The making of an Indigenous food lab

A mug of nettle tea steams by a fresh slice of huckleberry pie. The oven stands dormant, sinks quiet and clean. Baskets, jars of herbs and bulk ingredients like dried plums, tricolor popcorn and several varieties of seaweed adorn the shelves alongside gleaming pots and hanging garlic braids. It’s not an auntie’s kitchen on the rez, or a new Bay Area restaurant. It’s a university research lab — the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute. “We want people to feel invited into the space, to encourage them to learn with and from Indigenous knowledges and sciences,” said Cutcha Risling Baldy, who speaks and moves as though unafraid to take up space as she serves up pie and tea. 

At Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California, Risling Baldy (Hoopa) is associate professor and former chair of the Native American Studies Department, which founded the Food Sovereignty Lab. It’s the first lab in a California State University dedicated to researching Indigenous food systems — the acorns, salmon and seaweed of the Wiyot, Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa and Tolowa people along with Native foods from other regions, like maize. But it’s also for sharing Indigenous foods with the public and serves as a refuge where students can hang out, prep meals and learn about personal health. Over pie and tea, Risling Baldy told the story of how the lab came to be.

It started with a former convenience store, which in 2019 stood empty on campus. “It was a store that primarily served, like, donuts and Red Bull,” Risling Baldy said. She had been teaching a class on Indigenous natural resource management, and instead of assigning term papers, she asked students what they wanted to work on. They decided to research how other California campuses had Indigenized and to compare their findings with Cal Poly Humboldt.

They saw a need for a centralized space for the Native American Studies department. The empty convenience store seemed perfect. Students then canvassed local Native communities to find out what they wanted. “Out of that came that the community wanted a food sovereignty lab,” Risling Baldy said. “But we didn’t know what that was.”

Hampered by the pandemic lockdown, students nevertheless moved plans forward. They held additional interviews with community members who said they wanted a space for cooking, workshops and Indigenous art. The Native American Studies Department designed a lab to meet those needs.

Risling Baldy says their food sovereignty lab proposal did not initially get an enthusiastic response from university administration. The Facilities Advisory Committee denied the proposal, later indicating that they wanted the space to serve the general student population. 

“They didn’t want us to take the space, and they kept getting us excuse after excuse,” said alumnus Carrie Tully, a steering committee member who, as a student, had helped plan the lab. “We really had to fight and be really organized at a time when the world was on fire, essentially.”

Cal Poly Humboldt said the reason they initially denied the application was because it did not identify funding sources. “We recognize that the process of establishing the (lab) was long and, at times, difficult for those most deeply involved,” said university representative Aileen Yoo in an email to HCN. “As with many first-of-their-kind initiatives, there were complex logistical, budgetary, and space-planning considerations that had to be worked through — especially during a time when University resources were limited.”

But at the time, the administration emailed Risling Baldy, saying that “the committee has considered (the space) for a function that will serve as a general student space that may be accessed by all.” Instead, the committee proposed creating a student lounge that the Native American Studies Department could reserve for events.

“I wasn’t used to how earnest and how invested emotionally these kids are in traditional foods.”

Calvosa Olson

The Native American Studies Department replied that “dismissing Native knowledges as being too specialized or not for the ‘general student population’ effectively stereotypes and propagates attitudes that have always functioned to marginalize and dismiss Indigenous ways of knowing, our philosophies, and our place in higher education.”

For Tully, who is non-Native, the denial was eye-opening. “How could the university tell us no,” she said, “for this incredible project that we had worked so hard on, that was student- and community-driven, and was going to serve the community and the university and students and everybody?”

So, Risling Baldy said, the class’s community engagement project became about navigating bureaucracy. Students documented support from 71 other students representing 33 different majors, plus alumni, faculty, two tribal nations, community members and even a professor from another university. It worked: In May of 2020, Cal Poly Humboldt greenlit the food sovereignty lab.

But it still wouldn’t fund it. The Native American Studies Department had to raise a quarter million dollars. “The students were like ‘Well, what do we do now?’” said Risling Baldy. “And I said, ‘Now I’m going to teach you guys how to fundraise.’” So the learn-by-doing odyssey adapted again, and students shapeshifted into fundraisers. They wrote grants and held a “Zoom-a-Thon” with skits, music and art donated by volunteers. University foundations helped with grant writing and fundraising. Within a few months, the students hit their $250,000 target. “That was enough to cover the initial construction estimate, and then that construction estimate nearly doubled by the time of completion,” said associate professor of Native American Studies Kaitlin Reed (Yurok, Hupa and Oneida), who co-directs the lab with Risling Baldy. Much of the funds, she added, were small donations from individual community members, students and alumni, which “kind of speaks to the community support of this space.” Over the years, Reed and Risling Baldy have submitted 29 grant proposals through university foundations, raising upward of $2 million.

