STEPHANIE
PORTLAND, OREGON
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY DOING? (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING, ETC)
I currently work at a non-profit in Portland as the Forest and Community Program Manager. I work primarily with tribes in Indigenous communities across our region of Washington, Oregon and northern California. The reason I got into the work that I’m doing right now is because our traditional plants and cultural resources are tied to desert, forest, mountains and sea. I’ve had a deep connection with forests - how do we manage forests to promote traditional plants and resources? Tribes that do have forestry programs and land have to hire outside of their tribe, hire non-Indigenous people to staff their programs. We work to center community voices and values and support the more clearer and authentic desires and goals and values of the community of the forest management places.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FARMING?
I think honestly my whole life. Even when I was little my mom and I had gardens in my backyard. I grew up going back to the rez from LA and gathering traditional plants in our ancestral territories, taking part in Ceremony. It was powerful. I have a deep connection to food - that was an easy way to connect quickly with my culture so I’ve always loved food. Whether that is supporting kinship or communities, or spending time getting to know my mom and grandma better. That’s when I became interested in plants and food.
From there I started going to school in my Bachelors’ degree, an English degree, but I was really into plants and food so I took all of the Botany classes at my college. I worked at my college’s organic farm, they had a big ag program. I started working on the farm because I love farming (as I had known it) and food and thought it was really important to buy local and support small businesses, and you have that connection with that food. That’s why I started working at the organic farm. I took it as a full class, 12 hours / week for a full term (10 weeks). We had different rotations each week. Some weeks we were prepping CSA boxes, other times we were at farmers’ market, other times at the biodynamic-only garden area. Some days we would just be weeding. For me, why I got into it, I took that class and had recently gotten back from 3 months backpacking in northern Patagonia learning about traditional plants.
That transition back was really hard, going from seeing the same people every day and just going through some of your toughest mental and physical challenges together and at the end of the day you come together and make food no matter how tired or angry at each other you are. My classroom had been the forest, had been the Andean steppe for the last 3 months in a rain forest, and coming back, my classroom was in a city with four walls.
I sought opportunities to reconnect back to plants and back to food and something more grounded, which is why I also took the organic farming class. It was a healing process and very pivotal for me. I had met a few different people while farming, community volunteers, and it was so centered on healing. The conversation topics affected my energy while we were weeding, harvesting , working, gathering seeds. People came to the farm for healing, that experience was grounded in this healing practice but also showed me an actual career. Here is what you need to do to set up a small organic family farm, or CSA, the business side of things. I kind of more stayed in the community healing space of farming.
Now in my current role, I work with a lot of traditional plants. I am learning content specifically for tribes, working with cultural directors for lesson plans in school activities and I take that into classrooms. I am organizing field trips for the community to gather traditional plants or plant medicines. Even if you do live on a reservation, there may be a lot of trauma and fear going out into the forest. There is a disconnect that exists between community and the land. We are reconnecting people with the land. More traditionally we do work with community gardens. I’ve seen a lot of great work coming out of tribal community gardens, making kits for kids to take home for their kids, like rosehip teas and cedar steams.
WHAT ARE SOME ISSUES FOR FARMERS WORKING ON SOMEONE ELSE'S FARM - ISSUES THAT YOU'VE WITNESSED OR EXPERIENCED?
The cost of land. In Portland for instance, we saw land for sale and to buy this land was $800,000 for not that much land.
Lack of communication, especially working with Indigenous farmers on incubator farm programs. What they deem a traditional plant may be deemed as a weed by the main farmer. If you’re growing Minor’s lettuce, and you keep growing this and including it in CSA boxes, what happens is if there is not communication with the landlord who also works to maintain their farm, they will come through and do a weed check. If you don’t keep your area neat, you pay a fine. They don’t call it a fine, but it’s a fine. There is a disconnect in knowledge of what is a traditional plant and not.
The concept of fining a BIPOC person whose land was stolen and who is trying to grow food for their community is wild.
