'Our Food is Our Medicine' 

Marion Frye is cutting sea anemones, or sa'roh, gelatinous looking fists pulled from rocks at low tide. She's let them rest a couple days in water so they won't sting her hands. "Yeah, 'horse's ass,'" she says with a chuckle, explaining the nickname of the creatures whose flowery tendrils retract when touched. She cuts into the green-gray rings and scores them along the inside to straighten them out, as one might a shrimp, until they resemble huge caterpillars. She'll batter and fry them in bacon grease someone else is bringing today.

"In most of the state, we weren't allowed to gather our own food. It was against the law. We were criminals," says Frye, her eyes still on the sa'roh. She looks up at her granddaughter on the other side of the table and smiles. "Gramma's making sa'roh."

Frye doesn't remember the first time she cooked or ate sa'roh but for some at the Indigenous Foods and Cultural Gathering Day on March 10 at Suemêg Village in Sue-Meg State Park, it will be the first time tasting this ancient food. Funded through a food sovereignty grant awarded to the California Tribal Court Coalition, the program's demonstrations and cultural sharing focus on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), including the harvesting and preparation of foods like lamprey eel, acorns, mussels, elk, berries, greens and the sa'roh Frye is preparing. But the event's organizers' goals go beyond the realm of food as they seek to heal and support connections between community members, their cultures and families, and their ancestral lands.

Frye and her daughter Seafha Ramos, an assistant professor at Northwestern Arizona University, work in tandem at the stove, Frye turning the chunks in the bubbling fat and poking with a fork to see when they're done. When they've passed muster, Seafha cuts the thick, knobby strips into pieces and sets them on a paper towel in a foil tray. Under the savory crust of batter, the meat has a mild seafood flavor and a chewy crunch similar to jellyfish. It's easy to understand why it's a delicacy and why Frye's gathering spot is a secret.

Standing in the middle of the open space under an umbrella, Maiya Rainer, a California State Parks interpreter at Sue-meg State Park, has to shout a little to reach everyone over the rain hitting the trees and the roof of the kitchen. "We haven't had a voice, we haven't had a space to be here," she calls out to the crowd huddled on the covered patio and under pop-up canopies. "In the last four years, we've been able to make a change. ... We're able to tell our own stories and not have other people tell our stories for us."

One of the sheltered picnic tables is piled with baskets, some with more open weaving, some tight enough to hold water, ground acorn and the fire-heated rocks that will boil the porridge. There are carved wooden paddles for stirring and acorns in various stages of processing. Yurok Food Sovereignty Program Food Village Coordinator Annelia Hillman is running the day's demonstration. She's led workshops and field trips on acorn gathering and processing, and making nets from iris fibers, and she's planning an upcoming class on nettles.

"It's about engaging people in positive activity that connects them back to the land ... making those connections back to our cultural roots, our ancestors, back to our land, our foods," Hillman says. "It's so healing for people, especially people in recovery," whether from substance abuse or other issues. That connection, she says, is made not just through consumption of cultural foods, but through taking part in the processing of them. "Everything we did in life was like a prayer. Everything is a ceremony," she says. "Taking our time and putting our effort into things is just how we live. And that's how we bring that healing ... it's kind of that meditative state of process."

Zipping between cooking and demonstration stations is Kate Lowry, of the Wyandot and Ojibwe tribes, and a project specialist at the Northern California Tribal Court Coalition. She describes her role as "just being sort of the gopher for the advisory committee and for our partners, it's weaving people together that have these knowledge and gifts." The Nue-ne-pue (meaning food in Yurok) Committee, she explains, spans across Native communities, supporting the Yurok Wellness Court, as well as partner courts at the Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria, Hoopa Valley Tribe, Karuk Tribe, Trinidad Rancheria and Tolowa Dee'ni Nation.

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• Photo by Jennifer Fumiko Cahill
• Frying battered sa'roh, or sea anemone.

The gathering, Lowry says, has been in the works since October. "It started with women that I knew who wanted to learn or relearn how to gather mussels and seaweed — traditional foods." There was interest, too, from folks in the re-entry program for formerly incarcerated tribal members. When funds became available, the committee built the multi-tribal Suemêg gathering, as well as another upcoming event, around sharing TEK related to food gathering, offering stipends to those who could provide food and teach cultural practices.

One of the stipend recipients, Dianna Beck, wears a gray hoodie and stirs an elk stew prepped earlier at the McKinleyville Community Center kitchen. The stew is cooked four to six hours to break down the meat and cook out the gaminess. It's full of tomatoes, zucchini and potatoes, flavorful and restorative on a rainy day. Outside the open kitchen pass-throughs, people breathe in the steam and warm their faces over the stew before eating. On the table are jars of canned deer meat to make more.

