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Food, power, and hope in the American West · REAP/SOW

• This transcript was exported on 11/07/2025 - view latest version here Teresa Cotsirilos: You're listening to REAP/SOW, dispatches from the frontlines of food, farming, and the environment. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Teresa: Walmart, Kroger's, Driscoll's, JBS, the food we eat is increasingly produced and distributed by a small group of powerful companies. In the American West, this corporate consolidation has changed the economic and cultural landscape. Farms and ranches that have been passed down through families for generations are struggling to turn a profit. Farmworkers and meatpackers are overworked, underpaid, and often face unsafe conditions. Teresa: For more than a year, we've been working closely with our partners at High Country News to investigate who has power over food systems in the West. In September, we published The Fruits of Our Labor. I know, pun intended, sorry. Our friends at the podcast Down to Earth interviewed High Country News Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Sahn about this special issue, along with writers Rick Bass and Laureli Ivanoff. I'll let their host, Mary-Charlotte Domandi, take it from here. Mary-Charlotte Domandi: I'd like now to welcome Jennifer Sahn. She's editor-in-chief of High Country News, hcn.org. For the September issue, High Country News partnered with the Food and Environment Reporting Network, FERN, to produce a special issue on food and power in the West. We're going to be talking about that with several people today. Welcome to Down to Earth. Jennifer Sahn: Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Mary-Charlotte: Great to have you. It's an amazing issue. How did the idea for this issue come together? Jennifer: Well, the idea for this issue came together when some of us, High Country News editors, were in New York City for National Magazine Awards a couple years back. We had a story that we had done as a collaboration with FERN that was a finalist for the awards that year, so we had a meeting at the FERN offices, and basically said, "Hey, well, we really enjoyed working together on this story. The results were really great." That was a story about the H-2A visa program in sheepherders. That story had a big impact. There were some policy changes that came as a result of it, so we thought, "Hey, we've got a good recipe here. Let's expand on it." Mary-Charlotte: A lot of the problems that the various reporters are writing about around food have to do with corporate and government power, from consolidation of the food system to immigration raids on food plants and so many other things. Tell us about a few of those stories. Jennifer: Sure. We have an investigation in the center of this issue called The Kill Floor. This is a story by Ted Genoways, a reporter who's been covering food in the middle of the country for several decades now, and a couple of collaborators of his, Esther Honing and Brian Chu. This is a story about how the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, has been benefiting from refugee labor and how more recent changes with the new administration are going to affect access to refugee labor for these meatpacking plants. It goes into great detail about the abuses that take place as a result of that being a captured workforce. These are some of the most dangerous jobs in the country and certainly in the food industry. There's also a report by Jeremy Miller about pecan growing in New Mexico. New Mexico surpassed the Southeast as the major grower of pecans in the US. Mary-Charlotte: Which is insane. Jennifer: [chuckles] Yes, right? This is a thirsty crop, and this is all happening because of the Elephant Butte Dam on the Rio Grande. The Rio Grande, we don't hear about as much because in the West, we tend to be focused on the Colorado River, but the Rio Grande is also a river that is divided among different states in the watershed, including Mexico. This is a story about water rights being used for a thirsty crop that has very little benefit toward the local economy, and that isn't really consumed locally either. Most of these pecans are exported to China. The photographs that ran with this story are pretty shocking. They show just a really desert-looking landscape, like a lot of the Southwest, on one side of the photo, and on the other side, it's just these lush orchards of pecan trees. One of the issues that comes up in the piece is when there are shortages of water and farmers need to fallow their fields, you can't fallow an orchard. You can't just sit out for a year of an orchard crop. You have to water the trees to keep the trees alive. It's an industry that has created a foothold for itself in just a very unlikely place. Mary-Charlotte: Now, there's a bunch of other stories, and it's interesting. I think you've been careful to balance stories about these big and daunting topics with ones that are about successes in the world of food, like the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Lab at Cal Poly Humboldt in California. Jennifer: Thank you. That program really had to go through a lot of hoops to get where it is today. It's a real story of just integrity and persistence and really believing in an idea and fighting for it. The administration wasn't very supportive of the effort, although in the end, they agreed, but really weren't willing to put any money behind it. There was a facility on campus that had been a fast-food snack place for students to pick something up on the way to class, and it was no longer being used for that purpose. That is part of what birthed this idea of an Indigenous food lab, is that there was this facility basically not being used, but it took them a lot of work to get the university to agree to let them use the facility. Then they had to raise all of the money independently to launch their program. They're running culinary classes in there. They are serving community needs, food needs in the Indigenous communities. There are several tribes in the area that have different but related foodways, and they're reconnecting students with food culture. They have big plans to expand what they're doing on campus, so