Restoring Western Apache Foodways by Walking and Cooking with Wild Foods
Ciara Minjarez points to the white blossoms on a stalk of a yucca plant and reminds the group gathering alongside a road in Whiteriver, Arizona, to taste a bloom before picking a bunch of them.
“If it tastes too bitter, then the blossoms aren’t ready, so move on to another plant,” she instructs.
Minjarez, the Indigenous Foodways Program Manager at Local First Arizona, knows that the best way for someone to understand something is for them to experience it. That is why she has joined with Chaghashe Bidan Siine, a community-led child food security team based in the White Mountain Apache Reservation, on a sunny morning in June to help reconnect Native youth to their traditional foodways by inviting them to experience a wild harvest walk before lunching on a soup prepared from what they gather.
Chaghashe Bidan Siine works to connect the children of the Apache tribe with access to healthy food, while instilling Indigenous food knowledge. Through their efforts, they have helped bridge the gap between their Elders and the youth by providing a space for an exchange of intergenerational knowledge — the Elders teach about traditional foods found on tribal lands to a generation that has been removed from it.
As the land begins to enter summer, Minjarez prepares the group to harvest sumac berries, yucca blossoms, and wild tea. Reintroducing wild foods to community members not only brings healthy precontact foods back into the diets of the Apache youth, it is also connecting them to the ways of their ancestors.
Food is All Around Us
Minjarez was raised on the White Mountain Apache Reservation and grew up with her family in Cradleboard, with her ancestral roots coming from Cedar Creek. The White Mountain Apache once migrated around the landscapes of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma but were restricted to the Fort Apache Reservation in 1891 by Executive Order. The White Mountain Apache Tribe currently covers 1.6 million acres in east-central Arizona and has over 12,000 members located on nine major reservation communities. Today’s White Mountain Apaches are Western Apaches, a large, diverse group that includes Cibecue, Tonto, and San Carlos bands.
“My family comes from a line of healers, and I think about that when I am doing things. I am relearning everything. I've been taught this before, but it wasn't significant to me when I was younger,” explains Minjarez. “I grew up with my mom, and she made sure that I knew about Indian rights and what the Trail of Tears and Pueblo Revolt were. She also included stories from our reservation. I grew up knowing what rations were.”
It wasn’t until Minjarez started working with the Rainbow Treatment Center in 2018 that she looked to reconnect to her heritage by engaging with her community through public speaking. Later that year, she started working at Nde Bikiyaa, The Peoples’ Farm as a project assistant and then as an outreach coordinator, where she connected more directly with the community around Apache food sovereignty efforts. During this time, she partnered with First Things First and the Arizona Food Bank Network to address food insecurity on the reservation. Through a committee, they collected surveys from over 400 local community members and found one thing in common: people were tired of seeing kids go hungry.
From this feedback, the Chaghashe Bidan Siine organization was born. The group would travel to schools and ask, “Where are healthy foods, and where can they be found?” It was the Elders that reminded them: “There is food all around us.”
White Mountain Apache Reservation land consists of diverse ecosystems, from the desert of the Salt River Canyon to grasslands, wetlands, and a large ponderosa pine forest. The Arizona state fish, the Apache trout, lives in the lakes and streams located on tribal land, and there is a rich flora of edible plants, including dandelions, cottonwood buds, pinon pines, Emory Oak acorns, walnuts, cholla cactus fruit, sumac, elderberries, water chestnuts, mesquites, century plants (agave), wild tea, and yucca pods.
In 2019, the first “Wild Food Walk” was held as a way to connect Apache youth to this abundant edible landscape.
“The first Wild Food Walk turned out so well,” remembers Minjarez. “Kids were really into it and eager to learn. We had Elders there to teach them hands-on and [explain] why we harvest wild foods and how we need to respect the plants. These are not just lessons to learn. They are significant to our cultural and traditional ways.”
Minjarez explains that involving the youth in these Wild Food Walks is incredibly important. “I was told that if you want something to last, teach a child.”
Upholding a relationship with the environment is deeply connected to Native food systems. For thousands of years, Native communities engaged with the edible landscape by foraging, hunting, and gathering in order to survive and thrive; they also managed the relationship to ensure the health of the ecosystem, in turn, ensuring the health of the tribes. Gathering food from the natural landscape requires an intimate connection with the land and knowledge of when plants bloom and what parts can be eaten and used for medicinal purposes. Practicing these traditions and passing them on to other generations was a key component of ancestral foodways for the White Mountain Apache tribes.
The Wild Food Walk
On a warm Monday morning, a small group meets at the American Legion Building located off Highway 73 in Whiteriver, the largest White Mountain Apache community with over 2,500 residents. The day begins with Minjarez and other partners, including the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, Whiteriver Indian Health Service, First Things First, Arizona Food Bank Network, The Boys & Girls Club, and White Mountain Apache Tribe Food Distribution Program, introducing themselves to a small group of about twenty participants, many of them in their teens.
