Good afternoon, everybody.
All right.
My name is Nate Moxley.
I'll be your moderator today.
I work for the Department of Neighborhoods P-Patch program.
Shout out to everybody that's within the patch community.
It's 50 years strong are the Patch community program.
So I have the distinct pleasure of introducing our panelists today.
I'm going to read, quickly read their bios.
Have them introduce a bit about their work
and then we'll jump into the questions.
We will have.
We will have an opportunity for folks to ask questions as well, at the end.
Is that a hot mic? Okay.
All right.
Is this one on? Testing.
Okay.
So we're going to jump into this.
So starting with Demarus Tevuk.
She is an environmental educator focusing on traditional
ecological knowledge, native plants and native pollinators.
She's an Inupiaq woman from Nome, Alaska, and she enjoys sharing her research
on the definition of sustainability from an indigenous perspective.
Demarus is a program manager for the Seattle Indian Services
Commission, a member of the Rising Tides Indigenous Planning Group
and a board member of Common Acre.
Anthony Johnson is an Anishinaabe and citizen
of the Red Lake Nation in northern Minnesota.
Anthony was born and raised in south Minneapolis.
He studied at the University of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Twin
Cities, where he graduated with a degree in finance.
He moved to Seattle in May of 2021.
Shortly thereafter, he started as a started
at the ʔálʔal Café as a manager at the Chief Seattle Club.
He cares deeply about hunting, fishing
and foraging for traditional foods and decolonizing his diet.
Is the environmental justice programs manager at Young Women in Power, Y-WE
Particularly focused on youth farming and food justice programing
at Marra Farm in South Park.
They first connected with Y-WE as a mentor with the Nature Connections program
and fell in love with the powerful intergenerational community of diverse
women and gender expansive folks supporting each other in the outdoors.
During this time, she served as an AmeriCorps term,
or she served in AmeriCorps term with Solid Ground
teaching, nutrition, cooking and gardening with elementary school
students experiencing food insecurity.
Neli also organizes with Got Green,
Climate Justice for Black Lives,
and with fellow South Asian community around BIPOC solidarity.
She is passionate about working at the intersections
of environmental, racial and social justice within community.
Healing with the land and growing food with young people
while disrupting racism and injustice within the food system.
And lastly, we have Jaydalen Blossom, she/her.
Jaydalen began her journey in Y-WE as a youth participant in 2018
with the Nature Connections program.
Since then, she's been involved in Y-WE, Create and Write.
Lead Youth Leadership Council.
And in recent times, she has been involved in Y-WE Grow.
While participating in Grow Jaydalen found her calling
and now she wants to help others find a sense of deep connection
with themselves and with community by connecting with nature.
She recently joined the Y-WE team this year as the program assistant
for the Grow Spring Program.
Besides her immense love and gratitude for the Y-WE community,
Jaydalen loves spending quality time with her loved ones,
being in nature, facilitating yoga.
She recently graduated from the Heart Center
and connecting with people from all walks of life.
Join me in welcoming today's panelists.
All right.
So we're going to jump into this by having folks
just kind of introduce their work, tell you a little bit
a bit about their work and how it connects with today's topic.
So we're going to start with with Demarus.
Hi, Can you hear me? All right.
I brought a presentation, but I don't know
if we're able to bring it up
for my work with the Rising Tides Group.
from December of 2021 through July of last year,
we had a native neighborhood survey that
we were looking for at least 400 responses from people
who are native and indigenous, who have a relationship with Seattle.
We got an amazing 768 responses,
and what I wanted to share today was a map that shows the diversity
of our urban native community that we are from all over North America.
The other thing I wanted to share with the presentation
was a map of where people live in Seattle.
And so for this study we also did
food talking circle and we had support from
What Office?
Office of Sustainability Environment for the update to the Food Action Plan.
So we had a talking circle that was co-sponsored by OSE
and we actually had the meeting
at Marra Farms outdoors,
that was,
we we didn't mean to do it this way, but we actually accidentally
had it at the same time as the, the Sea Fair Indian Days powwow.
But we even though we had it during the powwow, we still had
a really great group of people come out and share their thoughts about,
food security, food access and building
a neighborhood for the urban Native community.
And then as a board member with the Common Acre,
we are planting camas at a site in South Seattle.
It's called The Green Line.
We planted the camas.
We planted the camas last
October,
and the place that we harvested it from is in Oregon.
I'm pretty sure that it is an intact pre contact
camas site, which is really, really special because,
camas prairies were lost
during colonization and the reason why they were lost.
