Protecting Food Sovereignty in New Mexico
Oral Histories Collected by Adrienne Katz Kennedy
Photos by Joel Wigelsworth
Brett Bakker dries and labels seeds before storing in his Albuquerque seed vault.
Oral histories or life histories are a sacred and significant tradition within many cultures. The process and traditions around the telling and receiving are often as important as the stories themselves. These traditions and the knowledge passed on through them are often localized, tied to a particular place and time and passed down within a small community.
In New Mexico, this method of knowledge passing is practiced regularly among small-but-overlapping communities, and has been for thousands of years, creating a web of intertwined lineage so strong it becomes difficult to separate out one strand from another, the netting is so finely interwoven.
The state’s present-day communities include a mixture of Hispanic, Latinx, Chicanx, Native and Pueblo lineage including 19 current active Pueblo communities, the Navajo Nation, three Apache tribes, and a separate community identifying as Genízaros, who are descendants of nomadic Indigenous people—Comanche, Apache, Ute and Navajo—who were captured into servitude and enslavement.
They were later freed to settle buffer communities in between Spanish settlements and nearby tribes, often serving as mediators or becoming persecuted. The state supports a thousands-year-old and widespread system of intertribal trade, from salt, to agriculture to, at one point, people. As a result, most multigenerational New Mexicans will have direct ties to some form of Indigenous origins.
“Many of us in New Mexico are mixed,” says Moises Gonzales, a professor at UNM from Cañón de Carnué Land Grant. “I mean some people keep their Pueblo identity, some their Spanish identity. Us at the buffer zones, we’re Genízaros.”
This lineage and history are directly connected with land-based food traditions practiced throughout many of the communities within the state. Active seed trading networks and seed saving, natural salt bed expeditions, collecting wild herbs and vegetables for everyday cooking and teas, plant-based medicine practices and gathering piñon for cooking and incense burning are among those practices. Most people will have experienced at least one, some with regularity.
For many New Mexicans, like Shayai, Charlie, Joel, Tina, Brett and Moises these traditions may be associated with milestone ages, realizations or discoveries related to personal identity and culture. With each of their stories below, comes a unique interpretation and relationship with these plant-based experiences.
Shayai Lucero collects the ends of reeds along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque. These reeds serve a number of utilitarian purposes, and have edible parts, as well. Part of Pueblo tradition includes thanking the plant for allowing its harvest and use.
Shayai Lucero: Talking to the plants
Lucero is a florist and certified curandera (traditional Mexican healer) from the Laguna and Acoma Pueblos in New Mexico. She is also a scientist at heart, a mother, wife and former Miss Indian World pageant winner.
My childhood career goal was to be a doctor, says Lucero. I was fascinated with how someone could heal someone else who was sick. In eighth grade, I did a science fair project, a research-based project that focused on talking to local Pueblo Elders about their plant knowledge.…In 1997, my mother convinced me to present the medicinal plants for the talent portion of Miss Indian World pageant. I was very surprised when I won the title including special awards for interview, dance and Miss Congeniality. Growing up, I would think, “Why are people making a big fuss about medicinal plants?” My thinking stems from our family’s lifestyle in which we use medicinal plants in cooking and healing every day.”
Shayai then completed an intensive Curanderismo or Traditional Mexican Healing certification course alongside her mother through the University of New Mexico, La Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos (Mexico) and el Centro de Desarrollo Humano hacia la Comunidad (Mexico).
When I was studying Curanderismo with my mom, the healers would remind us that before we could expand our knowledge with Mexican healing, especially with the plants, we had to learn about plants from our area. Although I know plants, I needed to continue studying and also have them available for those who were calling me for advice. Availability of plants is very important when helping to heal.
More recently, young people are calling me for advice these days, especially because of the pandemic. In July, I virtually taught classes to a group of students in Florida who have asked me to share my knowledge. In Pueblo tradition, teachers and knowledge-keepers need to be asked to share; if there’s something you want to know you have to go to the person and ask permission directly. That’s part of the culture.
These days, Lucero is waiting and preparing for it to be safe enough to reopen her florist business, Earth & Sky Floral Designs. She acquired the shop and skill unexpectedly; its designs and fauna are largely based on Indigenous plants, culture and sensibilities. She also accepts calls from her people within the Pueblo community, seeking medicinal plant advice, as well as placing floral design orders. Her floral customers reach out to her because they want something that reflects and celebrates their Native American culture. The type of plants she uses and using even-numbered arrangements in her design often reflects her Pueblo traditions. Native plants have always been a part of her life.
“I talk to the plants,” she says.
Their presence is a constant during times of transition.
Charlie Gauna walks a field in his hometown looking for camote, just as he did as a child. An unusually dry year around Vaughn yields no evidence of the plant he once relied upon.
