Bringing back First Foods

The underdeveloped area near the edge of the parking lot on the north end of the Vancouver campus didn't look like much as students headed back to school for fall semester. "Just weeds and grass," says Julian Ankney.

But plans, in the works for some seven years, call for extensive plantings over expansive plots. This fall and winter, the soil is being prepared to grow garden-variety vegetables as well as plants traditionally used by Indigenous peoples. Western crabapple. Beaked hazelnut. Blue elderberry. Serviceberry. Salal. Tall Oregon grape. Trailing strawberry. Nootka rose. Additional plantings are slated to surround the nearby Life Sciences Building. Western red cedar. Oregon white oak. Cascara. Toughleaf iris. Kinnikinnick.

Campus prairie restoration, also part of this project, focuses on camas, one of the most important First Foods to Native peoples in western North America.

"Our goals are to connect our communities, decrease dependency on unhealthy foods, and build upon traditional ecological knowledge as well as modern skills," says Ankney ('20 MA English), director of Native American Programs in the Office of Equity and Diversity at Washington State University Vancouver. "We're committed to integrating the gardens as a research site to help us combat food insecurity at WSU Vancouver and the tribal communities with whom we partner."

Traditional foods, foods that Indigenous peoples consumed before colonization and the loss of ancestral lands, play a big role in the new gardens, landscaping, and prairie, which all offer space for outdoor experiential learning to advance not only food security but food sovereignty. According to the definition from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, food sovereignty refers to a food system in which communities "determine the quantity and quality of the food that they consume by controlling how their food is produced and distributed."

The movement is gaining traction across Washington state and the rest of the United States, whose government once not only disrupted but weaponized Indigenous foodways. Today, government agencies and public entities such as colleges and universities, including WSU, are partnering with tribes and tribal-serving organizations to reimagine Indigenous food systems.

"We're in an era of revitalization. We're seeing a lot of opportunities to build programs to revitalize traditions, particularly food traditions," says Landon Charlo ('10 Nat. Res. Sci, '18 MS, '24 PhD Ed. Psych.), an assistant professor of Native American Food Systems at the WSU School of the Environment and a member of the Bitterroot Salish Tribe, part of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation in western Montana, where he grew up.

Charlo's position is approximately half teaching, half Extension and outreach. Since his appointment in spring 2024, he's been working on building partnerships with tribes in the Inland Northwest, particularly the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Kalispel Tribe of Indians. His research focuses on the impacts of climate change on traditional foods in forest ecosystems, food sovereignty as a social movement, and food as a driver of tribal economy. He also teaches an undergraduate course in Native food systems and a graduate course in Native science, focusing on tribal and environmental policy and collaboration.

More and more tribes are working toward the larger goal of having more control over their own nutrition and food supply, Charlo says. Their health, traditions, identities, and more are at stake. "There are so many reasons why tribal food sovereignty is important," he says. "A big overlapping aspect is that so much of culture is connected to food. So many traditional ceremonies revolve around it. And food is an important aspect that connects us to the land."

Charlo's definition of tribal food sovereignty is simple: "The right for tribal nations to define their own food systems." He says, "I like to keep it very general because every tribe has different resources and is unique. For me, it's up to the tribal community to define their own idea of what food sovereignty means to them and use that as a starting point to move forward."

For centuries, the diets of Indigenous peoples consisted of what they could harvest locally and regionally. In Washington state, staples included salmon and other fish, lamprey, berries, hazelnuts, deer, elk, rabbit, and native plants such as nettles and wapato, tubers also known as duck potato. When European settlers arrived, they displaced tribes and upended their food systems.

Treaties, reservations, and anti-Indian policy restricted tribes' hunting, farming, fishing, and foraging activities. "A classic example is the killing of the American bison," Charlo says. "It was not only a really important food source, but it was clothing. It was tools. It was shelter." The US Army provided free ammunition to hire hunters and actively encouraged troops to destroy herds, bringing the number of bison from tens of millions to fewer than 500⁠-and the brink of extinction⁠-by the 1890s.

Surplus commodities issued to Indigenous peoples typically included wheat flour, lard, canned meat, and canned fruits and vegetables, which are typically high in sugar⁠-"a lot of processed foods," Charlo notes. Fry bread, developed by Indigenous cooks using these government rations, became a survival food. Dough is hand-flattened and deep-fried until golden brown, with a crispy exterior and chewy interior.