that is a very cool program. Mary-Charlotte: There's many more stories that people can find if they go to hcn.org, and you can get a digital subscription, by the way, which I want to always tell people about. Anyway, tell us a little bit about FERN, the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Who are they? Where are they? Jennifer: The Food and Environment Reporting Network is based in New York City, but they report on stories all over, I think primarily North America. They are an outlet that does the majority of its work in partnership. They don't produce really their own publications, so they look for outlets that have either a print and/or an online publication to work with. They pair their stories with those outlets. They do have staff writers. They have editors on staff. They produce a couple of podcasts every month and some video work as well. Their mission is really at the nexus of food and environment. A lot of their stories are about food, but not all of them. It was really great to partner with them on this issue because I think, High Country News, we do food coverage, but it's just one of many areas that we are trying to cover. We learned a lot from the FERN folks about what kind of food coverage is really at the cutting edge, what are the stories that people have heard before, learned from how they really think about positioning their stories. I think the flip side of this is that they really learned from us about how to cover the West, which they're located in the East. Their editor-in-chief is in New York City, and we really guided them on, like, "No, that's a tired story in the West," or, "Oh, that's a myth that we try to myth-bust whenever we can." We really benefited from being partners on this project, and I think partnership is a big part of the way forward for nonprofit journalism outlets. Partly for financial reasons, we were able to do a lot more and produce, I think, three more stories than we otherwise would have because of our partnership on this issue, but also, you get to piggyback on each other's expertise. Mary-Charlotte: It's the FOOD & POWER in the WEST issue of High Country News. Once again, hcn.org. Jennifer Sahn, editor-in-chief of High Country News. Thank you so much for being with us. Jennifer: Thanks, Mary-Charlotte. Mary-Charlotte: I'm delighted to welcome Rick Bass. He's an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. He's a writer for High Country News. He lives in northwestern Montana, and his latest piece, for the FOOD & POWER issue of High Country News, is titled What old growth forests have to do with your food. Welcome to Down to Earth. Rick Bass: Thank you. Mary-Charlotte: You start this piece, it's an interesting short piece, talking about basically the impossibility of sustainability at this point in human history. Talk about that. Why is sustainability impossible? Rick: It's an abstraction, the word sustainability. I think the way it's used, we assume zero harm, zero net balance. We produce as much as we consume or whatnot, but that's simply, we exist at the expense of other species, other lives, and other resources. We're just 150 pounds of nitrogen and potassium, and we drink water, we breathe air, but the fuel that sends us through the world, we don't produce what we take. That's my definition of sustainable. I think it's a great concept, know where things come from, and reduce the footprint. I like the idea of a footprint a lot better than-- I think it's a more honest conversation to say, "Our species is not sustainable, and what are we going to do about that?" Mary-Charlotte: I think of the 250,000 years of hunter-gatherers and the relatively small population on Earth until the last several hundred years. How much does that have to do with population? How much does that have to do with our industrial lifestyle? Rick: 100%. It has everything to do with population. I'm not sure the hunter-gathering individuals were sustainable, but they're unrecognizable to us if such things are kept on a chart or a graph. I know there's too many of us consuming too much. Sustainable, it's a good word, but again, I think it's important to just acknowledge we're really expensive. We have high maintenance. Mary-Charlotte: In your piece, you talk about the fact that forests are managed by the Forest Service, which is within the Department of Agriculture. You make the argument that that placement is based on a kind of outdated paradigm. Talk about the role of old-growth forests, first of all, with respect to weather and climate change. Rick: Delighted to. Old forest, old trees, big trees are incredible champions at storing carbon, absorbing carbon, the carbon we produce. It's insanity or it's worse than insanity. It's ecocide. Sorry to be using rhetorical phrases, but to be cutting down the very thing that can buy us time to slow the rate of climate change and can offer us a lifeboat into the heated future that we're hurtling into, you couldn't devise a strategy more suited to hastening climate change than be cutting down these old forests. They store so much carbon, and they store it safely long-term across the centuries, and house incredible biodiversity. It should not be Department of Ag. It should be Homeland Security or Department of Interior at the very least. Mary-Charlotte: There's also the role that forests play in the water cycle, which has a cooling effect. Rick: Exactly. Shade keeps things cooler, and it keeps things more moist. I can hear myself in this conversation getting that brittle tenor of the environmentalist. We're all so burned out and besieged by so many terrifying and bad things going on in the world in every direction that that's not a very effective way to be an advocate. Part of the story is what we've decided upon to protect these old forests, particularly in the Northern Tier, where the sub-boreal and boreal forests, coniferous forests that store so much more carbon in those wet soils. That's to celebrate the old forest instead of contracting and getting defensive and angry, to just really celebrate them with art as well as independent science. We're bringing artists into the old forest up here in Northwest Montana's Yaak Valley to celebrate it. Poets and painters and photographers and