Food is Medicine

Today on Native Pulse, we consider the vital roles of Traditional Foods and Medicines in the Covid-19 Pandemic and how they also relate to our overall health and wellbeing as Indigenous Peoples. Ethnobotanist Linda Black Elk (Catawba) gives us insight into how we can start and maintain a healthy intergenerational relationship to our Traditional Foods and Medicines.

Linda Black Elk is an ethnobotanist specializing in teaching about culturally important plants and their uses as food, medicine, and materials. Linda works to build hands-on curriculum and ways of thinking that will promote and protect food sovereignty, traditional plant knowledge, and environmental quality. Linda takes the mantra food is medicine very literally, teaching classes on simple ways to incorporate “edible medicinals” in to everyone’s diet. She has written for numerous publications, and is the author of “Watoto Unyutapi”, a field guide to edible wild plants of the Dakota people. Linda is the mother to three Lakota boys and serves as the Food Sovereignty Skills Instructor at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota.