed of humans.
Will Peters, the father of the family, asked why I was not eating with the family. It was their tradition that everyone who came was fed and welcomed to the table. I explained that I had never eaten beef because of the way the animals were treated. He looked at me crossly.
Will explained to me, “We are honoring the lives of the animals by eating them. When you eat the meat, that animal becomes part of you and gives you strength.” Though he was usually a very gentle and caring man, he spoke in a harsh tone. He went on to say, “These animals were put on this earth by the Great Spirit to nourish our people.”
Not eating the food that was offered was foreign and offensive to him and caused disconnect in our understanding of one another. I had become a separated idealist by letting my own past experiences become prejudices toward other people and their experiences.
As the evening progressed, the activities were jovial and I joined the family. The next day was the annual pow-wow on the reservation. The children in the house were preparing for dancing, drumming, and singing as they glided around practicing their acts. There was a lot of activity as the girls opened the closets to pull out their dresses and moccasins in preparation. The girls, even the smallest of toddlers just learning to walk, adorned themselves with the most beautiful dresses that hung long, decorated with beads and colorful fabric. Shawls hung over their shoulders with long fringe dangling down over their dresses resembling upside-down grass waving in the wind as they glided across the linoleum floor. From the closet came feathered fans and moccasins that were set out to adorn the house like handmade displays of art. Intricate patterns of turtles with decorative shells, diamond shapes, and patterns of blues, reds, white, greens, and black were beaded into the buckskin. It was a preparation for a big day of the gathering of nations.
The next day, people gathered from across the reservation and beyond for dancing and singing. On the pow-wow grounds, a large circle was set up in an open field. Surrounding the circle was a shade arbor made of pine poles with cedar boughs laid on top in a lattice for shade. Off to one side, a group of men and boys sat around a large drum, singing and beating the stretched rawhide in unison, each with their own long, padded drumstick. The people in the round arena surrounded by the shade arbor danced and never missed a beat. I watched the elders engrossed in the dance. It looked as if there was nothing surrounding them, no spectators or judges, just the next step in front of them and the rhythm of the dance. The dancers looked and moved like the animal they were dancing. They danced the deer, with legs rising up high in a celebratory bound. The costumes were full of eagle feathers, buckskin filled with beadwork of all things natural: bears, horses, turtles, and butterflies. Watching the dancing and listening to the traditional songs inspired genuine gratitude in me for the earth. It was as if everyone were celebrating something big, like surviving a harsh winter.
Off to the side of the arbor, a young girl taught me the grass dance. We swayed our bodies like the tall grass on the prairie while she sang. I pictured the grass bending in the wind and bouncing back up again, never breaking at the force but rather being flexible and resilient. It seemed clear to me the way the little girl was dancing that she had seen the way the grass dances on the vast prairie with the wind as the choreographer and the grass as a million dancers all taking their place on stage. The pow-wow eventually came to a close, but that was not the last time on that trip I would visit an arbor where ceremony was held.
The following weekend, I was invited to attend a thank-you ceremony conducted by a family who had their prayers for their sick child to be well again answered. I sat in a circle with the Peters family as their cousins from a nearby town offered their thank-you or giveaway ceremony, called a Wopila. As we stood in the arbor of the ceremony grounds, the family hosting the Wopila brought out large crates of beautiful star quilts, useful kitchen tools, books, and toys. The gifts were abundant, both lovely and useful. The family putting on the ceremony had had their prayers answered, so this was a way to give back and say Wopila—thank you.
The family passed out food that was sacred to their people. It was food that was not just nourishing but healing medicine. Feeling the soft, greasy mash, brown with flecks of red and white, in a bowl that was passed to me, I grasped a pinch between my fingers and lifted it to my lips. The sweet smell of chokecherries combined with a rich, earthy smell wafted toward me. As the food entered my mouth, a shot ran through my body like lightning, striking through me to the earth to recharge and restore the earth-atmosphere electrical balance. This was Wasna (pemmican), made of ground-up bison, bone marrow, and chokecherries. It was the sacred traditional food for healing during ceremonies. As I ate the Wasna I felt what Will had taught me about the animals becoming part of me. I ate the sacred food and pictured the land where the chokecherries were gathered. I pictured the grasses that according to Lakota belief were put on this earth to feed the bison.
