We are experiencing food insecurity
globally, nationally, locally right now.
Food is such an integral part of one's culture.
No matter what background you come from,
what culture you're from around the world,
food is such a pillar to that activity.
And when we encounter a new climate – especially during climate chaos,
where we're shifting, we’re moving seasons,
the weather patterns are changing –
we should reach back to our indigenous,
traditional, ecological knowledge,
and approach our farming practices from that lens.
There are so many factors that contribute
to our food insecurity in our country.
Logistically, we have consolidated
our seed companies, food distribution companies and grocery stores.
It’s just a handful of companies that are producing
and distributing foods to Americans.
Additionally, land continues to go up in price.
40% of farmers don't own the property they farm nationwide.
That's mega farms to little farms.
40% of our food system,
the American food system, is on rented land.
And that's a really dangerous and scary place to be.
Also, we are fighting climate chaos.
High spikes, cold and hot,
wet and dry,
are coming our way constantly.
All of that makes a huge impact
on food distribution and access in our community.
We can wait for this airplane to go by.
I know we're right under the flight path
to Portland International.
We're here at Xast Sqit,
which translates to Good Rain Farm,
a direct-to-consumer Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) vegetable farm.
We share this property with 11 other operating farms.
I rent an acre and a half of intense
vegetable rotation and farming
for our nearly 150 CSA membership.
We service the Portland metro area, which,
when I say that Portland, Oregon is a huge native population,
those are native community members from all across Turtle Island.
And, you know, we have a urban native population
because of relocation and the disbandment of many tribes
who then had to fight again for recognition.
I myself, as an Arrow Lakes person,
my tribe in particular was considered
extinct until 2021, 2020.
And when we grow crops
that aren't necessarily mine, right?
I'm not Seminole, I'm not Miskoki,
I'm not Hopi, I'm not Cherokee.
But when I grow those crops from those communities
and I'm serving an urban native population,
ultimately those crops make it back to
some of those people from those tribes.
So, Xast Sqit, Good Rain Farm, kind of tries to focus on
bringing foods back to those dinner plates
and sharing those foods with those tribal members
so they can reconnect.
Oh, do you know the weather this week?
I think it's supposed to be pretty...
Sunny? - Wet.
Darn it. - Let me see.
- Yeah. Looks pretty wet.
All right then.
Well, farm walk? - OK.
All right. Field walk, chores. - Yep.
And then other stuff. - Other stuff.
At this point in this season, we are doing a lot of field walks
to take in how our soil moisture content is,
and if it's ready to be tilled and worked.
So I try not to like walk in it.
I walk on the edges
so I don't compacts the soil too much.
I don't want to till the soil when it's too wet.
So, I do this test.
And it's just called like a hand ball test or a soil test.
I kind of lightly squeeze it, and then I'm going to bounce it.
Uh oh. - Oh, that's wet.
- Yeah, that's super wet.
It rained last night.
This, on Saturday,
would actually crumble about three or four bounces in.
Right now, it stays firm.
So this is high moisture.
It's way too wet to be tilling
or doing anything major to right now, so.
Yeah, making do with the weather.
But it is so wet over here.
We're not gonna get in, are we?
Yeah. - Not for a while.
Such a bummer.
All right.
Climate change is hitting us hard.
We are experiencing both extremely wet
and cold winters and springs here in the northwest
that make it hard to get into the ground and grow things
till it's almost too late for our season.
And then we're having hotter, short, dry summers.
But as we experience new, different climates,
we're able to pull techniques from community
and test them out and see if they grow well here.
And there's a lot we can learn from indigenous communities
that have thrived in hotter, drier climates
for centuries, millennia.
All right.
So let's take a look at some of our Hopi Blue Corn
underneath here.
So the Hopi Blue Corn
is a really great corn to grow here in the northwest.
It does really well dry farmed here.
And dry farming,
which is from our communities southwest,
is the act of farming without mechanical irrigation methods.
So no overhead, no drip irrigation,
no plumbing really, which is both handy
because I'm not the best plumber.
And our clay soils tend to retain moisture
for a really long time.
So, we'll plant crops like tomatoes or corn or beans
through a wetter spring.
We won't irrigate them.
And then they're going to grow deep roots
deep down into the ground
and become really efficient scavengers of water and nutrients.
Because they're used to scavenging and different soil types,
this variety, it's much hardier and drought resistant
than some of our genetically modified corns.
Those corns need a lot more babying,
a lot more pesticides, a lot more fertilizers,
because they're just not,
they're not scavenging for that in the soil as well.
They're not very good at taking up water.
You need a lot more water to make things sweet
than to grow a dry item out.
So a lot of our heritage crops that we grow,
we're trading off a plant that has high yield
and maybe tastes better to us,
to be more climate-resilient and bioregionally adapted.
So one of the ways that we build
a more resilient food system
is by protecting and saving
bioregionally adaptive plants.
And that could be any plant from across the world
that has slowly been introduced to a new climate.
And over time,
the strong ones that have the genetic material to survive,
say, the Pacific Northwest, a wetter, shorter season,
those seeds then go on to be saved
and grown again and again.
