- Details
- By Neely Bardwell
A $350,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation was recently awarded to the co-directors of the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledge Institute, California’s first dedicated space for cultivating Indigenous Knowledges in a university setting, for their pioneering work at the Native American Studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hoopa Valley, Yurok, Karuk) and Dr. Kaitlin Reed (Yurok) both work to advance Indigenous science, food sovereignty, and land justice by mentoring students, fostering collaborations, and integrating Indigenous knowledge into academia and community life. Both are associate professors of Native American studies at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Editor's Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and length.
What is the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab?
Risling Baldy: The lab has been envisioned as a space where we can connect Indigenous scientists, leaders, and knowledge holders with students, community, faculty, staff, and people that are just really interested in what the resurgence of Indigenous science and place based learning could and should be, especially within a higher education institution.
I think the goal has always been that we could envision projects and research that really foregrounds Indigenous peoples’ voices as the primary sources and knowledge holders, and really connect people in a way that they can envision new things, new futures, new ideas that maybe they wouldn't have thought of otherwise because they're not limited to a Western education approach to things.
We want people to feel welcome and comfortable in coming into a campus space and doing research, engaging with research, and understanding their own knowledges, so that higher education is not so inaccessible, but instead can be an integral part of a community, and Indigenous peoples can feel really good about the work that they want to do.
How has the community responded to your work?
Risling Baldy: I've only seen really positive and amazing things happen. We just did a partnership with the Black Student Excellence center on campus, and they brought in some of their cultural and Indigenous practitioners of food. It was a day where they all talked and worked together with the lab space, and we were able to connect and tell them about Indigenous peoples in this region.
Afterwards some of the staff told me that the students, and people who came in, said this feels like a very safe space to learn, and I thought that was really powerful. to be like, It was a space where they felt really safe to ask questions and build new ideas, and they felt invited to do that.
In this time where we're all wondering ‘Where does the hope come from?’ I think the hope comes from Indigenous peoples in the ways that we've always done things. Even when the world feels out of balance, we can do things to put the world back into balance.
Reed: Part of the story of the lab is that our university didn't fund us, but when you look to donations, we do have some large donors that we're incredibly grateful for, but a lot of them are small, less than $5 donations because people want to be involved and demonstrate support of the community. So, I think it's really telling that we have hundreds and hundreds of really tiny donations which I think demonstrates the support of our community, both on campus and within our broader community.
How did the lab start?
Risling Baldy: The lab itself got started as a student project in one of my classes. They did a project where they interviewed Native faculty, staff, and students and held public stakeholders meetings and focus groups to ask ‘what should Cal Poly Humboldt do to Indigenize this campus?’.
What loaded to the top was a food sovereignty lab, so we had to figure out exactly what that is. They then held more stakeholders meetings and invited people to come and just envision what would that be? What do you want to see in that space? And everything that they envisioned we now have.
They wanted a space for cooking and demonstrations. They wanted a space where they could do workshops. They wanted a space where people could study and build connections across multiple disciplines and knowledges. They wanted a salmon cooking area and acorn processing. All those things we now have or are building.
We're not the only Native focused research program on campus, but we are the first food sovereignty lab in the California State University system. We are the first traditional ecological knowledges institute that's really thinking about Indigenous science.
What is your experience bringing Indigenous knowledge systems to academia?
Reed: I'll say that there is a lot of excitement and people who are genuinely very eager to learn from Native American Studies faculty, but what I have noticed is it's often the same exact people who take you up on those types of opportunities, and the people who are the ones actively perpetuating harmful stereotypes and discourse around Native peoples and Indigenous Knowledges are not the people lining up to learn how to ethically integrate TEK [Traditional Ecological Knowledge] into their curriculum.
Part of your job as a Native American studies professor is to let students come into your office and vent about how colonial all of these western disciplines that they have to take for their general education requirements are, and the ways that actively does harm. So, how do we actually change the professors that are doing harm to students?
Risling Baldy: There's a lot of people who think they have a lot of interest in TEK or Indigenous science. They ask ‘what about what I could do with that?’ Or ‘how is that going to help my work?’ Then when you start talking to them and say we can help and demonstrate for you how that's going to elevate the work you're doing, but that also means you're dedicated to the political struggle and the social issues that are happening to Native people.
That's when they get very turned off from it. They don't want to also have to dedicate themselves to the political struggles and social issues of Native people, and just want the knowledge. This is part of an ongoing process of colonialism where suddenly we're still being extracted from. The extractiveness that happens in higher education needs to stop.
We always say, ‘If you're not there, if you're not ready to support the struggles, then you’re also not ready to engage with Indigenous knowledge.’ Preventing that extraction has been an important part of what we're trying to do with our lab.
Would you say there is a connection between food sovereignty and health?
Reed: Yes. One of the things I think about in my work a lot is the relationships between the health of the people and the health of the land. Those are often reflections of one another. Our elders will say, as long as the river is sick, the people will never be healthy.
When we return to traditional foods, we can see the physical manifestations of that through health. In a lot of the work that Dr Rislin Baldy is doing with youth, we can also see the way that impacts things like mental health and emotional health. There's graphs I love to show people where it shows the rates of salmon populations, and as that graph goes down, the rates of diabetes in our region of Northwestern California go up. It's an inverse of each other.
When you take all the salmon out of the river because they don't have water or clean water, we're actually seeing that manifest itself in the bodies of Indigenous peoples, and because Indigenous peoples have such close relationships with their lands, we'll often see really disproportionate rates of those health disparities within Indigenous communities.
Risling Baldy: Colonialism exists all around us to make us feel uncomfortable in our own spaces, to make us feel crazy and unhealthy. When you start to realize everybody's made to feel very unhealthy in this space because if they keep us unhealthy, then maybe we're not all going to organize together and start exercising our sovereignty.
So when you start also saying to yourself, I need to be healthy, and when I'm healthy, I can then help to make the land healthier. I can help my more-than-human relatives to be healthy, and when they're healthy, then the water will be healthy. When the water is healthy, then everything else will come together. We know things are interconnected.
Native people understand that food is not just the food that you eat that goes into your body. It's the entire system that it took to bring that food to you, and part of that is the relationships that we have had within that system to bring that food to you and part of that is the relationships with people that you have so they could teach you about that. It's all interconnected. We can't disconnect land health from the health of each other.
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