Food Town, USA by Mark Winne

Author:Mark Winne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2019-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Traditional Food and the First People

Totem poles have been a vital part of the Native Tlingit oral tradition in Southeast Alaska. About a decade ago, the ancient medium was “reinvented” to communicate messages of health and wellness on the grounds of Sitka’s SEARHC Community Health Services center. It is known as the Wellbriety Pole and includes traditional images like the raven, but also carvings of a shaman and medicine woman that reference issues of alcoholism, substance abuse, diabetes, and cancer. Reams of statistics are not required to underscore the seriousness of these public health threats, to which we can now add climate change and overfishing. They are easily discernible in the image of a medicine woman with a tear rolling down her cheek.

I learned more about the cause of her sadness during my time in Sitka. I discovered that traditional foods like salmon, herring roe, deer, and beach asparagus take on profound meanings that are rarely imagined in non-Native North America. As indicated by the SLFN survey, the vast majority of Sitkans consume a lot of fish, game, and wild forage foods. But for the Tlingit and other Native people who comprise the four thousand citizens of the Sitka Tribe (2,500 live in Sitka), these subsistence foods are an integral part of their cultural tradition. The region’s land and waters are the provenance not only of the tribe’s sustenance, but also its soul and spirit. Unfortunately, the same survey revealed that 60 percent of the tribe’s members were not able to consume as much of their traditional food as they want.

The biggest threat to traditional foods appears to come from the $5 billion Alaska seafood industry. Without traditional foods, Native culture is weakened and individual health compromised. Compared to non-Hispanic white people, American Indians and Alaska Natives are 2.3 times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes, and their youth are 9 times more likely to have diagnosed type 2 diabetes (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2012).

While Alaskans, including state government, generally acknowledge that Native people hold a certain cultural primacy, a “first claim,” as it were, to the region’s bounty, it doesn’t mean that Natives are exempt from navigating the confusing maze of federal, state, and private land jurisdictions that promulgate regulations governing where, what, when, how, and how much game and fish can be harvested.

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