Clement Loo  00:00
Hi, I'm Clement Loo. Welcome again to Just Sustainability. Curious conversations about sustainability, equity and social justice. Before we get started, I should note both to provide some context and to serve as a disclaimer, that it was really windy the day that I interviewed Heid. The wind is worth mentioning to you because Heid refers to it in our conversation, it's also worth mentioning because it messed with my recording equipment. So there's some weird volume fluctuations throughout the recording. I tried to adjust the levels while I was editing, but I couldn't get everything evened out perfectly, so I wanted to give you some advanced warning anyhow, on to the episode. This episode, I'll be introducing you to Heid Erdrich. It's actually a little difficult for me to introduce Heid, because she's one of those folks that's really awesome in a whole bunch of really different ways. I should definitely note that she's an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain band of Anishinabe, she's an award winning poet and author of one of my favorite cookbooks. She's also an artist, and a curator, and Heid's also, perhaps most importantly, for the purposes of this podcast, and advocate for indigenous rights and sovereignty as well. Someone whose work is often focused around reclaiming indigenous foods, food systems and food ways. Anyway, here's how she introduced herself.

Heid Erdrich  01:23
I had a meeting last night and it was so loud, had a video meeting and it was so loud. People were like, What is that noise? I'm like "that is the wind."

Clement Loo  01:30
Yeah, no, I mean, I think it gives us a sense of place right? In like, you know, the flat part of rural Minnesota where it's windy and wintry

Heid Erdrich  01:38
where I grew up on the roaring prairie or on some days I say the godforsaken prairie.

Clement Loo  01:43
Yeah. No, it does feel that way. On days like this.

Heid Erdrich  01:46
 I grew up here. So 

Clement Loo  01:47
oh, you grew up here?

Heid Erdrich  01:48
40 minutes from here.

Clement Loo  01:49
Oh where'd you grow up?

Heid Erdrich  01:51
Wahpeton.

Clement Loo  01:51
Oh, that is real close.

Heid Erdrich  01:52
Yeah. 

Clement Loo  01:54
Yeah, I guess we get started if you want to, in the words of Heid who is Heid?

Heid Erdrich  02:01
Well, I'm Heid Erdrich. And I grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, I'm a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Anishinabe, magically Indico, hydrometric, shog. And Ashley, among those are my names. I am Makwa Bear Clan woman, and I live in Minneapolis, now.

Clement Loo  02:20
After Heid introduced herself, I asked her to tell me a little bit about how she thought about sustainability and equity, I would invite you to pay particular attention to what she says about access, and how she approaches improving access. When you think about sustainability, what are the things you're thinking about trying to achieve? What are the topics that you think of? And then when you're thinking about like, equity, same thing, like what are you trying to achieve? What does equity look like to you?

Heid Erdrich  02:41
Yeah, you know, that's interesting, because I generally don't think about the abstract when I'm doing my work, I'm focused on the concrete, the, you know, the vehicle part of the metaphor, not the tenor, not the content that it's holding, you know, the rose and not love. Yeah. So, for me, like, I often don't get a chance to just stop and say, you know, my work is about equity. And sometimes if I'm, you know, writing a grant or being asked to do something like this, I just gets stopped in my tracks. I'm like, what is it? How is that? You know, there's like, there are levels of equity that I think of pretty often in my own work. And they are around the possibilities of access. Yeah. For for individuals and in various arts and food systems in health in a certain way. 

Clement Loo  03:34
Yeah.

Heid Erdrich  03:35
 Mental health, for certain, and access to our own histories and our own sense of our sovereign cultures. 

Clement Loo  03:43
Okay. You say something more about, like how you think of access? When you say access? How does one have good access?

Heid Erdrich  03:50
Well, I can give you you know, a very simple example, when I was working on the cookbook, one of the first things I did was see where people grocery shopped on the in the Upper Midwest native communities, and looked at, you know, what I could find about the corporate sites if they were corporations, what I could find out from actually visiting them what's on the shelf, you know, what access do you have to your own indigenous foods? If they aren't, where you live? And how do you get them? Do you get them, you know, through a micro local system? Do you you know, get your own wild rice? Or does your uncle get it or your auntie right now? How do you get your food? Do you want to somebody else hunt? Does your grocery store carry excess of these things? Does your corner gas station carry seasonal foods that your tribe likes? So that's that's kind of thing I was looking at. That's an access issue. To me. There are places where that is just simply not a possibility. 