Two reasons.
first, access to the prairies was denied.
The settlers would put up fences, but settlers
would also let their their cows and their pigs go through.
And they destroyed the camas prairies.
So just last weekend
we checked on the camas, and they're doing really well.
They're sprouting.
And I'm so happy that they they made it.
We weren't sure if the bulbs were going to do okay.
I guess the other thing about myself
I wanted to share is like, I'm native Alaskan and I
really I'm really
privileged to know my traditional food really well.
I grew up eating whale, seal, caribou.
My older brother is a hunter and a whaling captain.
And I went to high school in Neah Bay on the Makah Reservation
during the time when they were seeking to,
sorry if I'm speaking too long, but
to get their treaty rights to, to be able to whale again.
And they came up against a huge force of public opinion,
opposition to their right to whale and
food is so central to culture
and all of the work that I do, I lean heavily
on a group of values that I identified in some research
while I was getting my degree in environmental studies at UW.
I have a set
of values that are related to sustainability,
and I was just thinking today they're all related to food.
It's all about how you gather food and then share it with people,
how you take care of the land so that you can have the food
that you need to share with each other and take care of each other.
Like every value has some connection to food and,
yeah, and that's about how to live.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I was hoping that I could share my presentation a couple of slides today.
The,
the report will hopefully be shared soon,
through the Na’ah Illahee Fund website.
That's the nonprofit that fiscally sponsored our work.
Rising Tides has,
we have the goal of, of building community spaces that are missing in Seattle
and one of the other big themes
from our survey responses that people want access to the land
and they want, they want access to the land and to grow food
as part of cultural revitalization programs.
So being able to have gardens
and any way rooftops, balconies
and then open space, it's all really important to our community.
So I think that's it.
(greeting in his native language)
Hey everyone.
Greetings.
My name is Anthony.
As Nate said, I'm a Anishinaabe, a citizen of Red Lake
in northern Minnesota and I am the cafe manager at Chief Seattle Club.
The ʔálʔal Café Manager.
ʔálʔal Café opened on Giving Tuesday,
November 29th of Native American Heritage Month last year,
and the café is on
the ground floor of the ʔálʔal Housing Building,
which is Chief Seattle Club's first permanent housing complex.
You know, built from the ground up by
Chief Seattle Club right down in Pioneer Square.
So the club has been around for, you know,
50 some odd years in Seattle, but has been,
you know, really exponentially growing over the past couple of years
to the point where you know, we were able to
really build this
massive capital campaign to be able to provide permanent supportive
housing for our homeless native relatives out there on the streets.
You know, there's a pretty big disparity in the homeless population within Seattle.
Native people make up around 1% of the overall population of Seattle.
But, you know, I've seen figures anywhere from 10
to 15% of the homeless population.
So there's clearly a disparity there.
And, you know, there's a multitude of reasons for why
that disparity exists that could take,
you know, possibly the entire time to go into each one of those facets.
But suffice to say that, you know, there is a disparity
there that Chief Seattle wants to step in and to resolve.
So the cafe is
the cafe is, like I said, you know, been open for the past four months.
And my mission and the mission of the cafe,
you know, might seem a little bit distant between nonprofit providing permanent
supportive housing and, you know, a business that's open to the public.
But I see like a pretty clear
connection between the cafe and the broader mission of the club.
And what that is, is,
you know, I believe that
reclaiming our
traditional food pathways and our connection to our
our traditional foods is an important way to heal
in the wounds of colonization that native people have faced.
And so through that mission of, you know, serving traditional foods at the cafe,
we're able to offer a space for,
you know, native people to come in and to see some traditional foods
that perhaps they haven't seen in a long time, you know, since their perhaps
maybe their family was removed from the reservation and
and brought out here to Seattle.
And so, you know, I want to serve as that space for folks to come in
and to learn and relearn their connections to their traditional foods.
And I believe that's one of the ways that we could, you know,
really start to regain our sense of self and who we are in our connection to food.
Because connection to food, you know, it is so important to our culture.
I know as Anishinaabe people like we really are,
you know, we're really nothing without wild rice, without mnomen.
And that that food is directly tied in to our
our origin story and who we are as people.
And so it's there's really you know, there's really
a direct link
between us and that food And without that I mean it's tough to imagine
what our culture would be and who are people would be.
So, you know, with that being said,
you know, I think that the cafe serves as a place to, you know, be able
to spark that conversation with people and and gain awareness of the fight that,
you know, a lot of Native folks are having for reclaiming their
their traditional foods and protecting their traditional foods.
