Felix Clary
ICT + Tulsa World
TULSA, Okla. – The Osage Nation has gained food sovereignty through the pandemic by scoring 250 bison and working to bring back cultural buffalo dances and traditional meals, says Osage Chief Jefferey Standing Bear.
“The last time we had a buffalo hunt was in the 1860s. … That whole culture we had involved with the buffalo is pretty well past. We still have buffalo clans, but we don’t have buffalo dances, and we lost so much. … So what we’ve been trying to do is bring those activities and try to rebuild our culture.”
After having no bison for 150 years, the Osage Nation has enough buffalo now to serve the community. The 250 buffalo roam the 43,000-acre Butcher House Meats Ranch in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
Buffalo dances are ceremonial dances performed at festivals, believed to assure the return of the buffalo and food provisions for the season. When there were no buffalo left in Oklahoma, this dance was unable to continue.
On April 6, Standing Bear attended a food sovereignty panel and traditional meal served in Harvest Land Farms’ greenhouse, during the Sovereign Futures four-day gathering.
The panel consisted of Chief Standing Bear, artist Tahila Mintz, Native Farm Solution’s creator Travis Andrews, and Dr. Rodney Clark, owner of Clark-Asbury Ranch in North Tulsa.
Standing Bear told panel-listeners that for the Osage Nation, food sovereignty lies in providing healthy, culturally significant food for its people. Bison is a staple in Osage diet and culture.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Osage Nation struggled to access fresh produce, which was already difficult since they were located in a food desert, with few grocery stores nearby.
On March 20, 2020, Standing Bear’s staff told him the only food left was in everyone’s refrigerators, because the slaughter houses and grocery stores were shutting down due to the pandemic. They had no more food supply for the food distribution programs the Osage Nation offers.
Standing Bear said his plan for farming was not “a vision. It was panic.”
Standing Bear and Assistant Chief Raymond Redcorn drove out to a spot of land that Standing Bear knew was owned but unused by the Osage Nation.
When they arrived, a man came out to greet them on a tractor. Standing Bear told him he thought the Osage Nation owned that land. The man responded saying that they do, but no one had used it since his aunt donated it back in the ’80s, so they keep up with farming it. Standing Bear told him he would like to work out a deal with him.
The Osage Nation gained control of their own land again. Standing Bear said they tried every farming technique they could to care for the land.
Oklahoma State University, Kansas State University, the USDA, and more helped the Osage Nation turn the land into Harvest Land Farms. Butcher House Meats was created next as an effort to purchase and keep bison.
“Every community needs to do this. You need to be able to take care of yourself. Because whoever is going to be controlling the food during the crisis has way too much power.”
Sovereign Futures
New York-based art museum curator Allison Glenn organized the Sovereign Futures gathering, which celebrates sovereignty for Indigenous populations of Oklahoma, and descendants and survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Activists, artists and art lovers traveled from all over the United States to follow Glenn and her team of curators around the greater Tulsa area, visiting black and Indigenous artists whose art speaks to the sovereignty of tribal and black communities in Oklahoma.
“This project has been really trying to draw connections to the afro-Indigenous histories in the region … because those histories are in the present moment and give an opportunity to think about the future,” said Glenn.
The following are brief descriptions of other speakers at the Sovereign Futures event.
Tahila Mintz is an Indigenous Yaqui and Jewish media maker, educator and community organizer, multidisciplinary artist, water protector, land guardian, medicine carrier, and founding executive director of OJI:SDA’, Sustainable Indigenous Futures.
Her work focuses on ancestral matriarchies and gender equilibrium. She has been a photographer for over 20 years, working through the Americas, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is currently on faculty at Vanderbilt University for Performance Arts. Her work exists in public spaces, publications, museums and private collections. She was also a National Geographic explorer and Magnum Foundation Fellow.
“So for me, the teachings that I received was that our primary responsibility was (to be) guardians of the natural world. And … also that we are cared for by the natural world. We are nurtured, and we are in beautiful harmony through this relationship through our ups and downs,” Mintz said.