ceramicists, luthiers, violin makers, guitar makers. We've had a beautiful craft guitar made from a piece of ancient Engelmann spruce that was knocked over from an illegal logging operation. Musicians are using the incredible tone from that spruce top to advocate for the forest that she came from, that the guitar came from, from one seed. It's just really important, I think, that artists participate in this conversation about our climate future and our climate portfolio. Mary-Charlotte: It's interesting. I'd love to see a multimedia show of the art that you're talking about. I think about the kind of Ansel Adams' beautiful, picturesque landscapes of the West, which are weirdly outdated now because they pretend that there's no human habitation in them. What's the art like now, like the photography and visual art? Rick: It's hard to talk about art because you use abstractions, but Clyde Aspevig, incredible landscape painter, has painted the interior of the old forest. It's a very realistic representation. The light coming down through the canopy is exquisite, and that's how it is. It's a very realistic rendering. Moran glorified the light coming down on Yellowstone 125 years ago or whatever, and this has that transcendent religiosity vibe. That's how the light is in these old forests. The light slows and slows and slows. It hits one level of canopy, slides horizontally, laterally, drops down to another layer of cedar fronds, slides off those, comes down through some hemlock, filters through some spruce so that by the time it gets to the forest floor and lands on the moss or the lichen that it is sustaining, it is a color of green that your brain has not ever seen before. We are a spiritual species, and it makes you feel some big feelings. It's extraordinary, so he really captures that. Another landscape painter, Monte Dolack, has painted an enormous painting reminiscent of Rousseau's in the Jungle, where different animals that live in this old forest are peering out from behind the trees at the intrusion of man. Only this time, it's a man with the guitar, so they could be listening to him, or they could be watching him, thinking, "There goes the neighborhood." It's an interpretive piece. We've had a ballet dancer come in and tightrope along the fallen logs, the large woody down material that characterizes old forest, and just watching the human grace of him navigate as would any other animal of grace, that catwalk, those fallen logs moving from one to the other. That in itself is a kind of music. The way the light coming down through the canopy is a kind of music. Mary-Charlotte: You mentioned before, and you mentioned in the piece that you wrote, that the forest department should be part of the department of climate defense or department of homeland and global security, or as you wrote, a physical and spiritual department of the interior. Talk about each of those things and the role that-- you've talked a little bit about how the role that forests play in climate defense. What about homeland and global security? Rick: I think our relationship with old forest has a lot of room for growth and for adventure. We're starting to understand, not fully, but just have an inkling of the degree of communication and reallocation of resources through mycorrhizae and mycelia just beneath our feet, and the conversations going on in a forest between different trees, different species. That's one of the amazing things about this old forest up in the Yaak, in the Black Ram region that we're trying to protect as a climate refuge. You have traditional forestry turned upside down. You have far more basal area square feet per acre than our traditional forest teachings tell us could be sustained there or held there. It's wet. It's not really soil. It's more living, organic material, the carcasses of the old giants becoming nurse logs for giants that then go down, lie down, and become more of this organic material rather than soil. To your point, it holds so much water in those fallen, rotting logs that the mulch is this beautiful orange mulch that it is, again, not really soil. It's another medium. There's a lot to learn in there. We have shade-tolerant species like cedar growing shoulder to shoulder with sun-requisite-early stage species like larch, western larch. They're supposed to be enemies, and here they are, huge, shoulder to shoulder, two fists with distance between the two of them, not just coexisting but prospering in each other's company. There's so much to learn here, and we need a Department of Ag to grow monoculture and row crops and short-yield crops, but an old forest is 8,000 years in the making. You don't clear-cut it and then begin growing a new one. Mary-Charlotte: I just got done reading a couple of books by the author, Philip Connors, who's a fire lookout. In one of them, he talked about the time that he was working at The Wall Street Journal and the way the people in the editorial department, one in particular, was talking about how all old growth forests should be clear-cut and they would really be better off as fax paper and furniture than as old growth forests, and that anybody who didn't agree with that was like a romantic and a tree hugger. It was so painful to read that because that paper is so influential, and that way of thinking is so influential. There's not just convincing people of the science, although that is part of it, but there's this big paradigm shift. A lot of people get it, but a lot of people in power seem not to, that thinking of a forest not just as a set of potential commodities, but rather as a complex ecosystem. There's an irony there. That perspective is actually a better and more long-term, successful way to manage land and ultimately provide food and wood and those things than the current way. Making that paradigm shift seems it's what you're about, it's what I'm about, but it's very daunting. Rick: Well, folks at Wall Street Journal are frightened by the questions that are coming out of the study of old forest and the communications between non-human species and now between non-animal species. I just have to laugh. This whole campaign has been characterized by incredible generosity. People who hear about it want to help however they can. They love the