We have a lot of issues with pipelines going through our wild rice beds back
home,
you know, oil pipelines
and, you know, so gaining awareness of that,
as well as raising awareness and the broader support of the,
I guess, the average Seattleite
and understanding the mission of Chief Seattle Club
so that the cafe, you know, kind of serves as a space for people
to come in and, you know, obviously hopefully get some really good food.
I oversee the kitchens.
I hope, you know, if everyone's been there, I hope you like the food.
I won't hurt my feelings if you don't, you know.
But yeah, I mean, I think so.
It's you know, it's an entry point
into learning about traditional foods and learning about the work of the club.
So, yeah, really honored to be doing this work and to be here with all of you today
and excited to, you know, kind of share more about,
you know, some of the work that we're doing.
So miigwech (Thank You).
Hi, everyone.
My name is Neli.
I am the Environmental Justice Programs manager at Young Women Empowered.
Y-WE I feel very honored to be here with you
all on this panel and everyone here.
So Y-WE, Young Women Empowered.
Our mission is to cultivate the power of diverse young women and gender
expansive youth to be creative changemakers within their communities.
We do that
through a lot of different types of youth programing,
ranging from creative expression to social justice issues.
And Jaydalen and I get to be on the environmental justice
and food sovereignty side of things.
We primarily work with BIPOC
youth, queer and trans youth folks
who are often pushed to the margins.
And uh, yeah,
so some of our goals at Marra Farm in South Park where we get to do our
Y-WE Grow program, which is focused on farming
and food justice, our primary goal
and maybe I'll say our foundational goal is to create a
space where our young people can feel a sense
of joy, healing, connection
with each other, and also in relationship with their environment and the land.
We know that essentially
all the youth that we work with, whether they're indigenous to this land
or part of diaspora, have experienced trauma at the side of the land,
whether that's personally or ancestrally.
And so we recognize a lot of young people
coming into this space at Marra Farm in South Park.
Many of them don't see themselves there
or feel as many of them feel unsafe in these spaces.
So it's kind of foundational for us to create
a place where they can kind of regulate their nervous systems
and, you know, lean on each other, but also their environment,
plant allies, the creek, the soil, to start to kind of
embody into the space and into the land.
So that's the first thing we do from there.
We also like to develop skills, we call them skills for interdependence.
So we recognize that a lot of these systems, food systems
included, were not built for us in our communities.
They are steeped in racism and injustice.
So we like to think about
how can we develop skills where we can take care of each other.
So that includes gardening and growing our own food, our cultural foods.
But it also means food preservation,
woodworking, ecosystem
restoration, chicken care, fruit tree care,
uh, mushroom cultivation.
And the idea is that, yeah, even through these brief workshops,
we can start building those skills, building that interest.
But the idea too, is that, you know,
we can take care of each other for now and in the future,
and they can also go on to share those skills with their communities,
families and be leaders in these spaces as well.
Next, we really focus on
kind of learning about environmental justice and food justice.
There's often a narrative that
this is new for BIPOC community to be connecting with the outdoors
and growing food.
And we recognize that this is like the opposite, like
this is core to who we are.
And so it's about remembering those connections and those lessons
and getting to really highlight
the people whose shoulders we stand on
and also recognizing the original stewards of the land
that we are so, so lucky to get to steward at Marra Farm.
And then,
yeah, our last goal is to we say love on community.
So we have cohorts of about 20 young people
and about four adult mentors that spend time with us at the farm.
We have a spring cohort, fall cohort,
and then we do a paid internship in the summer.
And so throughout all of these cohorts, the young people get to
get creative and plan offerings that they want to share
with the larger community, and that can look like community events.
We've made a zine sharing food, sharing,
gardening resources, so kind of sharing that abundance outwards.
Yeah.
So I'll pause there.
I guess there isn't much too much to add for me to share about Y-WE but I guess
being here, I can be that representative of just
the joy and love and healing that I receive from being a part of Y-WE.
And yeah, I'm also just here to learn and yeah,
listen in to also do better.
And maybe I'll add one thing, Jaydalen,
you were in the first group of young people to ever visit the farm.
Do you want to share a little bit about your story?
Yeah,
I started in 2019 and that's like the height of the pandemic
and everything was kind of just like,
I'm sure things people were going through their journeys
with dealing with how they are showing up in spaces and why
and Y-WE Grow was my safe space,
like where I can actually connect with other people, connect with myself.
