For Siċaŋġu Nation, Taking Food Sovereignty Back Means Eating Climate-Friendly

On a Wednesday summer evening on the Rosebud Reservation, members of the Siċaŋġu Nation arrange twelve tables to form a U around the parking lot of a South Dakota Boys & Girls Club. The tables at the Siċaŋġu Harvest Market are laden with homemade foods for sale — tortillas, cooked beans, pickles and fresh squeezed lemonade. The market is one of many ways the nonprofit increases access to traditional and healthful foods that also happen to come with a low climate impact. The Lakota, of which Siċaŋġu is one of seven nations, were traditionally hunters and gatherers, but today, the Siċaŋġu Co nonprofit is building on both new and old traditions to fulfill its mission.

The market is one component of the group’s food sovereignty work, which also includes cultivating mushrooms and caring for a bison herd. Siċaŋġu Co is also working on housing, education and programs that support physical and spiritual wellness. But food came first. “We started with food because it’s so universal. Not just as a need but as a grounding cultural and family force,” says Michael Prate, who spearheaded the program in its initial stages. “It’s where people come together to build relationships.”

The food inequities that Siċaŋġu Co is working to address can be traced back to the eradication of bison herds by white settlers during the 1800s. For many Lakota, bison are akin to family and play an integral part in both their physical and spiritual lives. Millions of bison used to roam these plains, but when colonizers pushed West, they slaughtered the animals en masse, both to make room for the cattle herds they brought with them and to disrupt the Lakota way of life and force them onto reservations.

Mushrooms For Health and Sustenance

At the market, Siċaŋġu Co member Frederick Fast Horse shows off the mushrooms that he has foraged and raised to passersby. According to an important story passed down in Lakota history, the Lakota were once cave dwellers, and mushrooms were key to their survival, Fast Horse tells Sentient. These critical fungi are more than just calories though, as Fast Horse believes mushrooms are part of what helped Lakota stay so healthy for centuries, until the effects of colonization, which shifted the Nation’s diet to a heavy reliance on dairy and processed meats. “Every single mushroom actually coincides and targets a specific organ inside of your body,” he tells me.

In addition to being a skilled mycologist and forager, Fast Horse is also the chef at the nonprofit’s school, where he is reintroducing culturally significant ingredients to the students. Fast Horse makes breakfast and lunch for around 70 students and staff each day. The typical fare is pretty simple, he says: dishes made of just a handful of ingredients, plus a broth and spices.

In collaboration with school leadership, Fast Horse is developing dietary guidelines that reflect more traditional foods and agricultural practices. This way of eating amounts to “living off of the land.” It means eating “all the foods that are already around us, everything that you grow and very simplistic methods of preparing food and eating it,” says Fast Horse.

The diet they’re launching at the school isn’t just culturally important, it’s also better for the students’ health, according to Fast Horse who is very critical of the modern, industrialized food system. When discussing the FDA, he says “They don’t care about your health. They’re only caring about mass production.”

A diet that leans more on mushrooms and plants also happens to be more climate-friendly than the typical U.S. diet, in which beef is consumed four times more than the global average. In the big picture of global greenhouse gas emissions, somewhere between 12 and 20 percent of all emissions comes from meat and dairy farms. While the goal of Siċaŋġu Co isn’t explicitly to eat less meat, it does aim to boost access to traditional foods. This includes both low-emissions plants and mushrooms that are locally harvested and bison raised on a very small scale, treated as “kin,” in a way that looks nothing like a factory farm.

Native-Owned Bison Are Family

Rosebud Reservation is home to the largest Native-owned bison herd with over a thousand animals roaming 28,000 acres. Bison are ruminants, like cattle, which means they too belch methane, but bison offer a variety of ecosystem benefits thanks to the way they live on the land.

