This report is in collaboration with our partners at PBS Wisconsin.

Erica Ayisi
PBS Wisconsin + ICT

Eldon Powless is an Oneida chef. On a February morning, he is busy making lunch at the Ukwakhwa kitchen on the Oneida Nation reservation near Green Bay.

Powless said his “Northern comfort bowl” is an Indigenous take on Southern comfort food.

“I wanted to do like a little twist on that, and use wild rice, and use the beans that we have, and whatever we have available local,” he said.

Ukwakhwa, which means “Our Foods” in the Oneida language, isn’t a restaurant, but Powless is the guest chef for the week’s meal. He said he uses some heirloom Indigenous foods that are harvested on Ukwakhwa’s farm — the Oneida way.

“I try to incorporate whatever we can get locally,” Powless said.

His comfort bowl recipe of diced celery, onions, carrots and locally-sourced wild rice are added to a butter cream sauce with roasted sweet corn. Black beans simmered in braised smoked ham hocks are on the side.

“The ham hocks are cured here, then smoked,” Powless said in the Ukwakhwa kitchen.

Stephen Webster is director of farm & culinary operations at Ukwakhwa. He said a grant of $250,000 from the Wisconsin Partnership Program for their “From Seed to Table” program subsidizes sales of hot lunches made by Indigenous chefs to restore wellness to their diets and combat health disparities.

“They get a stipend, they cook about 80 to 100 meals for the community,” he explained. “The community then puts in orders — how many we want. And then we pretty much disperse those meals throughout the community.”

Webster said their grant-funded program offers community members meals rooted in ancestral knowledge for modern living, integrating traditional ingredients like corn and beans with contemporary cuisine.

“The goal of this was to try to expand people’s palates,” he said.

The grant also subsidizes hands-on meal preparation workshops using products harvested on the reservation.

“We’ve had people make maple seed cookies, which blows my mind sometimes, where it was like there was no gluten in it,” Webster shared.

He said the program is meeting its goals in its first year.

“I think we did 1,393 meals just through the ‘Hot Meal’ noon program, and then we did another 80-some meals through the meal prep class,” said Webster.

He explained that meals like the “Northern comfort bowl” would cost about $30 each in local restaurants, but Ukwakhwa is able to offer it here for $13 to the Oneida community due to reduced pricing through the grant. Webster hopes to continue the same pricing when that funding ends.

“I feel like we’re much stronger from a logistic standpoint to take on this stuff in the future,” he said.

Webster described how the food programs help the Oneida community reconnect to their Indigenous foodways from a time when their ancestors were relocated from New York to Wisconsin in the early 1800s.

“When they came here, again, it was, they were following Christian missionaries, but there were still people who practice our traditions, our language, and all that other stuff,” he said. “And a lot of little seeds came with them as well.”

What did lessons from ancestors and working with other tribal organizations around the country teach about Indigenous cultivation?

“The biggest one that most people are aware of is companion planting — the Three Sisters style of planting,” Webster said.

Maintaining Oneida agricultural methods of planting varieties of corn, beans and seeds next to each other, Webster explained, is a balancing act of traditional and modern farming.

“For two or three people like me and my wife to do it, we have to use a tractor, we have to do stuff, but we still make it a point to hand-plant and hand-weed and so forth to keep those traditions alive,” he said.

Twice a month, the Ukwakhwa team delivers their culturally relevant meals to seven different dropoff sites along an Oneida tribal departments route. Webster and Ukwakhwa’s staff and volunteers pack up his truck with dozens of hot and ready pre-ordered meals prepared by that week’s chef.

Toni House, on the other hand, picked up her three meals at the Ukwakhwa farm — and reflected on her childhood memories of food insecurity from colonization.

“I remember what it was like to be hungry as a child,” she said. “You know, and I remember thinking, how come people didn’t hand me good foods?”

House said the program will help younger children have an appetite and desire for healthy Indigenous meals.

“Nutrition right here impacts three generations automatically,” she said.

Back in the Ukwakhwa kitchen, Powless said traditional Indigenous ingredients can be cooked with love and risk while exploring new recipes.

“You don’t have to be super traditional and make it a certain way,” he said. “You can incorporate it however you would like.”

Webster said the From Seed to Table project incorporates the past for a healthier diet in the future.

“To make sure that we go back as much as we can,” he said, “to what maybe our ancestors were eating to help combat some of that.”