The Peterses believed so strongly that the ceremonies needed to come back, and they live their ways despite the tragedy of their people being displaced and imprisoned. I spent time with that family, got to know where their hearts were and how important it was for them to continue to pass on their heritage in a meaningful way to the next generation. I sat and I ate bison with their family. My peanut butter and bread languished in my backpack.
I knew now why the Peters family reached for the packages of meat at the supermarket, holding on to any thread of the past they could. Their ancestors were taken from their hunting ground and put on that reservation, far from the fertile valleys where their people had flourished. With the large herds of mega fauna gone, the desert had engulfed them. The prairie suffered when the keystone species such as the bison and wolves were removed. It became a desert of the kind where the cracked, parched earth is sparsely covered in sagebrush and a kangaroo rat scurries from one bush to the next in a mad dash to make it to cover. There is so much bare ground that even North America’s smallest falcon, the American kestrel, needs to watch his food source or that too will be depleted like the rest of the species on the barren ground.
In the desolate, remote landscape of the reservation, the only option for food was that of the convenient, cheap, and easy-to-ship variety. What, then, was the next step in unraveling this situation? It was like the Peters family had been given an ugly sweater that did not fit and they were forced to wear it. Their original ways and their bison kin were no longer part of an intact ecological web, yet any thread to the past, like traditional recipes prepared with supermarket ingredients, was a spark of hope for the future.
I sat looking out the window into the darkness one morning after returning from the reservation. The looming memories of the dreams I’d been having since the age of fourteen came to mind. In those dreams I walked amongst dead bodies after a war. Each watering hole I came across had dried up. In the distance, cities were up in flames.
Those dreams were coming true. Rain no longer falls in vast desert landscapes. There is no water for the crops, as the water table has dropped nearly out of reach of a drill. Desertification has stricken many parts of the world, leading to wartorn communities whose only choice is flee to unwelcoming lands. Gilbert Walking Bull told me of a vision he had that a yellow gas would come, killing many people. He said it was only the ones who know how to live like the wild animals who will survive.
This Lakota community I was invited into looked from the outside as though they did not have much—yet they gave me plenty. They welcomed and fed me, taught me their traditions and ceremonies, and never asked for anything in return. Throughout my life, I have visited other Indigenous tribes who shared those same values. Even if they have just a little, they always share it.
After spending time on the reservation, and being at the pow-wow and Wopila, I took inside a way of being that the dancers embodied with the dance. It was not what they said or how they looked, but how they interacted with one another that shifted something inside of me. It was the act of living in prayer. They believed that sending one’s mind to the spirit world to ask for help in living a good life with meaning was a necessity for survival. Consistently, the sacred was acknowledged and held as a pillar that supported the entire community. For me, this acknowledgment that all life is sacred brought me a deeper sense of belonging and connection to the life around me.
I was still tracking animals voraciously at the time, and I brought this way of being with the sacred into the trail. Tracking became my dance. At times when I tracked I would go to a place and picture in my mind the animal I wanted to track, say a thanksgiving and a prayer, the way I had learned from the Lakota, and do a dance for that animal. I used my feet as drumsticks and the earth as a large drum, matching my rhythm with the rhythm of the earth like an elder I had seen in the pow-wow ring. However hunched and frail, he still embodied the energy of the deer he was dancing. I let go of the clock that kept so many stuck to a schedule based on a false reality and opened up my body as a radar, surrendering to the subtlest of sensations from the land.
