SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S HISTORY MUSEUM
How Chef Elena Terry Revisited Heritage Seeds to Cultivate Hope
Ho-Chunk Chef Elena Terry cultivates and cooks with ancestral seeds that were preserved despite forced tribal relocations. She focuses on providing opportunities to community members to eat and prepare traditional tribal foods as a method of healing.
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“How can you be a good ancestor?” Chef Elena Terry asks the audience at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
As a trained butcher and wild game specialist, Terry’s approach to processing and preparing food centers on strengthening ancestral and community connections. She is a member of the Ho-Chunk tribe from Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. The Ho-Chunk tribal territory historically included parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois, but the tribe has been displaced at least sixteen times since the Indian Removal Act of 1830. These displacements have had profound impacts on the tribe’s access to traditional food. With each forced relocation, tribal members sought to save their ancestral seeds by sewing them into their moccasins, clothes, and even hair.
Access to ancestral ingredients is a crucial component of preserving the community’s history and narrative. Organizations such as the Indigenous Seed Keeper’s Network, which collects and distributes seeds from ancestral fruits and vegetables to safeguard and preserve culturally significant foods, have helped return seeds to be farmed on Ho-Chunk land. “Each one is like a relative coming home,” Terry explains. “These seeds have traveled with the tribe and provided for them…They bring us hope when they come back to tribal lands.”
Many heirloom seeds currently sit in restricted collections and seed banks, having been collected for academic and scientific study. Increasingly, tribes have been using a process established by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 to request the return of items significant to their heritage and identity.
While she prepares succotash on stage, she tells the story of how the ancestral bean seeds sitting in a small jar on the table returned to Ho-Chunk land. Seed keeper organizations had worked with farmers from past tribal territories around Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois to grow the beans and other ancestral seeds with the goal of returning seeds to the tribe. As time went on, the organizations dissolved, and the farmers lost the ability to locate the appropriate Ho-Chunk members to receive the seeds. With no reservation in the state of Wisconsin, the nine thousand enrolled members of the Ho-Chunk tribe are spread across the state. The farmers kept growing the bean and saving seeds, hopeful that one day they would find the right person to take them back to Ho-Chunk land. By coincidence, they met Terry. She tells the audience that she hopes she can use the beans in the future in her succotash recipe, but, for now, she uses canned.
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She reminds the audience to be realistic. It costs a lot of money and time to only eat “decolonized food.” When Terry first started trying to eat more traditional foods, she found it extremely challenging. Most of the ingredients simply weren’t available. Having worked in the restaurant industry for over a decade, the long hours and demanding lifestyle were taking a toll on her health. She decided to shift her focus to growing and preparing traditional foods so they would be available for everyone.
Food, family, and community are braided together at the heart of Terry’s work. When she was growing up, she learned how to look to the land for food as her grandmother and great-grandmother taught her how to forage.
“Relatives teaching and caring for each other—that defines the meaning of ‘tribe,’” she says. With this understanding, she founded the educational outreach nonprofit Wild Bearies. The organization provides mentorship for people overcoming substance abuse issues or emotional trauma. Participants of Wild Bearies spend their time working in the kitchen, gardening, harvesting, processing, and preserving food.
“Food is medicine,” Terry says as she plates the succotash. She uses Wild Bearies to highlight how the indigenous food movement can be nourishing and nurturing, and she wants to help people connect to their communities through shared cooking and eating experiences despite their collective struggles.
The Ho-Chunk tribe has around 1,300 acres of agricultural land spread across the state of Wisconsin. Terry travels to farms to provide heritage seeds for cultivation—not only for her tribe, but for other tribes as well. She cultivates ancestral seeds for other tribes with the hope that they will return home, just like the bean seeds in her jar, because, she says, “I want to be a good ancestor.”
Find her recipe for succotash here.
The 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which received funding administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, ran from June 26–July 1, 2024, and provided programming that highlighted the living traditions of Indigenous peoples. Information about the annual festival can be found on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival webpage.