And they strengthen those muscles to this climate
and stretch their roots out into this clay wet soil better.
So on our farm, we save seed in house.
So, inside the curing shed here, I just turned off the fans.
We always have fans going.
It's a pretty dark, cave-like space.
It is fully insulated.
We only have windows on the north side, not the south.
The sun’s coming up and shining in. We’re blocking that out.
So we store some of our seed.
We do a lot of onsite farm seed saving as well,
and that is to grow regionally adapted
and microclimately adapted seed for our farm,
especially indigenous seeds
which are considered rare heirloom.
From Hopi Blue Corn and Cherokee Gourd Seed Corn,
and Seminole Pumpkin and Cherimoya Peppers,
and Seneca Sunflowers.
The list goes on and on.
These foods were almost completely wiped out
during colonization and settlement.
We've really hindered the growth of a lot of our foods
all around the world, and we're losing them.
We're losing these ecosystems, we're losing these foods.
And that's why it's so important that we do seed saving,
both for just our own food resiliency, modern day,
but also for our histories
and the reclaiming of indigenous identities.
Yeah, so now you just plant them and they'll grow.
Yeah.
Really pretty.
Growing up here with my family,
we always played in the dirt.
And one year I had asked for a raised garden beds.
So before we knew about anything radical,
we just tore up the front lawn and put in these raised beds
and grew this food.
And it wasn't till later when I was entering the agriculture industry
and learning about these small-scale farming systems
that I realized that I already knew this stuff.
It was already in my bones,
in my DNA, in my blood.
This intuition that plants were people
and that we should treat them with that reverence.
So, it was just natural for me.
This bed doesn't look like much,
but if you start training your eyes, you’ll see them.
This is Camas Lily.
And Camas Lily is a Pacific Northwest native root crop.
It takes about 3 to 7 years
to truly establish.
So it's a very long, slow growing plant,
but a really important first food
for the northwest region.
It loves our soil types
and it pretty much only grows in these cleared
savannah spaces alongside
Oregon White Oaks and marshy wetlands.
It used to be prolific,
but they're extremely rare now and not by choice.
This land was stolen and developed and abused.
And we lost this plant.
We lost these foods.
And these ecosystems.
Growing up, I wasn't particularly encouraged to talk about
or share my indigenous identity with anybody.
I had lots of questions, but
they were usually brushed off
and I think that that was a lot of generational trauma and hurt
and concern for my safety and well-being.
My grandmother had gone to boarding school,
had lost contact with her tribal, specific tribal connection
from the reservation.
There's this famous quote from a colonel
for why the boarding schools existed.
And it was, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
And our generation
is the saved man, but killed Indian.
To have grown up in a space like that,
It was a protective space, but it was lonely, too.
And just it felt like I was disconnected from something.
To be reintroducing
native plants and native crops
and native foods to stolen land
is a very steep, emotional toll for me
and a laborous toll.
But I decided to do it for at least one bed
and they can bloom every spring and showcase
my hopes and dreams and goals for Xast Sqit,
for Good Rain Farm.
This is our first harvest for the season.
We saved it, especially for you.
You know,
this purple, pink, red coloring in it.
That's all those antioxidants.
So the more colorful it is, the more antioxidants there are.
The red color is like the sunscreen, too.
It's just funny how that always seems to go hand in hand.
Yeah, and I love that.
And then the dandelions, right,
are growing in here, which you can actually eat.
And that is like a big part of my indigenous ancestry
and utilizing what we had, we had access to.
So, when we lost access to a lot of our native native foods,
or pre-contact colonial foods, we were then eating a lot of these weeds.
And they're all part of an important ecosystem.
Yeah, being those pioneer, those first plants
to pop up in freshly tilled, barren land
and to populate it and hold that soil steady.
And they proliferate with all their progeny
and their their roots and like hold that soil down in place.
So they're actually so, so important.
And then we, like, totally degrade them and that's such a bummer.
It’s so unfortunate.
So we're going to harvest all of these nice little yellow,
delightful heads that we have everywhere.
Why not eat them?
All right.
- Bring it to the truck? - Yeah.
- That was pretty good. - Nice.
I estimated 40 to 50.
- We got 40? - We got 40.
So we're going to go take this down
and wash and pack it.
To the truck!
For me, the farm ebbs and flows
in how big of an impact it feels it makes
versus how small and singular I feel.
I don't know.
I struggle with that.
And like, the reality is, is I got stuff to do.
I got a farm to grow, I got people to feed yesterday.
I live here in capitalism.
I got to pay rent, I got to pay my bills.
Like, but you can do all of that
with respect for your fellow human, with respect for the plants
and the respect for all these other living creatures on this planet.
And it can just be part of your everyday.
Food is for all people.
It's a human right.
And for me, food sovereignty
really means that a community
gets to make their own choices.
So, being able to continue to be like,
Hey, hi, I'm Sinixt, I'm Arrow Lakes.
I exist, I am here still today.
I'm growing this food for these other community members
who are still here today.
Despite all of this persecution,
we are still going to continue to bring our wisdom
and our knowledge with us
to tackle these problems of climate chaos
and make a thriving, more equitable, future.