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I’m born and raised on the Blackfeet Rez. I grew up very different than a lot of people, and I’m fortunate for it. I grew up having picnics and harvesting trips out on the land, roasting kidney and sweetbreads over the fire, and having peppermint tea that we’d just all harvested the night before and dried out in the sun while we fished all day. That’s when I felt the most surrounded by love and connection, being out on the land.

Now I’m the co-director of FAST Blackfeet, which stands for Food Access Sustainability Team. We’re a nonprofit organization focused on food security, nutrition education, and food sovereignty.

One of the key things we do here is provide access to traditional foods by going out on the land. Recently I led a workshop called Little Harvesters, and we took a bunch of kids out to learn about dandelion. We taught them how the leaves are like spinach for the Blackfeet—so high in iron—and about how Popeye loves spinach and how it makes them strong. We showed them how to identify dandelion. It looks like the sun when it’s bloomed, and then when it switches to a puffball of seeds, it’s the moon, and when you blow it, the seeds look like the stars. So if the kids could identify a dandelion as a sun or a moon, they could start looking for the leaves around that area, the ones with “lion’s teeth” on the edges.

“One of the key things we do here is provide access to traditional foods by going out on the land.”

We talked to the kids about different ways you could eat the leaves—like a kale chip, raw in salads, in smoothies, or sautéed, like spinach. It wasn’t just the kids that I was focused on, though, it was the parents too, and making it all feel attainable.

The reason why peppermint tea and kidney feel so good to me is because those are the foods that my family ate for generations, it’s connected to my genes. When we have those opportunities for our community members, it brings back good connections. Those kids are all going to remember dandelions, that’s for sure.

We think about the change in our food system as if it’s in the dinosaur days, I told them, and it’s not, it’s three generations back.

My great-grandmother was Annie Mad Plume Wall, who gave me my name Comes-in-Singing and went on plant trips with us in my childhood. She was born in a tipi in 1914 and raised by her grandmother on the land with the language, with the seasonality, with the connection to our food system and our plants. Diabetes did not exist in her generation.

Then she got taken to boarding school. We have a picture in my family that is a visual of when culture, identity, and food and health changed for us. It shows my great-grandmother when she came back from the school in 1930. Her hair is cut and she’s wearing a buttoned-up shirt and a skirt with tights and flats, while her grandmother standing next to her is still in traditional regalia and moccasins.

“Plant knowledge was the magic; that’s what kept her connected.”

Even though she was forced to learn the language and cut off from family and culture, my great-grandmother protected her plant knowledge. Sometimes I imagine it, her being in boarding school and studying the plants because she knew her grandma on the other side of the boarding school fence was also looking at the same plants.

Plant knowledge was the magic; that’s what kept her connected. And she passed that down to our next generations. Even if she couldn’t pass down language or dancing or ceremony, she passed down what she knew was safe for us to learn, something that we could keep within our family.

Her daughter, my grandma Theresa Wall, grew up on rations from the government. This was decades after the U.S. had issued an order to massacre the buffalo, our primary food source, to starve the Indians so they would comply with reservation boundaries. I remember my grandmas saying they’d dump out the government flour because it had bugs, and it was purposeful, the government wanted to make them sick.

My Grandma Theresa was angry, very angry, because she had diabetes. She would tell the doctor, You did this to us, this is what you wanted, as she was getting ready to go to surgery to get amputations higher and higher up her leg. As a kid, I didn’t understand what she meant—how did this doctor we never met before do this to her?

It wasn’t until I grew up and learned about the change in our food system that I was like, Ah, she’s grouping him with all the people that did this to our food system, that colonized our land. And I saw how the foods she had to eat because she couldn’t go out and harvest and hunt affected her health. She had nine kids, and eight of them have diabetes, now including my mom.

My mom, Ella Wall, was born in 1974, and she says she’s the frozen-pizza generation. She had to survive being a single mom with four kids, navigating a food-insecure world with pizzas and chicken patties and chicken nuggets and burritos.

My generation gets to be the rebellious-advocate generation. One of the key reasons I went back in my family story was for my kids, so they wouldn’t have to ask me the same things I asked my mom, who felt guilty by the end of my questions and said, “I’m so sorry that I didn’t do anything sooner. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that diabetes was being passed down like this, due to lack of changing the way that we eat.”

I tell people that in Indian Country, you cannot say, “You should be healthy, you should be walking, you should be eating salads, you should be eating white chicken meat.” Because then you create this stigma, and this idea that we should be like the people who get to be the healthy population.

Instead, you tell them that the government purposely tried to get us to be sick, that they want us to be sick—but we’re actually really healthy people, and if we go back on the land and we’re picking berries or learning how to harvest buffalo and moving our bodies, we’re getting healthy foods that go back into our homes.

Foods with omega-6 cause inflammation, and because we have so much heart disease and arthritis in our communities, we really need to eat omega-3 foods again, and that’s our fish, our wild game, and our buffalo that’s back on the land. They are absolutely superior to beef and pork and chicken, which are all non-traditional proteins. Eating traditional foods again, harvesting on the land, makes people feel like they’re sticking it to the man.