idea that the moral leadership of art is being empowered here to help people who are benumbed and besieged by so much bad news to feel, to feel deeply. That's what art does. If it does nothing else, it helps people feel. One of the tiny little things that's wonderful every day about this campaign, you mention Philip Connor's book. I was visiting with him here at this booksellers' convention in Denver, where I'm calling from six minutes ago. There's just too many coincidences in this campaign that does the old forest want to be protected? Yes, I think it does. Does it communicate to us? No, but there is a body of knowledge that is so enormous and a degree of connectivity and electricity in these old forests that anybody who ever steps in one, you don't understand it, but you feel it, and it needs to be honored. To your point, it's the best thing we can do for our own species is to protect these cool, wet, shady places of mystery. Mary-Charlotte: Tell us about the forest where you live in Montana and its ecological significance, and about this campaign that you've mentioned about conserving it. Rick: Sure. Well, it's mentioned when we went in this group. I work with the Yaak Valley Forest Council, little tiny grassroots group. We field-truth every proposed vegetative management prescription on the Kootenai National Forest, 2.2 million acres. We just wander through the woods looking at what they're proposing and planning and coming. When we found this old forest, we got angry. We thought, "We've got to defend this. We started thinking about tree-sitting and stuff, then thought, "No, this forest is so unique, so singular, so important that we have to try something entirely different because we can win or lose with the traditional battles. We win some, we lose some, and we have to win this one." We chose to put down our old, tired weapons of litigation. We use litigation if we have to, but we decided to try and defend it with love, bringing in as many people as we could to create art, artists who will feel deeply, feel passionately about-- They'll get the human response, the human experience of being in this mysterious, ancient forest. They've just responded so powerfully. The poet laureate of the US, Ada Limón, came in and wrote a couple of beautiful poems. Beth Ann Fennelly, Mississippi poet laureate, came in, Kristen Browski from Montana. Jack Gladstone, Blackfeet storyteller, musician, has been playing the guitar that came from the old forest, Rob Quist, a songwriter-singer in Montana. Many musicians have written the songs for the forest. Breedlove Guitars made six more guitars from the same piece of tree. Jeff Bridges is championing it. Just everybody is stepping in with their various arts and humanities to make this a cultural moment to recalibrate our relationship to forest and to nature at large. Mary-Charlotte: Do you feel like it is landing not only with already like-minded people, but with, for example, senators, representatives, people in power, who actually do have the power to help you conserve this place? Rick: We have a few friends left in Congress and climate champions, and we take care of them as well. The numbers are not in our favor, but as former Representative Pat Williams from Montana said, "It is a joy to struggle when the cause is just." We've identified our champions, and hopefully, more will be placed in positions of leadership. Mary-Charlotte: Talk about your own relationship to this place. How long have you lived in northwestern Montana, and what is your relationship to this forest? Rick: I moved up here in 1987. I had been a wildlife biologist and then an oil and gas geologist, and then became a writer, and I wanted to have a big, blank spot on the map to write. I did not intend to become an activist. I was going to be a fiction writer and nothing but. That work out for a couple of years, but then I started seeing the pace and type of logging going on the Kootenai National Forest and became an activist, and that's where I am yet today. I don't want the listeners to get the idea that I'm just defending this one beautiful, old forest up on the Canadian border, in the most northwestern corner of the valley, the most northwestern part of the state. We designate this area as a climate refuge, which is a place dedicated to storing the maximum amount of above-ground carbon in the long-term safekeeping of old and mature forests, and serving as a focal point for increased inquiry by scientist and artist on the effects of climate change on sensitive species, including our own. It's not just this Black Ram forest we want to protect. We want to advocate. We are advocating for a loosely linked series of climate refuges all along the Northern Tier of the United States and beyond, around the globe, a green halo, a green curtain, a green necklace up at the northern latitudes absorbing up to 1/3 of the world's carbon emissions. Again, it's a global lifeboat. It starts in one forest. It starts the way the guitar started, with one seed and one tree. This one forest, Black Ram, will be the first, but it will ignite a green fuse of cooling shade and moisture retention. It's an exciting idea, and it's a necessary time for it to launch. Mary-Charlotte: If I recall, this is a forest where there have been no human-made extinctions. Is that right? Rick: Yes. Since the ice last left, nothing in this valley has gone extinct. Woodland caribou are the very most rare species, but they still come down across Canada now and again into this ecosystem. You can use whatever metaphor or creation story you wish. It is a garden in its first day. Nothing has been lost here yet, and it is, in every sense of the word, a refuge. We contracted with a team of independent scientists to assess it for its climate refugia properties. They identified in their assessment what we thought they would find, that it is the most resilient place, least likely to have wildfire in the next 75 years, and it's going to have the most canopy, the most overstory, the most shade in the next 75 years. If there's one place deserving of a climate refuge designation, this is at the top of that list. Mary-Charlotte: What are your days like with respect to being outdoors in this place? Rick: I wake up and go out to my