Wild Food Walk
Minjarez, dressed in a yellow and black plaid flannel and jeans, explains how the Chaghashe Bidan Siine team is working to empower the Apache youth with wild and healthy Indigenous food knowledge and understanding food is medicine. The team teaches community members how to harvest and safely prepare wild foods, as well as how to create delicious dishes they can provide to their families by utilizing what is readily available to them in their backyards.
To begin the harvest, the group gathers along a small road where there are plenty of yucca blossoms and hopefully some wild tea and sumac berries to harvest. Minjarez heads to a tall yucca plant and teaches the groups how to identify yucca blossoms that are ready for picking: they will easily detach from the plant and taste mildly sweet. She shows the group how to gently pull the white flower petals from the main stalk and place them in bags, warning that some small bugs may fly out. In removing blossoms, she instructs the group to take care not to cut or damage the main stalk, as it will kill the plant. The yucca plant is vulnerable to overharvesting and no more than one-quarter of the blossoms from any one yucca plant should be taken, as overharvesting means little or no seed will be produced.
Foraging using traditional Indigenous practices means following an ecological stewardship approach – never taking more than that which is needed while ensuring the plant species can also continue to survive.
As the group walks to find more yucca blossoms, Minjarez points out a century plant, or agave, that has been overharvested. The plant is wilted and the leaves are starting to die off. She stresses the importance of harvesting in a way that ensures the plant will regrow the following year, which, in turn, ensures that there will be another year of food harvesting available for the people.
Wild Tea
Someone from the group asks Minjarez about what wild tea looks like. She searches around and soon points down to a slender, green tall stem with a small yellow flower bud attached to the top. “The wild tea should be harvested as it blooms,” she tells the group. “The wild tea plant is cut at ground level before hitting the root, as pulling it completely out of the ground will prevent it from growing again the following year.”
Wild harvesting like this was once common practice among Native cultures. However, time-honored foodways and traditions were nearly forgotten because of the forced placement of children in Federal boarding schools, which prevented tribal members from transferring cultural knowledge intergenerationally, including speaking their own language.
Minjarez herself recounts how, at the age of four, her maternal grandpa ran away from a boarding school, walked many miles alone, and returned home so his mother would hide him away to prevent him from being sent off again. Her father was not allowed to speak his native Apache language: “Every time they spoke Apache in school, they would get in trouble publicly,” says Minjarez.
Language is a large barrier among the Apache youth because their grandparents and parents were not allowed to speak their language, and over the generations, the language was not taught. Many were also told that to get ahead in life, they had to learn to speak English.
As Native peoples were forcibly separated from the land and traditional practices that shaped their ancestors, there was a dramatic shift in food systems. Tribal communities were no longer familiar with the food all around them, and this has had devastating consequences on their health. Native communities have some of the highest rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart attacks, as well as mental health issues resulting from generations of cultural genocide. That is what Minjarez and the child food security team set out to change.
Yucca Blossoms
Cleaning the blossom petals
Cleaned Blossoms ready for the soup
Tasting the Harvest to Inspire Apache Food Sovereignty
After about an hour of harvesting wild foods, the group returns to the American Legion meetup building. There, several long tables are set up, and the participants begin to prepare the blossoms for cleaning. After removing the petals from the rest of the blossom, the group places them in a large bowl filled with fresh water and salt. The petals are thoroughly rinsed to remove any small bugs, debris, and bitterness.
Meanwhile, in a small kitchen located in the corner of the room, several women are busy preparing other wild food treats for the group. Minjarez has already prepared what she calls “Wild Kool-Aid,'' which is made from boiling and straining sumac berries that she harvested at an earlier time. She adds the red liquid to a large pot of crushed ice and divides it into small cups for people to try. She provides honey if people want to sweeten the refreshing drink.
Wild Kool-Aid
Yucca Blossom Soup
A soup pot has already been boiling with stew meat for several hours when the clean yucca petals are added. After allowing the petals to cook and mix with the meat, cups of the yucca blossom soup are handed out to participants. The cooked petals taste like delicate artichoke hearts.
As the event winds down, Minjarez wonders how she could have shared even more in-depth knowledge about the traditional Western Apache diet and its connection to food sovereignty. As she begins to question the event’s effectiveness, one of her partners tells her that the kids couldn’t stop talking about it. “They said it was the best meal they had,” the person tells her.
“I think the Apache youth are starting to gain an appreciation for what we lost and want it back,” says Minjarez. This gives her an idea for the third annual Wild Food Walk.
“A few of the teenagers could possibly teach or lead the event themselves next year. An Elder in training.” She smiles as she says this.
Recipe for Yucca Blossom Soup:
1 pound of stew meat/roast, cut into cubes and boiled over medium heat for 1-2 hours
Add 3-4 cups of cleaned yucca blossoms to the pot and simmer for 20 minutes
Add salt and seasonings to taste