Most importantly, and build my relationship with the land.
That's where I received a lot of healing there.
I remember many times where I would show up with whatever
I was holding and just being in that space to really be who I am.
And learning all the ways to show up in
community is was very healing for me, still is very healing.
And now I get to have the opportunity to work alongside with Nelly and Tia,
who are holding down the grow.
Yeah, I'm very grateful.
All right. Thank you all for intros.
We're going to jump into this
and I think this is a good Segway, what you just said.
Jade Island is a good segue for this next question.
And I think we're going to start we'll start with you, Jaydalen,
because it actually kind of just a perfect, perfect segue.
So can you tell us a little bit about
your pandemic experience around food access and justice
and how you see this as an area, as an avenue
for healing and connection?
The program that you hear Nelly and I talk about Grow,
I think it's a great outlet for
especially youth, who
from my experience, I felt a sense of like
I didn't feel like a sense of belonging or a sense of self
or I felt very powerless.
So being in
that space, a container to really grow and heal
and just learn ways that I can show up,
it's like having it's like healing
and also putting into action and like having those three things
like releasing the trauma, like talking about things that have hurt us
and then going through ways how we can heal by
like taking care of the land and supporting each other
and then putting it into action by having
meetings where we plan events that we want to do.
I think those three things have been very important
in terms of healing and food justice.
Yeah.
Neli, do you want to
tackle that question?
Sure.
Yeah, I think the pandemic.
So we were about to start
heading into Marra Farm, like waking up the garden
right when, you know, lockdown happened. And
yeah, there was, there was just so much going on.
I was really grateful in the pandemic that
so we had like young people and then also their parents
and caregivers, they were like, I can't be inside anymore.
I feel really isolated, you know?
How would you feel if we came out there to kind of help you all at the garden?
Like we feel okay with it?
Because Y-WE at that point had shut down all of our programing in person.
So and one of the parents was a physician.
So I was like, okay, if you say you can come out here, sure.
And then we started doing it and we were like, Oh, this is this feels okay.
So we started our Y-WE Grow programing at the farm June 2020.
And we've had young people out there since then and you know,
the rest of our Y-WE programing was online
basically through 2021.
So like the fact that we could
be a space where young people could come together in person, it was
they were telling us this was the only time
they were interacting with other people their age in person.
So I think that sense of like isolation,
panic, fear, rage with social justice,
you know, racial justice, uprisings, I think there was a huge need.
In addition to what folks were getting at home online
in social media through the news of like what's going on and how to plug in.
I think they also needed that mirror space where they can be in person,
tap into like their physical embodied present space
rather than like the mediated experience of just being bombarded
with with the news in the panic.
So I feel extremely grateful.
The timing, because we started at Marra Farm in 2019, the fact that we had
that space to be able to invite folks into was really was really huge.
And then with that, like Jaydalen said, young people were coming
kind of fried, like feeling, feeling a lot.
So the fact that they could come in and feel,
yes, their joy of being able to connect with each other, but
also the deep sadness, the rage, like I mentioned,
and have somewhere to kind of channel it, like with their hands in the land, like,
you know,
in the dirt, in, you know, by the creek.
Like it kind of created that outlet for them to
release the stress that was building.
And so I feel really grateful for that.
And also, like Jaydalen said, that that purpose piece, like
we were feeling a complete lack of agency at that time.
So the fact that young people could plug in to immediate like
food sovereignty actions that we were taking,
South Park is an amazing community.
The way that they showed up during the pandemic,
South Park experiences food apartheid, which is a lack of
fresh local produce, organic produce, disproportionately
impacting communities of color, many immigrant communities in the area.
So neighbors just like came out
in full force, started the food pantry system.
We helped support meal distribution, and then all the food that we were growing
at Marra Farm went into the food pantries, went to the local food bank.
Neighbors also organized El Mercadito,
the first neighbor organized farmer's market in South Park.
So we got to plug into these efforts and like, feel
that sense of purpose and, and agency
that was so lacking at the time
and just want to give a shout out to Monica Perez and Luciana Williams
Cultivate South Park Urban Fresh Food Collective doing that work there.
Yeah.
And I also want to shout out Tayah Carlisle, I meant to mention her name earlier.
She does this work with us and if you don't know where, there's
a beautiful article in the Department of Neighborhoods blog about Tayah.
Yeah.
Anthony I'll reiterate the question.
Just that'd. Be nice. Yeah.
