Portside

Tlingit & Haida’s Traditional Food Security program connects Native youth with traditional foods that are nutrient dense, unprocessed, and culturally relevant. This increases traditional food access and encourages youth to make healthy food choices.

A lot of this work about food sovereignty is bringing an understanding of our indigenous foods back to us. We work on rebuilding our food systems and bring a lot of pride and connection back to our ancestors.

Small farmers of indigenous foods lose income to capitalist food production, which creates ostensibly cheaper substitutes and stigmatizes indigenous food as unhealthy, inconvenient to produce, environmentally degrading, or inferior in taste.

Undermined by displacement and centuries of cultural assimilation, indigenous foodways are careening toward extinction. A number of increasingly prominent Native chefs hope to change that.