Chími Nu'am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen

Read an Excerpt

EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION: "Ayukîi"

This book was written from my home on Huimen Coast Miwok lands. I’m profoundly grateful for the advanced and skillful stewardship of the Miwok people—their strong reciprocal relationship with the land is why this area is so beautiful and abundant. Because of their energy, immense amount of scientific knowledge, compassion, and commitment, I know the land still retains a deep love for people. Yôotva, I am glad to have had the opportunity to walk among your original ancestors.

Most people tend to bisect the state of California into two distinct cultural factions: Northern California and Southern California. But this land of rivers, deserts, mountains, valleys, prairies, wetlands, lakes, and more than 800 miles of Pacific Ocean coastline is home to a vast number of different tribes with unique and separate identities and cultural lifeways, in addition to waves of diasporic cultural influences.

Even if many tribes are still unrecognized by the U.S. government, their impact on the abundance of this land is evident in every nook and valley of this state. Many of our foodways intersect and seamlessly blend with one another throughout the state while still maintaining dynamic and unique cultural differences. If our foodways are bookended by acorns, a food eaten by people in both the north and the south, then there is an entire library of food combinations in between. This book is meant to be inclusive of but not representative of that library. I hope people from all parts of California (and beyond) will be able to connect to some portion of this book. I have deliberately held back traditional and ceremonial recipes in an effort to draw a line between how we prepare our ancestral foods versus the foods Native people make in their modern kitchens using ancestral ingredients. These recipes take a new look at some of the oldest foods in California, in an effort to connect to a greater holistic picture that includes everybody.

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I wrote this book because I want to be in service of my people, of all tribal peoples and elders and my great-great-great-grandchildren. Though this book is about starting slow, I want to impress upon everybody the urgency with which we must act to keep our ecosystems healthy and our air clean and eliminate our dependence upon fossil fuels and other extractive industries. I want us all to wake up wondering how we can be of service to our communities every day; in small ways and in big ways, being in service to one another and this planet is the highest calling.

This book is curated for people who want to recalibrate their lifeways to the natural rhythms and cycles of the plant and animal relatives we were put on Earth to care for. I believe that we all need to work together to address the inequity in our food systems, community food apartheid, water protection, and climate change. There is a story in Ararapíkva by Julian Lang that I’ve found to be profoundly prescient. It is about the Old People and the way they saw the coming of the corruption of our food systems when the men “with the little wide hats” arrived.

Today when I see how many diet-related diseases are affecting our communities, and the corruption and overextraction of resources that U.S. agriculture has inflicted on our lands, I feel it is more important than ever that we wrest control of our food systems back from these settler-colonial systems. Food is inherently political; we cannot separate our foodways from our past, present, or future, and this book is gently infused with historical context, activism, and calls to action to work toward securing a more equitable and sustainable future for all of us.

This work is also an act of resilience. Adaptability is one of our most powerful attributes as Native people. I have found that non-Indigenous people often succumb to a “Chicken Little’’ perspective: the sky is falling, climate change has won, we just can’t fight fossil fuel corporations and the government entities they own. “They’re just too powerful, so we might as well give up and enjoy our lives in as much comfort as we can while stockpiling resources for ourselves because the Earth is going to right itself; humans are a virus and we ruined everything, oh well”—I hear it all the time.

Indigenous people on the other hand, even after enduring several waves of genocide and colonization, disease, land theft, pollution, and resource extraction, are found on every front line facing into the illest of winds, still fighting with each breath, fighting for a future that is balanced and harmonized with the world. We will never stop fighting. We will not abdicate our role as stewards and protectors. We know the fight is hard, but we have been through the hardest things and we are still here. We will not succumb to the notion that the fight is over, and some of us have been fighting for hundreds of years, mid-apocalypse. Don’t give up. Get on your pony and get in here.

Many of us are already actively decolonizing our diets in our own ways, each at our own pace to varying degrees of success—often running into problems with ingredient accessibility, as most of us are no longer oriented to gathering or do not live in an area where traditional foods are accessible. But every season is a new opportunity to share knowledge and to offer a light in the dark for those who are in various stages of connection or reconnection with their traditional ways; it is a chance to introduce one another to our plant relatives, to begin forming or to keep nurturing a relationship with our cultural biomes, and to support one another in our journeys.

I hope you will begin to see the interconnectedness of storytelling, art, ethnobotany, climate change, agricultural practices, and how they all come together to provide context for our traditional foodways. In collecting, creating, and compiling recipes using some of the oldest foods in California, I hope it is a first step in restoring the rhythms of sustainability that our ancestors have refined since time immemorial.