So can you tell us a little bit about your pandemic experience
around food access, food justice
and how you see this area as an avenue for healing and connection?
Well, in fall of 2019, when
I grew up, grew up in the city, I always been like an urban Indian,
urban native and
never really had a connection to culture.
Like, you know, a lot of folks that grow up on the reservation do.
So I didn't have that as a
as a child and as like, you know, a teenager.
And it
it really took my sister, who is probably,
you know, one of the most important people in my lives, who is
an Ojibwe language teacher.
She's an immersion teacher at our and on our on our tribe.
They just opened
an Ojibwe immersion school and she's the kindergarten teacher. And
she really took it upon herself to reclaim the language and learn the language
and, you
know, is now able to teach that to, you know, the little ones.
So that's their their first language growing up.
And so she was instrumental and,
you know, being able for, you know, for me to reclaim my indigeneity,
you know, being separated from the community like that.
So that, you know, that being said,
you know, I
in in fall 2019
when on my first first year hunting trip
and kind of near Red Lake
but unsuccessful but I really like we really changed the way that I look
about the way that I look at food and the way that I look looked at meat
and it really flipped a switch where I wanted to.
Now it's,
you know, want to pretty much hunting is pretty much one of the only things
I think about
to my partner's demise, I guess.
But it's like it planted that seed And then with the pandemic,
you know, happening six or so odd months
after that, that hunting trip,
I really started to question, you know, you know, question everything in my life.
I had studied business and studied finance and was working for a corporation
who shall remain nameless and didn't feel like I fit
in, didn't feel like I had a purpose in life.
And so I went to the drawing board and I just started to think about
how I could give back to the community, how I could get involved
in in the indigenous like world, in the native world.
You know, there's a lot of folks that go into medicine,
there's a lot of folks that go into, you know, planning government.
And I was just and I thought about food that that's that's what I wanted to do.
So while, you know, I was lucky enough
to be in that corporate position, working from home
pretty much had all my meetings camera off, mute and was just cooking
my cooking just as much as I possibly could, just learning
everything that I could about indigenous foods, reading books, reading blog posts.
Going to the other native restaurants in Minneapolis to learn about
what those pioneers in indigenous
foods were doing, what they were cooking, what they were making.
And I knew that that's where I wanted to like, pivot my career
and what I wanted to do with my life is to just,
you know, get into indigenous foods by any means possible, really
by any means necessary.
So, you know, through that process, then I threw together
a little like PowerPoint, a little portfolio of like some food
that I had made and sent it over to Chief Seattle Club and said, you know,
hey, this is what I want to do, doesn't really fit with the cafe.
But like, this is, you know,
like, you know, this is where I want to go with my life.
And they took a gamble on that, which was pretty cool.
I'd never worked in food service or anything, you know, was coming
out of the corporate world.
So for me personally, there has been a lot of healing and reclaiming.
I guess, you know, my my sense of my sense of self
and my my self-worth to, you know, it I always felt
it felt
selfish to be, you know, I guess working for a company
that wasn't directly benefiting the lives of Native people.
And so I was able to hopefully, you know,
take a step in the right direction where I'm able to give back to the community.
And, you know, and then I guess
as we as we talk about just
what, you know, happens and what happened in the pandemic
was all the traditional protocols and all the ways of harvesting,
harvesting traditional food, we're like, we're shut down.
So in March, it's the Anishinaabe New Year, it's the Ojibwe New Year.
We're tapping maple trees and we're turning that sap
into maple sugar and then maple syrup.
And obviously, you know, it's around three,
three years ago where we weren't able to go out.
But it's yeah, it's, it's it's pretty amazing to you to kind of see
the way that we're able to get creative and find safe ways to go out and collect
sap and, you know, go berry picking and go hunting and everything like that.
And so I was able to get back into it, you know, after kind of
flipping that switch in 2019 and pausing throughout 2020.
And I know everyone's life is on hold, but then, you know, 2021,
it's been full steam ahead of, you know, Nate's at it in the bio,
just trying to decolonize decolonize the diet, you know, only eat,
you know, foods that were here before contact.
And it's hard to do but I think having
that is like the lens and how I
you know, try to make meals and feed myself and you know
I guess in the work that I do at the café, that's the always going to be,
you know, try to try to be the mission or both of those aspects of life.
The pandemic was
a big disruption for me.
I usually bring my kids up in the summer to Nome to visit my mom and my aunts
and cousins, and we go berry picking and fishing and we pick grains.
But I wasn't able to go in 2019 because of moving to a new house.
