Acclaimed Indigenous activist, farmer, and speaker Winona LaDuke shared her thoughts on reimagining food systems with an emphasis on traditional ecological knowledge at the Slow Food in the Tetons’ Farm to Fork Festival in Jackson. The weekend-long event in early October featured talks, workshops, and even a guided hike to find wild edible plants – all to help people connect with local sources of food.
LaDuke is an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. The environmentalist has made headlines in recent years for her attempts to disrupt the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline project in Minnesota, which activists said would threaten the areas’ waters and wild rice harvests.
At the start of her keynote speech, LaDuke told the crowd about the Anishinaabeg phrase “Akiing,” which translates to “the land to which the people belong.” LaDuke said it’s crucial that people build a sense of belonging and responsibility to the land, rather than a sense of private ownership and extraction.
“We have to go back and learn a lot from what is supposed to be here on the land, and then put our good minds and hearts together to make something that is good for the future,” she said.
LaDuke emphasized that, to her, food is not just nourishment and medicine – it’s also of deep spiritual and cultural importance. She said that wild rice, which only grows in northern Minnesota, is central to the Anishinaabe people.
“Wild rice is what we're instructed to eat and our word for it, ‘manoomin,’ means magical or sacred seed,” she said.
LaDuke said that the contemporary industrialized food system has significantly reduced agro-biodiversity and disconnected people from their local food sources. She advocated for protecting biodiverse ecosystems and ensuring that harvesters get a fair price for what they produce.
“Anybody who is Irish could tell you that you need more than one species of potato,” she joked. “There are lessons that have been learned in history that you need biodiversity to survive, and that is the danger of the systems that exist today, with a concentration of power and seeds in the hands of so few and so few varieties of crops.”
In addition to harvesting wild rice, LaDuke also owns a small-scale hemp farm on Anishinaabe land and has been trying to figure out how to make textiles out of hemp for seven years. She is currently working to develop an intertribal Indigenous hemp cooperative and said the project can reconnect Native peoples to their ancestral lands and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“The entire textile economy could be made out of something like hemp, which sequesters carbon at the highest rate of any field crop,” she said. “Instead of a bunch of poly synthetics made of fossil fuels, you could have a textile economy that is North American.”
The hemp movement has been gaining traction in recent years. In 2022, the Northern Arapaho Business Council voted unanimously to authorize and regulate hemp production within Northern Arapaho Tribe-controlled lands of the Wind River Reservation. Earlier this summer, LaDuke met with other Native hemp growers on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to continue laying the groundwork for the Indigenous hemp cooperative.
LaDuke said she is committed to developing hemp-processing technology that is non-toxic, non-exploitative, and keeps the textile supply chain as localized as possible. She plans to expand her hemp farm in Northern Minnesota and hopes to obtain abandoned mill factories to weave textiles.
Eastern Shoshone tribal member Jason Baldes was the other keynote speaker at the Farm to Fork Festival. He spoke about the work of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative and bison revitalization on the Wind River Reservation. His work was recently featured in a PBS documentary, “Homecoming.”