Beck is on cooking duty but she has also come to sing for a pair of elders being honored at the event, Susan "Tweet" Burdick and her sister Bertie Peters, both of whom are lifelong practitioners of traditional skills, "all of what makes our people our people," says Beck. During the honoring ceremony, Burdick and Peters sit in folding chairs under a broad canopy as people take turns extolling their skills, reminiscing and thanking them for their teachings.

Kayla Maulson, who owns Frybread Love, ladles out stew once it's ready. Her family is active in the community, hosting Brush dances, and the elk meat was harvested by her brother Zack Brown, court project planner for the Trinidad Rancheria. Even without a big gathering, she says sharing food with others, especially elders, is typical. "If you get meat, deer or elk, you go, 'What elders do I know?' And when you get salmon," she says. That, she adds, dipping her head, is how it should be.

Traditional foods have always been part of Maulson's life. "My great aunt and grandmother were always cracking acorns," then leeching them in the sink, she says. Unsurprisingly, frybread was a staple along with the baked version, wee bread. Salmon, she says, only tastes right to her cooked the traditional way, the hunks of meat skewered on redwood sticks stuck in the ground around a fire.

At a picnic table in the back corner of the covered patio, Phil Albers, a member of the Karuk Tribe and education director of Save California Salmon, holds a short knife in one hand and a narrow stick of redwood in the other. He's flanked by a pair of boys learning to carve sticks for cooking salmon. He ribs them a bit about wearing sweatpants to work in, then demonstrates the angling of the knife, watching as they mimic him. "This is geometry. This is math," he says, showing how increasing the angle of the blade shaves off more wood. "If you're strong enough, it's easier to pull the stick." He notches the knife into the redwood and pistons his elbow backward, peeling away a layer of wood.

Albers regularly visits classrooms and presents on TEK, sometimes using an art project, sometimes a fieldtrip to the Klamath Dam removal site to reseed the area with native plants. "It's not just food but policy and advocacy and activism around protecting the watershed and its relevant community members," he says. The salmon, he says, are "interwoven" with communities and cultural practices, and learning about the latter can shift people's perspectives about the environment. "It gives you a sense of connectedness."

The gathering at Suemêg Village, Albers says, is "a great example of people's work in advocacy and policy because of the work with the state park to make that area accessible." That it's a safe space for cultural practices is a big deal he's not sure younger people understand.

"When I was a kid, it was potentially physically dangerous to talk about using mussel shell spoons or having a fire on the beach and cooking eels," he says, stressing the fear of being accused and prosecuted for poaching. "Even in my own time, if I had eels and I went to a park," he says, he'd be asked, "'Where'd you get those?' Elk, too — there'd be, at a minimum, questioning and somebody looking for a way to punish you for poaching. ... Even setting a basket [for catching eel] in the river, you faced a felony charge."

"The Fish Wars were serious," he says, adding he knows people who were arrested during the period of upheaval over Native fishing rights during the 1960s and 1970s for practicing their cultural heritage.

Ruthie Maloney remembers those days, too. A Yurok Tribal member who is also Navajo on her father's side, she recalls stealth being a part of learning to forage mussels, seaweed, wild onions and basket weaving materials with Burdick. "We would have to park outside the gate there, and we would have to be all sneaky and quiet." That was only a decade ago in this park, then named Patrick's Point State Park. "But that doesn't stop us," she says with a mischievous chuckle. "We've had to fight to live our way of cultural life. ... We're not afraid to get in trouble."

These days, as executive director of the North Coast Native Protectors Tribal Marine Collaborative, Maloney's fights are over policy and coastal access, which also touch the practice of traditional foodways. "It's who we are," she says. "They've always said when the fish stop running, we will cease to exist as a people." Food sovereignty, she says, is a safeguard against calamity and vital to Native identity.

"I can't tell you how [eel] feeds my soul," she says. "It's like our bodies crave it because it's in our DNA." And as much as it killed her fingers to learn to pry mussels from rock with an elk horn instead of a metal tool, "when you gather your own food, being out there in nature, like with Tweet, it's good for you."

Nikkie Lara-Hostler, who is Yurok from the Big Lagoon Rancheria, with purple hair and a rhinestone affixed to her cheek like a crystal mole, says, "My grandma made beer can frybread. It was one can of beer, always Budweiser. Never the light stuff, though." The three other women at the station cackle.

They're singing and chatting in a loose assembly line, talking about their favorite kind of frybread, thick and puffy or nearly thin enough to see through, with one woman saying she was taught to leave a hole in the middle.

Frybread isn't an Indigenous food but an invention of Native people whose traditional foods had been wrested away all over the country, a comforting staple made from commodity foods common on reservations. Lara-Hostler says she learned to make it by watching her grandmother Beverly Moorehead, who told her, "Never measure anything you cook with your heart." She makes it at least monthly for her family. "That's how I got my wife," she says. "Elk backstrap and jalapeño frybread with strawberries and fresh whipped cream."

