October 4, 2015

Thanks to seed savers, Glass Gem corn exists

Thanks to seed savers, Glass Gem corn exists

By: Robin Shreeves
April 15, 2014, 12:47 p.m.

Photo: gnotalex/flickr

Corn on the cob is one of summer’s biggest treats, but there’s rarely a surprise when you peel the husk (unless of course a worm has made it’s home in it). That’s not the case with Glass Gem corn. Peeling the husk from this variety of corn is like unwrapping artwork each time.
What is Glass Gem corn? It’s an old variety of corn with kernels that come in an absolutely stunning array of colors. It’s also a reminder that there are varieties of fruits and vegetables that we’re in danger of losing, and it would be a real shame if we lost them.
This multi-colored corn was brought back into our collective consciousness a few years ago when a photo of it went viral. Business Insider has the story of this corn (along with some beautiful photos) that an Oklahoma farmer named Carl Barnes has been growing for many years. He’s half-Cherokee, and he wanted to reconnect with his heritage, so he exchanged Native American corn seed with people from all over the country and started growing corn with seeds the colors of the rainbow.
His efforts were successful but went under the radar until 1994 when another farmer named Greg Schoen obtained some of this rainbow corn seed from Barnes and grew it himself. His photo of a particularly beautiful ear of corn went viral in 2012, and now demand for the seeds is high. Native Seeds sells Glass Gem seeds for $7.95 for a 50-seed packet, and the seeds they sell come directly from the seed gifted to them from Schoen. Anyone can now grow this beautiful variety, save the seeds, and pass them on, to make sure these seeds don’t get forgotten again. By saving the seeds from specific-colored kernels, people have been able to play with the colors, creating new color combinations in the Glass Gem corn.


This corn isn’t the type you’d slather with butter, sprinkle with salt, and chomp into on a summer evening. It’s tougher than that, so it’s used for popcorn and for grinding into cornmeal. 
The story of how Glass Gem corn was rediscovered is important because it highlights the need to save seeds and swap seeds with others to keep produce varieties alive.
According to Food Bank, there are about 100,000 global plant varieties (edible and non-edible) that are endangered. Saving seeds and making sure that a large variety of plants continue to thrive is important for agricultural biodiversity, but its importance goes further.
Saving seeds doesn’t only help improve agricultural biodiversity, but helps farmers and researchers find varieties of crops that grow better in different regions, especially as the impacts of climate change become evident. Many farmers groups, nonprofits, and governments are conserving crops in their own communities — there are currently more than 1,000 known seed banks, collaboratives, and exchanges around the world.
Food Bank has a list of 15 seed-saving initiatives, including several that you can purchase seeds from. You can also go to a local seed swap or swap with others online. Once you get your seeds, the idea is to grow the plants, save the seeds, keep some for yourself and swap or give to others to perpetuate the diversity of seeds that are in circulation.
Do you grow any varieties of plants that you didn’t know existed until you came upon their seeds somewhere? 

October 3, 2015

ReMatriate

I love food stories, culture, cultural pride and stories about Rematriating Our Nation. Here's a great site about restoring, reliving, reviving, keep our cultural ways alive and well, some great harvesting and good stories too. You will be seeing more of me sharing more stories from this site for sure.


 Original story and photo from this facebook page.


Peyton Straker is an Ojibwe member of the Keeseekoose First Nation (Saskatchewan) and has lived in Somba K'e, Denendeh (NWT) since birth, where she works as the Indigenous Students Advocacy Worker for Yellowknife public schools. She is an artist who focuses on traditional pelt and hide work with animals that her and her partner harvest together. Her jewellery line SavageSalvage Jewellery, purposes: caribou antlers, muskox horns, bones and teeth from her personal hunts, turning them into contemporary wearable Indigenous art. Peyton is also the NWT regional representative for ReMatriate.

www.peytonstraker.wix.com/savagesalvage
www.facebook.com/savagesalvagejewellery

Photos by: Kyle Enzoe, traditional harvester and caribou monitor from Lutsel K'e Dene First Nation