And then during the pandemic, we didn't get to go home either.
And,
it was kind of depressing because
I have a lot of native food in my freezer
and in my pantry, but I really don't like eating it by myself
because it's a family thing that I do with my mom and my family, my kids.
So it was hard to not be able to go home and,
like reinforce those traditions with my children.
But instead it really forced me to get to know my new neighborhood
and I've always known.
Well, not always.
I mean, I've always had an interest in plants because I grew up
outside all day long in the summer
and
my mom would send me under the bushes to go pick her favorite, like,
because I was small enough to go find her favorite herbs in Alaska.
So, I have, what is it called?
Plant literacy.
I think like, I can tell the difference between plants.
So, like, learning about native plants in Washington State was pretty easy for me.
And I, I was always interested in it.
I really enjoyed doing it. So
during the summer
of 2020, I took a lot of walks and got to know, like,
just kind of paid attention to what's in the forest by my house.
I found a patch of trailing blackberries.
It's still kind of secret.
Like, I'm not going to tell you where it is, but I invited my brother.
He lives in Kirkland to come,
and he came and wore his mask, and we went outside and picked berries.
I think I still have a bag in my freezer.
But that, that was that felt like a really beautiful gift
from the world to be able to find trailing blackberries.
If you get a chance to eat them, they are super tasty.
I think loganberries or marionberries
they're one of the plants that we're used to
that because the flavor is so good
that they're one of the like grandparents of that
breed of berry.
And there were other plants that I, I tried,
I got a little sick because I don't know what I'm doing, but it's still,
it was just a nice way to, like, kind of force me to get to know
the local native plants and kind of
build a relationship with the land and the, in a little different way.
And then
I think
a lot of, a lot of issues that came out of the pandemic,
like our communities have been saying
that things are unfair and
that there's, there's so much work, systemic racism
that hasn't been addressed for the Native community and the pandemic
really made it out in the open more like we couldn't ignore it anymore.
And I'm grateful for that.
But shifts in like the mainstream
culture, like the mainstream,
I guess, conversation about the issues, I still think there's a lot of work to do.
Let's see.
I don't know.
Last summer was the first time
that we were able to go back to Alaska, and I really appreciate it.
We were we usually I try to go up for like three weeks
because it's so expensive to fly back home.
And we were there for like eight days and it was
a whirlwind.
And of course the weather was bad while we were there.
But,
yeah, I, I mean, I always appreciate
what we're able to gather because appreciation is one of the
sustainable values. Like you have to be think for while you're gathering.
And that's a way that you give back to the world
is by expressing thankfulness to the plants and animals.
But I think the pandemic made it a little
like a little more meaningful where I was really, really grateful to be able
to go back home, go back to the tundra and, be with the land again.
So, yeah, I don't know if that actually.
The next question what you're saying really again
works well with our next question.
So I'm going to start with you, Demarus.
How do we as a community intentionally make space to think about
indigenous sovereignty, food sovereignty and racial justice together.
When.
Lets see, one of the things from our food equity talking circle that we did
last year, one of the big things that I brought up
for the Food Action Plan update is to just even point out
that traditional first food is not even viewed as a food.
There is a lot of native plants that are edible
and they're just not viewed as something to eat
for the common acre work.
The Green Line site.
I also want to just invite everybody to go check it out.
That is a native plant restoration site.
That program was set up before me
and everyone on our like we flipped our board.
We used to be white led.
Now it's, it's a BIPOC organization BIPOC led
and the program structure for the green Line.
But their goal was to
plant native plants for bees and birds.
But they don't view the native plants as serving a purpose for people.
And I view all of the plants that are
there as medicine and food
and as a way for us to help.
Coast Salish tribes build a relationship with the plants
that are there.
And like trying to work
from the bottom up to change that view of what the purpose of land is.
It's, it's actually, it's really hard.
A lot of these ideas about what conservation is.
What land management is, like,
what's the role of humanity in nature.
A lot of that is really hard and to change the view of
what is our purpose and what do we do.
I still try to change people's viewpoint all the time about conservation
can and should include people that when there is a lot of evidence
that shows, like when people are interacting
with the land, that nature
does better, like it grows better, it's healthier.
And to remove people from the land
is is harmful to the plants and animals.
So we just we need to I think we need a shift in mindset
about what it means to be human and,
and how to interact with plants.
I forget what was the other?
Really around finding ways
I mean acknowledging these are intersectional issues, right.
- Oh how to support.
