Arctic Village residents attend a gardening workshop held by the University of Alaska Fairbanks Tribes Extension Program. (Photo provided by Heidi Rader)
Food security is not an exclusively Alaska issue, but the land and location can sometimes necessitate different approaches. Molly Cerridwen, a Yup’ik traditional healer and herbalist who works with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Tribes Extension Program, is a part of a group of elders and traditional knowledge holders who serve in a role unique to the program.
“No other state has decided to do this; Alaska is at the forefront,” said Cerridwen. With family ties to Qaluyaaq, or Nelson Island, in Southwest Alaska, Cerridwen, who grew up in the Interior community of Nenana, weaves traditional health-based practices with complementary and alternative medicine modalities to work with and support tribes in their pursuit of food security, resiliency and economic diversity.
According to Heidi Rader, professor of extension and the Tribes Extension Program director, the TEP works to “meet the needs of tribes,” connecting people and tribes with grants, opportunities and education. Under UAF’s Cooperative Extension Service, the program is based in Fairbanks and reaches all over Alaska in partnership with organizations like Tanana Chiefs Conference and RurAL CAP. Its reach is growing: Rader shared that the program had hired Marisa McKasson as an agent in June 2024, expanding on a partnership with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association.
Historically, the Cooperative Extension Service was designed around Lower 48 programs where an agent was assigned to help farmers and ranchers with education and grants.
“The interesting thing with Alaska, we have 229 tribes and a lot of what Extension does is face-to-face education through workshops,” said Rader, who has led the program for nearly 20 years. The TEP program currently hosts a blog, educates through YouTube, and facilitates workshops online through webinars and in-person with educators like Cerridwen.
Cerridwen’s interest in traditional healing and herbalism started at home from a young age. As the youngest of seven sisters, she was surrounded by healers and herbalists, paving a pathway for her to learn traditional methods of healing, gathering, and foraging from the land.
“I use my voice as much as I can in honor of my grandmother,” Cerridwen said. Like many people across Alaska and Indigenous communities, Cerridwen’s grandmother was removed from her home, sent to a missionary school and not allowed to speak Yup’ik. While at the missionary, she lost her sister and was not able to mourn that loss. “The only way she knew how to mourn was in Yup’ik and she would be beaten if she spoke Yup’ik.”
Cerridwen shared that her grandmother would be brought to tears, when they asked her questions about how to say words and phrases in Yup’ik. “So we stopped asking her because it was retraumatizing her and we didn’t want to see her cry,” Cerridwen said. But what her grandmother remembered was “the healing plants that live on this land. So she passed that on to her daughter, who passed that on to her daughters, myself included.”
“One of my frameworks in my traditional healing practice is that each family held on to bits of traditional knowledge. And my family held on to plant medicine,” said Cerridwen. “Every family has a medicine, that medicine might be art in the form of beadwork, art in the form of ivory carving. It might be mask-making. It could be music. It could be dance. It could be language. This is all medicine that, when we come together as a collective, we can share with each other the medicine our families were able to hold on to through colonization and learn from each other. That is healing. That is creating community and also sharing this experience that many, if not all families experienced.”
Rader shared they want to support whichever avenue makes sense to harvest and preserve food.
“There is a statistic that is often thrown around that all but 5% of our food comes from outside. … That is accurate for how much food is purchased from outside. But it doesn’t adequately factor in all the food that we hunt, gather, fish and grow,” Rader said. “Part of what we are trying to do is look at the number more specifically … but also make sure that people can access funding that is out there to improve food security, even if they don’t plan on farming and ranching.”
To address the differing needs of communities in Alaska, the program offers workshops from seed starting, soil fertility, starting a community garden, and gardening with kids to food preservation like canning and pickling and even identifying edible wild plants.
“Another program we do in the TCC region is send out seeds to tribes for as many gardeners as they have. So we ask every year, ‘How many gardeners do you have? How many — roughly — seeds do you want?’ In this TCC region, there is about 500 gardeners, according to the seed distribution,” Rader said.
They also provide technical assistance to apply for grants through programs with RurAL Cap or micro food-security grants provided by the Alaska Division of Agriculture. Rader said there is assistance available to purchase items like a freezer, construct a root cellar, or to purchase a snow machine to hunt for elders in a tribal community.
Cerridwen weaves her traditional practice with modern-day food needs like gardening. It’s a way for her to honor traditional practices with modern necessities. “One of the things I love about gardening is that we live in homes now. We are more stationary than ever. Hunter-gathering was when we were nomadic. We would follow the herds. When we would follow, and while we were following the herds was when women would pick the plants. You would literally be walking and that’s how they sustainably harvested. Because they weren’t picking everything clean, they were just picking a little bit as they walked and they slowly moved across the land from fish camp to winter camp to hunting camp. And because of that, the plants didn’t suffer.”
Cerridwen shared that gardens don’t have to be the conventional plants but they can also be from wild plants found in Alaska. “Gardening doesn’t have to look the way that the Farmer’s Almanac set in stone that, ‘This is what a garden is; this is what a greenhouse is.’ We have a lot of wisdom behind us as a collective people.”
That includes being able to transplant native plants, Cerridwen said.
”If you know the plants that grow in your area, they will probably love living in your garden or in your yard. And they require a lot less maintenance than most other commercially grown plants. They can reseed themselves because they are still heirlooms. You can create a traditional garden. You don’t have to plant any seeds that you buy in a store. It can all be transplanted from another area.”
Anyone interested in learning more about the program or to request a workshop can visit their website, which has a full list of workshops offered, educational resources, and other information relevant to promoting food security in a tribe or rural community.
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