How many hands does it take to make chokecherry jam? For this year’s special batch for Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone elders – many!
That’s according to Jacqueline White, whose Arapaho name is Te3oo Niibeisei, which means Singing Crane Woman. White is the tribal relations specialist for the Food Bank of Wyoming and is also part of the Sweetgrass Food Lodge, a new group working to build permanent food lodges on the Wind River Reservation.
Her passion: increasing access to traditional foods. From White’s perspective, this goal is possible because of collaboration.
White and a bunch of partners recently came together to make chokecherry jam for elders for Native American Heritage Month in November – and to include bison meat in the Food Bank’s monthly distributions in Arapahoe and Fort Washakie.
The Food Bank of Wyoming also collaborated with community members and Shoshone and Arapaho Fish and Game to harvest 10 elk for the monthly food distribution on the reservation this month.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann talked with White about the role of community in these local food sovereignty projects.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
Jacqueline White: Last year, I started visiting with Morgan Crowley from the Wildlands Restoration Volunteers in Longmont, Colorado. They wanted to know how we can partner, how we can work together.
Colorado is our Arapaho homelands, and we're always talking about traditional food and how we could obtain our traditional foods for our Indigenous people here on the Wind River Reservation.
She had a group of volunteers that went through and picked 78 pounds of chokecherries. They cleaned them and bagged them and froze them, and then when they were able to come up they delivered them to us, along with chokecherry trees and some other trees that we distributed in the community.
That's how we got the chokecherries, and the idea was to have something special for elders because they are knowledge keepers and we have that ultimate love and respect for them.
Hannah Habermann: Can you share a little bit about the significance of chokecherries?
JW: Around here, we have our chokecherry season and they're hard to obtain because of certain areas and locations where they may be over-picked. We utilize those chokecherries in our ceremonies. We don't just prepare them and cook them to be cooking them. There's always an intent and a purpose behind that.
As we're doing things, we're praying. We're praying for the purpose of why we're harvesting them. We're praying for the purpose of why we're preparing them and those good blessings that we want for the people that will partake [in] it, especially for whatever ceremony we're preparing them for.
We also partnered with the Wind River Food Sovereignty Project with Kelly Pingree and Livy Lewis. They provided the supplies for us. The Sweetgrass Food Lodge board members came together and volunteered to make the chokecherry jam.
The awesome reviews we got from elders or people in the community that received that chokecherry jam was enormous. We had elders saying that it was something that their grandmother or their mothers used to make and that they haven't had it for a long time. It just really was special.
HH: You also worked with Jason Baldes at the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative and Dennis O’Neal with the Northern Arapaho Tribe to harvest two buffalo for the monthly food distribution in November. What was that process like?
JW: That was a huge undertaking because we requested early on if we could obtain any buffalo, we just posed that question. Dennis and Jason both come together and have just been enormously helpful and generous to help our people with our traditional foods.
The first day, we gathered at the Arapaho site, the tribal buffalo enclosure. There were several people that came out to help support.
Indigenous people don't just take an animal. There's a process and there's a prayer and there's protocols that are involved. You know, we harvest that sacred buffalo, that is giving their life so that we can have life. And that was really important, that we followed our traditions and our cultural way of life and that we honor that buffalo that way.
Then the next day was the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative buffalo harvest. That was another amazing experience. We did the same thing there: Everything was done with prayer and there were a lot of people that came together.
I was just really impressed because of the generosity and the good heart and the good intentions that people put into harvesting those buffalo – skinning it and gutting it and taking it to the processor, and then having it prepared and ready and frozen for our mobile food pantries that we distribute that meat in.
That's a service that we provide from the Wyoming Food Bank. All that started four years ago with this – we call it CRFI – but it's called the Culturally Responsive Food Initiative. And what we did was we surveyed our tribal members, Shoshone and Arapaho tribal members: “What are your traditional foods that you utilize, that you want?”
Because we're not your typical mobile food pantry where we just [go], “Here's a box of food. Here you go.” It's more catered, because we want to provide foods that people are going to utilize.
HH: Can you talk a little bit about the role of community and collaboration when it comes to supporting food sovereignty?
JW: It's important that we do everything from the community, so it's coming from them in the community, not us coming into the community saying, “This is what we're going to do for you. This is what we want.”
No, we want to know what you want, what's important to you.
I was told from [Northern Arapaho elder] William C’Hair, he said, “You are so very fortunate. There is no greater honor amongst our Arapaho people than to give one another food.”
HH: You've dedicated so much of your time to increasing access to traditional foods. What are some of the barriers to accessing those foods?
JW: The biggest challenges that we have here are transportation and access. And we don't have food pantries here, and that's a huge one. We're working on that.
Our number one goal is to have food pantries here on the Wind River Reservation in locations that people have access to in Fort Washakie, Ethete, Arapahoe, St. Stephens. The challenge is finding a building.
And we have large families. We do our mobile food distributions every single month and we have up to 20 people in one household. There's multiple generations in a household. There's mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and the children and the grandchildren, and we have a lot of elders and grandparents raising their grandchildren.
HH: Jackie, what keeps you coming back to this work day after day? What motivates you and inspires you?
JW: My motivation and inspiration comes from my late husband Crawford White and those teachings that we have to love one another, to help each other and care for each other.
Knowing and understanding our Arapaho way of life, how important it is to be helpful to each other, and especially with food – that drives me. I have a dream for us out here to have brand new food pantries buildings out here.
We want to get away from calling them “food pantries.” We're going to call them “food lodges.” That's more appropriate for Indigenous people.
HH: Looking ahead to the next year, what are some projects you're really excited about or looking forward to?
JW: I'm looking forward to continued work with our food sovereignty and our traditional foods with wild game, buffalo, elk, and the continued partnerships with people in Colorado with the chokecherries, because that's going to be a continued project. I'm really excited about it, because it's something that we started and I would like to see continue on.
I'm really, really excited about the food lodges that we're going to have here on the Wind River Reservation. Of course, it's going to take a huge undertaking with doing a fundraising campaign. We're still working on those things as we're waiting for the 501c3 status to come in.
That's been a hope and dream of mine, to make that happen with those food lodges here.