#ReMatriate #ReMatriateCampaign#WeAreStrongWomen #ReMatriation

A CULTURAL FEAST AWAITS AT DAL'S ANNUAL MAWIO'MI CELEBRATION

A CULTURAL FEAST AWAITS AT DAL'S ANNUAL MAWIO'MI CELEBRATION

 - September 25, 2015

A dancer at the 2013 Mawio'mi. (Photo by Nick Pearce)


It’s the time of year again when the Studley quad will be transformed into a colourful celebration of culture, diversity and heritage. On Sept. 30, the Dalhousie Native Student Association will carry out its sixth annual Mawio’mi in commemoration of Treaty Day.

In Mi’kmaq culture, the word Mawio’mi means gathering and signifies one of the most important social and governance systems that the Mi’kmaq people have. Indeed, the upcoming Mawio’mi – or “powwow” – will facilitate a community gathering of both native and non-native individuals to embrace the practices and history of the indigenous peoples of Halifax.

Attendees of the daylong event will be treated to a cultural feast and refreshments in the Studley Gym and will have the chance to enjoy a ceremonial raising of the Mi’kmaq flag alongside traditional drummers, dancers and crafters.

Beyond the campus gathering, the Mawio’mi at Dal also kicks off festivities that are going on elsewhere in the city. In 1985, the Supreme Court of Canada proclaimed Oct. 1 of every year to commemorate and celebrate the Treaty of 1752. On this day, the Mi’kmaq will gather in downtown Halifax for a mass at Saint Mary’s Cathedral Basilica and a march to legislature where another Mi’kmaq flag will be raised.  

Dal's growing support


For Diana Lewis, program coordinator of Dal’s new Indigenous Studies minor, the annual Mawio’mi serves as a good indication of the university’s growing support for Mi’kmaq culture and indigenous culture in general.

“To have the launching of the Indigenous minor in the same year that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission comes out with a recommendation that the education system is not doing enough to promote the history of its indigenous peoples is very timely,” she says. “I feel that Dalhousie is now very much on board with trying to demonstrate efforts of reconciliation.”

In addition to the annual Mawio’mi and this year’s launch of the minor, the university is involved in the organization of the second Indigenous Speakers series. The series brings indigenous leaders to Halifax to discuss contemporary issues facing indigenous communities.

Dr. Audra Simpson, author of the award-winning book Mohawk Interruptus, kicked off the series Wednesday evening. Next up on Oct. 15 will be world-renowned educational theorist Dr. Marie Battiste with a talk on decolonizing education.

“I hope this trend continues,” Lewis says. “This is a good sign of what’s to come and just the start of more wonderful things that Dalhousie will support.”



“HONEY, PASS THE MAKTAAQ”

“HONEY, PASS THE MAKTAAQ”

Feasting on YK's offerings, Inuit style


by Juanita Taylor-Towtongie | photos by Angela Gzowski

“Neco, can you carve this turkey? Let’s get eating soon!” I ask, more like tell, my husband who is finishing up his Thanksgiving tasks. Eventually, he lays the perfectly browned stuffed turkey we bought at Fancy Meats beside the cherished country food on our dining room floor, alongside the sharp knives and ului (the plural form for ulu, an Inuit women’s knife) we’ve placed on flattened pieces of cardboard.
 
That’s how Inuit feast. No plates. No forks. Sitting next to and across from one another, slicing pieces of the Inuit niqai (Inuit country food) including frozen caribou meat, boiled seal meat, boiled caribou ribs and caribou tongue. There’s also maktaaq (beluga whale) and arctic char. At this Thanksgiving feast, there are about 30 guests, people from all walks of life, and we’re ecstatic, because there is also dry caribou meat and dry arctic char, or pipsi.
 
Neco axes chunks of caribou meat for the women – that’s just courtesy – making it easier to cut into smaller pieces with their ului. There’s sushi-style bowls of soya sauce for dipping.  And salt for sprinkling.
 