Charlie Gauna: Connection to childhood freedoms
For Gauna, who grew up in the small town of Vaughn, snacking on wild finds was what all the neighborhood kids did on the way to and from school. Foraging was associated with leisure and childhood freedoms during the 1950s and ’60s, when parents chased you out of the house in the morning and called for you to come back in by dark.
When I was a little boy, 6 or 7 years old, we would walk to school every day. What we learned from other kids is that there were certain plants growing in the fields we walked through to get to school that you could pick and eat. One we call camote is like a sweet potato root plant. It looked like a carrot. We would dig it out, and depending on the maturity of the plant, it would be about 3-4 inches, then [we’d] scrape it and chew on it. And we would just forage for it, but we didn’t call it ‘foraging.’ I didn’t know exactly who taught me that or who came up with it. We just did it.
The other one was verdolaga, a tangy, fleshy type plant that grew around there. It didn’t taste that good raw, but that one we would take home, and my mom would sauté it with onions and we’d combine that with quelites [wild spinach], and it was good, I mean it was good eating! And we grew up that way.
I did it until I was about 13 or 14 years old; it was almost like a ritual. We’d look up and see a lot of kids on their knees digging. It wasn’t something that we saw as out of the ordinary. I mean, I know I was part of a poor community and a poor family, and it helped us, it sustained us for quite a while. I still like that kind of food.…In reading about tribes and their customs and foraging, even when reading that, I still never thought of that as what we did. Even though that was the same thing. I read the word and I understand what foraging is but I still never saw it as what we did. But that’s what we did! That’s what we did together, and it was a part of growing up.
Vaughn gave us that opportunity. And now that I look at it, foraging was really a lot of fun. It was a good period of my life in that area. I never saw it as digging for food, but that’s what we did.
Capulín
(Levi Romero, A Poetry of Remembrance: New and Rejected Works., UNM Press)
at the Wal-Mart pharmacy in Española
a woman’s prescription costs $400.00
causing a stir of ooohs and aahs
among those standing in line
for my son, she says
he needs three injections a day
insulin? someone asks
no, to thin out his blood
¡remedios!
someone in line blurts out the word
everyone agrees
yuh, mm hmm, remedios
yuh, remedios would be better and cheaper
capulín, chokecherry! someone remarks
my grandmother used to say that chokecherry
was good for thinning the blood
another woman adds,
the bark from the chokecherry tree, boiled into a tea
or you can make the jam syrupy, drippy
más antes salía uno a los barrancos y jallaba uno de todito
we jostle ourselves from foot to foot mumbling
our memories
past lessons learned and rekindled
a greater wisdom priceless and an offered prescription
for lost traditions and discarded remedies
at the Wal-Mart
(We are grateful for the poem above, lent to us with permission by Levi Romero, state poet laureate, proud Chicano, and assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico.)
Verdolagas (purslane) pop up wild just about anywhere in New Mexico—ditch banks, vacant lots, parking lots, and yards. Most people consider them weeds, but many traditional New Mexicans use them as a food source. These have sprouted up and flourished in the backyard of a home on Albuquerque’s West Side.
Joel Wigelsworth: A new perspective
Wigelsworth, photographer and communications specialist for Albuquerque’s Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, says the word foraging seems to be applied by outsiders to a practice that people with a close relationship to the land just automatically do.
Having grown up here, I was well versed in New Mexico history in the form of places, events, and timelines, but through Chicana/o Studies at the University of New Mexico we took a closer, more ethnographic look at history through a cultural landscape lens. It was history, but it was tied more closely to the gente, focusing on the details between the spikes on the dominant narrative’s timeline.
The history of New Mexico is predominantly about land, and usually focuses on themes of conquest and conflicts over ownership, but rarely on the people and their actual everyday ties to the land, which they counted on to sustain them. Through the literature, both academic and poetry, and the personal stories of instructors and classmates, I became more aware of the role foraging played to New Mexicans throughout the centuries, and even now.
My appreciation for the edible and medicinal plants that grow wild here has expanded a lot in recent years. I used to pick piñon, and I’ve regularly used cota [Native tea] for decades, thanks to my mother who gathers it annually for us, having learned from an old boyfriend from Laguna Pueblo. I have also learned to use foraged verdolagas, chimajá, and limoncillo in cooking, and juniper branches that I burn to harvest the ash to add to my atole (Spanish) or tanaashgiizh (Navajo). It’s great knowledge to have, whether you just enjoy the flavors, or if you find yourself in a situation where you need it to survive or supplement food insecurity.
Globemallow is an edible plant with medicinal value.