"And she'll tell you," she affirms, adding they married nine months later.

Beside Lara-Hostler, Tina Taylor is flipping pieces of frybread in a cast-iron pan of bubbling oil. Taylor is part of the Siletz Tribe, whose ancestral lands stretched from Northern California up through Southern Washington. The sleeve of her jacket is tucked back over her missing right arm. As the women talk about what they want to cook next, she cracks wise, saying she's always happy "to lend a hand," setting the others laughing.

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• Photo by Jennifer Fumiko Cahill
• Leonela Bolanos uses her thumbs to separate the cartilaginous spine from a lamprey eel.

"Before I was addicted to drugs and alcohol, I was addicted to approval and validation," Taylor says. A history of child sexual abuse left her vulnerable, she says, and she fell for a man who sold drugs. Believing she'd informed on him to police, she says he took her out to remote area in the Central Valley, where he and another man shot her with a 9mm handgun and shotgun before kicking her down an embankment and leaving her for dead. She survived, but lost her arm. Still, Taylor says, "It took me a long time to get it." She says she was sex trafficked and still using when she was arrested for possession and went to prison.

Once out of prison, Taylor said, "I did everything different, I took up running." However, "It wasn't until I connected back to my tribe that I got sober." That began with attending sweat lodges in prison and continues with traditional cultural arts in Humboldt. "All along, I had been looking for someplace to belong and the whole time I didn't realize I had a community that I was alienated from." With the blessing of her grandmother Agnes Baker Pilgrim, who had tribal chin tattoos, she eventually got her own from a traditional artist. "I got my 1-11s in June of last year," she says, adding that she did so repeating a mantra: "I belong."

On the opposite side of the fire, Robert Ray is standing at a wooden picnic table, the tail of an arm-length lamprey eel in one hand, pushing the thumb of his other hand up the center of its split belly to separate a cord of cartilage from the surrounding flesh. After retracing his path again, he pulls the cartilage up and out in a single piece from the tail to the toothed ring of mouth. A couple of those who'd watched him choose their own eels from the slippery pile in the middle of the table, each grasping the tails with a paper towel for a better grip and trying to repeat Ray's method. It's tougher on one's thumbs than it looks and holding the fish, much less holding it steady, is difficult. Finally yanking the white line of cartilage free after digging in the ice-packed meat with sticky, freezing fingers seems supremely satisfying.

"I'm taking them home after this," Ray jokes. He caught the eels on the Klamath River using a traditional eel hook. "You could pull out 10 in one hour or one in 10 hours," he says, adding it's best to go at high tide and fish as the water recedes. Otherwise, he says, "You might not be seen the next day."

While commonly called eels, lamprey belong to the family Petromyzontidae, older than dinosaurs, marked by a disc-shaped mouth distinct from a true eel's hinged jaw. They have no bones, only a cartilaginous spine. The slick, gunmetal gray lampreys, key'-ween in Yurok, have always been part of the local Indigenous diet. Today's batch has already been cut open and gutted for expedience, so more people could try their hands at removing the tricky cartilage. The head and its somewhat terrifying mouth of teeth in concentric circles would be cut away before cooking. Though Ray says in his own family, not even that was wasted, noting, "My grandma used to suck on the heads."

Ray dumps a bag of Kingsford coals into the barbecue grill beside a pile of wood embers. "That's then," he says, sweeping his hand from the wood to the coals, "and this is now." Now also involves a generous spray of lighter fluid that sends a column of flames up into the canopy keeping the rain off the fire and prompting a collective "Whoa" from clusters of people on all sides.

"Remain calm," Ray booms, to general laughter.

Ray says he "vanished" for a few lost years after losing his mother, Del Ray, with whom he was close. "Getting back into the community, teaching kids, doing what I love," he says, has been good for him and helped him find his way back from despair and self-destruction.

"I miss her but she'd be proud of me today," he says, laying the cleaned eels out on the grill, skin side down to keep them from curling.

If he was cooking on the beach, Ray says, he'd forgo the shake of salt and pepper and dip the fish into a bucket of seawater instead. The fat from the pink flesh drips into the fire, feeding a shifting cloud of thick, black smoke that makes him squint as he works.

A man stops at the barbecue to tell him an eagle showed up at the site. "It's gotta be good now," says Ray.

And it is. Even before the cooked fish are layered in a tray for the buffet, Ray is handing out pieces of dark, smoky filet to folks standing around the grill, squinting in the smoke. It's firm and wonderfully oily, its briny flavor not masked by sauce. The bystanders huff around hot pieces, eating from their fingers and nodding their approval.

