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My name is Lois Ellen Frank and I'm a Native American chef that lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I have a company called Red Mesa Cuisine and we specialize in Native American sourced,
wild sourced and Native American cultivated foods for health and wellness.
We are at the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
We're outside in a tent and this is our booth, it's called the Power Plate
and we have some great success stories on returning back to the ancestral foods
for health and wellness in our Native communities.
The Food for Life program or My Power Plate,
what we're asking Native American communities to think about is what was on your indigenous plate
in your community, your ecological area, before contact.
What are the indigenous plants and the indigenous foods that sustained your ancestors?
And we believe that if we go back to an ancestral diet that's culturally appropriate
for each Native community, that this diet is the healthiest for health and wellness.
So the wild edible plants, the cultivated plants, all of the different wild foods
that our ancestors ate.
Depending on where your community is from or where the wild foods are from,
for instance, if we go a little further south in Albuquerque,
we can wild harvest the mesquite bean which can be ground into a flower or made into a syrup.
We can harvest the cactus fruit from the nopal or the prickly pear
and all of these foods are very, very, very healthy.
They're ancestral foods, they're Native American foods,
and very important in our indigenous diet.
When we return to an ancestral indigenous diet,
we find that this is the most healthy for our Native American community.
Because we're in a time when we have the internet,
I could go online and I could say hand-harvested wild rice
and I could find a Native American organization in Minnesota that is harvesting wild rice
on a canoe the way it's been done for thousands of years, and I can purchase that.
And when I purchase that wild rice, I support everything associated with that wild rice,
including the Native communities that are still harvesting it.
So this is an active Native American food movement.
Everybody can participate.
Everybody can purchase these indigenous foods online or from Native purveyors, Native farms.
San Ana Pueblo here in New Mexico grows, mills, and grinds their own corn.
And so we can pretty much find anything we need on the internet.
And when we support these organizations,
we support these wild foods of the ancestors of our Native people.
If you're looking for recipes, you could look for Food for Life,
Native American Foods for Health and Wellness,
and that is at this organization, which is the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine.
My Native American power plate, and they have some recipes there
with some delicious Native foods for health and wellness.
My name is Lois Ellen Frank, and I'm a Native American chef that lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