- Food sovereignty, racial justice. - Yeah.
- And really this, this idea of making space,
I mean, obviously today we're making space to think about these issues.
How do you see you know in some of your work aligning with
with those intersectional issues and again continually to to make space to yeah.
To talk about to deal with to work on.
- I think, I think also one of the biggest things that our ...
like the groups that I've been working with keep struggling
is just having land that we can manage it
on our own, on our terms and how, how we want to manage it and to not have
like a top down definition
of what you can do with the space, like being able to have the freedom
to grow what we want and manage the land
and the way that we decide is, is good.
That, that's something that keeps coming up.
And, there's also a theme of wanting to be able to co-create
funding opportunities like don't, don't have the top down.
They're telling us what we should do, like our community.
But a lot of our work is grassroots,
like being, like being able to have the,
the power at the same level,
like so that we have equal or maybe even a little stronger voice.
And what we would like to do and co-creating the opportunities for that
to actually happen.
Excellent.
So
yeah, so I guess the
way that I'm thinking about this is,
you know, through the direct work at the, at the café.
So I was telling Demarus,
so I built the staffing model of, of the café.
And in my infinite wisdom, I thought that I would have the capacity
to be both the lead cook, run the kitchen as well as do
all the admin stuff related to the café, which it turns out that I can't.
So I've been pretty much
I've been probably like a 95
five split between 95% in the kitchen
during the day to day operations of running that.
And then probably 5% on the kind of bigger picture admin work.
So four months under our belts and starting to rethink
how the staffing models set up, you, I'm definitely going to try
to have a more healthy balance and a better split between those two.
And the reason that, you know, kind of give a little inside baseball
there is because the café is a place that I want
to be a space to have these conversations, to have
the yeah,
to be a place for Native folks and non-Native folks to come in
and learn about food sovereignty and learn about traditional foods and beyond.
Just simply eating the foods.
But in presentations, native markets make makers markets
and really be a gathering space for the community.
So that is, I guess, something to look forward to that,
you know, got a bit of a better grasp on how to run the
I run the shop and you know kind of reconfigure my time.
I think I'm, you know, going to be able to spend more time on
planning those events, advertising those events and gathering
other voices in the indigenous food space and letting those folks share
about the work that they're doing so that,
you know, people can learn about all the different avenues
of the indigenous foods and the food sovereignty movement.
But I think it's also important to maybe mention that a lot of these topics
are very high up on like
the higher Maslow's hierarchy of needs like these,
these topics are not something that, you know, a day to day member of Chief
Seattle Club who's riding the busses all night to stay safe and to stay dry.
It's a very difficult conversation and a topic
for us to talk about with them
simply because they're trying to make it to the next day.
So that's, I guess, like a duality that I always try to think about, or
just to keep in mind
that a lot of the folks that we serve in our core focus of the club
and the focus of the work that we're doing is, you know, providing meals every day,
providing hygiene services, showers, those day to day supplies that folks need.
And, you know, and then on top of that,
I guess looking at the bigger picture and trying to,
yeah, dance between those two kind of tensions that I see.
So - Thank you, Anthony.
I want to jump to our last question.
I'm going to start with with Nellie and Jaydalen
So I feel like this is a really important question
and thank you to everybody that's here, everybody that's tuning in online.
But the question is, again, for, for, for Nellie and Jaydalen, how would you like
to see city staff and community leaders supporting
your work?
All right.
Hello?
Let's see.
I have a few thoughts.
I think echoing what Demarus
had shared around access to land.
So the way that we access our plot
at Marra Farm is through the city, through the Department of Neighborhoods.
Thank you.
And we're really grateful.
And we also are in good relationship with you all, Nate’s our,
Nate’s the person I talked to, actually.
And just recognizing, like, wanting to honor,
you know, what's happening with nurturing roots right now of,
you know, that they have been investing their time and love into the land
and community for eight years, and then that can be taken away from them.
So I think, yeah,
that's, that's one piece is like access to land
that where people can actually
grow roots and not feel like
they can be displaced at any moment and not actually be displaced at any moment.
I think that's really important
and maybe they can share a little bit more about that too.
I think the other piece is, you know, we are really also grateful
to be funded through the city grant programs.
That is an incredible, you know, the Environmental Justice Fund like these
are incredible opportunities
for us to access needed resources.
So keep up with that.
And I think there can be challenges
with funding models asking,
you know, communities to compete for resources.
That is, you know, for a finite set of resources that is really challenging.
