Honey Fermented Cranberries

Rinse cranberries in water.

With a dinner fork poke holes through each cranberry and drop into the jar, adding orange zest and slices of ginger as you go, you can also add the canela/cinnamon stick at this point. Continue to fill the jar until there is an inch of room left.

Add orange juice.

Slowly add honey. (We find that if you use a chopstick to poke into the jar while adding the honey it speeds things up)

When the cranberries are submerged in the honey, put on a regular lid and flip upside down to completely coat the cranberries. It doesn't hurt to give it a few shakes!

Remove the lid and using your chopstick, or whatever you choose to use, push any air bubbles you see out of the cranberries.

(zested and (sliced)

Insert the fermentation weight and push down. If there seems to be too much liquid you may pour some off and if not put on your fermentation lock.

Canela/Cinnamon quart sized fermentation fermentation lock.

Label your jar with the date and put in your cupboard, pantry, or just leave it on the counter.

Your cranberries will be ready to eat in 3 months but, we have left them for a solid year with amazing results!!!

Rachael Perney

Another amazing instance of this is that of Wapato Gardens! If you’re not familiar with Wapato let us introduce you to our contributor for this issue, Rachael Perney, so she can shed some much needed light on this beautiful relative!

Wapato: A Story Of Deep Aquatic Roots

The case for the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples has been clearly documented for many years. We know about the broken treaties and the frequent displacement of peoples from their native lands. However, we also need to highlight the myriad ways that the complex ecosystems of Indigenous peoples continue to be harmed by their marginalization in Western society. I write this as one small attempt to explore that marginalization through the microcosm of aquatic plants.

For a number of years, I have been learning about Indigenous foods by studying, foraging, raising, and preparing native plants. After moving to Indiana, the ancestral lands of the Miami, Wea, and Piankashaw, I focused my interest on native water plants, including the wapato and its tuberous roots. But this research has produced more than beautiful plants. It has also yielded a richer appreciation of the cultural importance of water plants and demonstrated the sophisticated agricultural food systems sustained by Indigenous peoples for centuries. And all that has brought me a little closer to the root of the problems—as well as some positive developments.

Tubers, seeds, flowers and leaves from a vast variety of water plants have provided Indigenous people with medicine and an abundance of nutrition since time immemorial. The wapato has 25 cousins in the sagittaria genus family (including cuneata, lancifolia, rigida, and graminea) that are all edible. They are all botanically water plantain. Other members of that plant family are edible as well, though some require more specific extended preparation when cooking. While the types of water plants eaten are widely varied across the continent. Wapato is a prominent example of a nourishing tuber, both found in the wild and cultivated, sometimes in large aquatic gardens, for thousands of years.

Wapato, often called duck potato (sagittaria latifolia), has many Indigenous names because of its presence in hundreds of different tribal communities. The name wapato became a well known alias because that is what it was called in a widely used trade language of the Northwest coast. There was clear intentionality in the development of the wapato’s ecosystems that included , weeding, tending, habitat expansion, selective harvesting and transplanting, soil building, terracing, fire management and waterway modification. In some areas it still grows abundantly, though in some areas it has been virtually eradicated.

Wapato enjoys growing in clean water with lots of sunshine and can be found on the edges of streams, perennial wetlands, marshes , rivers , swamps , and slashes— anywhere the water depth meets the wapato’s requirement of being at least 6 inches but no more than 16 inches deep. The brilliant green arrowhead-shaped leaves are striking as they pierce the water, growing alternately from the plant's base. In midsummer, a stem producing clusters of three flowers—each with 3 white petals and bright yellow stamen emerge.

Below the water, rhizomes grow vertically to the plant deep into the mud, producing fat, bulbous egg-shaped tubers with a little tail. The tubers grow untwined in the delicate wispy rhizomes. Even when produced by the same plant, the tubers can vary in color from tan to lightly tinted shades of blue, purple and pink.

How can you grow wapatos?

To grow a wapato seed takes at least two years of alternating cold and heat to break the seed’s dormancy. It takes up three years to produce tubers. While breaking dormancy, wapato seeds must stay wet the entire time. They also cannot be placed where the current is too strong or they will be swept away. Growing wapato from tubers is much faster and they are not as sensitive to water current. But make sure you push them down firmly in the soil when planting or they will pop to the surface of the water like fishing bobbers and float away.

What can you eat?

All parts of the wapato are edible, especially the tubers. The flowers are nice raw and leaves can be cooked any way you would cook greens. After the tubers are peeled and cooked (reducing much of the bitterness), they taste much like a potato with a sprinkle of fresh sweet corn, corn meal, chestnut and grapefruit with a slightly more granular texture. They can also be dried after they are cooked and saved for later.

(Two warnings: Make sure you are harvesting wapato from non polluted water. And parts of the plant that grow below water can contain parasites that cause liver damage. Cooking ten minutes at 200 degrees will kill all the potential parasites.)

Water plants—and the water commons— under attack

Like all aspects of the lives of marginalized Indigenous people, water plants like the wapato have suffered. Over the years, deforestation, urbanization and farming have taken a toll on the environment of native peoples. The mismanagement of water in this capitalistic system has been particularly harmful. The pumping of underground water for irrigation has caused lakes and ponds to disappear and streams to dwindle. Massive dams have destroyed the shallow habitat required for these water plants, as has the straightening of rivers. In short, the water commons—water available to all people—is increasingly under the control of the few.

