After the Harvest

As the blustery winds of autumn blew in much-needed rain over the weekend, RED hosted our annual fall event on Saturday, October 23. Our Native Harvest Gathering was a day of hands-on activities in food processing and a celebration of the harvest. Our two main projects were corn grinding and acorn processing. People attending were able to see all the phases of these indigenous foods being processed--from the shucking of the corn to the milling of it, and then sifting and making the corn meal for breads. With the acorns, people were able to crack, pound, leech and see how the acorn flour is made. Our acorn mentor this year, Mo, culminated her demonstrations with cooking a traditional acorn mush with berries and serving it as a mid-day snack. With the corn, we were able to experiment with several different cornbread recipes for the Feast.

The corn grown in the RED Community Garden comes from seed saved and gifted to RED by an Elder a few years ago. It is Chiapas Masa corn grown as part of our Three Sisters garden. It produced an extremely large and healthy crop in spring/summer of '09, from which we still had an abundance of corn saved to finish processing at yesterday's Harvest Gathering. We currently have a second Three Sisters garden about ready to harvest with this same corn, and we look forward to more seed-saving and processing. This type of hard corn is indigenous to Mexico and has been traded across the Americas for centuries by the Native peoples.

Acorn was traditionally a food staple for many indigenous people world-wide. In our region, acorn was a very important food crop for Native people from several oak species. The abundance of local acorn harvesting is something we can utilize more as a part of our diet. It is extremely healthy--high in protein, minerals and essential (healthy) fat, which was why acorn was so important to Native people wherever oak trees produced this nut.

In working with these indigenous foods, we have learned time-honored traditions in stewarding the land for food production, the model our Elders have taught us to look to for cultural and physical survival. We have MUCH yet to learn, but our "baby steps" toward growing and gathering these sacred foods have been healthy and happy steps for our R.E.D. community. Our Native Harvest Gathering celebrated harvesting the corn and acorns, as well as many other locally grown fresh foods that we combined throughout the day and made into a wonderful Feast. We look forward to many more meals featuring cornmeal and acorn flour from our community "cache" of these foods. Along with some Drum teachings to a visiting school group and the usual good songs and medicine Whistling Elk Drum provides for us, the Gathering provided us a simple yet productive way to process food together and share the bounty of our harvests.

Many thanks to those who helped, contributed in some way and enjoyed the event.