Last week, Portland State University hosted its first ever Indigenous Foods Summit. Across two days, presenters taught a host of workshops sharing place-based knowledge focused around food sovereignty.
Emma Johnson, Cowlitz, is the program coordinator of the Indigenous Traditional Ecological and Cultural Knowledge Program at PSU. Isabel Lacourse is a Colville descendant and on the planning team for the Northwest Indigenous Food Sovereignty Alliance. They both organized the summit and join us to share their takeaways from the inaugural event.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
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Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Last week, Portland State University hosted its first ever Indigenous Foods Summit. Across two days, presenters hosted workshops about everything from growing first foods and eating non-native species, to cougar hide tanning. I’m joined now by two of the organizers. Emma Johnson, a Cowlitz tribal member, coordinates PSU’s Indigenous Traditional Ecological and Cultural Knowledge Program. Isabel Lacourse is a Colville descendant who is on the planning team for the Northwest Indigenous Food Sovereignty Alliance. Welcome to you both.
Isabel Lacourse: Way̓ ̌əšt šx̌əlx̌ə́lt. Hello and good day. It’s good to be here.
Miller: It’s great to have you both on the show. Emma Johnson first, what sparked the idea for this summit?
Emma Johnson: Yeah, great question Dave. One of our fellow planning members, Jennie Brixey, was really the vision behind it all. Her, along with some other NIFSA members attended the Seattle Food Expo last fall, and were really inspired by it and wanted to bring that locally to Portland.
Miller: Isbael, NIFSA, that’s the Northwest Indigenous Food Sovereignty Alliance. How do you personally define food sovereignty?
Lacourse: That’s a big question. Food sovereignty is intertwined with personal and tribal sovereignty. It’s how we nourish our bodies, our communities, our souls. It’s how we care for the land and each other. It’s the resurgence and revitalization of safe access to these foods, shared learning, shared inspiration, and really just community work.
Miller: My understanding is that there had been a summit like this, a program in Seattle, and then the idea was let’s do something like this here. Did you take part in that one?
Lacourse: I did not get to get up to Seattle, but I’ve been able to participate in a variety of different food summits and food sovereignty work. And this is one iteration of the long process of cultural revitalization and access work, and is one piece of the puzzle of the overall work that the Northwest Food Sovereignty Alliance and the long legacy of advocates that have been working on this type of work for generations, and then for the last 30 years acutely in Portland.
Miller: Emma, as Isabel said, it’s a big question, food sovereignty, and they gave a pretty broad answer that encompasses a lot of different aspects of culture and individual life, tribal sovereignty. Do you have your own different definition of food sovereignty?
Johnson: I don’t know that mine would be different. However, the basic definition of food sovereignty is a person’s ability to manage and control their own food systems. And I think it’s really important that you also get to define it for yourselves, because every individual, every community’s food system is different and unique to themselves and their lands. And having that power to say I get to define what my food sovereignty looks like for myself and my people is really important.
Miller: I understand that you organized this conference in less than six months. And this is a two-day conference full of different hosts doing different workshops and classes, taking people around the campus. How did you put it together in half a year?
Johnson: I think a lot of love and care, and the belief that we could pull it off. It was a lot of community organizing and leaning on each other to see who we, as a planning committee, and some friends of the planning committee members, could make come to life. Because we’re all affiliated with different orgs and community partners that have overall normal full-time jobs. So we were piecing together for meetings and last minute planning. I think that just having this really incredible group of local Native folks come together because they care about this work and they want to make sure it’s accessible to everybody that’s interested was what made it happen.
Miller: Isabel, what was turnout like?
Lacourse: It was absolutely incredible. It was so heartwarming to see so many different community members coming together, and just the joy and love that they brought to the work and that they were sharing with each other, and the intergenerational aspects. We had under 6-month-old babies to elders in their 80s and 90s, and everybody in between. And just like Emma talked about, the collaboration, everybody finding their gifts and being able to share their gifts with each other in that space was truly incredible.
Miller: What did you share? What did you present at the conference? What are your gifts?
