VOL 119, Issue 7—Oct. 28, 2021

06
THURSDAY
OCT. 28,
2021
INDIGENOUS FOODWAYS:
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CULINARY ARTS AND
AND INDIGENOUS CULTURE
Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, the presenters for the Indigenous
Foodways event on Oct. 13, speak at their restaurant, Cafe
Ohlone. PHOTO COURTESY OF MAYO BUENAFE-ZE
07
SCENE
CALLIE FAUSEY
Staff Writer
Food is much more than what is on our plates, it is a type of knowledge that
canFood is much more than what is on our plates, it is a type of knowledge that can
be passed down from generation to generation. On Oct. 13, two days after Indigenous
Peoples’ Day, the online event, “Indigenous Foodways,” showcased the idea of
food as a pathway to ancestral knowledge and shared culture.
The event featured a conversation and cooking demonstration with Vincent
Medina and Louis Trevino, the founders of mak-'amham: Contemporary Ohlone
Cuisine and Cafe Ohlone. According to their website, mak-'amham (mahk-amhaam)
means “our food” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language, which is the Indigenous
language of the East Bay. Trevino and Medina are both Ohlone people who are,
as noted on their webpage, “working towards a full revival of Ohlone Indian food
traditions as a part of the larger, ongoing cultural restoration that empowers Ohlone
people to decolonize ourselves of layers of forcibly imposed identity and return to an
identity that is aligned with that of our ancestors.”
Thacher Gallery led the initiative to get the grant that made this event possible,
in conjunction with its current exhibition, “All that you touch: art and ecology.”
Thacher Gallery director Glori Simmons brainstormed with Professor Mayo
Buenafe-Ze, the director of the Cultural Anthropology program, and the idea for
the event began to coalesce. Included in the exhibition is a zine created by Buenafe-
Ze’s Anthropology of Food class from Spring 2020, which is an autoethnography
zine about “connecting to nature,” and includes “recipes and ways to heal and care
for yourself.”
“We wanted the exhibition to center Indigenous identity, culture, and art,” said
Simmons. “For example, at the center of this exhibition is Linda Yamane’s work, who
is an Ohlone basket weaver. All of the artists interact with nature as a part of their art
practice. Food is also an art form and a piece of culture, and obviously comes from
nature, which was how we began thinking about the event.”
Buenafe-Ze, a multiethnic Indigenous Filipina, educator and activist, led the
efforts to organize and facilitate the event. “Something that I learned from community
organizers, and I tried to incorporate, is let's not just have this event,” said
Buenafe-Ze. “Let's have a very intentional action to help people think through, okay,
now that you met these people and heard their story and witnessed their brilliance,
what are you going to do with it?”
As attendees trickled into the Zoom meeting, they were greeted with the music
video for “Land Back Loops,” a song by Apsáalooke rapper Christian Parrish Takes
the Gun, known professionally as Supaman, with one of the main messages of the
song being that “every day is Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Following the song, Buenafe-
Ze presented a land and labor acknowledgement which said that USF is “located in
the territory of the Yelamu and part of the unceded and occupied land of the Ramaytush
and Muwekma (Ohlone) peoples.”
Buenafe-Ze also shared her poem, “Kapwa-tid/Tribal Conversations,” featuring
three sections about what she learned from elders and leaders of various Indigenous
communities she has visited, including the T’wali Ifugao people of her homeland in
Northern Luzon, Philippines. She called the poem an offering, in lieu of not being
able to taste and share the food prepared in the cooking demonstration.
Part of the poem, from the second section about what she learned from the
Omaha tribe in Macy, Nebraska, reads, “Keep a place / For all people to come and
/ Take their rest / And go on again. / Let them know / That they can come in / And
eat some leftovers. / There is no need / to ask for anything, / Everything here / Is
handed-down.”
The poem introduced Medina and Trevino’s conversation, which was formatted
as an interview facilitated by Quinn Ruggiero and Cole Habeck, Buenafe-Ze’s
teacher’s aides and students in her course titled “Special Topics in Decolonization
and Indigeneity.”
“The main themes that we wanted the conversation to focus on were the complexities
of decolonization through the diet, revitalization of ancestral knowledge
and practices, and how non-Indigenous people can work in solidarity with Ohlone
communities,” said Ruggiero. “I hope everyone was listening when Vincent was
talking about how non-Indigenous people need to be centering Indigenous peoples
and lands in conversations. They are not just some part of history, they’re a living
culture and their presence should not be ignored.”
One of the questions that Habeck asked during the interview was what Medina
and Trevino would suggest as a call to action for the allies of Indigenous people.
