A Native Food Revival Through Social Media

According to Gladstone, Native American people are very active on Facebook, and her videos are made specifically for social media—she refers to them as “digital moccasin telegrams.”

A-dae Romano-Briones, director of programs for Native Agriculture and Food Systems for the First Nations Development Institute, agrees that Native food is receiving newfound attention, and she sees is as part of a larger continuum.

“Indigenous people have always fought for their foods, have always fought for access to the lands where those foods are, and the right to hunt and gather in their traditional places,” says Romano-Briones.

Cornmeal crusted trout with summer squash medley. (Photo courtesy of Mariah Gladstone)

She thinks that social media is shining a new light on what’s been there the whole time. Tech savvy young people are “finding new ways to tell the stories that we have told for generations,” she adds.

Romano-Briones is also helping to produce an upcoming movie called Gather that celebrates Native food culture. (Civil Eats has partnered with the Gather team to publish a series of articles about Indigenous foodways.)

She believes that as regional food cultures have been popularized across the U.S. in recent years, many stories about Native communities have been largely overlooked.

“The movie is meant to share stories of Indigenous communities and their long-standing relationships with food and their fight to continue to have access to their traditional foods,” she says.

Overcoming a History of Trauma

For Gladstone, upholding Indigenous food is partly about healing from a history of trauma. The processes of colonialization and the genocide of Native peoples across North America was mirrored by the devastation of the plants and animals that Native Americans had long relied on for sustenance and spiritual companionship.

Romano-Briones, who is from the Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico, says that when her community’s agricultural land was flooded by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1970s, it was devastating. “I grew up in a time when people were asking themselves, ‘Can we exist without being farmers?’ And the answer was, ‘No, we can’t.’ As people, we are so connected to our food; that’s what makes us Indigenous,” she says.

Mariah Gladstone teaching a Native foods class at a middle school in Montana. (Photo courtesy of Mariah Gladstone.)

The 20th century is rich with other examples of government projects destroying Native American and Alaska Native food sources, such as the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, which devastated salmon populations in the Columbia River in the 1930s, and the Kinzua Dam, which forced the relocation of hundreds of Seneca people from their native land in Pennsylvania in the 1960s.

And many Indigenous communities across North America continue to fight for their land, including water protectors resisting pipeline development at Standing Rock in North Dakota; the Yurok and Hoopa Valley tribes suing the U.S. Department of the Interior over their management of the Klamath River in California; and First Nations communities in Canada fighting against the Kinder Morgan pipeline and other fossil fuel industry developments in defense of their traditional lands.

Gladstone believes that the trauma of genocide and the devastation of food-giving landscapes had a large impact on driving poor health outcomes in her community, as evidenced by disproportionate rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. “Right now, 50 percent of Native kids are expected to get Type 2 diabetes in their lifetime,” she says. “That’s a staggering statistic.”

But, she adds, the persistence of Native food culture—now with the help of social media—is an indication of the resilience of Indigenous communities. “These foods have survived in the face of incredible environmental disaster and near-extinction—like we have, and that’s a testament to our resiliency.”