"Fry bread," Ankney underscores, "is not a First Food."

Charlo stresses, "Traditional foods are whole foods. The introduction of processed foods led to increased food-related chronic health issues."

Diabetes, rare among Indigenous peoples before the 1940s, exploded among their populations. Today, it⁠-along with obesity, food insecurity, and poverty⁠-all run high among Native Americans, who are nearly three times as likely to experience food insecurity than White Americans.

Almost all reservations in the country are considered food deserts, with limited supplies of fresh, affordable foods. According to the US Department of Agriculture, a food desert occurs when more than a third of the urban population is further than a mile from a supermarket or, in rural areas, when a third of the population is more than 10 miles from a supermarket. Regardless of whether they are urban or rural, areas with higher poverty rates are more likely to be food deserts. "This is big for a lot of rural reservations," Charlo says. "People have to travel great distances to go to a grocery store."

That could be changing. "There's been a movement to educate individuals on gardening and become less dependent on outside food sources, and a return to consuming traditional foods, or at least foods that are more healthy," Charlo says.

"A lot of tribes are also developing their own agricultural programs. Moving forward, we could see tribes becoming less dependent on the classic grocery store that's 50 or 100 miles away, becoming more self-reliant and strengthening the local economy by supporting tribally owned food businesses instead of supporting large, externally located food businesses that are mostly importing poor-quality and processed food," he says.

Washington state is ranked among the top 10 states for highest Indigenous populations. According to 2022 numbers from the state Office of Financial Management, the state is home to 29 federally recognized tribes and more than 156,500 Indigenous people. Their numbers make up just about 2 percent of the state's total population of 7,864,400.

Since the 1970s, Charlo says, "many tribes have strengthened their ability to self-govern and have become more economically stable. They are now beginning to devote a lot of time and energy to helping people within the tribe, especially in relation to food. In the last decade, food sovereignty has become one of the strongest social movements persisting within tribes."

Planting seeds

On the WSU Vancouver campus, where the Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge learning garden and student community garden were dedicated mid-June, Native American students made up less than 1 percent of the total enrollment of 2,833 in 2023. Overall, WSU enrolls nearly 800 Native American students, comprising almost 3 percent of total enrollment.

Indigenous gardens like the one at WSU Vancouver can help Native people return to their agricultural roots, grow healthful foods, and become more self-sufficient, says Ankney, a Niimíipuu, or Nez Perce, descendant, who also teaches Native American and multicultural literature, creative writing, and Nez Perce language revitalization.

Coordinated by Native American Programs and the Collective for Social and Environment Justice, with support from the WSU Clark County Extension, the gardens will be integrated across the curriculum at WSU Vancouver. They will not only provide First Foods and other produce to students and their families but also offer opportunities for students, their families, and community members to learn about growing, harvesting, processing, and preserving produce.

"The actual garden is going to be huge," says Ankney, citing its measurements. "It's going to be 60 feet by 100 feet, or 6,000 square feet in all. We're going to have three 20-by-20 plots and 15 10-by-10 plots."

Once the soil is conditioned and fencing is installed, the first plantings are slated to go into the ground this winter and spring. Squash. Beans. Corn. Carrots. Tomatoes. Onions. Garlic. "All of the stuff that normally would be grown in a garden, plus our Indigenous plantings as well," Ankney says. "We're also going to experiment with trying to cultivate huckleberries. We're going to grow sage and yarrow and stinging nettles. And we're going to teach students how to harvest it and how to prepare it so we can eat it.

"Our campus," Ankney notes, "is what's called a food desert. Our goal is to uplift students and our campus community while passing down knowledge and skills through hands-on training and consultation. We're really placing a high value on growing and harvesting our own food."

Plans call for organizing cultural arts workshops featuring harvested materials, conducting assessments and data gathering, saving and sharing seeds, and convening tribal leaders from throughout the Pacific Northwest to address the climate crisis, racism, and more. "This programming is so important because it elevates our knowledge holders, recommits to uplifting our food traditions, and balances those connections with the land and the waters that our campus is located on," Ankney says.

Intertwining roots

A Yakima Valley family with a longtime tribal connection and ties to WSU recently helped launch Yakama Nation Farms, part of a larger plan to expand food distribution throughout the Yakama reservation in south-central Washington state.

