Erstellt am: 8. 4. 2016 - 17:03 Uhr
Foraging For Food
"You should trust your environment in a lot of ways to provide for you," says Prairie Rose Seminole, "and it should be fun."
Prairie is cooking up an energizing tea, made with some herbs from the meadows near her North Dakota home. "You can try some now," she offers, "but really to get the full taste it has to stand for a few hours."
Amber Mattson
I can’t resist a smirk and ask whether she has problems at customs with her packets of herbs. She smiles and admits she was briefly detained on a trip to Italy on her way to a conference where she was presenting medicinal plants. "A misunderstanding," she says.
"There's a lot of food out there"
Prairie Rose Seminole, who was recently brewing tea at a session of the Salzburg Global Seminar, is a forager. She is at the forefront of a movement to reacquaint a new generation with Native American food gathering skills that are not just culturally important but also fun and healthy.
"When you go out there with someone who is trained and can understand the varieties of different kind of grasses and different plants," says Prairie Rose, "you will start to see that there is a lot of food out there."
Amber Mattson
This week on FM4 we are discussing food waste: How we change the mentality of our "throwaway society". But what if we are wasting food by simply letting valuable nutrients rot away unused in meadows? Are we turning up our noses at the gifts of nature?
In the grassy valleys of North Dakota that Prairie calls home, where wild horses and deer run free, there is a bountiful supply of valuable food: berries, roots and medicinal plants that nourished humans for centuries. Her ancestors, she says, could just wander through the countryside and find all they needed to keep themselves healthy.
And then this foraging culture was forgotten; or rather the Native American culture that had cherished it and celebrated were humiliated and subjugated - their wisdom ignored.
A Bewitching Landscape
To understand the Dakotas, you have to feel the power of the landscape.
I vividly remember passing through the region. In summer, the grassland is full of bright flowers and buffalo on the road and the mist hangs in the forests of the Black Hills. I remember the dusty beauty of the Badlands and I remember camping at night by lakes where the fish jumped all night, making a sound like explosion of a wet pop gun.
It’s an enchanting place dotted with memorials, such as the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota, to the disgraceful treatment of those who had lived there for centuries.
I was bewitched by the landscape and the many museums dedicated to Native American culture. "They lived a roaming existence," I wrote in my teenage travel journal, "in a countryside they worshipped."
Cultural Amnesia
The European settlers, on the other hand, tended to look out at the meadows and see just grass and dirt and felt they had little to learn from the indigenous population. Prairie Rose Seminole, who says she is a descendent of the Sahnish/Arikara, Northern Cheyenne, Mandan, Lakota, and Dakota Nations, says her ancestors too began to forget their inherited foraging skills after being violently swept off their land.
Amber Mattson
But Prairie Rose admits that even among her own community foraging has become "a dying art" pushed towards extinction by the dubious conveniences of fast food and indoor living.
"There is not a lot of motivation for the younger generation to pick these skills up. The environment is somewhat on the backburner as a resource for the quality of life."
But there is a move to rediscover the old ways of finding simple wealth if you natural surroundings. For example, using the indigenous blue clay as a form of soap, or using various flowers or tree barks as a natural medicine with antibiotic qualities that can spare you some of the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs.
"We are trying to instill this knowledge among the younger generations but we are trying to do it in fun ways."
Amber Mattson
Prairie is wary of over romanticizing Native American history and making them sound like ecological simpletons. "For over 10,000 years my people were constantly evolving and adapting. When new tools became available we used them."
But she says that she still sees Native American as stewards of the natural world. "I’m from a clan system that is all about caring for the environment and the water and we honour those elements for that they are. They are our relatives."
Prairie Rose Seminole
This emotional attachment to a healthy relationship between humans and their natural landscape has made the recent developments in North Dakota particularly painfully for culturally aware Native Americans.
Fracking
North Dakota has become one of the centres of the US hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") industry. Fracking, a multi-billion industry, involves digging wells up to four kilometres deep, before pumping in a cocktail of water and chemicals to crack the shale rock and release the gas.
For an activist like Prairie Rose, who advocates living as far as possible in symbiosis with nature, the process is horrifying.
"The Water Is Very Toxic"
The industry calls the waste water "brine" which evokes a healthy sea-side image, but Prairie Rose says "When it comes up, the water is very toxic. It is very poisonous." She says that the industry took advantage of the state’s lax environmental laws and what she describes as a certain political nativity.
They didn’t feel they needed to obey state laws to remove their waste, they just dumped it. "You can’t grow anything there."
Alongside the environmental problems came a slew of social ills that often accompany boom town economics:
"The transformation of small town North Dakota to oil life has been extremely devastating to our environment and our community," says Prairie Rose. "Organised crime as gone up by 400% and we have homicides and drug abuse at levels we have not known about."