An Ancestral Remembrance and Forest Stew

There is a certain poetry that unfolds within us when we eat the foods of our ancestors, when the bacteria of our native soils mix with our own genetic microbiome. There is nothing more grounding, more centring and deeply rooting than eating the wild foods of one’s homeland. Growing up in the colonized west of the Canadian prairies, the culinary identity of the land is far from identifiable, and when the ancestral foods of the people have been lost (or in Canada’s case, actively removed), the relationship to the land, to our own belonging becomes severed to the bone. When food becomes industrialized, and meals become government-regulated products, our identity shifts from protectors of the land to comsumers of the land. We forget our role as keepers of the medicine, tenders of the seeds and healers of the soil.

I was recently gifted some Moose meat from my Grandmother and I've been thinking about all the interesting and nourishing dishes I could make with it. Although my Indigenous ancestors have hunted and prepared Moose meat for thousands of years, I had never cooked Moose meat before, and it was not something I ate regularly growing up (however, I do have memories of reluctantly being served dad’s wild game spaghetti). This gift offered a particularly special opportunity, to prepare it for the first time like my ancestors might have. I knew it was destined for a stew, and I remembered the frozen Saskatoons that I harvested from my grandmother's tree in the summer, the pickled spruce tips from the spring and my last batch of marinated morel mushrooms. As with all of my dishes, I let my intuition guide and worked with the ingredients I had on hand. I added some raw cacao, roasted garlic, pickle brine and dried herbs and toasted seeds from the garden. Carrots, potatoes, peas and of course, more mushrooms. I wondered what this moose may have eaten in her wilder days in the forest, and what my ancestors would have gathered alongside the hunt. I added each ingredient as an offering to thank them all for their nourishment along with a prayer, and let it stew slowly for 14 hours.