I was just a visitor that time. It was winter. Well below zero with snow thinly resting on the tundra. It was a caribou in the final stages of harvest. Cardboard laid upon the table and floor of this home as several women with uluqs and their own sense of belonging, navigated bones, tendons and muscle groups to separate the meat into different cuts and meal-size pieces. In that moment I had an awakening. 

My relationship with food could be like this.

Community. Cooperation. Reciprocity. Spiritual, generational connection to a place. I was just beginning to feel this new possibility.

I ended up moving to Bethel, Alaska less than two winters after that visit. It became my home for 6-years. A region far off the road system in Southwest Alaska, Bethel is now a multi-cultural city. The ancestral stewards of the lands are the Yup’ik people, who still make up a majority of the population both in Bethel and the Yukon-Kuskokwim region.

I noticed how the Yup’ik people worked to continue breathing life into their cultural fabric while allowing it to adapt but not get lost in a modern paced and “blinged up” cultural norm. Food transitions were not excluded from this changing landscape.

Do you know what it is like to slowly feel life changing you? Like we are the side of a river bank, carved and exposed in new ways each day from the ebbs and flows of tides and freeze and thaw of ice to liquid to ice. Each salmon I pulled from the net was like this. Gradually awakening me. Ever so persistently carving new stories in me.

From winter to summer and back again, I found others, native and non-native, who became teachers of wild, subsistence food-ways. I harvested cloudberries, thimble berries, blueberries, crowberries and low-bush cranberries. I gathered wild rhubarb and sour dock, nettles and fiddle heads. I also started to garden. Some of these things I did in community, others alone.

My partner at the time taught me to shoot a 22 for small birds. I learned to clean rabbit and ducks. How to freeze, dry, smoke and jar fish. I learned the basics for butchering large game. 

None of these are skills that are perfected by any means. In sharing, I simply intend to tell you how happy all this made my hands and heart. I felt more real as a human being in a human body that nourishes myself daily with food.

There are so many stories in these years. So many.

It has been 3 years since I moved south from my Alaskan home. Oh, how I have changed!

Alaska taught me that we all have wild and cultural foods that have shaped our genes and the songs, language and stories of our ancestral people. They are physical expressions of our spiritually embodied conversation with place.

These foods, whether they be salmon, tundra herbs or freshly caught caribou, are always a pathway to healing food addictions, physical and mental dis-ease, the mass-cultural experience of feeling purposeless, and the common crisis that results from not feeling a belonging to community, faith and geography.

Do you know your traditional foods? Of the songs to the land that your ancestors sung when their hands would touch the soil every day?

And if you are multi-racial, can food stories allow for the richness of many bloodlines and homelands uniting in your being? How can you prepare a feast that allows for all of you to be eaten?

Traditional foods provide the nourishment to belonging. Join me in finding the food stories and traditions of our ancestors. Let us awaken or simply celebrate food traditions as a way to peace, the necessity of diversity and to honor the gift of our beloved Earth as home.

Leah Walsh is a writer, dancer, gardener and medicine maker. Newly transplanted to Portland, OR, USA, she continues her studies in traditional foods, herbal medicines and energy healing. She can be found making fish-head soup in her kitchen or at:

beauty.of.peace@gmail.com.