Rooted + Rising: Reimagining Food Systems
Reimagining our food system from the ground up
Reimagining our food system from the ground up
Small-scale agriculture can help alleviate hunger, but small farmers face huge structural barriers to building and sustaining their businesses; especially if they come from Black, Indigenous or other communities of color. To start reversing the effects of our country’s long history of colonization, land appropriation and racism, we must reimagine our entire food system from the ground up.
In the northern Willamette Valley, Michelle Week is doing exactly that. She’s the founder of x̌ast sq̓it, Good Rain Farm, whose name she took from the traditional language of her ancestors, the sngaytskstx (Sinixt) or Arrow Lakes Peoples. She plans to “make sure everyone gets fed” by bringing Indigenous First Foods back to dinner plates, treating the soil with reverence and passing something on to the next generation of farmers in her tribe. (“First Foods” refers to the more than 300 foods, from Chinook salmon to camas bulbs, that were staples of Indigenous diets and medicine in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years before colonization.)
Michelle is a participant in Oregon Food Bank's Community Producer Support program. Since 2021, this program has channeled nearly $5 million to 155 small-scale agricultural producers — 95% of whom are BIPOC — across 19 Oregon counties. In many cases Oregon Food Bank prepurchases crops that are culturally relevant to these producers, crops that are later harvested and then distributed into communities experiencing hunger. Other times, the fund extends business grants for land access and equipment. Either way, producers find greater stability and security in their businesses and build new wealth — which benefits us all.
Watch how farmer Michelle Week works with Oregon Food Bank’s Community Producer Support program to overcome barriers to land ownership and bring back the foods of her ancestors.
In the Q&A below, Michelle talks about reintroducing traditional Native foods and farming practices from her Sinixt ancestry.
How did x̌ast sq̓it, Good Rain Farm, begin and who does it serve?
This started as a really large garden project in an effort to positively contribute to our community and feed people in a time of turmoil. From there it grew into the food sovereignty project that is today. We primarily serve Indigenous people, including up to 150 community supported agriculture (CSA) members in the past. About half receive veggies free of charge. We also donated close to 7,000 pounds of food last year alone to a couple of organizations, including Oregon Food Bank.
How do you decide what to grow?
Good Rain Farm grows a variety of culturally relevant foods, anywhere between 70 to 80 different varieties every year. We focus on Indigenous First Foods varieties — a lot of beans, squashes, corns, peppers and edible weeds and greens that are native to the Americas, in addition to familiar cultivated foods. I'm reintroducing all these native plants to the lands they were removed from, and that soil is probably rejoicing because it gets to interact with its old friends again and do what it naturally wanted to do in this ecosystem.
How has Oregon Food Bank’s Community Producer Support program made a difference?
It has helped expand my farm through investment in our community and feeding our community, as well as investments in timesaving and body-saving ergonomic equipment to help weed, harvest and cultivate the land. We've been really grateful and appreciative. These kinds of innovative mechanisms allow us to bring careful considerations to how we impact the earth — and also save our bodies so we can do this work for the long run. Community Producer Support also helps us free up the money we do earn on the farm and funnel it toward accessing land.
Unlike many white farmers in the region, you did not inherit a family farm. What are some of the obstacles you’ve faced working on rented land?
As an Indigenous woman–owned farm with no real intergenerational wealth, we are really starting out behind zero, trying to generate enough financial well-being that we can then move forward into ownership.
In our first four years, we had to relocate almost every year because we either couldn't get leases signed or I got evicted from a site because I was storing wicker baskets and power tools that were considered non-farm equipment.
What kinds of creative solutions have you used?
We've created a mobile infrastructure so we can move from location to location. This includes a fridge truck, an old Safeway delivery vehicle and a mobile carrying shed we are currently building. All this means we're able to back up, hook up and roll out with this infrastructure instead of leaving it bolted and cemented to the ground. This is also a great benefit in the event of a wildfire or any other kind of disturbance.
How do you see your farm in the continuum of Native history, colonialism and restorative justice?
My tribe, my family became certified extinct and lost access to a lot of our land and a lot of our identity, a lot of our culture.
We're the original land tenders here. We had lived here for thousands of years and found a way to live here in harmony with our ecosystem and our fellow beings. It's been difficult to realize that all this land was stolen Native land, and I also have to pay over a half a million dollars to access some land that would make this farm viable and successful forever. It's something I hopefully can pass on to the next generation of farmers.
How do you balance using past methods to meet current needs?
We take teachings from my Indigenous culture and upbringing, to surviving our current economic situation, and making sure everyone gets fed. So, it requires a lot of creativity, compromise and embracing innovation. It’s human to invent and tinker and change things — but we must also balance that with reverence and respect for the soil and everything that lives in the soil.
What do you find most rewarding?
I'm just really excited to keep growing food for people and feeding my community. Bringing Indigenous First Foods back to dinner plates really elicits a lot of appreciation and joy from our CSA members. I really love to hear and see and share with the rest of our community that Indigenous people are still here, that my tribe is still here.
And so being able to share that and that whole story of what it is to be an Indigenous person in North America, on Turtle Island, is also important. It deepens our community broadly — the connection to place that we have here in the Northwest.
Why does this work matter?
Food is a human right, and everyone should have access to it. We are ensuring that finances aren't a barrier to that access while also honoring all the land stewards, all of the delivery folks and all the people along the way. And we’re ensuring they have dignified honorable wages, too.
The land, the earth, is living and breathing. There's a need for a lot of respect for and reciprocity and relationship building there between what we usually consider as inert or dead. It really does carry a soul and lives and breathes and supports us.