The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation bought Inaba Produce Farms in 2021. But its roots⁠-and its relationship with the tribe ⁠-date to 1907, when Shukichi Inaba arrived in the Yakima Valley from Japan, armed with a degree in agriculture. Alien land laws prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning their own farms. So Shukichi and his brother, Tomoji, leased tribal sageland, working it by hand and by horse team. They tilled the soil, built irrigation delivery systems, and planted wheat, potatoes, and hay.

When Shukichi's descendants sold the family farm 114 years later, the Inabas were growing more than 20 crops on nearly 1,600 acres of leased land and land they owned within the Yakama Reservation. "My mom⁠-she's 94 years old⁠-said, 'If we sell to anyone, I'd like to sell to the tribe.' So that's what we did," says Lon Inaba ('79 Ag. Eng.), who grew up on the reservation and, for two years after the sale, stayed on as manager, helping the tribe learn the enterprise and equipment.

The transition marked a full-circle moment for the Inabas. "Tribal people were very kind to the Japanese, especially our family," Lon says. "We wouldn't be where we are today without them."

As the government tightened its policies against certain immigrants in the early to mid-twentieth century, tribal members were there for the Inabas when others weren't. They were there in 1921 when Washington state prohibited people from Asian countries from leasing land, and in 1923, when the state prevented their US-born children from holding land in trust for their parents. Tribal members allowed the Inabas to act as contract farmers. "When the law changed, my grandparents pretty much lost everything," Lon says. "They had to become sharecroppers. They went from farming 120 acres to about 40 acres and moving every two or three years. It was pretty tough."

It became even tougher. In early 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US government forcibly removed Japanese people and people of Japanese descent from the West Coast. Shukichi and his wife, Shigeko, along with their children and including Lon's father, Ken, were sent to Wyoming's Heart Mountain internment camp.

After their release in 1945, signs warning "No Japs Wanted" peppered Wapato. The Inabas were among the few Japanese American families to return to town. Tribal members helped them rebuild their farming operation.

Shukichi died in 1962, and Ken stayed on the farm, helping grow it to 200 acres before his own death in 1996. After college and the start of his engineering career, Lon returned to the farm in 1982 to help his dad during what he thought would be a six-month stay. He never left. He and his brothers, Wayne (x'80) and Norm ('81 Econ.), along with their mother, Shiz, grew the farming operation eightfold, diversifying crops, building farmworker housing, going organic on about a third of their acreage, adding specialized packing lines, increasing ice production and cold storage, and supplying leading grocers. Sisters Diane ('82 Food Sci. & Hum. Nutri.) and Terri ('88 Soc. Sci.), along with Terri's husband Troy ('90 Food Sci.), also worked on the farm. When they sold the operation to the Yakamas, they employed about two dozen people year-round and up to 200 during peak season.

"I saw such potential to feed tribal people," Lon says. "Hopefully, the Yakamas can work with other tribes to share the food. Other tribes don't have access to the growing capabilities that the Yakamas have. They have beautiful land. There's real opportunity here. Hopefully, they expand. I want Yakama Nation Farms to succeed, not only for them but for the community."

Sharing knowledge

Nearly a quarter of the 7,000 residents of the Colville Indian Reservation in north-central Washington state live in poverty⁠-twice the national rate. Just over a third of all children on the reservation live in poverty.

"We have trouble with food scarcity," says Linda McLean, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, where "we talk about food deserts a lot. We struggle with food sovereignty and food access. Reservation residents don't have access to a lot of fresh, healthy food."

To her, "Food security and food sovereignty have become synonymous. A nation cannot truly be sovereign unless it can feed its people. You have to be able to provide food for your people, food that's cultural and traditional and healthy. That's pretty much the goal of both food security and food sovereignty."

This marks McLean's seventeenth year at the Colville Reservation WSU Extension in Nespelem, where she is an educator for the Federally Recognized Tribal Extension Program, part of the US Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture, as well as the director of 4-H and the Agriculture and Natural Resources Extension Program. One of her main outreach activities is teaching people on the reservation how to grow their own food. She and other Extension staff have hosted plant-and-seed swaps, published an annual nutrition calendar spotlighting First Foods and dietary tips, and taught workshops in composting, Inchelium Red garlic, and raised bed, container, and milpa gardening.

"Our main goal is to get more people growing," McLean says. "It's important for people to grow their own food. People," she says, "have a lot of power."

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