Wókičhičʼu TradLab Community Food Network

Wókičhičʼu to give food to each other.

This project addresses the limited access to a wide variety of food and the forced disruption of access to traditional food and food making techniques through the creation of a food sharing center on Standing Rock.  The center includes elements of a community buying club, a traditional food creation space, and supporting and bringing together small scale Indigenous food business into one space. The project will increase access to traditional food, food variety, and the technology to make traditional Očhéthi Šakówiŋ food.

The food center is one part of a larger project to build a TradLab, which is a community solution center that creates connection and brings together all of the technology and tools our community needs to solve problems.

This project will encourage and support more community efforts to eat healthy and well in our own traditional ways while also providing more opportunities to expand existing small businesses. 

A key element of the space is that it provides access to traditional Očhéthi Šakówiŋ technology for taking care of and creating traditional food while also providing access to newer tools and food technologies.  In the long run the space also seeks to provide access to the tools necessary to create new traditional food technologies that innovate new ways of taking care of our food along the principles and spirit of our designs and ways of thinking.

We believe what makes this project innovative is that it focuses on our traditional way of doing things.  A way that has been innovating in this place already for thousands of years while providing a new community space that focuses on healing some of the problems caused by the violent disruption of our traditional food system in a way that allows our community to continue to innovate based off of our own understandings of innovation and positive change.  

Our project is fundamentally about making food and especially traditional food accessible and affordable to our community.  The buying club element of the project allows people to directly choose from a wide variety of food, including food now only accessible in nearby cities, thus making it much cheaper and locally accessible.  Creating a community space that houses food tech makes it accessible regardless of whether or not people individually have the resources to access those technologies. Giving people flexible arrangements around selling food that they make creates more opportunities for people to generate income while living in a good way.

We are very limited by a lack of access to a good physical space.  Currently we have worked to facilitate food knowledge and sharing between elders and youth. 

As one piece of a larger holistic community TradLab space, over the next three to five years we would hope to make the food center self-sustaining. Long term we would like to be part of a larger traditional tribal food network ideally with our own distribution technology. By five years we would like to have a new and beautiful community space, with connecting spaces in each district, and a mobile TradLab. And through fellowships accomplish the goal of supporting a network of traditional tribal centers that can work together on larger problems created by ongoing colonialism.

The biggest highlights so far have been providing elders with foods and medicines that they sometimes have not had a chance to eat for a long time and providing young ones with the ability to make their own food from things that they themselves have gathered on their own land. 

We currently have a small amount of seed money to expand this project and assist in finding a space where it can grow.  We would hope that Solve could assist us in expanding the resources that we have to work with, either in terms of in kind support or help in finding additional funds.  We would also hope that Solve would connect us with other Indigenous people and organizations that we could learn from and collaborate with.

We are currently working with a number of organizations within our community. We hope to continue to work with more and more, so that the space can eventually truly be a center in the community.

We would like to work with other Indigenous organizations especially those working in the sphere of traditional food and those supporting traditional innovation. We would also like to work with other organizations that are taking decolonization as their framework.