I would just say that for me, really wanting to connect with the land and food was within a different context than majority of farmers. I have a different definition of success and goals and why I got into farming. Most people who own farms or own land are white. Being a brown woman coming into this space and working in these fields, the internal conflict too, growing up in the California “salad bowl,” you see all the immigrant farmers, people in the agriculture field. There is a sense of guilt or conflict that I’m choosing to do this. Especially when it comes to the system that the farm sits in, the economic capitalist system, exploiting cheap labor to gain profit. It didn’t feel good. My experience is different than people staffed on farms versus people volunteering on the farm.
There is a weird interracial dynamic with people going to school to learn how to farm; there is a lot of privilege that comes with that and not great cultural characteristics around land ownership, racism that comes with.
There is a big difference between industrial ag farm school and organic farm school.
CAN YOU TELL ME THE QUALITIES OF A DREAM FARM NOT LEADING TO OWNERSHIP - THAT YOU WOULD WANT TO WORK ON?
Going back to communication, I’m aware Indigenous people are not a monolith, we don’t have a single narrative, but I would say that communication is key. Why I would go to a farm and not want to leave, it would be because I would feel seen and heard as a staff member. I can show up as my full self to work in all of the aspects of work. Compassion and forgiveness. It would also be integration of community based work, creating opportunities for community to support in CSA days, education, investing in the staff, community and care and ties to your food.
In growth, I would want to learn about the different plants and how to grow them, how to harvest them, how to harvest seeds, where is this food Indigenous to? How can we support our Indigenous food system through our work? For me, so much of farming was a healing practice, and I would like to see integration and space for spirituality and healing at a farm. There are ways to do this that are profitable, a lot of that comes with investors and funders, people buy in.
“I grew up going back to the rez from LA and gathering traditional plants in our ancestral territories, taking part in Ceremony. It was powerful. I have a deep connection to food - that was an easy way to connect quickly with my culture so I’ve always loved food. Whether that is supporting kinship or communities, or spending time getting to know my mom and grandma better. That’s when I became interested in plants and food.”
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE DIFFERENCE (IF ANY) BETWEEN A FARMER AND A "FARM WORKER"/"FARM EMPLOYEE" BESIDES PROPRIETORSHIP?
When I think of farmer, it’s someone who owns land, or an individual.
When I think of farm worker, the first thing to come to mind are people who are being exploited for their labor. I think of people who immigrated here or are currently living here at the poverty level because of the system that they live within.
When I think of farmer, I think of land ownerships, I think of single person.
When I think of farm worker, I think of a collective group of people.
There is a great book of the stories of farm workers in the Salinas Valley. It’s called Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies.
WHAT KIND OF SUPPORT WOULD BE HELPFUL FOR PEOPLE WORKING ON FARMS NOT THEIR OWN?
Health insurance. I think of basic needs.
Somebody to help you navigate legal documents because farmers have to do it all by themselves.
A social support system, emergency relief fund.
With my work, we partner with worker safety organizations and that’s been really helpful to support farm workers and we able to subsidize for that day if workers have to take a day off.
Creating brave/safe spaces to talk about micro-aggressions or conflicts arising. There is a lot of top down resistance to that.
WHAT IS YOUR OPINION/TAKE ON THE FARMER LUNCH? (DO YOU TAKE LUNCH, DO YOU SKIP LUNCH, DO YOU ENJOY TAKING LUNCH WITH YOUR CREW - FOR COMMUNITY BUILDING, IS THERE PRESSURE TO BE SOCIAL....)
I probably should have mentioned this, but I didn’t think of it as work. This summer I was a farm chef on my friend’s farm.
On Fridays, I would go with my Dutch oven and Coleman camp stove. We were all Indigenous women and I would cook whatever was there, like salads and mostly plant based food.
My friend had rabbits so we had rabbit meat sometimes.
It was fun and such a creative outlet.
It was organic conversation. Like talking about who is dating this new person or something weird that happened.
My work allowed me to do it. Over the summer, when the racial uprising started, we were allowed to code 2 hours/week for social justice work. I made the argument that being in community with other Indigenous women connecting to the land was a form of social justice. I was able to charge my time as ½ day on Fridays.