Tina Archuleta: Ties to justice
Archuleta, from Jemez Pueblo, is a doula and owner of a newly established Indigenous plant-based catering service called Itality. She sees access to land-based knowledge as a form of food and birth justice.
Last August, Archuleta was accepted into the Native American Food Sovereignty and Alliance Food and Culinary Mentorship Program. Now, with her recently purchased Airstream food trailer, she plans to continue her mission to bring wild, plant-based foods to rural areas, where access to fresh foods outside of those that are foraged can often mean being at the mercy of whatever can be found in the fridges at the local gas station. On Jemez Pueblo, specifically, there are two options within a 40-minute drive for fresh foods: the gas station or the dollar store.
Archuleta’s dedication to native seeds and plants began in high school in 2005, when she and a group of her friends began their journey to, as she says, “decolonize their diets and living.”
Collecting piñon and Indian tea is probably how I was introduced to foraging, but that was all normal. In my teenage years I was trying to decolonize—looking at my own life from how I was eating, how I was working to businesses I was supporting.
Following her first experience with pregnancy and the assessment of her own health, she was motivated to take her work further.
That’s when I popped into action and my partner and I started farming. We took it to the next level. We planted foods, vegetables that people hadn’t seen in a while, and we started selling at the market. I mean, there’s a connection with traditional foods like red chile, corn, blue corn, squash. There was always a connection there, but we thought maybe we needed more foods, ancient foods that we had forgotten. The conquistadors made amaranth illegal, so it’s good to bring it back.
My work fits into earth ethics. Last year I went out and right by my house is a big patch of prickly pear, so I was like okay, I’m going to just get this myself, the prickly pear and the nopales, and I went out with my tongs, and I collected it and processed it. I have to remind myself when I’m foraging and trying to connect with the medicine and the ancestors, that it wasn’t so complicated. the methods were simple. The way to take in the medicine was simple, too.
For Archuleta, it’s also about a return to ancestral knowledge and making sure it passed onto future generations.
It’s about learning. I mean, this knowledge was taken. It was washed out—stolen through Americanization. I was talking to an Elder from Taos Pueblo who was telling me about her experience when the food pyramid was introduced, and Native people weren’t seeing their foods on the food pyramid. Right now, it’s about putting pieces together and getting information when you can.
So, I see Native tea growing roadside every year. I know where it is growing in my Pueblo, it’s where I go every year to pick it, but my Pueblo is closed right now for safety reasons, so I can’t get it. I see all of this tea, growing on the roadside and I’m thinking it’s so sad, all this tea all this seed wasted. So, this year I collected tea and I planted the seeds for the future and gave them out [the leaves themselves are discarded]. I think the regeneration will clean the medicine and we’ll be able to use it. I mean, people were like, don’t collect it roadside, but the medicine is there! Let’s save the seeds and move them! So that’s what I started to do this year. And I’m giving people seed too.
It’s about learning. My journey is about finding information, putting pieces together, connecting with the plant and doing it in an ethical way. It’s about trusting the plant.
Brett Bakker standing in the doorway of his seed vault in Albuquerque’s South Valley.
Brett Bakker: Connecting the seed to its origins
Bakker hitchhiked to New Mexico from New England in the late '70s when he was just 19 years old, and has been there ever since. Though not indigenous, he has been working with Pueblos and for nonprofits like Cuatro Puertas and Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute based at Santa Clara Pueblo, and seed saving and distribution groups like Native Seeds/ SEARCH. He now collects and saves seed from his own farm in a dedicated seed room on his 2-acre property in Albuquerque's South Valley.
Most of the knowledge [I've acquired] came from reading whatever I could get my hands on, learning by doing, but most especially by meeting and speaking with these Elder farmers. What I found is that no matter what culture they are from, if you talk to someone who is a farmer or gardener, they want to talk about crops, and they are willing to share what they're doing. I mean, there are some boundaries I won't cross with Native or Pueblo farmers. If there's a religious or cultural significance that's not shared, I won't ask. I won't even go there.
For Bakker, not only is the process of growing and seed saving something he has dedicated his life towards, but, perhaps more importantly, he works to reconnect varieties of crops to their rightful home.
Right now, we don't have a formal outlet for the seeds, it's just stocking up on the seeds and making sure they are still being grown. Sometimes, I will just bring them back to where I got them from. A lot of times, they'll still have the seed, but there's been times over the last few years that I've reconnected families to the seeds that I had gotten them from their Elders who are gone now. I'll show up with a sack of melons or gourds, and I'll say 'hey, I got this from your father or grandfather' and it just feels like the right thing to do.