cabin at the edge of a marsh and write, creative writing, for an hour or two, and then it's phone calls and Zooms, and emails. I'm just grateful for the opportunity. So many people are coming in to support the campaign, and I'm just trying to keep them all connected and in touch with each other. Next summer, a bunch of college students from all over the country are going to be driving in buses and vans to come to a climate aid concert in Montana next summer. I like to envision them traveling, going from one old forest to another all around the country, experiencing old forest, and then convening like mycelia from a central tree to celebrate the Black Ram guitar and this Black Ram climate refuge campaign. Mary-Charlotte: You're also a hunter. Do you hunt your meat from the forest? Rick: I do, yes, and that's my get-well time. Last week of October and then all of November, it's just wandering the mountains, looking for deer and elk. It's just so restorative to get into that cycle of getting up early, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, and hunting hard, and coming in cold and wet, and too tired to eat, and just maybe building a little fire in the wood stove, maybe not. Just going to sleep at 7:00, 7:30, and waking up and doing it again day after day after day, learning where animals are, following them, playing the wind, guessing what they're going to do under pressure, and just trying to set yourself up for a good hunt. It's escapism, but it feels really good. It feels really healthy and healing to be that attentive to the most minute things and moving slowly and carefully. It feels good. Mary-Charlotte: Well, escapism, but it's also how you feed yourself. Rick: Yes. No, I do like to eat a little bit of meat. Not as much as I used to, but yes, I do like-- Who doesn't love wild elk, and venison, when it's aged, is just extraordinary also. I love the taste of deer and elk. Mary-Charlotte: If people want to get involved with helping with your campaign to preserve the Black Ram Forest, how can people get involved? Rick: The web is good for that. We have two small non-profits doing the work. Montanaproject.org is bringing the art and artist into the old forest, and Yaak Valley Forest Council, which is yaakvalley.org, is bringing the scientists in. Each is equally important to the success of this campaign. Mary-Charlotte: Anything else you want to let people know before we go? Rick: No. No. We're all scared. We're all frightened. It's just really easy to be still and look around and say WTF, but protecting this old forest is something we can do that will translate to global scale. We can do it. Even if your representative is in some far-flung place, that representative is going to be on a committee that knows somebody else on the committee deciding the fate of it. It's almost like our anonymity works to our favor because when a constituent calls and says, "Hey, Representative so-and-so, Representative McCollum in Minnesota, I want to protect this old forest in Montana called Black Ram." It's not something she'll forget, getting this out of the blue call. These little things add up. I really believe in the unseen communications going on beneath the surface in the forest and in our own kind. Mary-Charlotte: Very much so. Rick Bass, thanks so much for being with us. Rick: Thanks for having me. Mary-Charlotte: I'm very happy to welcome Laureli Ivanoff. She's an Inuit writer and journalist, and she writes the Lifeways column for High Country News in which she explores living in direct relationship with the land, water, and plant and animal relatives in Alaska. Welcome to Down to Earth. Laureli Ivanoff: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Mary-Charlotte: In the latest issue of High Country News, you wrote a piece called The Joyful Responsibility of Cutting Fish. I was wondering if you could read that aloud for our listeners. Laureli: Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Everyone had a job. The men and boys drove the boats upriver to dip the nets in the river and seine. The women waited, never wondering. There was always enough. The salmon that filled the boats when they returned weren't huge. Humpies aren't, maybe a foot long, but they were plentiful and made for good drying. My cousins and I played in the water, swimming, doing somersaults or handstands, holding our breath, eyes closed tight, our hands squishing in the mud on the slough side of the sandbar island our family called Eaton Station, in the Unalakleet River. Eaton Station, the best resort. We played badminton in the sand. Tanned on hand-sewn calico blankets laid on the beach. We ate Norton Sound red king crab, fatty grilled king salmon, and if we were lucky, akutaq made by mom or an auntie. It seemed like the sun was always shining, and it probably was. Climate change wasn't a part of our daily vocabulary, and persistent summer rains and winds weren't a thing back then. July was for sun and salmon. Once the boats returned, slow and heavy, the women gathered at the fish cutting tables, my favorite part. They said funny things when they were working. They always knew the answer to everything. They always seemed to be smiling and laughing. The cumulus clouds above us, like whipped cream on grandma's white cake with a sprinkle of fresh tart blueberries, laughed with them. My belly, my cheeks, my jaw, the oil and juice making up my eyeballs relaxed. Safe. So safe. Life flowed easy. My first job at the cutting table when I was maybe seven or eight was to clean the slime and blood off the fish my aunties and my mom cut for drying. Three fish in each hand, I'd wait out on the river side of the island, the sun so hot it didn't matter that the water was cold. I'd go past my knees, far enough to ensure that the fillets, attached by the tail, wouldn't touch the river bottom and stayed free of any sand. I swished the orange flesh in the sparkling, fresh, clear water. The gulls, those greedy cousins, flying and squawking for any piece of flesh or eggs, or milt. Now and then I'd toss a piece of the white sac from a male, just to see it disappear whole, the gull's head tilted to the sky. One day mom handed me her ulu at the fish-cutting table. It was a graduation, a commencement. I was on to