Although the foods they champion are as different as the tribes and geographical origins, their shared passion for the work they are doing ties the film together.
view supported by Kibbe Conti (Oglala Sioux): “The three sisters, which are corn, beans, and squash, grow together and nourish us uniquely … When we eat those plants,” she says, “we are in balance.”
The film also touches on the emotional and spiritual benefits of a return to a pre-contact diet, and the relationship between food sovereignty and tribal sovereignty. In a 2016 interview with Swentzell said that “because the diet was based on a cultural identity … there was also a reconnecting that none of us realized would happen. … It was not a fad or a diet. This was a belonging. This was an empowerment event.”
Before the title comes up, Swentzell defines some of the problems facing Native Americans and the solutions explores: “Hey,” she says, “we could maybe help ourselves. We could maybe eat better and make ourselves healthier. I could hear some of them saying, ‘What for? What’s the point? It’s too sad to keep going. Nobody listens to us anyway.’ I want to turn to them and say, ‘Win yourselves back by claiming ourselves from this colonization … [They] haven’t crushed us completely yet. Show them that you are not gone yet. Make it be a food revolution.’ ”
The call to decolonize indigenous diets has been picked up in a more politically pointed way by the I-Collective, an independent group of about 18 indigenous chefs, artists, herbalists, and activists from the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, who have begun serving nine-course dinners created from indigenous ingredients and served with a side of hard-to-swallow discussions of genocide, cultural erasure, and the general hardships affecting Native tribes.
“Indigenous food sovereignty is critical,” the collective’s website reads, “because many health issues are tied to colonialism and the exploitation of resources and people. Food is the most intimate connection to ourselves, our ancestors, our communities, but most importantly, to our future generations. Our vision is to increase visibility; own our foods and culture; promote Indigenous ingredients and histories in our modern world.”
“People don’t like it when you call them a colonizer,” said Hillel Echo-Hawk (Pawnee/Athabaskan) in an article about the collective posted on Eater.com on July 9. But “when Echo-Hawk addressed the crowd near the end of the evening,” author Suzanne Cope writes, “she didn’t mince words as she told the story of her Pawnee ancestors being displaced from Nebraska to Oklahoma by the American government, their ancestral round lodges plowed down, their foodways and customs forbidden, and their numbers diminished, through violence and hardship.”
addresses some of the same issues in a less confrontational way. Andrea John (Seneca Nation) tells how the government took 10,000 acres of the tribe’s land and flooded it to build a dam for the steel industry. After “a lot of fights and battles, within days houses were being burned down,” she says. “Prior to this the resources were there. We didn’t really need to depend on the government so much.”
The women who inhabit the documentary speak softly, even when what they have to say is painful. The original score by Santa Fe composer John Rangel and performed by Shelley Morningstar (Northern Cheyenne/Dutch) and Fabian Fontenelle (Zuni/ Omaha), contributes a pensive note to the film, subtly underscoring the sadness that lies beneath many of the stories the women share.
Shot on location in New Mexico, South Dakota, Alaska, Washington, New York, and Wisconsin,
was financed by a major grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation President’s Grant Fund of the Princeton Area Community Foundation, which supports health initiatives and work in Indian Country, supplemented (as are many independent releases) by donations from the producer and some of her friends.
Her purpose in making the film, Cantor says, was to communicate some of the positive things happening in the Native American community. She hopes the takeaway for viewers will be the awareness that “they can make a difference in their own lives and in their wider communities — and that part of the difference comes from something as basic as food.”
Return screens at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Cinema Showcase at 3 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 16, in the New Mexico History Museum auditorium, 113 Lincoln Ave.. For more information, visit returndocumentary.com. Food Sovereignty the Navajo Way: Cooking with Tall Woman by Charlotte J. Frisbie is published by the University of New Mexico Press. Learn more about the I-Collective