While herds of cattle also graze nearby, the differences are stark. Cattle are destructive to everything, says Siċaŋġu Nation member Karen Moore. Moore, who manages the food sovereignty initiative and lives on the reservation, describes how grazing cows tend to concentrate together, sometimes feasting on a single type of plant until it’s depleted. Bison are more likely to  cover more ground when they graze, eating a variety of plants, which has a gentler impact on the ecosystem.

Last year, two animals from the Nation’s herd were donated to the school. With that meat, Fast Horse says he has been able to replace 75 percent of the red meat the school would have otherwise procured.

Getting the students to eat more culturally significant foods is not without its challenges, however. If one popular student decides they don’t like a particular dish then all the other kids follow suit, says Fast Horse. He avoids the problem by trying to make foods more palatable. For example, by grinding mushrooms into small pieces. “They get the flavor, but they don’t see the actual mushroom,” he says.

Another Siċaŋġu Co member, Mayce Low Dog, teaches community cooking classes that instruct participants how to use traditional ingredients in their dishes.

The work is paying off. “It seems like more people are into trying weirder foods, not necessarily like your tomatoes and cucumbers,” says Moore. “It’s been really, really exciting to see.” Her coworkers raved about her stinging nettle pesto, made from plants she foraged.

Harvesting local plants is also a critical part of the group’s work. The Nation has “been in crisis for hundreds of years,” says Moore, but harvesting their own food is part of “getting back to being self-reliant.”

On a brisk morning during my visit, Moore and Low Dog invite me to join them to harvest local plants that they’ll dry and turn into herbal teas, both for the farmers market and a community-supported agriculture program that subsidizes food shares for some residents. The teas are a way residents can reconnect with traditional foods even if they’re not skilled foragers themselves.

Gravel crunches under the tires, as we pull off of the main road and slowly roll along the banks of a pond. Along the way, Moore and Low Dog keep their eyes peeled for useful plants for tea. For both Moore and Low Dog, foraging is a newer skill. As we walk, they consult each other about different plants, making sure they’re selecting the correct ones and that everything is ready for harvest. It’s a skill they’re intentionally learning from each other and their elders.

Moore reaches down to gather some Ceyeka, or wild mint, for the teas. She’s sure to leave behind about half of the plant, to ensure the plant continues to grow on the banks so there’s more when they come back again on a later day.

Forging Connection and Community

Victoria Contreras was introduced to the food sovereignty initiative as a high school volunteer. Now, two years later, Contreras, who manages the Siċaŋġu Harvest Market, has learned to be more intentional about incorporating Indigenous ingredients in her meals, she tells Sentient. “I’m actively looking for something that I can swap out, or a recipe that I can try,” she says, fondly recalling a stinging nettle ice cream one of her coworkers made.

In addition to expanding community knowledge of traditional ingredients, the harvest market and other programs have also brought community residents together. The market helps create new friendships and revive old connections, says Sharon LaPointe who helps her daughter, Sadie, with her stand selling flavored lemonades and homemade pickles and bread. It’s a sentiment shared by many of the vendors there that Wednesday.

Michael Prate, who helped get the group off the ground, remembers some Nation members weren’t so sure of the group in the early days. “I think people have a skepticism that things are gonna go away,” he says, “because that’s the trend,” as many programs that pop up on the reservation tend to be temporary. There are challenges, including growing crops under the harsh weather conditions in South Dakota, conditions that will become even more severe in a changing climate.

The many shifting challenges facing the Siċaŋġu Nation is why food sovereignty is so critical. “They’re here to teach us how to be food sovereign because someday food is gonna get too expensive for our people,” says Brandi Charging Eagle. “The prices of food are going up, but our wages aren’t,” adds Charging Eagle, who is part of the Siċaŋġu nonprofit, but also follows its mission in her own home, where she is teaching her children how to grow their own food.

The Siċaŋġu Nation’s nonprofit will have to stay nimble in order to survive. “There’s always going to be something else that the community is going to be weathering and adapting to,” Prate says. “That’s just reality.”

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with the Guardian, MEDA, Sentient and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University) and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.