The university acknowledged that it didn’t front the money for initial construction, but Yoo said the university eventually contributed $239,088 for things like construction, IT, equipment and supplies, and positions for interns and research assistants.

In the spring of 2024, the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute opened its doors. Rou dalagurr is Wiyot for “all are working/making,” according to Wiyot Tribal Administrator Michelle Vassel. Opening the lab had taken years of uphill work — literally; it sits at the top of a steep campus hill. A class project about collective decision-making, bureaucracy and fundraising took its final form: a research lab for traditional ecological knowledge, food systems and Indigenous cuisine.

“We’re incredibly proud of the Native American Studies department faculty, students, staff and all NAS partners,” said Yoo. “Their leadership and their dedication to honoring Native culture made the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute a reality.”

Tully said the experience shifted her worldview from one that prioritized the input of formally trained experts to one that sees value and expertise in community perspectives. “That’s having a community-driven project,” she said, “to be able to understand and share and learn and grow from everybody — not that it’s just the experts that can drive a project.”

On the steering committee with Tully was then-undergrad Cody Henrikson (Denaʼina Athabaskan and Sugpiaq). When Henrikson came to Cal Poly Humboldt as a marine biology major, they were going through a tough time, missing their community back home. Getting involved with the Native American Studies department helped, they said. “When I’m in a bad mood, salmon and blueberries always make me feel better,” Henrikson said. “Not having access to those foods really impacted me in ways that I didn’t fully understand until I started taking these courses.”

Henrikson said they want the lab to serve future struggling students. “The idea that on campus you could smoke salmon. The idea that on campus you could process berries,” they mused. “A space like this would have given me so much.”

With the lab open, Reed and Risling Baldy enlisted a chef-in-residence, Sara Calvosa Olson (Karuk), to give cooking demonstrations, hold workshops and plan projects with students for two semesters. “They have created this really interesting base where the Native students can come and go, and they feel taken care of, they feel heard,” said Calvosa Olson.

Some mornings, students came in to make breakfast, or work on homework. Calvosa Olson realized some didn’t know how much daily protein they needed. She showed them how to prep healthy, inexpensive foods. “I wasn’t used to how earnest and how invested emotionally these kids are in traditional foods.”

One day she sat around a table cracking acorns with pre-med students, who’d grown up seeing their aunties and uncles struggle with diet-related diseases like diabetes. “They go to doctor’s appointments with their mothers and aunties, and they are treated so poorly,” Calvosa Olson said. “And they are fired up about bringing in some equity to public health and treating people with dignity and respect.”

Some projects were more playful. Calvosa Olson taught students to make windowpane pasta with dulse, a red Pacific seaweed. One experiment recalled the building’s previous incarnation: Students made Takis from traditional ingredients like blue corn, acorn, mesquite and cedar powder.

Starting this fall, Oakland restaurateur Crystal Wahpepah (Kickapoo) will be the lab’s second chef-in-residence. She said she hopes to show students, for example, how her restaurant returns buffalo squash seeds to farmers to support heritage food propagation, or how she makes acorns palatable to the general public by putting them in something familiar like crepes. “I love feeding the community,” Wahpepah said. “That’s what sovereignty is, is giving back to your community and feeding your community medicine — and that is food from this land.”

According to Reed, food sovereignty means people having a say in the production and distribution of their food. “But when we talk about Indigenous food sovereignty, we are also thinking about relationships to homelands and traditional foods,” she added. “Do people have access to foods that are culturally and spiritually significant to them as a people?” Grocery stores, she said, require a specific type of relationship to the land and other species. “In the process of creating the commodities that we find at grocery stores, we have to violently transform more-than-human relatives into natural resources.”

“This was a deliberate act to separate us from our traditional foods and to remove us and our connection from the land,” Calvosa Olson said. “How do we reestablish these connections when we’re still facing the same challenges?”

Today, the lab extends into an outdoor learning space, Wiyot Plaza, with an Indigenous garden and a stand of redwoods for traditional ecological knowledge demonstrations, and plans for a salmon cooking pit, an acorn-processing station and other learning centers.

The second Saturday of October, Wiyot Plaza will be dotted with booths and smoldering with fragrances as the lab hosts an Indigenous foods festival. The lineup includes speakers, vendors, dancers, singers, “and lots of food to eat,” said Reed. “So that’s just like a fun day to hang out.”

It’s a way to engage the general public, but Risling Baldy said the festival is also for “inspiring Indigenous peoples to feel really welcome to a college campus,” where Indigenous knowledge has not always found acceptance or support. “I want them to see that their knowledges have a place in higher education.”