Clement Loo  04:43
of those different options? Right. None

Heid Erdrich  04:44
 Yeah, yeah, those options.

Clement Loo  04:46
 okay. So like you're thinking, not just sort of the presence of providers and retailers but also skills,

Heid Erdrich  04:51
skills, and, you know, of course, the economics of it and just being invited into that process. When I wrote the cookbook I thought it would resonate with people because I went to people in these many Native communities in the upper Midwest. And I asked them, you know, what do you eat? What do you cook? How do you work with your own traditional foods, I wasn't going to do anything purely indigenous foods based, like the brilliant John Sherman does, because I wanted to know what people were eating today, right, and how they incorporated those things, and to encourage people to just, you know, incorporate indigenous foods into their own days. And when I started taking the book out and reading it, and working often with student groups, I'd find out that those students had never had any access to the things their parents and grandparents had. It just takes a generation for people to lose that access and the skills and the invitation to learn how to do those things from the the elders who know.

Clement Loo  05:47
no, so I've encountered that, too. When I talk to students, and they tell me stories about going with their grandparents do like to gather things, right. Like, for example, like, yeah, I can who was talking to but someone like, Yeah, or like going out yellow, the Yellow Medicine is like, what do you know what what species that isn't? Like no, no idea. Like, do you remember what the plant looks like? No. Yeah, I'd have to go ask my grandma. So It's interesting, because there are people who have had experience doing it, but still haven't done it enough

Heid Erdrich  06:17
that yeah, that's one of the things I'm going to talk about tonight, when I get my lecture here at Morris is that it's a brain development thing. If you don't see the way people gather plants, when you're really young, you lose a certain ability to just immediately identify the shape of the leaf, the growth pattern, it's um, it's not something that people do intellectually, it's a pattern matching and immediate visual thing. And then some sense memory, like a lot of older people, when they introduce you to a plant, they might crush a leaf. So you know how it smells, they might point out what's around it. And when they do that, when you're really little, and you see them just naturally doing that it's ingrained, right. But if you start when you're older, it's like learning a language. It's hard. It's much harder.

Clement Loo  07:01
The next section of our conversation began, when I mentioned to Heid that I first became aware of her as a poet. And then I was surprised when she published a cookbook. And I asked her how that happened. Somehow that question turned into a discussion about climate change, colonization, reclamation of indigenous lifeways and foodways and exploring indigenous identity.

Heid Erdrich  07:20
Well, you know, the little notes on the top of each recipe are very poem like, little prose poems. And once I started to think of it that way, it became a much easier project for me. But essentially, I accepted it as an assignment from the great editors at the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Okay. They had consulted with me because I was an author on their catalog already with an anthology called Sister nations. And I said, Oh, God, you know it would be great if somebody did a book about what people eat right now. And what they've shared from their generations, and you know, and how they're passing it on, and just give people a chance to, you know, say what they cook with. And, and I even have a title for it. I said, original local, you can have that one for free. You just find an author. And a few months later, they're like, Well, we haven't found an author, you have to write it. So I thought about it, and it wasn't easy. And I got some funding, and I was able to do it. That's cool. Only in two years, which was extremely fast.

Clement Loo  08:20
Yeah. No, that is actually pretty quick turnover. Yeah.

Heid Erdrich  08:25
Especially because climate change really affected the foods the first year. And in the beginning of the book, I talk about how the ice wasn't strong enough for ice fishing in a lot of places. Starting right there. That was a huge disappointment to a lot of people. And I had been wanting to go out and to learn about traditional ice fishing and so forth. Later on, the rice crop was was very scarce and all over the upper Midwest. And I went to my home reservation to a mountain and there have been late frost, and there were no berries, and hardly any nuts. So all the things that I kind of thought about experiencing and writing about were not an option the first year, which was really bad. Yeah. But then I wrote about that about how you know, we are going to be hit by climate change in a way that other people may not.

