Amid the gleam of stainless steel in the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab, a pair of women sort huckleberries and place them on a tray. Sara Calvosa Olson (Karuk) flicks her eyes over to them and says they’re doing all the hard work, while tomorrow she’ll turn the berries into smoothie bowls for a faculty and staff workshop. The menu will also feature peppernut coffee and hazelnut granola. “We’re just having a brunch workshop,” says Calvosa Olson.
During the rest of Cal Poly Humboldt’s Indigenous People’s Week, Calvosa Olson will serve as chef in residence, offering another workshop for students and an Oct. 16 book talk on her recently published cookbook Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen. The title uses the Karuk words for “let’s eat,” mirroring its author’s inviting and practical approach to cooking, sharing culture and Indigenous food sovereignty.
“When I was young, we lived without running water or electricity,” Calvosa Olson says of her upbringing along the Trinity River. “My father was a hunter; my mother was a skilled gatherer,” and the food they brought home was supplemented by “commod boxes,” or commodity foods. Calvosa Olson helped her parents gather and process the foods that have been staples for Karuk and other Native people on the North Coast for millennia, like salmon, elk, acorns, berries and nuts.
Later, living in Marin County, Calvosa Olson, who now splits her time between there and Willow Creek, says she wanted to not only maintain the traditions of seasonal gathering, but to impart the regional palate to her sons — an appreciation for those bitter, bright and fishy flavors supermarket shelves don’t supply. “I wasn’t living in community,” she says, noting that participating in traditional and group gathering methods wasn’t always possible. But using ingredients, like acorns, allowed them to connect to the seasons, “to be as attuned to those rhythms,” as well as methods of gathering and processing.
“I’m still competing with Takis and Fruit Snacks, though,” she says with a wry smile. Now grown, her sons gather on their own and use traditional ingredients in their cooking, which pleases Calvosa Olson.
The acorn crepes and huckleberry muffins she’s sharing in workshops this week are examples of how she’s folded Indigenous culture and ingredients into daily cooking in a contemporary kitchen. The preparation is a far cry from the cooking she learned “when you’re living in a yurt,” she says with a grin and a shrug over the food dehydrator and blender she uses at home. Those tools “allow us to make these foods … pervasive in our life.”
That’s part of Calvosa Olson’s work toward Indigenous food sovereignty. “You can’t have sovereignty without security,” she says, including when a road washes out or the cost of food rises at the market. Teaching the next generation to become familiar with traditional ingredients, as well as gathering and processing skills, is passing on the ability to provide for oneself, one’s family and one’s community. “When we have an abundance of our traditional foods in the pantry, that feels like security, like abundance.”
It only seems daunting at first, she says. “Once you start gathering, you have these ingredients right there in your pantry.” Then, the labor isn’t so different from the all-day cooking she watched her Italian grandparents do, simmering sauce and grinding homemade sausage.
While happy to serve as chef in residence this week, Calvosa Olson says, “I’m not a chef; I’m a home cook,” adding, “I would never have been on this trajectory without Indigenous chefs” whose work she has followed and written about for Edible and elsewhere. In fact, her book was originally planned as a collection of her pieces about other people’s work. The pandemic forced a pivot — without the ability to travel, she shifted to the far more personal endeavor of sharing her own recipes, stories and photographs.
The result is what Calvosa Olson refers to in the introduction as “a very inconvenient book” of more than 70 recipes arranged by season that require one to wait for and find ingredients in the places they thrive. Acknowledging, “we are all colonized,” it’s also a forgiving book in terms of exactitude and substitution. She also encourages readers to consider ways to engage mindfully with Indigenous culture and communities (“Are there Native elders in your community that could benefit from your labor first?”), and keep stewardship of natural resources in mind, rather than simply scooping up ingredients for a recipe.
Here Calvosa Olson shares the recipe for huckleberry acorn muffins featured in Chími Nu’am. And with it, an oft-repeated warning for the ambitious about the painstaking business of cleaning and sorting huckleberries: Only gather as much as you can process.
Huckleberry Acorn Muffins
Makes 12.
“I love sheep yogurt but if all you’ve got is Go-Gurt, who am I to be snobby about it?” — Sara Calvosa Olson
Ingredients
1 ½ cups flour
½ cup acorn flour
½ cup maple sugar
1 ½ teaspoon baking soda
1 ½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 eggs
½ cup oil
½ cup plain yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla paste or extract
1 cup huckleberries
Heat oven to 375 F. In a large bowl, whisk together all the dry ingredients: flours, maple sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
In a smaller bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients: eggs, oil, yogurt and vanilla. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients in the large bowl and mix until combined. Gently fold in the huckleberries.
Drop batter into greased muffin tins, ¾ full. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean, about 20 minutes for regular sized muffins, 12 minutes for mini muffins.
Find Sara Calvosa Olson’s work and Chími Nu’am at akihsara.com.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.
This article appears in Ballot Measure Soup – A look at all those local revenue proposals coming before voters.
