Native Harvest: Reclaiming Land and Lives

The Native Harvest Dinner and Concert, February 5, is the third such event the organization has presented at the Historic Holmes Theatre in Detroit Lakes, MN. It brings together great food and people interested in native artists and uplifting causes.

Native Harvest is a part of the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELR), a multi-arm organization that is changing minds and lives. The brainchild of founder Winona LaDuke, an Anishinaabeg (Objibe) activist and author of two books, WELR is committed to saving endangered food varieties, creating bio-diversity in agriculture, and restoring traditional nutrition systems to help ease poverty and health issues, first in their communities and also in the rest of the world. Since the American agricultural system relies heavily on fossil fuels, and more and more on corn grown for ethanol, the security of our food supply may be at risk.

WELR is helping to preserve native strains of corn, beans, and squash through the Indigenous Seed Sovereignty Network, a network of tribal groups throughout North America. Working with indigenous people in Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Hawaii, WELR have organized legislation to protect native wild rice and taro and to fight genetic engineering of many native foods. Community-held land and individual farmers on the White Earth Reservation have been growing Oneida white flint corn and Bear Island flint corn, heirloom varieties.
In cooperation with Slow Food, WELR also has introduced heritage turkeys like the Narragansett Blue strains, which haven’t been raised for decades in this country. They have a more intense flavor and have more dark meat. They also are more viable than the single strain of white turkey everyone finds in the grocery store.

The Heifer Project has also helped WELR and local ranchers are raising Scottish Highlander Beef, a rare breed that Queen Elizabeth II is enamored with and keeps a small herd of at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Chef Janice Chilton, who will be preparing the Native Harvest Dinner at the Holmes Theatre, says, “It’s a lot like buffalo.” In that, she means, they are grass-fed, raised without antibiotics, and mouthwateringly tasty. She uses both heritage turkeys and Highlander beef at the Minwanjige Café in Ogema. The Café originally housed the office for WELR and Native Harvest production facilities, where food products are prepared for distribution and sale.

The Native Harvest menu on February 5 will include a wintergreen salad with a rose hip vinaigrette, a variety of fresh breads (one of Chef Chilton’s specialties), Narragansett wild rice, a side of roasted winter roots with rosemary aoli, dessert, and Muskrat coffee (a fair trade coffee, roasted and ground at the Minwanjige Café). All of the ingredients for the meal come from local sources, many from WELR lands.