This fall marks our sixth year living in Yellowknife. We had planned on staying for two. We left our home in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, to further our careers; Neco is a journeyman power lineman and I am a journalist. It’s been working out… mostly. The education system is more challenging for our children and there are more organized activities for them to do. I can get my nails done, a good haircut, a coffee from McDonald’s and even wine with a nice dinner at a restaurant.
 
But, like most Inuit here, we’ve had to make adjustments.
 
Our house is in Range Lake, a paved neighbourhood with sidewalks that looks nothing like the treeless, rugged tundra and the windy shores of Hudson’s Bay that make up Kangiqliniq, or Rankin Inlet. Once inside though, when we’re feasting on country food, we feel closer to our Inuit roots.
 
When we lived in Rankin Inlet and Iqaluit, my husband hunted for us. Since moving here, he hasn’t been able to hunt caribou because of the territorial government’s ban, so we fill our freezers courtesy of other hunters back home. It’s one of the reasons we constantly wrestle with the idea of moving back to Nunavut, so Neco can hunt like his father does and like his grandfather did before him.  Another reason is family. We always feel the tug from them to move back. My mom lives there and same with Neco’s parents, the Towtongies. Yes, as in Cathy Towtongie. His mother is the president at Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., the organization that administers the land claim agreement. In some ways, Yellowknife still doesn’t feel permanent.
 
At the end of every feast, it is time for tea. Our friend Angela Hovak Johnston made fried bannock and she’s brought a bowl full. Anyone who has tasted Angela’s bannock knows it’s like dessert. It’s a skill she learned from living a traditional life, having spent her first seven years in a cabin in Umingmaktok (Bay Chimo), now an abandoned outpost camp in Bathurst Inlet, the place she most calls “home.”
 
“Living in the outpost camp, I loved it,” she says. “Living off the land, a very physical way of life, but then when we got sent to school, then we got used to that town-living, easy-living. You get all the taste buds ‘cause you tried new stuff, so you crave all the new stuff. But when we were living in Bay Chimo you didn’t really have all those cravings, and you were good with one big meal a day; with some berries here and there, but basically living on water and tea.”
 
Those fond early childhood memories turned sour when Angela was faced with a different form of survival: life at a residential school in Cambridge Bay that included abuse, even sexual abuse.
 
“That was hard, it was hard because it was a bunch of us little kids living in a hostel with hostel parents,” she says.
 
She worked through those horrors by breaking the silence around them. As a performing artist, she throat-sings and recorded an album in 2006 as a way to heal from the abuse at residential school. To see her today, Angela is a happy, healthy, courageous 40-year-old woman who sews beautiful creations such as seal skin mitts, parkas and kamiit, traditional Inuit boots – skills she learned from her mother and aunts who gave her lots of encouragement.
 
She and her husband have three sons. They’ve been in Yellowknife six years now. You may have seen her. She has traditional Inuit tattoos on her face and hands. The “V” on her forehead was a common design back in the days before contact with white people. There are lines on her face and hands that represent her sons. There are also symbols of traditional Inuit tools used for seal and caribou hunting.
 
Angela decided to get the traditional tattoos when she was living in Nova Scotia, where her husband, Mike, is from, and where they lived before moving to Yellowknife. Prior to that, they met in Kugluktuk where he was teaching.
 
She tested the markings by first penciling them in with eyeliner and going out in public.
 
“When I first got my tattoos on my face when we were living in Nova Scotia, people would ask my why I did that to my pretty face. But when I came here to Yellowknife, I had no questions. I didn’t have to question myself. And when I go home (to Kugluktuk), people remember their grandmothers or great-grandmothers and share a story about them. They’re thankful that I am carrying on this tradition.”
 
And that’s one of the reasons why she likes living in Yellowknife. People are accepting of the diversity of cultures.
 
