Culturally Whole

White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP), distributes traditional foods like maple syrup, hominy corn and wild rice through its retail arm, Native Harvest, working together to make a fractured culture whole.

In an old farmhouse near Round Lake, 12 miles from the village of Ponsford on the White Earth Indian Reservation in northwestern Minnesota, grew WELRP’s bold vision. “The mission of the White Earth Land Recovery Project is to facilitate recovery of the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation, while preserving and restoring traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, community development and strengthening our spiritual and cultural heritage,” reads Native Harvest’s brochure.

Bold Vision

WELRP’s vision is bold because the White Earth Band of the Chippewa or Anishinaabe, as they prefer to be called, were granted 837,000 acres (1,300 square miles) of magnificent land in northwestern Minnesota by an 1867 treaty. However, in the 1930s, 95 percent of the reservation was taken from the Anishinaabe and transferred into non-Indian hands. With the loss of their land, their native culture suffered.

“Our land sustains our spirit,” said Winona LaDuke, the founder of WELRP. “The loss of our land has meant the loss of our traditional values.” With the land went the language, the traditional foods and, finally, the family structures. “I think of White Earth as my mom’s and grandmother’s place. It is where they come from. I know that mom wants to go home and be around trees. My mom listens and talks to trees and if she went home she’d be happy. I would come home and be happy with her,” writes Charlie Boy Thayer in one of Native Harvest’s catalogues.

Tribal Elders Teach the Young

Sometimes the older people associated with WELRP will take the younger people into the woods. That’s called “jiime”. “That’s the Ojibwe word for out in the woods,” Donna says. “We do that in the spring and the summer. They learn about canoeing and how to survive in the woods. We incorporate language into that, too.”

The tribe and WELRP will send six busloads of children out west this summer. There the children will learn from jiime, the horses, the trees, and they may come home with a new wisdom to help themselves, their families and their communities. WELRP, working together with the tribal government, is taking the idea of jiime and using it as a vehicle to enhance family life.

Feel the Earth

“What we try to do is put everything all together,” says Donna Cahill, administrative director for WELRP. Taste the sweetness of the syrup and feel the earth under your feet as you cultivate the corn, hear the mallards as you work the rice in the fall and you might discover something the Anishinaabe have known all along: how nature works together. “We are always taking groups of children out to the sugar bush so they can see and learn about their culture. It’s important for them to see what their fathers and grandfathers do,” states Donna. “When we are out there we work on language skills too.”

When Winona LaDuke began the Project in the late 1980s some of the elders were reluctant to soil the value of treasures like maple syrup by trading money for it. Now non-Indians can purchase treasures from White Earth via Native Harvest’s catalogue and Web site. Some of the money goes to support programs like hiring an Ojibwe teacher in the Detroit Lakes school and the jiime. The rest pays contract workers, rice pickers, and wild plum gatherers (Native Harvest’s plum jelly is unforgettable).

WELRP also relies on cash donations from individuals and private foundations and the occasional land donation.With those funds they will:

• buy more land to plant corn for gijikonayezigan
• erect a wind electricity generator on tribal land near the village of Wauban and
• put up a new building, with solar electric panels for Native Harvest’s kitchens and offices.

WELRP has allowed people at White Earth an opportunity to stand a little taller and to dream again of a world where everything is put back together.

Putting It All Together

Putting it all together has involved purchasing, or having donated, 1,300 acres of former reservation land. A majority of that land is sugar bush, so come spring, the woods bustle with the 30 or so people that WELRP contracts to tap 4,000 maple trees. Later, after thousands of gallons of cold crystalline sap has been gathered by those same contract workers, it is cooked down into sweet amber syrup in two large, wood-fired sap evaporators. Since it takes about 40 gallons of sweet sap to make a gallon of syrup, great billows of steam roll off the shallow stainless steel evaporator pans, out of the evaporator, and into the woods when the WELRP crew is cooking.

Some of the syrup is carefully cooked further and made into tawny brown Anishinaabe Ziinzibaakwadoonsan (maple candy), which the children are allowed to taste. Maybe when they close their eyes they see the perfect green of the maple’s spring leaves or the brief flash of late autumn orange. Maybe they hear the maples sing when they hold that sweet sacrament on their tongue, letting it dissolve and the sugar, from deep in the earth and high in the sky, becomes one with their warm pulsing blood. Then things are truly put back together.