The grass dance the little girl taught me, as well as those I witnessed at the pow-wow, were part of the culture of hunting and gathering. Relating to life through the dance created empathy toward the animals hunted and the plants gathered. I understood then why it was so important to keep those dances alive. By dancing, the Peters family and their community could still tap into their ancestral way of life.
Growing up we ate shellfish gathered in the ocean and inlets. We ate fish when we knew where it was from. We did not eat anything with four legs. I remember as a little girl going through the grocery store holding onto my mother’s pant leg, peering out to see those packages of meat in the display case, all red and bloody with plastic covering them on a little Styrofoam tray bearing no resemblance to their original form. We never reached down for those packages. We did not eat animals that were not able to be free like the fish in the ocean. This shaped my view of food. I proudly stated my food status during school lunches or at sleepovers. I enjoyed being different. Having knowledge of food gave me power.
Before my wilderness training, when I was traveling as a teenage vagabond, I became vegan to protest the cruelty of animals in confinement and the chemicals that were used in the leather industry. I did not want any part of the chromium leather tanning which replaced plant or animal tanning and was more often than not done in poor countries where the carcinogenic chemical ended up contaminating nearby bodies of water, not to mention the bodies of the workers. I also did not want to be part of the industrialized agriculture system, where nutrients were being eroded at an unprecedented rate. Soils once rich with organic matter, minerals, and nutrients were replaced with synthetic fertilizers applied at such a large scale that it leached into the groundwater, contaminated the water, and suffocated aquatic life. As long as I did not have to actually work or do anything physical, I could deplete my body of those foods that were derived directly from animals. But the vegan diet took its toll on my body in a short time. My energy was depleted and my eyes sunken from the nutrients I was missing out on by avoiding animal fats and protein. I slept a lot. When I returned from a trip, my mother saw that my eyes had dark circles under them. I was malnourished. She quickly cooked me a meal of fish and eggs that boosted me back to health and marked the end of my vegan lifestyle.
I felt that the monocultures of our modern Western human lives were echoed in our food. The row crops grown and shipped were like the lines of young adults waiting for a degree just to be trucked to some unknown destination beyond their will. I had seen the agricultural fields of the open plains as I traveled the country. The fertile valleys where bison once roamed were now engulfed in crops of corn and soy laid out in lines as straight as jet streams as far as the eye could see. What made people stop caring about producing food for their own basic needs? It felt as if no one even cared about the food they put in their mouths, where it came from, how many lives were destroyed in the process, or what it did to their very own bodies. Food for people was the latest addiction; we were living for the next quick fix, not fully understanding the consequences.
Finding the foods aligned with my values and my body’s energy requirements became my primary motive throughout my teenage years. After trying out every diet from vegan to paleo, after wasting away without animal protein and then tasting the electric nutrition of pemmican, I held a vision of my own perfect diet. This was one where I grew my own food like my homesteading great-grandparents had, one where what I did not grow I would supplement from the wild plants and animals that surrounded me. Each one of these foods I consumed would come from a source that regenerated the earth’s soils instead of depleting them. I wanted my food choices to be good for the earth I loved: I wanted to be a regenetarian.
When I had stepped out of the wilderness after my clothes caught on fire, I felt a calling to find a regenerative solution to humans living on this earth. Any other path felt like suicide for the entire human species. When Gilbert Walking Bull spoke of the time that would come when the humans who knew how to live like the wild animals would survive, he always had one caveat: The visions he received from the spirits were in spirit time. He could not translate the spirit time to calendar years. Running into the wilderness and waiting for the earth to come to an end from the destruction caused by my own species would be selfish and unproductive. A fire was ignited in me that night at Cedar Falls when I surrendered myself to the elements. I became aware that my vision was part of a solution, one where people learned to adapt to the ever-changing ecosystem and find ways to live abundant lives while at the same time restoring abundance in earth’s life forms. And now food and agriculture became paramount in that vision.
Becoming a regenetarian meant treating food as sacred medicine like the pemmican and creating more life whenever a life was taken, whether plant or animal. I needed to start to think like a tender of the prairie.