The Johnston’s don’t visit Kugluktuk much because of the high cost of travel. But because Yellowknife is the hub for the Western Arctic, family and friends come often, either for medical care or while passing through on their way to southern destinations. Even so, she misses seeing elders around town. When her youngest son Bailey, now in Grade 6, finishes school, their plans are to move back to Kugluktuk where her husband will teach and she will be able to get back into fishing derbies and picking berries and learning different sewing techniques from her elders.

Davidee Qaumariaq plans to move back to Iqaluit after finishing an apprenticeship at Polar Tech.

Similarly, 24-year-old Davidee Qaumariaq plans on moving back to his home in Iqaluit after he earns his ticket as a small engine mechanic. He came to Yellowknife last November to visit his girlfriend and landed an apprenticeship opportunity with Polar Tech a month later. He works on snowmobiles, all terrain vehicles, outboard motors and Harleys. Davidee is entering into his first year of the apprenticeship this fall in Quebec, and that comes with studying online.
 
“I really want to commit to this because any other job that I had in Iqaluit, I haven’t had a good opportunity, so when my boss said ‘I’ll apprentice you,’ I said ‘alright.’ And he said, ‘You gonna stay?’ And I said ‘Yep.’”
 
His family in Iqaluit is OK with that decision because he’s been able to go home a number of times for visits. His buddies in Iqaluit are also mechanics so he gets to show off his new skills.
 
“You use computers to work on your sleds. Every time I went home I brought a computer with me and showed my buddies all this. It felt good knowing I knew more than they did because before it was always they knew more than I did. I’ve grown in being a much better mechanic, just from this job.”
 
While Davidee keeps his eye on the prize – talking about starting his own business in Nunavut when all is done – homesickness kicks in every now and then. Not speaking Inuktitut every day is another change.
 
“I spoke a lot of Inuktitut when I was in Iqaluit and I never do it here. Our neighbours are Inuit, at first we weren’t too sure but one day they had a bunch of people over and a bunch of kids were playing outside and a little girl starts yelling, ‘Anaanaa! Anaana!’ (Mom, Mom) and then my girlfriend freaked out saying, ‘They’re Inuk!’”
 
An avid hunter and snowmobile racer, he misses hunting in Nunavut the most; preying on seals, whales, caribou, fish and geese. He’s still waiting to catch his first polar bear. His instincts make him want to kill ptarmigan when he sees them around on Yellowknife’s snowy streets.
 
His employer and co-workers make living in Yellowknife easier by giving him the time off to go home, and lending him their boats to go fishing. He’s not a fan of portaging but he does get out on the lakes where he’s seen bears and wolves, and he’s getting used to the trees.
 
Apart from the high cost of living, Davidee likes what Yellowknife has to offer. There are more activities, such as bowling and driving out of the city to Rae for soft ice cream – things you can’t do on Baffin Island. Plus, Yellowknife has a “northern feel” to it because there are so many aboriginal people.
 
The 2011 Statistics Canada National Household Survey shows four in 10 Inuit live in large, urban centres. Yellowknife is tied with Ottawa for having the fourth largest Inuit population at 735. Edmonton is first, with 1, 115 Inuit, followed by Montreal with 900. St. John’s has 680.
 
Not all of Yellowknife’s 735 Inuit migrated here from elsewhere. Tiffany Ayalik was born and raised in the capital. Her father is from Kugluktuk, and her mom is from Ontario. Her mother is the one who taught Tiffany and her siblings about Inuit culture, including how to build an igloo and how to hunt and skin a caribou, having been in the North for over 30 years. Ayalik is amazed, and grateful, for that.
 
“Anything that I did learn about my Inuit culture came from my white mom from Ontario who did her best to try and immerse me and my siblings in a culture that isn’t hers, but that she felt is really important for us to learn about,” she says. “So I just have such mad respect for my mom for doing that. She’s always told me and my siblings that we’re in a very gifted situation, that we can take the best of both worlds.”
 
I discovered I have a lot in common with Tiffany. Both our grandmothers were born in igloos. Both our moms raised us and our siblings as a single parent. And we both come from blended cultures. And, like me, she doesn’t speak Inuktitut fluently, yet she starred in a play called Night, a story about youth suicide – a problem all too common across the North – that is performed solely in her father’s native language.
 
