Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

In each meal, there lives a multitude of stories.

Memories and customs flavor every bite.

Histories and knowledge are folded into and carried on by the growing and cooking of foods.

And in the fullness of being fed, we are brought back into a larger story, an ancient cycle of nourishment.

For many indigenous communities, this primordial relationship, the right to live out of this relationship,

has been devastated by the sweep of colonization.

Indigenous foodways have been erased and agricultural practices repressed,

severing many from both their ancestral traditions and access to healthy ingredients.

In this story, Dene poet and author Jake Skeets honors the food traditions that has sustained

his people since the beginning.

As Jake prepares to butcher a sheep for Kinalda, a Dene puberty ceremony of family and song,

he contemplates reclaiming culture and restoring the relationships between people and land,

food, and community. Summining the experiences that have shaped his own kinship with food,

he puts forth story as a path to food sovereignty, reminding us that within each bite,

the beauty of the beyond and the beauty of the world come together.

I rattled with a truck as my family and I drove a short way to the corral to get the sheep.

It had been donated to us to help feed the many who were scheduled to show up later in the day

in celebration and reverence for a relative who was reaching a pinnacle in her their life.

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