22
“Sorry if I’m late,” Miles apologized. “Got a little waylaid out there.”
“No worries brother,” excused Becca. “We operate on Indian time around here, some of those conversations you’ll have on the sidetrack are just as productive as the work you do in-between.”
“I can already feel that,” Miles said. “But I’m not sure how to feel about the word Indian. Isn’t it more politically correct to say Native American?”
“Since when has politics ever gotten anything correct?”
“True.”
“Hey, you wanna cut up that bag of onions over there?”
“Yep. What’re we making?”
“Don’t know yet,” she confessed. “But I’m sure we’ll need those, and a bunch of garlic. The rest’ll come together from there.”
Miles recognized the carefree approach to campstyle culination.
“So I’ve only spent time on a couple of reservations, and one other camp, and that was all in this part of the country, so I’m sure opinions differ as you travel deeper into the invasion, but I’ve personally seen more people offended by the term Native American, than by Indian, by far.
America is the corporation that genocided their people and eradicated their way of life, they’re not native to America, they’re prisoners of it. POW camps, as designated by the United States War Department and policed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, rights defended by the American Indian Movement, where we eat Indian tacos and live by Indian time. It’s like anything else, we give them the short end of the stick, and they make the best of it as they flourish with culture in the face of merciless oppression. So of course we want to take that away from them too.
If anything, they’re natives of Turtle Island, their name for our vast continent. They’re indigenous of a place, which means that they are a living piece of it, not simply living on top of some foreign occupation.
But as far as you’re concerned, just plain native seems to work for most people. You wanna pass me those onions?”
“Yeah. Thanks. Did you say something about Indian tacos?”
“Oh yeah, I guess you’ve never had them before, have you?”
“Nope,” he admitted. “But I am partial to anything taco.”
“Well that settles it, Indian tacos it is, the people will be ecstatic.”
“I am.”
“Great, that’ll make it easy to get some good heart energy all up in there, especially while you’re peeling all that garlic.”
“You know, I got some friends that taught me about that, they were out at camp too, Annie and Spaz.”
“Annie, with the hair and freckles?”
“That’s the one.”
“How cool, you’re friends with Annie, I remember her, she’s awesome. I was only out there for two weeks, don’t know if I met Spaz, maybe. Well that definitely just earned you a little street cred. Oh man, they should come out here, that would be so cool.”
“Yes it would.”
It already felt as though weeks had passed since he was back on the hillside. This place was quickly becoming a second home.
“Yeah, she worked in the kitchen some when I was on dish duty, the water would start turning to ice before we finished scrubbing. The kitchen had such a good energy, and we kind of just made everything up as we went, it was all sorts of fun, and pretty soul-enriching to be putting all that love into feeding the people. Our people, our family, you know? It was something else.”
“Yeah, that seems to be the sentiment I’ve gotten.”
“No doubt, even for that short of a stay it felt like a lifetime. So you’ve got the garlic covered, then just dice it up and we’ll let it sit for a while. Do you know about that? Letting your garlic rest so that it can achieve its maximum health benefit?”
He didn’t.
“So garlic’s super healthy for you, right? It treats everything from the common cold to heart disease, it’s a natural antibiotic and even prevents many forms of cancer. It’s best if you can just eat a couple cloves raw, but that can be a little intense for a first timer. So then you cook with it, which you were going to do anyway for the taste, but that destroys many of the health benefits, especially the anti-cancer properties. Unless you give the enzymes a few minutes to react and create our superhero compound, allicin, which can still be destroyed by overcooking, so to be safe we’ll toss in a little raw root near the end, and voila, we’ve now preserved the actual content of our flavor profile.”
“No, I’ve never heard about that.”
“Of course not, how could they prescribe the pink stuff if our food kept us healthy? That’s what it was like before, you know. Before all this. The food was alive, and so were the people who lived with it, and cared for it, and took part in the evolution of a living ecosystem. And the food took care of them, and the medicine plants, and everyone involved lived a life of peak performance.
Then we came in to plow that world away, and we cut down ancient forests to build antique furniture, but we leave a few saplings and plant some corn, so it should be good as new, right? It’s still plants and trees and bugs, just reorganized into an arrangement that’s more financially beneficial to the bottom line, it’s still nature though, isn’t it? And the result of lifetimes committed to the depletion of anything remotely natural, is that we’re left stranded with a toxic food supply and poisoned soil, good thing they have a pill for that.”
“Annie always said the food was healthier before domestication. I mean, I know this processed and gmo crap is no good, but was the juice actually stronger back in the wild?”
“For sure. It’s like those piñons, incredible nutrient density that could single handedly get an entire tribe through winter. But if we domesticated them, we’d probably select for thinner shells and bigger nuts, with little regard for what we gave up in return, just the return on investment and the profit margarine, and so begins the backwards evolution of our food’s fitness. Or we’d just cut down the native food supply to plant corn, that one kills two thunderbirds with one stone.
That’s probably good on the garlic, you warmed up enough for some firekeeping?”
“My eyes are already burning.”
“There’s a hatchet over there, can you split up a bunch of little pieces, small enough to wrap your fingers around.”
“Sure can.”
“Thanks, then you can come over here and build a fire in the stove if you want. This thing’s so awesome, it’s from the eighteen hundreds, it just takes a little fire in this door on the side and the entire top becomes your cooking surface. I can easily fit five or six big pots on it, been cooking for a hundred all month. Then it’s got this oven part too, the heat wraps around it before it leaves through the back, we’ve been making all kinds of bread and sensuous desserts. Takes a little finesse, a little art and a little science, gotta stoke the fire ahead of when you want the heat, and the top’s kind of a fretless gradient of temperature, but I don’t know if I can go back to any other way of cooking. I love this thing.”
“Did you have one out at Standing Rock?”
“Nope, I wish. No, we used propane, at a pipeline fight, but what else could we do really, we were just trying to survive. This way feels so much cleaner, less hypocritical, and I’m convinced the food tastes better.”
“I believe it. We’ve been eating off the open fire for a month.”
“Oh yeah, so you know. Wait, Annie’s been cooking for you out there? You lucky duck.”
Or turkey.
“One day when we were in the kitchen together, we got word that the entire tent had to be packed up and relocated. Overnight. It was kind of a madhouse for a bit, stuff getting thrown every which way, people that had never set foot in the kitchen deciding the priorities of a world they knew nothing about, the worst was when the spice rack got rearranged.
The kitchen had been fluid before that, slowly adapting to the rotation of each character’s influence, the most used items found their way to their most suitable home, favorite spices gathered on the favorite shelf, the whole system grew more efficient as it evolved over months of extensive taste testing.
And then it was clearcut. An era of vibrant history was erased and a pile of pieces were left to tell the story. It was regrown of course, and in a manner that was technically functional to the untrained eye, it could at least cook corn. But it had lost its mojo, its flow, its nourishing energy that can only be developed over time. It was no longer an interwoven ecosystem of organically formed partnerships, it was still plants and trees and bugs, but a truly symbiotic community is more than just the individual pieces of the puzzle.”
“I see what you did there, good one. And I guess industrial agriculture rearranges the kitchen every season, scrambling the pieces so that a less suitable spatula can surface through the chaos, and then they have to poison the food with msg to make up the difference.”
“That’s it. You got a little out there on that one, but you get it.”