How Beautiful Food Remembers Our Way of Being

The morning sun filters through the kitchen window, and the steam rises from wild mint tea. Two little girls sit at the table, their hair still sleep-tousled, their small hands reaching for plates arranged with the same care as an altar. Here, the blueberries and whipped cream are piled high on the pancakes. So, this breakfast I crafted for them with a lot of love and intention is a language older than words.

Our grandmother's teachings weave their way through these meals. In the way I light the candles to sit beside their meals, it's in the patience we take to beautifully plate our children's food, and how we serve them first. There was a time when the first berries of summer were always given to the little ones, when our Aunties would put on Elvis, and move into their joy turning it up loud as she peeled potatoes to make a our bowls, when the smell of roasting deer meat carried stories of respect for the animal's sacrifice through our Uncles remembering of their hunting trip.

I remember my Aunts voice, low and heavy, when she spoke of her first days at the residential "school." “They fed us rotten meat,” she said, “like we were dogs. They wanted us to forget we were loved.”

Our grandparents, aunties, and uncles carry these stories, meals designed to break, not nourish. Scraps. Mouldy flour. Food stripped of its spirit. Colonial systems knew that if you teach a child they are worth only leftovers, you teach them they do not belong to themselves.

But today, we fight with beauty.

And look at these two girls now, their fingers sticky with berry syrup I made them with my music up, and enjoying giving them the best of everything my kitchen had to offer, their laughter bouncing off the blueberries tumbling across the table. They will never know that lie told to their Aunts, Uncles, and Grandparents. To them, this abundance is normal. A beautiful and healthy breakfast is, well, ordinary. The fact that someone took time to arrange their food with beauty is simply how love tastes.

This is how we move with our children through quiet revolutions from the kitchen table. We teach our children the way our grandmothers taught us to serve only the best we have, to make the most of what we have, to knead dough with prayers folded in. This movement happens through the radical act of serving frybread on flower-strewn plates to children who will grow up knowing their worth is as unquestionable as sunrise.

The residential "school" tried to teach our people that we were worthless. But here, in this kitchen, with these two giggling girls and this beautiful food, we are teaching them something older and truer, you are the reason the salmon swims upstream, you are why the berry bushes bend heavy with fruit, you are what the Ancestors dreamed of when they fought to keep our ways alive.

Every beautiful meal is a treaty with the future. Every carefully prepared plate is a promise that no one will ever teach you to settle for less than you deserve.

The land remembers how to love you. So do we.