Restoring Native foodways requires returning land. What happens when it’s contaminated?

Little by little, parcel by parcel, the Indigenous groups that comprise what are known as the Buffalo Nations have been reclaiming their historic homelands across the Northern Plains and Rockies in the U.S. and Canada. “One of the biggest things we need land for is buffalo.” So says Jill Falcon Ramaker, Director of the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative at Montana State University and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Anishinaabe, using her preferred moniker for American Plains bison (Bison bison bison). Perhaps 100 herds, totaling thousands of animals, have been rematriated to this landscape of shortgrass prairie under the supervision of their traditional caretakers, for whom the animals’ return marks an important step on the long path back to food sovereignty.

“There’s contamination, there’s depletion,” says Ramaker of some returned lands. “If you’re thinking about intact land and food systems, where … webs of relationships once worked in a healthy, sustainable way — that has just been completely fractured.” That’s not likely to change. With land resources becoming scarce, “It’s going to be a situation of beggars can’t be choosers,” Ramaker says.

Dirty and depleted

On the Lake Traverse Reservation of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Nation in southeastern North Dakota, arsenic was used to poison grasshoppers in the 1930s. A river flows through the Coeur d’Alene Reservation in northwestern Idaho that for 100 years was mined for silver, lead and zinc, leaving high levels of waste-metal contamination in its wake. And in southeastern Idaho, the Fort Hall Indian Reservation is home to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, their herd of about 400 buffalo, and legacy selenium, cadmium, vanadium and nickel contamination remaining after 50 years of phosphate mining.

But Ramaker says there are plenty of other casualties of industrial pollution on Buffalo Nations land: Assiniboine (Nakoda) and Gros Ventre (Aaniiih) community members at the Fort Belknap Reservation in north-central Montana have also been exposed to chemical contamination, from gold mining in their watershed. Nitrogen and pesticide runoff from barley, wheat and cattle operations is rampant across the region as well, and overgrazed rangeland is also a problem. “Even if you get that land back, it’s all connected,” Ramaker says.

Blackfeet Nation, which tends a herd of several hundred buffalo, “were able to purchase this incredible parcel of their own land back, but now begins the tedious process of literally walking transects to identify what condition the land is in,” Ramaker says. Similarly, when Chippewa Cree on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation acquired some cattle range for their buffalo a few years back, they were uncertain what flora the land historically held. “They’re like, Can you help us identify all the plants that are here and all the plants that maybe should be here?” says Ramaker. Invasive leafy spurge and cheatgrass, as well as crested wheatgrass that was planted abundantly by ranchers in the 1960s, have pushed out the flowering forbs, sedges and perennial bunchgrasses that once proliferated. To restore rangelands and bring these species back, says Ramaker, “We got a lot of work to do.”

Toxic waters

Onondaga Creek, however, empties into Onondaga Lake, which once provided the Nation with drinking water, foods like whitefish and berries and cattails, and a wide variety of medicinal plants. No longer: The lake is the site of nine Superfund sites (a map of the region shows 78 additional Superfund sites surrounding reclaimed Onondaga territory). Allied Chemical, now Honeywell, produced chemicals “and dumped the [mercury] byproduct into the lake every day from 1946 to 1970,” says Heath. Even after Superfund cleanup, the lake is still so contaminated that the water, the surrounding soil and the fish still test high for two dozen potent carcinogens.

Catherine Landis, Science Advisor at the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, compiled lists of probable historic plants and animals of the region, including many that may have been used by Onondaga for food: oak and hickory for nuts, wild rice and wild onions, elderberries and sunchokes, elk and rabbit. Such lists might prove useful as the Nation decides how they want to use their land now. At the moment, they’re lobbying to win back Maple Bay. This is a portion of Onondaga Lake whose reclamation, if successful, would mark the first time in 200 years that Onondaga had access to any land along those shores. But of course, it’s contaminated, too. “We don’t really want to plant food plants around the lake,” Landis says. “At least not now — maybe in 1,000 years.”

That means a refashioned food system, should Onondaga desire it, needs to be born of those 1,023 acres, where there are other decisions to be made. Should the Nation keep leasing to farmers whose corn and cattle fields send chemical and manure runoff onto the land? Should they plant an apple orchard or crop fields, or let the land revert to woods? “Would they consider a food forest, with annual crops and silviculture to have wild plum and butternut trees?” Landis wonders. Even with contaminated soil and water in every direction, there is promise in possibilities.