Medina responded that we should talk to our elders, “keep an ear open,” and educate
and correct people when they refer to Indigenous people and traditions in the past
tense, and to make sure that visibility around Indigenous people is never tokenized
or performative. To present an example of the ongoing revival of the Bay Area’s
Indigenous languages, Medina shared a video of his niece reading from a children’s
book in Chochenyo.
“Louis and Vincent were sharing that Ohlone people are still here, and they’re
doing amazing things in their community,” said Buenafe-Ze. “If you’re in a space
where you’re hearing people talk about Indigenous peoples, make sure they’re talking
about us in the present tense. Their presence and what the whole event was about is
also such a powerful way to show representation, you now get to meet someone who
not only is Ohlone, but knows how to cook Ohlone food, is learning the Chochenyo
language, learning the Rumsen language, so you have very visceral examples of who
Indigenous people are.”
Another part of the discussion revolved around acorns and acorn soup. Medina
mentioned that acorns are the centerpiece of their traditional diet and can be traced
back through generations.
“I think acorns also really are a metaphor for the resilience of our community,”
Medina said. “Our elders today still make acorn soup in the old way. Those are
things that we value in our culture, being intentional and being rooted in where we
come from. Specific to our traditions, acorn soup is a comfort food.”
The topic of traditional ingredients in Ohlone meals coincides with the concept
of decolonization through our diets, which Buenafe-Ze described as a journey that
looks different depending on one’s individual identity and heritage. “Decolonization
does not look the same for everybody. We’ve all been colonized in different ways,”
said Buenafe-Ze. “And with decolonizing our food, in the context Louis and Vincent
were coming from, was how it was a reclamation of their ancestral knowledge that
had been violently wiped out from the consciousness or memory of their communities.
Reintroducing those foods to their community is that decolonizing act for
them, because decolonization is an action to dismantle forms of colonialism.”
For the cooking demonstration, Trevino and Medina made chia seed porridge,
or “pattih,” an old time food in California. Medina mentioned that, “in the old
days,” chia and other ingredients were gathered “primarily by women going out
with beautiful burden baskets.” Trevino held each component of the dish up to the
camera before returning it to his preparation table as he and Medina narrated the
process. To accompany the porridge, they put together a blackberry and bay laurel
sauce and made rose hip tea. Most of the ingredients they used, such as candied
mushrooms and dried fruit, like chia, are native to California. “Our food, it looks
like the land,” said Medina.
Professor Mayo Buenafe-Ze, the
director of USF’s Cultural Anthropology
program, organized and
hosted the Indigenous Foodways
event online on Oct. 13
PHOTO COURTESY OF MAYO
BUENAFE-ZE.
“A big takeaway for me was just how significant the process of obtaining ingredients
and cooking food is, it’s just as important as actually eating food,” said Ruggiero.
“That’s something I think we tend to forget in such a consumerist society, that
our food actually came from somewhere, that every ingredient has a story behind it.”
Many of the questions in the following Q&A had to do with sourcing ingredients,
which, as emphasized by Buenafe-Ze, is “not gonna be as convenient as hitting
up your local Whole Foods.”
Medina explained that when gathering ingredients, such as acorns in the East
Bay, the first drop has to be left for other life. He said that Ohlone people have “no
word for famine because we always have enough,” but do have a word for having too
much. They find ways to source ingredients that do not put stress on the land, and
in order to be respectful of their homeland, sometimes substitute traditional Indigenous
ingredients with more sustainable alternatives similar in taste.
“As far as where we source our ingredients, we have to be innovative, because
we can’t gather everything in the traditional way,” due to the colonial degradation of
their homeland, Medina said. He continued that they source ingredients from places
such as student organic gardening associations, grown by allies of their community
and in home gardens, and develop relationships with local farmers. They also offered
suggestions about modifications to the recipe for those without access to harder-tofind
ingredients.
“I felt really honored, like you’re being invited to somebody’s table,” Simmons
said about the demonstration. “If I do and when I make it, I will be thinking about
Vincent and Louis, their community, and the culture they shared.”
Buenafe-Ze praised the cooking demonstrations' simultaneous simplicity and
complexity, and said that it is a form of “Indigenous pedagogy.” She said that the
intergenerational transfer of knowledge is a healing tool for their communities.
“If you’re learning this stuff from Indigenous people, acknowledge who
you got it from, and use that knowledge for the way it was intended,” said Buenafe-
Ze. “Cooking is an experiential form of learning. It sits with you and it makes you
kind of expand. What is your relationship with food, with the environment and
with other people? It makes you think about all of those things at once. And that is
inherently an Indigenous way of teaching and learning.”
Cafe Ohlone is planned to reopen as a full-fledged restaurant in the courtyard
of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the University of California, Berkeley
campus by 2022.
SCENE