bigger things, the handover said. I was ready to learn the real craft with real technique with her favorite tool. I didn't realize that from that point on, I'd stand at the table with my mom and my aunties and learn the secrets of the world when the boats came back. With guidance from my mom, I cut my first humpie, a small female. I sliced down the belly pushing harder than I anticipated. Then down the back. A few other cuts, and the fillets were attached at the tail ready for the tirraqs or angled slices that ensure bite-sized pieces in winter. When I was done, the heart was still attached. The purple morsel hung from the collar at the bottom of the fillet. I didn't know that leaving the heart attached to dry was considered a skill. I hadn't meant for that to happen. "Wow, Paniuq," Papa Ralph said, his voice ebullient like cold Tang. "The heart's still on there. The best way." Papa handed me my diploma with those words. Words warmed by the love and pride in his inflection, feelings that also flowed from his eyes and heart that day at Eaton Station. Words I can return to any time to feel grounded in love. I am important, he said to me. I will do important work, he said to me. I'm doing good, he said to me. The pride seeped through my marrow. I waded out into the clear water of the river and swished the humpie, the cottonwoods and birches on the other side of the river practically clapping for me. I hung the cut fish on the drying rack made of cottonwood poles that my dad, brother, and uncles put up every year. We no doubt ate uuraq that night for supper. Boiled pink salmon steaks and fish eggs with onions, potatoes, salt and pepper in a broth like no other. Mom would have put either kimchi or ketchup in hers. Dad, seal oil. If there was leftover uuraq in mom's stainless steel pot, blackened on the bottom from the fire, she tossed it into the river. White fish and grayling ate the pink meat with boiled eggs. We washed out our bowls at the river, using sand as dish soap for scrubbing. My job of cutting fish returns year after year. My favorite job. My favorite job because, thanks to my teachers, it's done with love and was born from love. Because we all work together, and together is the cornerstone of everything that gives meaning in life. My favorite job because cutting fish means I belong. To a family, to a community that shares, and in the process of doing, I remember I belong to a long line of ancestors who made cuts just like the ones my mom showed me. It's more than just food for winter. Salmon remind me that I am important and loved. Mary-Charlotte: Thank you so much. Thank you for reading that. You write in a way that makes the reader feel like we're there with you. In your other pieces in High Country News, I feel the same way. One of the recurring themes, which I find so interesting and important, is the difference between the subsistence way of life and of eating and the commercial way of life and eating. A lot of people when they hear the word subsistence, they think of almost like a kind of deprivation, but you write about subsistence as a kind of abundance. I was wondering if you could talk about that. Laureli: I actually have a strange relationship with the word subsistence because I feel like it doesn't encapsulate enough of our way of life. Subsistence is gathering food so that you can take care of yourself. I forget what the definition, the real definition is, but it's not deep enough. Our way of life is more than just harvesting food so we survive. Our way of life, the community comes first. For instance, if I catch my first fish or if I catch my first moose or my first caribou, I give that away to someone who needs it. I give it to an elder. I give it to a single mother. My grandma raised her siblings when she was 13 years old. She quit school and raised her siblings because her parents died. They were completely fine because of our way of life. People gave them food. It's a very sharing, giving, loving community, and way of being. Yes, subsistence, the word is really tricky, because our way of life is so much more than just harvesting. It's living in community with one another. It's living in community with the land that gives so much if we respect it and take care of it and speak up for it today. It's living in relationship even with the beings that we are harvesting, loving them and caring for them in processing, in sharing. It's often said that the animals won't give themselves to you if you are greedy, if you are not living right, if you don't share what you have, if you're not taking care of others who can't harvest for themselves. Yes, subsistence is far too shallow a word to encapsulate all of that, right? Mary-Charlotte: Right, exactly. No, it's so interesting. The idea that the animals don't give themself to you if you're greedy, and yet we have this commercial way of life where greed is taking animals and fish and birds away from the people who do this, for lack of a better word, subsistence way of life. When you're talking about it, it makes me think those animals aren't giving themselves. It's a totally different relationship. Those animals are being stolen against their will. Laureli: So much of over-harvest will result in collapse. We're seeing that in the oceans with salmon currently in Western Alaska. There are so many rivers that are not seeing a return of king salmon, of chum salmon. It's because of over-harvest and wanton waste. There's direct correlation with what's happening in our oceans and the over-harvest that's taking place. There is greed involved in that, obviously. I think the Indigenous wisdom is you don't take more than you need. The commercial way of being, of operating with the earth is very dangerous and very unwise and very unsustainable. There's deep, deep wisdom in the Indigenous approach to harvest, and living in relationship with that can solve a lot of the over-harvest and greed and the unsustainable practices that are leading to collapses. Mary-Charlotte: The way you put it in one of the pieces you wrote is that an animal that's harvested is not a possession, but rather an offering to be shared, as you just said. That thing of relinquishing, at least to some extent, the idea of possession, I think, is really central