The threats to native water plants are multiple, including such diverse factors as water pollution and invasive species (the European carp), one overriding historical cause is the false narrative used to displace people from their lands. The colonial argument in its simplest form was that natives had no claim to the land (or its water) because they did not farm it. You can see this narrative in blatant assertions that Indigenous people were “primitive and savage.” But you can also find in in the language describing the use of water plants. In that misleading narrative, natives were only collecting wild growing plants. Common words to describe the water plants as being “heavily collected,” “consumed” or “eaten.” These narratives are leftovers from white supremacist ideologies and colonizer propaganda that Indigenous people didn’t participate in farming or agriculture. That helped to justify the theft of people’s land and coopting the resources of that land

The truth is that many edible aquatic plants were cultivated and managed by Indigenous communities as part of large-scale aquatic foods systems. These systems were greatly varied in techniques, water sources, and natural materials used. In this diversity of aquacultural systems, views on the plants’ purposes also varied. But these were based on reciprocity and symbiosis between not just the humans and the plants, but also the water and animals in the ecosystem. And that native ecosystem, far from being “primitive and savage,” was a sophisticated and sustainable aquatic food system. Evidence from the Katzie Nation whose stories of wapato go back to their cosmology makes that case.

The Katzie x̌ʷəq̓ʷə́l̕s (wapato) beds

In 2006 in preparation for the Golden Ears Bridge, crews stumbled across the ancient remains of an aquatic gardenscape. In the project, handled by the Katzie Development Limited Partnership, a Katzie Nation owned firm, unearthed a 450foot wapato growing platform. The leveled platform had been used underneath the wapato beds to keep the tubers from growing too low in the soil. Two-thirds of the rock used was shaped and fire-treated and the rest meticulously filled in by hand piecing small rock.

In the excavation were the preserved remains of 4000 wapato and 150 pieces of broken wooden digging equipment. Carbon-dating placed the age of the site at 3,800 years old! The garden had been used for about 700 years! That a site made from locally sourced organic material was preserved for that length of time is truly amazing. It yet again demolishes the argument that Indigenous people were not agriculturalists. And it gives the Zatzie people a visual glimpse into their ancestors’ achievements and practices. Practices that are still carried out today include the work of the Katzie Eco-cultural Restoration Project that grows wapato free from pollution for food and for seed stock for transplanting.

Hopeful signs: Yakama Land Restoration

In the wake of colonization, a devastating number of food systems were distorted and the teaching about them lost. But there are still people practicing these ways. And there are people fighting to return land and water autonomy to native hands.

In 1993 the Yakama nation recovered a long-lost piece of their traditional homeland when it bought a 430-acre farm across from their reservation in Washington state. It had been a wetland with a creek, but it was drained and used to grow wheat for many decades. They hoped they could return it to its former holistic ecosystem. This would help save the steelhead trout, which had depended on them for their survival since their habitat had been obliterated. They also wanted to restore flora and fauna traditionally used by the Yakama that had all but disappeared. Fire management and other traditional methods were used to restore the land. Elders advised the use of beaver mimicry to assist in the revitalization efforts.

While working on a project for her MPA at Evergreen University, Yakama Nation member Emily Washines did a case study looking at a connection between natural land restoration, cultural knowledge and the health disparities of Indigenous people. While researching plants that would have made up the traditional Yakama diet, she learned about the wapato. It had been one of the traditional first foods for her people. She decided to go to the restored Toppenish Creek floodplain to look for it and found it had returned on its own and was growing again after 70 years! Below is a link to a video she made about the return of wapato to her community. https://youtu.be/J2LiaKkas4w

Hopeful signs: the Columbia River restoration

In November 22, 2021, members of multiple northeast nations,along with the Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, partnered to return wapato to the Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge on the Columbia River. They planted 3,000 tubers and 30,000 seeds on 965 acres of floodplain habitat that has been home to this plant for thousands of years. The wetland floodplain was re-established by the removal of two miles of barriers in the largest restoration project of the lower Columbia River to date. It is hoped that in addition to protecting the salmon and wildlife, this area will become a place where native people can once again come to harvest foods and medicine.

What is the future hope for restoration?

Wapato can be seen as a symbol of many other beneficial water plants that need to be protected and reclaimed in an industrialized society. More critically, the history of the wapato demonstrates a small slice of the massive consequences of historical land displacement of Indigenous people.

Realistically, remedies for those historical atrocity will never be complete. But small steps toward healing are possible. From the telling of stories and distribution of seeds to the removal of dams, land restoration and the returning of lands to native people.

Finally, the very water on which we all depend must be protected for the health and survival of the overall environment, the people who drink it, the plants that live in it and the ecosystems that thrive from it.

A personal note

Learning about these plants has given me the chance to deepen my understanding of Indigenous foods and, more importantly, the people who developed and preserved their history. I have been enriched by what I have discovered. That said, I came to appreciate the maxim that the more you know, the more you realize you do not know. The more I waded into the complex sophisticated agricultural practices of the ancestors who came before us, the humbler I became. But my journey has begun.

What an amazing journey and insight! Another piece of that story is that wapato grows across the majority of the so-called US and Canada, and quite often in the Great Lakes region, alongside our next plant relative, Manoomin. Most commonly known as “wild rice” this plant has, and continues to be, tended by the people and yet like most traditional foodways it is under constant threat from mining, oil and gas, dams, invasive species, and manmade climate change. Where rice used to flourish in Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, and southern Wisconsin it no longer exists. The Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission’s Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment is a great tool to help understand the true level of these threats.

In response to this a 2021, first of its kind, lawsuit filed by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe recognized the Rights of Manoomin, essentially acknowledging Manoomins, “right to exist, flourish, regenerate, as well as rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.” set precedence for cases to enforce the rights of nature!!! With that being said, let's celebrate with some Manoomin Ice Cream!!!

Topped with Honey Fermented Cranberries perhaps?