Page 8
Commentary
BY STEPHEN QUIRKE
unlike today, the food was primarily held in
common, not exported while people went
hungry. Many of those food sources still
■ Portland is widely regarded as a city for
exist, and could return to abundance with
.
foodies and a hot-bed of farmers
-B- markets andI fdddcdfopsl'Lastyear the the proper care and attention. x ..
“The salmon were very plentiful,” says
Washington Post even ranked us the best
Wilbur Slockish, a Klickitat chief. “There
food city in the country.
was up to 30 million of those fish in the
But who controls our celebrated food?
river, ‘cause we only took what we needed.
Oregon ranked No. 1 in the nation for
You had spring salmon, summer salmon,
food-insecure children in 2011, and despite
silvers, the coho, the sockeye, steelhead.
farms and ranches covering over 16 million
They were all there. Steelhead’s role was in
acres of the state, we remain among the
the preservation of our powdered salmon.
most food-insecure states in the country
He would provide the oil so that it wouldn’t
today, with more than 210,000 children in
spoil. They all had their roles.”
2014 unsure of where their next meal was
Chief Slockish says that his people lived
coming from, according to the non-profit
in temporary villages in and around
group Feeding America.
Portland, and moved to harvest the best and
Why? According to the Oregon Farm
most abundant foods as they became
Bureau, about 80 percent of Oregon’s
available through the seasonal rounds, while
agricultural foods leave the state, and 40
also traveling to higher elevations, away
percent leave the country so that property
from Portland, in anticipation of the floods.
owners can bring “new money” to Oregon.
Access to these foods diminished when
On the flip side of this abundance, the
settlers began building fences and
Oregon Food Bank reports that 270,000
establishing farms in the Willamette Valley,
people a month are eating from emergency
tilling up the fertile soils that had provided
food boxes - 92,000 of them children.
traditional foods to countless generations.
This was not always the state of affairs,
Access diminished further with the
and doesn’t have to be today. In “Braiding
establishment of the reservation system and
Sweetgrass,” the ethnobotanist Robin Wall
the overharvesting of fish that came with
Kimmerer writes, “For the greater part of
the settler canning industry.
human history, and in places in the world
But Chief Slockish says the food in the
today, common resources were the rule. But
region was originally very abundant. “The
some invented a different story, a social
food was plentiful - we never, never went
construct in which everything is a
hungry.”
commodity to be bought and sold. The
“This land was a giant supermarket The
market economy story has spread like
wildfire, with uneven results for human well foods, like your supermarket now, they have
different aisles for different foods, and that’s
being and devastation for the natural world.
the way the mountains and this area was.
But it is just a story we have told ourselves
And that’s why they called us migrants, but
and we are free to tell another, to reclaim
you know we follow the ripening of the
the old one.”
seasons. High water fisheries, low water
In fact, the food right here in Portland did
fisheries, all of the berries and the roots,
not always come from private landowners
they had their seasons and in different
who sold wherever they wished. Not so long
areas.
That’s why we just went, like going
ago, the Portland area was an abundant food
from one aisle to another aisle like we have
forest surrounded by a huge variety of
now. But they don’t call ‘em migratory when
berries, edible roots, fish and big game. And
STAFF WRITER
Street Roots • June 24-30, 2016
WIKICOMMONS
they are going down their supermarket
aisles.”
Slockish says that camas, a blue flowering
plant whose root bulb provided a staple food,
grew in massive beds on both sides of the.
Willamette River, and that these, massive
patches extended all the way from Salem to
Portland, and up to the mouth of the
Columbia River past Sauvie Island (then
Wapato Island) after the arrow-leafed food
plant that grew in abundance in its shallow
waters).
Today, the native peoples whose cultures
grew up with these foods want to see their
habitats restored so that the original bounty
can return. And if their vision is embraced
by other Northwest leaders, the result would
not only be a healthy and ecologically sound
food source that revitalizes native cultures,
but a stronger and more diverse economy
for the entire region.
Multiple tribal governments have begun
initiatives to restore abundance and access
to these traditional foods. The Puget
Sound’s Northwest Indian College launched
the Traditional Foods of Puget Sound
Project in 2008, which led to the Lurnmi
Traditional Food Project in 2009, followed by
the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project
in 2010.
In 2007, the Confederated Tribes of the
Umatilla Indian Reservation in Eastern
Oregon went a step further, shifting its
entire land management strategy towards
the preservation and restoration of first
foods - a transformation initiated and
implemented by their Department of Natural
Resources.
Eric Quaempts, the department director
who crafted this strategy, says that his goal
is to manage the land based on the lesson of
foods served at religious and cultural events
- a crystallization of tribal creation beliefs.
“In tribal creation belief there’s an order
in which the foods promised to take care of
the people. Water is served first, then
salmon, representing other fish, deer,