And the other piece too, of like
always wanting community to be doing something new or different,
like the act of actually sustaining and allowing
programing or whatever we're working on to naturally evolve.
It might not look like a big shiny new program,
but valuing like a natural organic evolution in the way that,
you know, plants do and our earth does, I think that's really important.
And I think another piece would be,
I think sometimes interacting
with city folks, again, really grateful to have a strong relationship,
but sometimes it can seem disjointed As someone coming in
from a community based organization realm.
I can talk to a lot of folks
from many, you know, parts of the city
that might not know each other or know that I'm talking.
So I sometimes have to play that middle person.
But with that, sometimes we fall through the cracks as well.
So encouraging inter
I don't know what you all call an interdepartmental relationship
I think would be really, really great.
And then.
And as for how
I guess we'd like the city to help support is to care to listen,
especially with the youth as young people I think we all have been young people.
So I think it's very important that
to create that healing, that generational healing.
We listen to the people
and especially ourselves because we are a mirror to each other.
I know that
even the mentors like speaking that how Y-WE we have mentors
who are in their young adult years and then we have us youth
interacting with them in that already I can see healing and change.
I think just being able to communicate and treat each other with that same
respect is really important when it comes to like
how we can be involved with each other because everything is connected
and that's what we get
to learn being at the farm that we're all connected in somehow
and we all get to make that change.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Maybe I have one thing to add, but I want to hear
what they have to say first, and then I can. What?
And I just wanna say thank you for for calling out the interdepartmental
communication piece.
The city is is a large entity, and
we could do better with that.
So thank you for calling that out.
We, we do our time is limited.
So, but I do want to hear from Anthony and Demarus
on this last question about how we can better support your work.
I think
I mean, yeah, I guess keep it brief.
I think capital is super important, you know, receiving funding.
We have
one grant through the
Food Equity Fund, Department of Neighborhoods that we've received.
That's a two year grant, but
margins are are pretty thin and
food service and Chief Seattle Club, you know,we try to pay our folks a living wage.
You know, no one at the club earns under 20 bucks an hour
and so you know and benefits and all this stuff so it's expensive to run
you know a business within a nonprofit.
And so direct investment through capital and supporting with
easy grant requirements like this
you know grant that we have is is offering where
it's kind of this outcome based,
you know, outcome based invoicing where, you know, we're able to put together
attainable goals and if we achieve those goals, were able to invoice for,
you know, certain amounts of money.
So keeping those administrative burdens down
and I guess increasing, you know, donation of capital or, you know, not
donation, but, you know, access to capital is really important.
Oh, I'll just repeat and
yeah, the competition
for limited funding is super frustrating.
I know like one of the previous reports from 2014
with the Urban Native communities said we want to be able to be cooperative.
But the Yeah, grant funding is very competitive.
Also, yeah, all the grant reporting is,
is so much work and the grant objectives
don't always match what the community wants to do, like what's important to us.
So but again, just co-creating
the grant opportunities and the parameters, like what,
what should be reporting and what should the money be used for.
I think some people, just
everyday people just need money like guaranteed
basic income that that's the thing, a small project that I'm working on.
I know Rising Tides love to be able to give our native neighborhood
the findings presentation to city staff.
It hasn't happened yet.
We are so eager to share all of the data
that like the big picture data that we have gathered,
and we would also love to have funding to be able
to dig into the qualitative data because
768 people wrote thousands and thousands of comments in our survey.
And, we don't have to go do the outreach again.
We can dig through the, the data and find,
visioning and design and all like answers to all kinds of questions.
Let's see.
I also I need capacity building support.
I keep saying it and
it's like I have to go find the opportunities
and also apply for funding to pay myself to learn how to do things.
And there's, it just feels like there's a lot of I've,
I actually came across a program
that was about capacity building but
we don't even have the basic things that they were looking for
in order for me to apply.
So there's there's just a lot of
things that end up being restrictions, like a lot of well-meaning,
but maybe a little out of touch with what is actually needed.
But yeah, capacity building I think is a huge thing.
I would like to try
to get more people excited about planning and,
project management
all like being able to build our own places and like
have radical design, like all of that stuff is like really exciting,
and also long overdue.
Thank you. Thank you to Demarus.
And the Department of Neighborhoods is going to be hosting Rising Tides next
month, and we're looking forward to that and hearing about all the amazing
work that that's happened.
All right.
So as we close out, I just want to thank everybody again for joining us
and just join me in thanking our panelists for for their work
and for their contributions today and sharing their work.