to what you're talking about. Laureli: Yes, I think there's real danger in thinking that the world is just something for us to exploit, right? The earth is just something for us to take from. Yes, there's just real danger and harm, and like I said, unsustainability. To approach these offerings as gifts, because they are. I mean, this is the earth providing for you and giving to you. I'm in Alaska where it can be pretty unforgiving, but yet there's these moments of being out in the tundra and seeing this bright red cranberry, lingonberry, and just like the earth is saying, take this, take this with the color, with the fragrance and just the time of the year. It is very much a gift when those moments take place. Mary-Charlotte: I think one of the things that people think about when they think about subsistence is a fear comes up, what if there's not enough? What I appreciate is how you write about the way you cut fish and then dry fish so there is enough. There's centuries, probably millennia-old tradition of drying fish and lots of other things so that you do get through the winter. Laureli: Right. There's that long-held practice that you just don't take more than you need. We don't. There are plenty of moose on the Unalakleet River that many, many people can go up and harvest moose, but families know how much they need. People don't harvest more than they need. The moose return. There is not an over-harvest. The same goes for berries. The same goes for salmon. The same goes for the roots that we pick. There is always enough if we respect these beings and not over-harvest the gift that they're giving. Mary-Charlotte: One of the things that I love in the piece that you read also is, you talk about, and again, in some of your other pieces in High Country News, the Inuit values that are different from mainstream American values. Part of that is that deep sense of belonging and community, and those things being more important than individualism. I was wondering, how do you maintain that in the face of a dominant culture that is so much about individualism? Laureli: That's a really good question. I think it's a question that many communities are grappling with, honestly. I think the way that I was raised was to share. The way that I was raised, and this is by example. This isn't someone sitting down with me and saying, "This is what you need to do to be a good person," or so that things function in our society. People just take care of one another. I grew up in a small community of 750 people. We all had to rely on one another for things to happen. There's no contractor to call if something goes wrong in your house. We all figure it out together and make it happen. There's not typically a mechanic to call to bring your four-wheeler or snow machine to if something breaks down. There's always a person in town who knows how to do this. We just all rely on one another. I think when you're raised in a community where people still fiercely hold on to the truth that we as individual human beings need others to live healthy, productive lives, we need other people. We're built for community. We're built to take care of one another. This individualistic society is new, and it's causing a lot of problems. We're seeing so many issues today with mental health and depression and anxiety and all the things. So much of that I would attribute to the lack of community, the lack of community care, the lack of just connecting with other people on a human level and being there for one another and taking care. This is one thing I really appreciate about Unalakleet. Unalakleet's not special. So many communities throughout rural Alaska, western Alaska, northern Alaska are like this. We put the community first. The community comes first. If someone's going through a hard time, we help them out. It's what you do. It's just a basic thing that I think I took for granted for a lot of my life until I moved away. Mary-Charlotte: You moved to Anchorage. Is that right? Laureli: Yes. Mary-Charlotte: What made you move away? Laureli: It was a lot of things. Right now, looking back, I have a lot of health issues. It was important for me at this time in my life to really find help. Unfortunately, there isn't a doctor in my community. Thankfully, I am getting that help through being here in Anchorage and getting the care that I've been needing for a while. Mary-Charlotte: I live here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which historically was, in many ways, it's a complicated history, but there was a community where people took care of each other. A lot of the time now, I hear people talking about community. I started thinking that it's like the more they talk about community, the more endangered community is in any given place. As you said before, people take it for granted when that is the way of life, but then when it's threatened, you talk about it. You have to talk about it because that's how it survives. I feel like your column is part of that. We have to actually talk about things that we as a community have taken for granted in order to set that example. Laureli: It's one of those things where as I was writing, I wasn't even really thinking about that. It's just because this is how we live, it's what is written. It wasn't until after the fact when a friend of mine who isn't from an Inuit community was like, "Thank you so much for sharing this example. This is what we need." I was like, "Oh, thank you for saying that because it seems really normal for me in many ways." Mary-Charlotte: Right. In the piece you read, you write about doing the fish cutting every year, year after year, and there have been some changes, changes in climate. I wondered, first of all, what does that look like, those changes in climate? What else has changed? What has stayed the same? Laureli: The climate change thing is very real where we live. It's pretty typical in Unalakleet. I say it in the piece where growing up in July, it was hot and sunny. We swam, and we went fishing, and we cut fish, and we just played in the river every nice day, which was a lot. Today in July, it's pretty typical to see a ton of rain, so much rain. So much so that it's getting really, really hard to dry salmon. To dry salmon, you need a good