Montana State initiative receives $500,000 grant for Indigenous food sovereignty work
The Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative provides education and conducts research on tribal food sovereignty focused on the peoples of the Northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountains
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By Anne Cantrell, MSU News Service
BOZEMAN — A project at Montana State University that works to support intertribal food sovereignty has received a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation Humanities in Place program to continue and grow its work.
The Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative provides education and conducts research in support of Indigenous food sovereignty focused on the people of the Northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Its aim is to revitalize cultural knowledge, educate Indigenous food systems professionals, expand food system research and increase engagement. It is a collaborative project of the MSU Department of Native American Studies in the College of Letters and Science and the MSU College of Education, Health and Human Development.
The initiative will use the Mellon grant for its Buffalo Nations Foodways project, which aims to ensure Indigenous cultural continuity in the Buffalo Nations biocultural region food system, according to Jill Falcon Ramaker, director of the initiative and assistant professor in the MSU Department of Food Systems, Nutrition and Kinesiology. She noted that a biocultural region is a geographical area where the natural environment and the cultural practices of the people living there are deeply intertwined.
Falcon Ramaker said the work is about keeping important knowledge in communities while sustaining food systems and culture.
“Buffalo Nations students are vessels of resiliency,” Falcon Ramaker said. “Through educational opportunities and projects working in their home communities, students gain understandings important to success in their career paths, accessing Indigenous knowledge that will guide their work into the future. Place-based and ancestral knowledge is essential to sustainable food systems.”
To meet its goals, the Buffalo Nations Foodways project will work to strengthen food, culture and identity and the exchange of knowledge among what the project refers to as a kinship network – the Indigenous system of exchange that undergirds Indigenous belief and traditional food systems. In practical terms, Falcon Ramaker said that translates to supporting connections between knowledge people of many Native nations in the region toward shared food sovereignty, while providing educational opportunities and materials to Native communities, Native partnering organizations, and tribal colleges and universities.
The project will also support MSU students’ projects in their home communities. Over two years, an estimated 40 to 50 students will participate in community knowledge regeneration projects, Falcon Ramaker said.
For example, Watson Whitford, an undergraduate studying environmental horticulture, is working with his Rocky Boy Ojibwe Cree community to generate connections between youth and elders. Together, they are building a food sovereignty garden, growing produce for and with elders while learning and practicing plant names in the Cree language.
“The language has evolved with thousands of years of relationship with people and place,” Falcon Ramaker said. “Descriptions of plants give us an understanding that is ancestral and connected to place. Knowing the plants and their uses helps us to thrive in our home communities.”
Another student funded by the grant, Seth Still Smoking, is working to create cooking videos using both English and Blackfeet language. The videos will be distributed by FAST Blackfeet, a nonprofit devoted to food sovereignty and ending food insecurity on the Blackfeet Reservation. They will teach basic cooking skills and engagement with ancestral language, both important to Native well-being, Falcon Ramaker said.
In addition, the grant will provide opportunities for students and community members to work in a new Indigenous Foods Laboratory, located in the Community Commons at the HRDC, a nonprofit providing social services in Bozeman. This training and educational center, founded by Buffalo Nations in partnership with Piikani Lodge Health Institute and North American Traditional Indigenous Foods, will host student fellowships and internships at the lab related to food entrepreneurship, recipe development, community education and outreach.
The grant will also be used to update an interactive map of the Buffalo Nations Biocultural Region meant to reinvigorate connections among Indigenous people and places that supported Indigenous food sovereignty in the past. Falcon Ramaker said the funds will help add more layers to the interactive map and distribute it throughout the region – particularly to tribal colleges and universities – as an educational tool. The Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative first started working on the map in 2021, Falcon Ramaker said.
Alison Harmon, MSU vice president for research and economic development, said Falcon Ramaker has made “significant progress in the good work of sustaining food systems and culture among Buffalo Nations.
“Students are drawn to her because they see the importance of this work,” Harmon added. “Traditional knowledge is a finite resource that will be diminished over time if not shared and regenerated by individuals and communities who understand its value. I am grateful MSU is engaging in and supporting this regeneration.”
Students who are interested in the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative and its Buffalo Nations Foodways project are invited to visit the website for more information: www.montana.edu/ehhd/bnfsi/index.html.