People have been very generous with me, which brings up one thing I try to get across when talking to people about seed saving. I've worked with different seed banks; necessary work but we're not the ones that are really saving the seed. Traditional people have been doing it all along very quietly, I just happen to be a loudmouth about it. I'll talk to anybody and I write about it all the time and make sure people know about it. But I want to be sure where the focus and the credit goes: to the cultures who have been doing it all along.
Moises Gonzáles gathers salt from flats in central New Mexico, just as his family has done for many generations.
Moises Gonzales: A living history
For Gonzales, the practices of keeping his culture alive include many things: annual trips to the salt beds to collect and process salt, growing and preserving certain foods and plants, and participating in trading networks from seeds to salt to tobacco for ceremonial use. The latter connected him to Bakker and the kind of squash that would have been grown in his area for hundreds of years. Alongside growing the squash to keep the seed alive, Gonzales grows a kind of tobacco originally gifted to him from an Elder from Isleta Pueblo in the late ‘90s, in attempt to keep the strand alive.
Now, Gonzales sets aside part of his crop each year, an unintentional hybrid of two strains, to give back to those from that area. This practice isn’t uncommon among growers and traders. Rather, it is an unspoken rule within the seed trading community. There must always be seed to returned to the people and land of origin.
Gonzales has also been making trips to the salt beds to collect and process salt with his grandfather since he was a kid. His grandfather was taken there by his grandfather. Over the last few years, Gonzales has also opened up these annual trips by offering to take small groups of young men, passing along the knowledge and keeping the coming-of-age tradition alive. Salt is an absolute necessity for both culinary and religious practices, and for him, too valuable and sacred to buy or sell. It must be traded or gifted.
I was raised in Albuquerque with my parents, but I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. The first time I went to the salt lakes was with my father and grandfather as a young kid.
My grandpa just wanted to give a lesson that salt was important. I mean today we get industrial salt produced in factories all over the world, but it doesn’t have the same mineral content. The mineral salts produced by Indigenous communities have a lot of magnesium have a lot of clay brine associated with them, and a lot of these mineral salts are produced in tandem with these brine types of mud clays and associated with a high mineral content. So, we get a high amount of iron, potassium and magnesium with these types of indigenous salts that you can’t get from iodized salt.
My grandpa learned how to do salt from his father and grandfather because that was their only source of salt. Small groups of young men would go out there as a community, because that was their work. It was gendered work because of the danger of getting attacked by other nomadic tribes during salt gathering parties, so it still is somewhat [gendered]. They would go out as a day trip to the salt lakes and they would mine the salt for a few days or a week and they would trade it but also that was their salt. That’s how they got salt.
And then my grandpa would tell stories from his grandpa about when he was little that they would gather salt all year, also for trade, that they would use when they would go on the buffalo hunts. Then they would meet the Comanche near present-day Amarillo Texas and they would trade; salt and Cal (calcium carbonate, vital for the nixtamalization of corn/maize to insure digestibility and use.) The salt was vital.
For Gonzales, keeping these family rituals and practices alive is cyclical.
Another thing my grandma would do was to make cota tea and ferment it into a wine and then into vinegar for canning or preserving vegetables. It would take about a month or six to eight weeks to make the wine. So, these certain types of wines or corn beers were made for our festivals. Our last fiesta or festival is San Miguel Day, September 29th, after that traditionally is when a lot of the men would go on buffalo hunts but that would also be the time when a lot of these things would be canned after the last harvest. Some of these culinary practices, I mean the old people are still doing it, I still do it. I can things just to keep that culinary practice alive.
Gonzales, like so many others, is determined to pass these practices forward to the next generation of New Mexicans, to stoke the continuation of connection between the people and the land.
My goal is to teach enough, to get enough of this younger generation to do all of this on their own so it’s not just me… In the last few years, it’s been an important thing for me to do, to teach. In terms of our culinary practices, everything is a component, from the Cal, the processing of corn—not just the growing but the processing—to the way we preserve our seed for the next harvest. I’ve also been teaching people that salt is one of these things that has a life cycle to it. One of these things that worries me about climate change is these salt lakes. These are living beings. They go through a process of which these clay beds become, they breathe. It’s important that we have a relationship with these living land formations that relate to our culinary practices.
He reflects on changes he’s seen since the global pandemic and the power of the Black Lives Matter movement,
There’s a lot of knowledge that I’m excited to see how we’re going to process it. I think this stuff is in momentum already, but Covid-19 has gotten people even more excited, and I think also with the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, there’s a lot of discussion around decolonization and its ability, and I’m excited about where it’s going to go.
Over the last few years, there has been a steadily growing acknowledgement within the U.S. culinary industry of Indigenous chefs, ingredients and foodways. But for every individual or ingredient brought into the spotlight, there are thousands more behind it, their legacies quietly, lovingly, carried forward as part of daily life. Such is life in the Land of Enchantment.