Clement Loo  09:13
ya know, so it actually makes me think, have you ever read anything by Kyle powers white? And you don't think so? He's a philosopher at a cannot. I know. He's Potawatomi Oh, he's, I think he's a Michigan State. He's one of the Michigan schools, either University of Michigan and Michigan State. So he has this when he writes about climate change, he thinks of it as a kind of a similar analogy to what his people went through. Right. So like, I think they originated around Michigan, right, like by the great week, great, great lakes region. And then they got displaced down to Oklahoma, which is-

Heid Erdrich  09:52
Yeah, most of them most Potawatomi remote. There's still someone Wisconsin but yeah, and so Michigan.

Clement Loo  09:58
Yeah. And he so he was noting that the sort of change in sort of surroundings that his people experienced during rent displacement will will be really similar to what people now will experience in the Midwest when

Heid Erdrich  10:12
they went to the Kansas like, you know, environment that we're going to have here. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. And then I mean, in some things will return to us in ways that they hadn't because they've been such a dearth of while hazelnuts, what we call pecans, and now they'll come back because they're, they're being successfully introduced south of here. So I think that we'll have those and they're very, very important to our diets. And yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, Maple will retreat northward, but we have relationships over the borders. So we'll continue, I think to have some for quite a long time have access to Maple that wild rice is the big game changer. Yeah. So dependent on the click clean water. Oh, yeah, lack of storms, you know,

Clement Loo  10:59
going back to the access, right. So there's, it sounds like, again, the lot of the issues that are coming up will be access ones, with the cookbook, what we're trying to, like accomplish in terms of like improving access, there's that first level of actually having recipes for people who might have lost them, that knowledge would learn some recipes that use

Heid Erdrich  11:18
anyway we can, encourage people, you know, just an encouragement. And someplace people could go to, at, you know, tribal colleges and historical sites. And it's something they could find in a lot of places. That's one of the reasons I was happy to publish with the stork Society Press because they get their books out there into tribal communities. So there was that I knew that it would be something that I could, you know, go to, and bring to a, you know, cooking, or, you know, the culinary arts classes, and I've been lucky enough to be able to do that in many communities in the Upper Midwest, I knew it would be of interest. So I thought it would get that support both from mainstream and from tribal communities. And I knew something else would come along, you know, right after it, that would work too. But this is, you know, it documents some of the attitude of people at the rise of this original foods, indigenous foods movement. So that's what I was hopeful. But, you know, as a writer, I'm sort of a lazy activist and like, I write it, you figure out what to do.

Clement Loo  12:24
I tell the part that I like I find most appealing both original local stories. When I read I think, like, if I was a descendant of those cultures, reading those stories would make me want to think about r:itgh:my history, think about the traditions, the food, like how that family how those things all tied together, what would you try to capture with those stories? I think that is some element of access, right? Just to let people know, like, Hey, you're missing something, and you will, right,

Heid Erdrich  12:49
and that they may be hearing these stories and not like keying into them. Because I think for me, there was always an issue. You know, I was raised by two teachers. Yeah, I had a great education, I fit in well in the white world. So you know, the issue of like, what is my, my, you know, own lived identity as an indigenous person, as noted white person and most clearly to me, yeah, it's in food, you know, in, in traditional practices, and of harvesting and gathering and so but that was very much a part of my life and always interested me. So I don't think we often get to express that it's, it's easier for people to express other kinds of ceremony and other kinds of dance and other kinds of movement. But the movements of harvesting are actually even part of dance. So there's so to me, it was an expression of, you know, personal understanding and exploring how our family came to have a strong interest in food and how I feel that is a really traditional value that people might ignore, they might be hearing these stories and not realizing that these are as important as a sacred story, right, you know, or a story about a cultural hero, or, and they contain our history, too, you know, they map our history where the foods are, where we lived, why we protected certain areas, that is all about the foods sources that we had.

Clement Loo  14:09
Our conversation then turned to how stories help us connect to culture and how stories are important for decolonization. It strikes me that for a lot of younger folks, they're probably really alienated from those cultural stories.

Heid Erdrich  14:22
Yeah, they are. And sometimes the stories that I tell the cultural stories are maybe a little more access for them, actually, because people have a hierarchy, you know, that that is more important than, you know, learning how to how to process wild rice. So how they think and sometimes those stories contain those processes. That's what I like to point out to, you know, is that these stories have food in them often. So there is a connection.

