Amuse-bouche

Return: Reclaiming Native American Foodways for Health and Spirit

her 2018 book Food Sovereignty the Navajo Way: Cooking with Tall Woman, Charlotte J. Frisbie, professor emerita of anthropology at South Illinois University, notes that improving diets is “a political as well as a public health measure.”

Academically dense but readable by anyone with a deep interest in Navajo foodways, the book reports firsthand experiences and information collected during the decade the professor lived with Tall Woman, who died in 1977 at 103 years of age. Frisbie documents the gathering, growing, and preparation of traditional foods on the Navajo Nation, augmenting her highly detailed narrative with studies, government reports, recipes, and the writing of other anthropologists.

Although the book focuses on only one tribe, Frisbie defines food sovereignty as an international movement by indigenous peoples to “return to traditional foods produced by traditional methods of subsistence … to reestablish healthy lifeways.”

The idea of a return to a diet based on traditional foods — the plants and animals that nurtured indigenous people before the arrival of Spanish, Anglo-American, or other colonists — is at the heart of Return: Reclaiming Native American Foodways for Health and Spirit, a 28-minute film by Santa Fe producerdirector Karen Cantor (Singing Wolf Documentaries).

Cantor’s third documentary — a film genre she calls “an intriguing challenge” — explores food sovereignty in a less fact-packed, more conversational way by focusing on six women involved in the movement. Although the foods they champion — salmon in Washington; whale in Alaska; corn, beans, and squash in New Mexico and South Dakota — are as different as the tribes and their geographical origins, their shared passion for the work they are doing ties the film together and demonstrates the national reach of the food sovereignty movement.

Although gaining control of and reversing the disproportionately high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses that afflict Native Americans is a major goal for all, the women’s focus isn’t just on improving the physical health of their families and tribal members. “It’s feeding your spirit, it’s feeding the people, it’s feeding who you are. It’s helping you to remember who you are and the land that you came from … that is the medicine we are after,” says Valerie Seagrest (Muckleshoot) in the film. “A Muckleshoot person without a plate of salmon doesn’t exist. Without our food we would be nobody.”

Santa Clara Pueblo sculptor and food sovereignty activist Roxanne Swentzell (who is credited as creative consultant to makes frequent appearances in the film. Much of her commentary is based on her Pueblo Food Experience experiment, during which 13 volunteers ate only pre-contact foods for three months and achieved dramatically positive changes in weight, blood sugar, cholesterol, and other health measures. Swentzell documented both the diet and its impact in The Pueblo Experience Cookbook: Whole Foods of Our Ancestors, published in 2016. Many of the scenes in the film also reflect activities undertaken both during and after the experiment.

Perhaps the strongest visual episode in the film is a trip to the salt flats of the Estancia Basin, historically the main source of salt for the people of New Mexico. The camera captures Swentzell; her daughter, artist Rose Simpson; and Marion Naranjo, founder of Honor Our Pueblo Existence and one of the original Pueblo Food Experiment volunteers, dancing barefoot on the gleaming white bed of the ancient lake, crusts of salt held high in their hands. It’s the image that opens the film and the inspiration for the creation of an animated representation of the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash — that makes brief appearances throughout the film.

Cantor notes that the trio of foods was an important enough source of nourishment for tribes throughout the continental United States to justify giving the foods a human form and a role to play in the film — a