On a Wednesday morning in May, the kitchen at Ukwakhwa (Oneida for “Our Foods”) is buzzing with the energy of a restaurant kitchen during dinner rush and perfumed with the smells of a delicious meal that is almost ready.
There is the tang of smoked buffalo brisket – which spent eight hours on the barbeque the day before, tended by pitmaster chef Elena Terry – warming in the oven. Terry, a Ho Chunk chef who starred on shows such as Top Chef Wisconsin, Chopped and BBQ Brawl, is today’s guest chef for the weekly Indigenous meal. Today she’s patting out fat rounds of dough, which her daughter, UW–Madison agroecology student Zoe Fess, is pan frying into puffy rounds of cowboy bread. Nearby, restaurant pans of maple-glazed heirloom carrots glisten in shades of marigold, pumpkin and garnet.
The rest of the luncheon plate includes a “superfood” salad of wild rice, fresh blueberries and baked beans made from an heirloom Oneida variety that was grown in gardens, on a farm built by tribal members Steve and Becky Webster.
It’s the kind of meal you might find at an upscale restaurant, but a grant from the Wisconsin Partnership Program allows Ukwakhwa to offer lunches for $10 each. They will deliver 90 meals to seven locations on the large reservation, which abuts Green Bay and Lambeau Field on its northeastern corner but is largely rural farmland to the south and west, where the Ukwakhwa kitchen, store and farm is located.
The weekly Wednesday meals have featured such Indigenous menus as “Oakley’s Wild Walleye Plate,” which came with asparagus, wild rice and a citrus beurre blanc sauce, and the “Wild Sistaz” bowl, wild rice topped with shredded bison and the traditional “three sisters” of Indigenous agriculture: beans, rice and corn.
The idea isn’t only to provide delicious meals to tribal members, but to reintroduce Indigenous foods into the everyday diet of Oneida people.
The tribe brought many traditional varieties of beans, squash and its treasured Tuscarora white corn to Wisconsin in the 19th century when it was relocated from its homeland in upstate New York. But historical forces hurt the transmission of traditional knowledge from the old to the young, creating a loss of knowledge about growing and cooking with these healthy ingredients. The result was a growing health crisis for the tribe. About 85 percent of tribal members are overweight and 25 percent have diabetes. Their risk for strokes is higher than any other group, the topic of a separate WPP grant.
“It’s a weird situation,’’ says Steve Webster, of the half urban, half rural reservation. “It’s easy to get food at fast food restaurants, and eating our traditional food is not convenient.”
Another problem is that people have grown to view reservation fare like fry bread tacos as traditional food.
“Now people think of frybread as traditional food, but it’s not. It’s a difficult conversation to have because they’re serving them at fundraisers that are for good causes,’’ he continues. “They’re delicious, but you can’t eat them all the time.”
Finally, there’s the loss of food preparation traditions. Healthy traditional ingredients would show up in the weekly Tribal Elder food boxes, also supported with a WPP grant, but the elders wouldn’t always know how to cook them. In their quest to grow and cook with traditional foods, the Websters have met a number of Indigenous chefs, such as Terry, who have mastered simple and delicious ways to include native foods in a diet that can also be gluten and dairy free. So, another part of the WPP grant brings in Indigenous chefs for monthly food prepping classes, where intergenerational participants learn recipes and go home with several meals for their dinner tables or freezers.
The overall goal of the “seeds to table” project at Ukwakhwa is to integrate traditional Haudenosaunee (the native name meaning people of the longhouse, once known as the Iroquois Confederacy) food practices into modern Oneida life.
The farm hosted a maple camp in March to make syrup from sap and held a field day in mid-May to plant 100 raised bed gardens with traditional food crops, herbs and flowers for the pollinators.
Inside the Ukwakhwa kitchen, there’s a “trading post,” with shelves lined with jars of traditional foods. There are bags of toasted corn mush flour, and beans with names like Kahnawake pole beans, Oneida White Kidney beans, Burnt House Village pole beans and bear beans, mottled black on purple, with a meaty taste and texture. Other shelves hold the products of their Anishinabe neighbors to the north: maple sugar and wild rice. Becky Webster says it truly is a “trading” post they don’t accept money and people need to trade items, so the Minnesota rice arrived in trade for the Oneida’s dehydrated Tuscarora white corn kernels.
“We only trade in barter, it’s hard to put a dollar amount on our foods because they are literally written into our creation story,” Steve Webster says. He’ll ask what people can offer in trade.
“Sometime people will say, ‘I have nothing of value,’ and that’s disheartening to hear,’’ he adds. “We ask, ‘What are you good at? Can you bring us chili and sandwiches when we’re out? Can you help us with hand harvesting and hand weeding? That way they can be a part of it.”
Ukwakhwa represents a life change for the Websters; Steve quit a job as a tribal administrative assistant and Becky quit her job as a tribal attorney. They built all the buildings on the farm, including the kitchen and trading post, and homes for themselves and Becky’s mother. They homeschooled their children, and when daughters Grace and Amelia were teenagers, they required them to research and operate a small business.
They came up with the idea of making and selling breakfast burritos. Steve Webster said the project involved logistics, time management, marketing, applying for vendor licenses and working with commercial kitchens to book time.
The girls started making 40 a week, and by the time the pandemic hit, they were selling 250 to 300 a week.
“We couldn’t make enough,’’ he says. “We were getting chased down by people wanting them when we were out on our delivery routes.”
The girls’ project showed Webster that there was a hunger for healthier food on the reservation, and that’s a hunger they are attempting to feed with Ukwakhwa.
“We really want to bring these foods to the forefront of our people,’’ he says.
Banner photo: Giselle Oliva-Metoxen, Ukwakhwa; Chef Elena Terry; Steve Webster, Ukwakhwa
Photos by Jim Moy
