Unity banquet highlights traditional foods

Wrangellites packed into the Stikine Native Organization building Tuesday night to partake in traditional native foods.

The SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium's Traditional Foods Project hosted a Unity Dinner, complete with traditional dancing, traditional foods, and native dress. The meal was the third time this year the program has collected the native organizations, and assistant Ken Hoyt ticked off the types of traditional foods local chefs, hunters, foragers, and others managed to assemble.

"We did okay," he said. "We got deer, we got moose, we got goat, we got sockeye, seaweed, a lot of berries, including blueberries, we had black cod, and we had soapberries, which was really special. We had our fall-time foods."

The dinner was part of a concerted effort on the part of SEARHC to re-introduce Alaska's native population to food sources which may have been lost over time as a result of the introduction of cheap and readily available commercial western food, which some natives blame on high rates of diabetes and other chronic ailments among Alaska natives.

"We just promote our traditional life as a healthy lifestyle," he said. "If we were living really traditionally, we'd be dancing all the time, breaking a sweat, out hunting and gathering and fishing and picking berries, lots of physical activity, lots of really nutritious food. And then this is good for the social self, the spiritual self."

Tribal Council President Tim Gillen, Sr. says area native organizations have been trying to increase the frequency of gatherings of the native community.

"Actually, it's something that we've been working, trying to do," he said. "We'd like to see something like this four times a year. In the past it's been done really kind of seldom. There's people here that can work towards that goal. It's something we've always wanted to kind of do. Something that happens a lot in other native communities."

Gillen and Tlingit Tribal Elder Marge Byrd both said an intergenerational knowledge gap exists as part of a disconnect between traditional life and contemporary convenience.

"We got away from it," Gillen said. "It's just like everything else. The way of the world is, it's really hard, even for my own kids, to keep them based in native traditions and customs. Even myself, the first part of my life, there was some stuff that just didn't fit in."

"It's kind of sad," he added. "We are losing a lot of our elders, and those are the ones that really pass those customs and traditions on."

When she was young, Byrd's brothers and father used to bring traditional foods into the house, she said.

"All my brothers were fishermen," she said. "Nowadays it's too easy to go to the grocery store. Long ago we didn't have those chemicals and stuff that they put in the food they get at the store."

"It's getting harder to eat these foods," she said. "Younger generations don't know where to find them or when to harvest them."

In the building's kitchen, Caroline Demmert took a break from serving food she and other chefs had worked for hours to prepare for a snack. Her contribution to the dishes that evening was the pork-and-seaweed chop suey.

While the ingredients might be unusual, the cooking methods for the foods prepared Thursday night might seem familiar or strange, Demmert said.

"It depends on what you're fixing," she said. "The deer normally takes the longest, because you have to make it tender."