four, five-day stretch of dry weather, sunny weather. We're not seeing enough of that sometimes, some years, many years. It gets really challenging to dry fish, which just feels really strange. It seemed like we were always able to do it fairly easily when I was growing up. Aside from drying fish, we're just seeing fall storms, these enormous storms. We're right on the ocean, and so the ocean, it becomes huge and menacing every fall, and we wonder if there's going to be a big flood every year, when a flood was a one-in-50-year event, when my grandpa was alive and growing up. Now it's a yearly event where everyone braces and prepares and gets ready for what could be a major flood. The sea ice isn't forming like it used to, as early, so the sea ice used to form in October in some years, and some years it doesn't form until March. That really is significant because there are so many animals who rely on sea ice that we rely on and have lived in relationship with for millennia. One of them being the ugruk, which is this enormous bearded seal, and I've written about that being affected and what that means for families and raising kids in a time when we don't know what's going-- We have an inkling of what is going to happen in 20 years, in 50 years, but how do we teach our kids? Will we be able to teach our kids ugruk hunting practices and processing? What do we teach our kids when that's not there? How do we teach our kids respect for animals when the animals no longer have the habitat where we live to live there? There's a lot I can say. Mary-Charlotte: I think about the life that I live and that most of my friends live, and it's really too complex for our own good. It's too distraction-heavy. I think about the influence of this online life that we're almost forced to live. I guess we're not forced, but we somehow semi-choose it. Social media, AI. The more I'm exposed to those things, especially as I get older, the more I really want to live in a small community that produces its own food and where the main relationship is with living beings and not with machines. The infrastructure that these machines provide is actually so fragile. It can be wiped out by a natural event or by a terrorist event or something like that. It's also helpful in some ways. You talk about maybe you're getting better healthcare for some of these reasons or whatever, and all of us have ability to communicate with relatives far away and that kind of thing. I just wonder how you navigate that, maybe trying to find the best of both worlds. Laureli: It's really challenging. I now live in Anchorage where it's just really hard. It's really hard to go fishing. Everything is so far away, and it takes so much time. For instance, in Unalakleet, when I go blueberry picking, I was able to just walk outside my door and pick berries. In Anchorage, it's like you're driving to the mountains. Then you're hiking for, it feels like two hours. It's probably less. I'm a wimp when it comes to hiking in the mountains. I'm not used to that. It's like you have to be a mountain goat to pick berries here and hike up these mountains to pick these blueberries, which is worth it. It just is so much more challenging. In Unalakleet, things are just right there. You drive down to the boat and you boat upriver. You go berry picking right outside your door. There's so much you can do, and it's all so very close and accessible. Anchorage is just a lot more challenging. You have to be really intentional about it. In Unalakleet, it was like, "Let's go berry picking," and we'd go right after work. Here, it's like, "Okay, we can go berry picking on Saturday because we'll have the time." It's just like you really have to be intentional about going out and harvesting. Also, like you said, we are very connected through our phones and computers and all of that. Everything there is really accessible. Living in relationship with land and water here in Anchorage, again, you have to be really intentional about it. Getting out of your house. I'm fortunate where we have an amazing trail system in Anchorage, and the trail system is right across the street from my house. I can leave and go for walks and be in the trees and stand on mud and dirt and see the plants growing and changing and see the change of the seasons directly from our house. That's really important to me. That was very intentional, knowing that a relationship with the dirt, with the plants, with the birds traveling through, that was all important. That's why we chose to live in this neighborhood, because it takes real intention to continue that relationship, which we are trying so hard to do. Along with that, I would say we are raising our son, who's seven years old, to live in relationship, to learn the lessons that I was fortunate to learn growing up, learning respect, learning not to take more than you need, learning to share with others. All of that. Yes, it takes serious intention if you live outside of a rural Alaska community. Mary-Charlotte: Do you think you'll go back? Laureli: That's a good question. Our son would be really happy if we did go back. I could see us doing that because there's real heartache when it comes to being-- I would say being away from the land and water in Unalakleet, is similar to losing a loved one. It's that profound. Yes, I could see us going back at some point. Mary-Charlotte: Laureli Ivanoff is an Inuit writer and journalist. You can find her work in High Country News. Thank you so much for being with us on Down to Earth. [pause 00:59:07] Teresa: Special thanks to Down to Earth for this episode. Their show is produced and hosted by Mary-Charlotte Domandi in collaboration with the Quivira Coalition and Radio Cafe. Thanks again to High Country News for their partnership. Reap/Sow is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskawy, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Our audio and video producers are Katie Gardner and Maya Okindo. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. FERN News is our home on YouTube. Find out more about Fern and donate to support our independent non-profit reporting at www.thefern.org. Reap Sow_Ep 27_20251104_Down to Earth_ROUGH CUT mixdown.mp3 (Completed: 11/06/2025) Transcript by GoTranscript.com