Mia Wapner, who works with Hillman as a food village coordinator for the Yurok Tribe, stands at a tall pot filled with black-shelled mussels barely visible through rising steam. The Yurok word for them, she explains, is pee'-eeh, and they have been a consistent part of the diets of local Native people. Today's batch comes from the shores of the Klamath and she's cooking them with garlic and onion. The shells, once cleaned and polished, can be used for eating spoons, as well. Later, Wapner captains a tall stockpot of chowder with more mussels in a translucent white broth with potatoes cooked just to melting. One might call the flavor transportive but we're already here, close to the sea and rocks from which they were pulled only yesterday.

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• Photo by Jennifer Fumiko Cahill
• After demonstrating how to remove their spines, Robert Ray grills the lamprey eels he caught on the Klamath River with a traditional eel hook.

Bessie Shorty, a Yurok tribal member and Yurok Tribal Court Youth at Risk program manager and tribal court mediator, is one of the people who did the pulling, along with her sons, at a sunny beach spot in Del Norte County. Usually, she smokes and cans a haul of mussels, sometimes turning them into jerky. She brought live mussels for her demonstration at Suemêg Village. "I wanted the participants to get a feel for the process ... and smell and check the mussels," along with sharing some basic safety information about checking the tides and where to forage, "because they are ocean cleaners, so you don't want to gather where there's a lot of pollution or runoff."

The shells, she says, will go to Bertha Peters, one of the elders being honored today, for making women's spoons for an upcoming Yurok Jump Dance.

Her work with the tribal court, Shorty says, connects Native cultural practices like food gathering and the dressmaking class she facilitates, as well as suicide prevention and intervention. Early exposure to TEK, she says, has a positive impact on kids' mental health. "They're experiencing firsthand the use of their five senses and the TEK ... that's knowledge handed down through not only generations, but your own family lineage. And that impacts not only your self-esteem, but your connection to your community and the role that you have within that tribal community."

That role, Shorty says, is vital to one's identity and changes throughout one's lifetime. Developmental stages are marked by different tasks of gathering and preparing food, starting with observing adults as a toddler, and learning hands-on as an adolescent. "For your family to trust you and that you're gonna be safe doing it," she says, builds self-esteem and feelings of competency. Adults, in turn, take on the responsibility of teaching young people hunting and foraging skills. "When your food sovereignty is taken away, you lose all of that human development. Because that is our school." As her great uncle Marvin Mattz used to say, "That river is our school." She says she sees a difference between youth who have access to it and those who don't.

Another uncle of Shorty's was the late Raymond Mattz, of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Mattz v. Arnett, which won the re-establishment of the Yurok Reservation's status as Indian Country with accompanying protected fishing rights. It was a case that began with a game warden confiscating Raymond Mattz's gill nets on the Klamath River.

"I know when it's time to gather and I feel so bad if I miss it," says Shorty, who says she never forgets the connection between her rights and cultural foodways. She would also miss the sense of belonging. "Practicing traditional food gathering can be very emotional for some people," she says. "And if you haven't been able to have [cultural foods] for a long time. Elders will cry and say, 'I haven't had this since I was little.' ... It can be healing and it can be triggering, as well."

Amos Albers, a cousin of Phil Albers, has come from Eureka for the gathering, "for my family and extended family, as you," he says. He's enrolled in the Karuk Tribe and is also Yurok. He wonders aloud at the strangeness of only making one of the two official and grins, adding, "Still can't take my blood away."

Albers is still recovering from heart surgery so, while he's enjoying seeing folks from his community, some of the offerings are off limits, like frybread, the aroma of which is wafting from the open kitchen. "The oil," he sighs out. Still, he says, "Acorns today were tremendously good. ... As I get stronger, I'll eat more."

Back in the kitchen, Dana Rose is scraping the thickened acorn porridge from the smooth black rocks that were used to cook it during Hillman's demonstration. "That's the best part," she says, as it's a little sweeter, browned and intensified. "Some lucky person is gonna get to eat this," she says, likely an elder who'll be sent home with a canning jar of it. They'll eventually crack, but these rocks are her best, she says, admiring them lined up by the stove, still steaming. Acorns are a steady part of her daily life, not just as part of her diet, but gathering and processing them. She's got a basket going at home right now, and when she gets home, she'll be back to shelling them.

"Our cultural ways have been so disrupted, we're trying to figure that out again," says Hillman, noting that starts with identifying community members who can teach them, as well as those who need to reconnect with their community roles. "We have so many people that are just lost and that's why they turn to unhealthy activities and substances, because they're lost. ... There's a lot of lost spirits and helping them to find their place again is so important. We can't just throw people away."

Food, says Hillman, is a natural starting place. "Our food is our medicine," she says. "It is our connection to the acorn trees, to that river, to the fish."

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.