Clement Loo  14:49
There is connection, but I think it might not be as lived as a family though, right? Yeah. True. So long stories about families and how family gatherings and family traditions, tie into those cultural The issue

Heid Erdrich  15:01
that can often be true, you know, the one thing that I did find out pretty early on that I didn't expect is that a lot of people are cut off from those two, we've had so much disruption of our structure, you know, starting with boarding school, but also in contemporary times, and people say, I didn't ever see anybody make any food, you know, we just bought it, we didn't, you know, or we just open a can. And that was not unusual. And people say, I feel a little wistful about this experience. And I'm like, Well, do you have any elders who are alive? Ask them and, you know, use that as a way to help with your relationship? And, and, you know, people like that idea. So, I think it is an entry point. But

Clement Loo  15:43
yeah, you said earlier that you don't really think kind of about the practical part, right? Being a scholar thinking about you, right, the thing that people forget, but it really does sound like you're thinking a lot about different ways of like engaging in decolonization?

Heid Erdrich  15:55
Yeah, I think so when I, when I'm actually able to visit with people and spend time with them or, you know, yes, then I, then I, I'm able to sort of switch gears when I'm making it, that's really not what I think about this, I might note the moments and sort of put them in my back in my head, the moments when I, you know, served a meal to a lot of younger native people. And many of them were like, well, I've never eaten anything like this ever eaten local fish. Never. You know, I've never tried any of these these foods that are kind of greens and herbs and things like

Clement Loo  16:27
that. So what are the things you're thinking about?

Heid Erdrich  16:30
I'm thinking about the story, the images, the connection, the sort of sensory connection to things, because I know, that's how we learn. And I want, you know, I was thinking about my kids, they were younger, and they were cooking alongside me, or helping prepare the foods or helping get the foods going on little research trips with me, I wanted them to know that they could be part of that that was an access thing for them to and that they can share it with other people. So

Clement Loo  16:55
yeah, well, I actually know one of your kids. And I think you were very successful that way, I think.

Heid Erdrich  17:02
I think I was also kind of clueless about that, too, because I remember when he was applying to college, and he wrote his college essay about cooking black beans, which were another Potawatomi gift to us. And yeah, and I looked at that I said, What gave you this idea? And he's like, I watched you make a cookbook for two years.

Clement Loo  17:23
I think it really like I think, seeing the folks who care about do things makes it important to you, right? Because I know it's super important to him. And it's something he shares with the people around him. Right.

Heid Erdrich  17:32
And that the idea of sharing foods, which is just a really essential value, I think in that is one that I It makes me really wonder what we're losing when people don't have that moment of sharing made food with one another. It's so it's like necessary, like, you know, people talk about, you know, breast milk is the first food and food to the first medicine. And I'm like those sort of sacred values and like, well, there are a generations of people who got totally cut off from that. So we need to recover that.

Clement Loo  18:00
Right. I mean, if you look at the sort of the history of colonization, right, that often was the way the US Federal Government, right, I do the assimilate,

Heid Erdrich  18:10
right, you know, substitute our food for your food. So you can't use the your dependent? Yeah, I think that was a very deliberate Yeah, whether they knew the science of it or the effect of it or not, they knew that it keeps people in line if you force them to eat your food,

Clement Loo  18:28
or force them, it forces them to have to participate in your systems, right? Eating their systems of getting food, listening to high talk about stories. And the importance of stories led me to think about heights work as an educator, has taught in a number of universities and hosted many workshops where indigenous writers at Turtle Mountain Community College, and it struck me that one of hides many contributions to equity involves or helping indigenous authors tell their stories. And that being the case, I asked her about her process when it comes to teaching folks how to more effectively tell stories. This is what she said, how do you think about access while you're teaching stuff like that?