Mintz also encouraged the panel-listeners to find food sovereignty for themselves, by planting their own plants, even if it’s just “one blade of grass, or the fresh lemon balm that’s behind you.” She pointed to the aromatic plants behind the lunch tables.
She said to not only care for the plant, but to connect with it, spend time with it, and learn all that you can from watching it grow.
As Mintz spoke, the lunch guests sipped on hot tea made from a blend provided by Mintz. The tea is called “Spring Equilibrium” and contains plant allies like red clover, sumac, spearmint, peppermint, lemon balm, and cornflower.
Travis Andrews is Navajo and Northern Cree. He is a former welder, urban farmer and founder of Native Farming Solutions, an Oklahoma grassroots organization formed to grow the foods and medicines needed within the local ceremonial community. Native Farming Solutions developed a method of holistic cultivation that is derived from traditional teachings about Native understanding of fire, farming and food as medicine.
This work is focused on encouraging Native youth to revive and regenerate cultural practices for ceremonial food preparation and language preservation. Andrews is also a garden program manager in south Oklahoma City at a food bank that has a one-acre farm dedicated to providing fresh foods to the patrons, as well as hands-on experience with gardening for community members. Travis works to develop educational programs that focus on small-scale solutions for urban gardening in Oklahoma for all ages.
“It took me a while to figure out what (food sovereignty) means. And what I’ve come to figure out is that there’s food sovereignty and food security. A lot of people mix them up. So food sovereignty to me is when you have total control over foods out of your food system. And food security is when you measure how much food you actually need,” Andrews added.
Dr. Rodney Clark is a native Tulsan and descendant of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. He has over 20 years experience as an educator, assistant professor of theater at Tulsa Community College and Berea college in Berea, Kentucky. He is an administrator of Tulsa Public Schools, as well as a playwright, filmmaker, entrepreneur and rancher. He is the founder and former superintendent-principal of Langston Hughes Academy. He is currently teaching video productions at Muskogee High School in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Clark has worked extensively in Theater North in Tulsa. He also wrote the musical “Black Wall Street the Musical.”
Clark told the story of how he and his family owned a bed-and-breakfast in North Tulsa. When the pandemic hit, he took a risk and shut down his business entirely and started farming.
He started growing watermelon, cantaloupe, squash, zucchini and more.
Eventually, he got his own cattle and chickens and sold milk, eggs and meat. He said his business took off because of North Tulsa being a food dessert, and a real need for food in the community.
He offers booths at his market for other local vendors to set up and sell their produce as well. Over time, they started planning out which local farmer would grow which vegetables, to make sure they had an even supply of everything.
The Clark-Asberry Homestead ranch is the only black-owned farm in North Tulsa, and it has been called the heart of Black Wall Street.
Clark also talked about the importance of healthy eating, making his own homemade chicken rather than getting take-out. He shared his own successful weight-loss journey, and stressed how much farm fresh ingredients can make a difference.
The April 6 art piece at the Sovereign Futures conference was a meal for about 60 guests, created by Ben Jacobs, the co-owner and co-founder of Tokabe American Indian eatery based in Denver. He started his restaurant nearly 16 years ago, all based on the idea of developing and sharing Indigenous cuisine, culture and identity.
Many of the meal’s ingredients came from Harvest Land Farm and Clark-Asbery Family Farm.
“Native first, local second. This is how we prioritized the ingredients,” Jacobs said.
Every ingredient in the meal was freshly harvested and Indigenous to Turtle Island.
The meal consisted of smoked butternut acorn squash guisecorn with beet greens that were just cut that morning at Harvest Land, a wild rice that came from Red Lake Nation, a salad with pumpkin seeds and a maple vinaigrette that comes from Spirit Lake Minnesota, a white tepary bean salad with cactus paddles and chimichurri made with parsley and cilantro from the greenhouse, smoked bison from the Osage Butcher Meats ranch, and for a dessert, a modernized Kuchuny (Cherokee dish) made with pecans, blue corn and blueberries.
This story is co-published by the Tulsa World and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Oklahoma area.
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