Lacourse: One of many is being able to grow up here in Portland, Oregon and be part of the local Indigenous community since I can remember. I started my work collaborating with Judy Bluehorse Skelton, who’s a professor at PSU in the Indigenous Nation Studies Program. At the time, she was working for Portland Public Schools Indian Education Program as a cultural and arts teacher. And I, at 11 years old, got invited to participate with her as like a teacher’s assistant. I aged out of the program, but got to be scooped up in her love and vision.
And so what we presented on is like I was saying, the 30 years of advocacy work that we’ve been doing with different organizations and institutions, and the public access work that we’ve been advocating for over time. So one extension of that is the Native American Community Advisory Council for Portland Parks and Recreation is one of those tools that we use to advocate our access work to collaborate with these various local agencies to get Indigenous community and tribal community members spaces to gather, spaces to harvest. One of the projects that came out of that is the Native Gathering Garden at Cully, which was a big heartwork of community members that was over a decade-long process to dream it into fruition. And various other projects and partnerships that exist to create the access work for community here in Portland in the greater region.
Miller: Emma, on both days of the summit, you led an oak savannah walking tour. But this was at PSU?
Johnson: Yeah, this was at PSU.
Miller: So what did you lead people on, and where did you go?
Johnson: Good question. So my team at Portland State has been working on a lot of education about what it means to reclaim the urban landscape. And Judy, who Isabel mentioned, is also the leader of all of that wonderful work. So we have an urban oak savannah on campus that our program tends to. And we have these really sweet oak savannah district banners that highlight six native plant relatives, five of which you can find on campus, to help support Indigenous placekeeping on campus. And they run from the Native American Student and Community Center to our oak savannah all the way to the Vernier Science Center, which is where we have our Indigenous Food Lab and classroom and a lot of our programming takes place.
So I led people on a sweet little tour where I introduced them to the banners and that collaborative work, with the hope of getting people to be curious about the Native plant relatives that grow around them. And then we would visit the oak savannah, and I’d introduce them to that site that is really the heart of our program at the Vernier Science Center, which is a really beautiful, newly renovated science building that was completely informed by ITECK to support BIPOC students in STEAM.
Miller: What’s your hope for how an experience like that could translate to awareness of or attention to a larger landscape? It sounds amazing, what you’ve just described. But it also obviously is limited compared to what once was a massive extent of oak savannah or white oak prairie in almost all of the Willamette Valley pre-contact. I’m curious how you think about that step, of going from the limited PSU landscape to thinking about the larger landscape?
Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. We’re always dreaming over here. So like you were mentioning, less than 2% of our oak savannah prairies remain in Oregon and Washington. They, as ecosystems, are extremely important cultural ecosystems. Adding in that word “cultural” really just means that they’re ecosystems that depend on human interaction to thrive and survive. And so Native peoples of this place in the past and still today are the sole reason why we had such abundant camas white oak savannah, prairies. And our hope in the urban landscape is to have these very urban ecosystems that we can use to help educate folks, and help urban Native folks and local tribal peoples connect to the place in the city. Because so many of us are here, and we have so much care and love to give to the lands, and especially our urban lands really depend on that dedication to bring that life back to them, and engage in that reciprocity and relationality.
So our intention with our programming and our community work is to help connect people to place, and make them aware of this ability to have a relationship with the land that they live on, and understand the ecosystems they exist in. And the hope there is the ripple effect. We really want people that do tours like this, come to food summits like this or visit our program to take that message with them, and let it flow into the work that they do with whoever they’re working with. Because all of us should have a connection to place. Through that connection, we have so much power in the way that the land cares for us and the way that we care for the land. We’re all living here together today. And the collective power of being a community and understanding our role in this place, and how much the land depends on us and our animal and plant relatives depend on us is really important.
Miller: Emma and Isabel, thanks very much.
Lacourse: Thank you.
Miller: Emma Johnson is the program coordinator for the Indigenous Traditional and Ecological Cultural Knowledge Program at Portland State University. Isabel Lacourse is on the planning team for the Northwest Indigenous Food Sovereignty Alliance. They joined us to talk about the first ever Food Sovereignty Summit held at Portland State University.
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