Heid Erdrich  19:02
Well, that's really that's interesting. Do I always my first thought is always Oh, no, I don't I just do I don't think

Clement Loo  19:10
how do you. What do you think? I don't teach

Heid Erdrich  19:13
that was that was a fun thing. Being here at Morris. You know, I don't teach in a classroom regularly. I have a low residency cohort of MFA students I work with I did for 20 years work with undergraduates. And it was before I had the sort of authority and ability to take charge in my own classroom, but I always taught in community and I always taught about let's find the stories that we do have, and value those stories and don't think all of your stories have to be some, you know, along the lines of some traditional tale or something out of deep oral history. Your stories are also the haunting stories. They're also you know, car accident stories, whatever. Those are actually our stories in the way that they're told in to look at how they're tool to have access to the tools to understand what a story is actually telling you is what I hope for them to have. Because I think it helps just in life to know that, you know, people will tend to tell you something that is not direct, right? And you will remember it better because it's not direct, but you will also have to analyze it to understand what it's telling you,

Clement Loo  20:21
right? We think in terms of narratives, right? So we have a good narrative. Remember the narrative we might not actually know, but the narratives about at first, right? Well, we sit with it for a while.

Heid Erdrich  20:29
Yes, exactly. And so I like to teach them how to how to do that with narrative and also to think about memory in poetry. This semester, I was able to do some really direct, what ifs about food sustainability. You know, I just gave them an exercise of what if food distribution stopped? And you were here at Morris, what would you do tonight that the events that I'm when I'm giving a talk to the students are going to read their responses there, what ifs.

Clement Loo  21:00
So how do you evoke stories from folks who might not be used to telling their stories? Like when you're working with students? How do you get them to like, Tell those sorts of impactful thoughtful stories? How do you?

Heid Erdrich  21:12
Yeah, well, I feel like everybody has inner narrative attempts. You know, I've read about brain development, it's very few people don't have an inner narrative. It's how language begins to work in us before we can speak, we have, you know, an inner language, most of a gestural language. So I ask people to tie their writing to their senses. Because that gets through a lot of a lot of barriers, you know, you don't have to think about those abstracts. You don't have to, you don't have to know what you're writing about. You just have to know how it feels, how it tastes, how it looks. Yeah. And then you begin to understand, you know, why you're valuing this image or this thing that you're writing about? So I sort of trick them into it. Yeah. And I also, I always have people do like a five minute exercise, you can fill an entire page in five minutes, if you just keep writing. And that helps a lot. I think I've never had a class where people were like, those five exercises were worthless. They're all like, wow, I got a lot in five minutes. So I think that helps it sort of meditative moments. And you know, what they call like, you know, me, you know, centering and being present, and mindfulness, you know, those things are all part of the practice.

Clement Loo  22:23
So it's sort of sounds like your approach is trying to just give people the opportunity to just start.

Heid Erdrich  22:29
Yeah, just to tap what they have in there. Yeah, I know, it's in there. You know, you probably couldn't be in school if it weren't right. And, yeah, so they just need to evaluate it and tap it and listen to it. I mean, it's not not every single person is able to do that. But then I do try to have, you know, commendations for people who that's really difficult for them. But a lot of people they can do it. And I'd say most can,

Clement Loo  22:55
for the students, what you need to think of accommodations, what are some of the things you might do? So if the strategy of just providing them the opportunity isn't working, what are the other things you might do to help people tell their own stories?

Heid Erdrich  23:06
Sometimes people are better at telling their stories orally, or, or even speaking, lyrically. Like you wouldn't a poem. Right. And so I give opportunities for people to talk. So we talked, we talked in class a lot, you know, we get off track as they say, I think off track is really rich. You know, it's where nobody's hunted before right? Off the off the beaten trail. So I let that happen a lot.

Clement Loo  23:33
Yeah. Think we're in a good place to end this episode. I hope that you enjoyed the first part of the conversation that I had with Heid. I hope that listening to hide helps you think more about access indigeneity and about the relationship between stories storytelling and culture. Next episode, return to the remainder of the conversation, which is about making learning fun cooking and storytelling, equity in the arts, and grass. Thank you for listening to just sustainability. If you've enjoyed what you heard, please support this podcast by subscribing and leaving a review. Just sustainability is recorded with the support of the institute in the environment at the University of Minnesota. In particular, I want to thank Peter Levin and Beth Mercer Taylor for all their help with this show. Other music on just sustainability is composed and recorded by Clifton Nesseth. And all our work was created by Crysten Nesseth. Thank you again for listening.


Transcribed by https://otter.ai