“It’s one of those things where it was extremely daunting at first, and I was very intimidated, but I just thought to myself, stop being a baby,” she recalls. “You had people speaking Inuktitut in your house all the time, you know more than you think you know, your ear knows it and your mouth knows it, but you just haven’t been taught it. So those weren’t foreign sounds to me, it would be different if it was a Swahili play or something.”
 
Martha Kyak from Pond Inlet translated her lines and recorded them so that Tiffany could memorize from repetition… listening over and over… and over and over.
 
She remains close to her grandmother and her aunts in Kugluktuk, going there every year with her mom to teach the techniques of paddling a canoe and kayak. And she offers storytelling workshops. As much as she loves Nunavut, Tiffany doesn’t plan on living there. Her heart is with her man who lives in Greenland. A successful actor himself, she beams when she talks about Greenland’s triumphs in keeping a strong Inuit culture, in part because it had a gentler colonization period compared to Nunavut’s.
 
“We’ve been through so much and still despite that we have a tenacity and a vivacious energy to survive and despite the effen cold winters and brutal conditions, we’re still here. Nice try, government! We’re still here, we’re still annoying!” she says with a laugh.
 
Like Angela, Tiffany has been using the arts to help struggling kids make sense of their changing worlds. The 27-year-old throat-singer wants to use her voice, skills and talents to address serious issues like abuse and suicide and to battle negativity. She likes pushing boundaries, but says she tries to be respectful at the same time.
 
My family and I try to be respectful too; respectful of the fact we are living on Dene land.
 
And we take it one day at a time. Well, more like one year at a time. My husband and I tell each other: It doesn’t matter where we are, as long as we’re together, we’re home.
 
Our time with other Inuit who are also “just visiting” Yellowknife, times like when we feast together at Thanksgiving, are crucial to staying connected to our culture.
 
I survey the remnants of our Thanksgiving meal after our guests have left. Every scrap of country food has disappeared from the spread. No one even touched the turkey.

Students revive extinct squash with 800-year-old seeds

Kwe, Well I am going to start sharing more on Indigenous Food History and Amazing food stories, recipes and more. 


Students revive extinct squash with 800-year-old seeds



The seed that grew this squash were preserved for 800 years in a clay pot in Wisconsin.


Gardens may be popping up in schools everywhere, but one school garden in Winnipeg, Canada is making news after growing a squash thought to be extinct for hundreds of years.
It all started with an archaeological dig on First Nations land that unearthed a small clay vessel estimated to be about 800 years old. Inside the vessel, the archaeologists found preserved seeds of an ancient squash.
Students at Canadian Mennonite University successfully grew one large squash from the seeds, but they aren't stopping there. The plan is to save the seeds from that first revived squash and then grow even more squash from those. The goal is to never let this squash go extinct again, according to APTN National News.
Brian Etkin, Coordinator of the Garden of Learning in Winnipeg, sees this revived squash as much more than a vegetable.
"This squash is representative of a tribe of a large community and everybody in that community having a place and food being a right on citizenship," said Etkin.
                                           Brian Etkin holds the ancient squash (Photo: APTN)

When the seeds were first put into that clay vessel all those years ago, they were likely meant to be used much sooner than now, but the discovery of them is a reminder that saving seeds is the best way to ensure plant varietals survive. The fruits and vegetables seen in the grocery store and even at the farmers markets are just a fraction of the varieties that exist.
Over the past 100 years or so, we've decreased the variety of produce grown and instead focused our efforts in cultivating species that produce a high yield or are able to travel long distances. But, we're discovering we're close to losing so many varieties, and seed savers are working to bring back varieties that most people have forgotten.
Thanks to the ancient indigenous person who put those seeds in a clay vessel hundreds of years ago, this squash varietal won't be lost to history. And thanks to more modern seed savers, we're reviving and preserving other fruits and vegetables — like this exquisite-looking Glass Gem corn:

Photo: gnotalex/flickr