When We Eat Together:
Recipes We Cook with Love
The concept of empathy for indigenous people is rooted in communal relationships.
Food is often a part of community events, potlucks, pauwaus, spaghetti dinners, church socials, etc. “When We Eat Together: Recipes We Cook with Love is the result of community effort and is meant to build community relationships across all races and cultures to build safety for children, adults, and elders.
Teaching empathy and respect for all living beings as sacred begins in the home. Intergenerational recipes from all cultures are shared and are included in Visioning B.E.A.R. Circle Intertribal Coalition’s first cookbook inspired by the food insecurity of the pandemic and the health inequeties COVID 19 exposed.
Honor the ancestors.
When we follow the recipes of our ancestors we honor the lives they lived upon Mother Earth. When the colonists came to America, they decimated the plants and animals that were here and replaced them with plants and animals they were accustomed to eating from their homelands. Included in the cookbook are recipes that honor the ancestral food of the first people, such as bison and moose.
Tranforming Culture/Transforming Justice: VBCIC’s Mission
In the Empathy Module of the Walking In Balance with All Our Relations transformational/restorative justice curriculum based on indigenous values and traditions prior to colonization, VBCIC teachs about the need for communal relationships to foster the value of empathy Sharing food and stories with each other contributes toward building a vision of a world where all races and cultures can live in peace and equity.
The curriculum teaches us to free our minds from capitalist constructs of ownership. The twelve values embraced cover peace & justice, respect, balance, courage, humility, compassion, empathy, wisdom, connection to the land, sacredness/vision/prayer, generosity, and gratitude. The knitting thread throughout the teachings embraces the need to resolve conflicts with each other in ways that transform each person to a place of seeing the story of the other. When we break bread, we can share stories of our resilience and survivorship with our children and teach about the sacredness and interdependence of all life. We can speak in Circle around our tables and camp fires about our visions for a harmonious world where all our valued equally, have homes, and food security. From our homes, to our neighborhoods, to our larger communites we can build a harvest of shared cultural wisdoms.