In this episode of Spirit Plate, Shiloh chats with:

Herself. She is an Anishinaabe community organizer, educator, and food justice advocate. In her  practice, she works in partnership with community members and local leaders from around the Great Lakes and the nation to build a more sustainable and equitable food system. For over a decade, she has worked within Indigenous communities to revitalize traditional food systems and support community self-determination. Currently, her primary work is with the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, as the Program Manager. She is also involved with the MI Good Food Charter, serves on the Advisory Board for the Center for Regional Food Systems, and offers workshops on racial equity in the food system.

Episode highlights:

Her history 

• Shiloh introduces herself as an Anishinaabe community organizer, educator, and food justice advocate. She then described what her childhood was like such as depicting, in detail, the picture of her nokomis(ba) carrying her mom on her backdated 1953 and the importance of it

• Shiloh then describes her travels and how she promotes food and seed sovereignty

Cooking lessons 

• Shiloh had monthly cooking classes in 2020 and the goal of the cooking class series focused on Indigenous people's foods, traditional ecological knowledge, and ancestral technologies related to food processing throughout the Great Lakes. 

•  Her classes include a seed literacy study, where the class learns about the lifecycle of this month’s highlighted food, tips for growing and saving the seed, seed saving ethics, and other seed saving information. The histories, cultural teachings, and identities of Indigenous peoples are wrapped up in the seedcoats of these heritage crops. Each of these varieties have a place and community of origin. They are living plant relatives that belong to living cultures. Beyond basic sustenance and nourishment, some of those foods are necessary for traditional ceremonies, carry stories, and embody cultural values. In this way, seed stewards are also historians and cultural memory keepers, passing on the stories of how Indigenous peoples and their plant kin have evolved through millennia alongside each other on this shared landmass.

Information about the Sacred Roots - Food Sovereignty Program

•  Shiloh explains how Sacred Roots is a food sovereignty initiative at American Indian Health & Family Services (AIHFS) in Detroit. In 2015, AIHFS became a sub-awardee of the Good Health & Wellness in Indian Country (GHWIC) grant. This grant is intended to address chronic illness in Indian Country by increasing healthy food access, access to physical activity, health literacy, and reducing exposure to commercial tobacco. The scope of GHWIC is to apply policy, systems, and environmental interventions to address the causes of chronic illness.

• Shiloh explains the difficulties in creating and maintaining the Space and Opportunities for Urban Indians in Food Sovereignty via the Sacred Roots Community 

• Shiloh discusses how the Sacred Roots Community has grown and her future goals  

Pop-up in Detriot where you were discovering Detriots roots through indigenous foodways

•  Shiloh discusses how she worked with the larger community to preserve our ancestral foodways. In partnership with community members, they have created space and opportunities for BIPOC to practice their ancestral foodways in the city. 

• She briefly mentions Jerry Jondreau, owner of Dynamite Hill Farms, and what the group did that day

Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance team as the Upper Midwest ISKN Regional Seed Coordinator (present-day) 

• Shiloh describes her role with the Upper Midwest Indigenous Seedkeepers Network to continue building our collective capacity towards establishing a regional seed growers cooperative. Their mission is to restore the Indigenous food systems that support Indigenous self-determination, wellness, cultures, values, communities, economies, languages, families, and rebuild relationships with the land, water, plants, and animals that sustain us.

• She speaks about how NAFSA brings people, communities (rural, remote and urban), organizations and Tribal governments together to share, promote and support best practices and policies that enhance dynamic Native food systems that promote holistic wellness, sustainable economic development, education, reestablished trade routes, stewardship of land and water resources, peer-to-peer mentoring, and multigenerational empowerment. NAFSA works to put the farmers, wildcrafters, fishers, hunters, ranchers and eaters at the center of decision-making on policies, strategies and natural resource management.