The Cultural Conservancy - “Traditional Foodways of Native America – Oral Histories of Native Food Revitalization” Audio Recording Project
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Nova Kim and Leslie Hook
Biography
Nova Kim, Osage, is from Wyoming and Leslie Hook is a true Vermont native (raised in the vanishing mountain tradition). Combined they possess more than eighty years experience with wildcrafting, teaching, and living with the land. Nova and Les promote the use of wild edibles while conducting and collecting research on the various plants occurring in the wild, encouraging and educating the public to the benefits derived from their usage, and helping to preserve the plants’ natural habitat. Nova and Les supply seven high-end Vermont restaurants, a CSA for wild foods, and meet much of their own food and health needs with the fruits of their gathering.
They have led classes and workshops with many groups including The New England Culinary Institute, the Nature Conservancy and the Vermont Institute of Natural Science, as well as with an Inter-tribal Hoop Society, at inter-tribal gatherings, pow-wows and an Ab'naki Women’s Group. They have also worked with the National Network of Forest Practitioners giving presentations at national conventions about the importance of non-timber forest products.
As a result of their activism, they were invited to give testimony by the U.S. National Research Council's Committee on Prospects & Opportunities for Sustainable Management of America's Nonfederal Forests in 1996. In 2005, they participated in and made presentations for the Smithsonian Folklife Cultural Festival, in Washington, D. C. In 2006, Nova presented on the Canary Project in the Wild Resource Session at Terra Madre, Turin, Italy.
Interview Script - Nova Kim (NK) and Les Hook (LH):
NK: My name’s Nova Kim. I’m Osage, and we live in Vermont.
LH: It’s Leslie Hook. And my father died when I was eight. So I learned a lot from my father and I’ve been learning ever since, and I’ve just eaten things out of the woods. So I really don’t have a tribe, I guess in that sense.
NK: We lived in Wyoming because there were no other Osage near us, because we lived off reservation. And a lot of the younger people don’t remember, but the older ones do. But if you were away from the reservation and they caught you, they arrested you and put you back on. They avoided at all costs doing anything that even remotely appeared out of the ordinary from the European, because when they did, my father would get fired, my mother would get hassled, my sister would have problems, my brother would get beat up, you know, etcetera, etcetera. So you don’t engage in a lot of that. But we hunted and we trapped, and we caught wild horses and broke them. And that’s when they were real wild. You were instilled with the idea that, one, things had to be sustainable. You had to have respect for them. You didn’t decimate something, you didn’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s funny, they never really thought they were teaching me.
Well, I never thought they taught me anything Native, until a number of years later. I moved to upstate New York where I met him (Les). And I thought, well, I’ll plant a garden. How hard can a garden be? I can read books. What my garden grew were weeds. And I was taught that you don’t waste anything, so you learn to appreciate it. And so then I started really getting into that, and then I met Les, and he was really into it. And we’re very fortunate. Every part of our life has been involved some way or another in with wild plants and in with native. And he had the same respect for that as well.
Let’s face it, our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of cars and grocery stores, and drug stores. And if they didn’t get things collected..
LH: And put away.
NK: .. and put away, they starved to death. If you don’t go out with the right attitude, you can walk right through it and you’ll never see it. Because they won’t call you. Okay? And that may sound Mary Fairy but they literally will call you. It’s like you see a deer and you look at the deer and that deer knows that you’re looking at him and they look at you. It’s inherent. It’s the same thing with plants.
One of the things that we’re supposed to teach is that you collect everything with respect. And that you understand and appreciate that plant and know that you have a common sharing. That something’s going to die for something else to live. If something’s dying before it’s normal time, whether it’s for food or medicine or..
LH: For sale or..
NK: .. for sale.. for war, for revenge – anything that dies before its time, there’s only one word. And that’s “war.” So you never declare war without careful and thoughtful thought.
Because when you collect a plant or you kill a person or you cut a tree, you’ve just declared war upon that other life form. And you can’t enter into that casually. You just.. you just can’t do it. And I didn’t realize it, and so I didn’t think as we’re going along and.. I saw something get dropped or if I step on something. Without even thinking I say “Excuse me. I’m sorry. Thank you.” And.. and I don’t do it because somebody’s taught me to do it, it’s because we’re all part and parcel and we the share, and it’s all sacred.
And I had studied mushrooms for years and years. While you, ginseng, I’d study mushrooms. And it was really funny, because I don’t know if you heard us, but we said, out of the 150 mushrooms we collect, 149 are medicinal, one we use as a spiritual guide. And it’s the lobster. And let me explain that to you. There’s one particular woods that we would go to. It was like this. It was literally straight up and down. Climbing those kinds of mountains was kind of rough. And I’d say, “I’ll wait for you down here.” “Oh, no, no, I want you be there with me.” Finally, after about.. I guess it was our fifteenth year, I decided this relationship was secure enough, I don’t have to keep doing this. “I’m not going up this year.” And he said, “Oh.. ” I said, “No, no. I’ll collect mushrooms down here. You go on up and have a really good time and I’ll be down here when you get back. And we’re not that far away.”
And as I’m going along, I’d see the lobster mushroom. I’d go over and I pick the lobster and I’d usually find a ginseng. And I’d start in heading off to another direction and something would stop me and I’d turn around and go the other direction, and there’d be a lobster mushroom. So of course I’m picking up, because I’ve got to show that I’ve got something to show for not going up there, right? And I kept running into these lobster mushrooms. And no matter what direction I’d start, I’d get to taken to a different direction or to another direction. It was just like I was being led around by the nose, right? And I’m not paying much attention and all.. Because I don’t believe I can get lost. You just maybe take a different route home, right? And all of a sudden I hear, “How the hell did you get up here?”
And I look around, and the lobsters have just literally led me up this very gentle incline right up to the top. And he never even knew it was there. And there’s been so many times where the lobster will show up just when we need it.
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LH: I could cry when I think of maple syrup. I could bawl my eyes out and never..
NK: yeah.
LH: .. I won’t eat maple syrup anymore. I grew up with maple syrup.
NK: That’s right. Because what they’ve done to the woods.
LH: They go in and they take a maple woods and have..
NK: And they have no culture.
LH: 400 different kind of wild plants growing in it, they take out everything but the maple.. everything is gone, and then they put pipelines through that woods, every 15 or 20 feet.
NK: So that the deer, the moose, nothing can get through.
LH: You can’t walk through the woods. Then they have to have all these big pipes to carry them.. most active.. it’s like a whole bunch of veins. A little pipe’s going under bigger pipes, going under bigger pipes. And they have suction where they suck the.. They don’t let the tree run. They suck it out now, with a little pressure machine back down to the sugar house, okay? They don’t have to walk out there and do anything. We carried the sugar on our back.
NK: And you used to with the oxen and the horses?
LH: I’ve sugared with oxen, I’ve sugared with horses. You know what I mean? I’m ashamed of a million things happening in Vermont right now. Maple syrup is just one of them. Sugaring is a very sad thing. If you don’t believe it, you know, get in the car or get in the plane and go to Vermont and just spend a couple weeks up there.
Related Website:
Wild Gourmet Food wildgourmetfood.com
Osage Tribe Homepage: www.osagetribe.com
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