Episode 2.2
Interview with M. Karlos Baca, by Peter Hay on Dec. 1st, 2020
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Peter (P): Our guest today is Tewa/Diné and Nuucui, an Indigenous Foods Activist from the Southern Ute Nation. He is the founder of Taste of Native Cuisine, which was created alongside the Southern Ute Cultural Center and Museum, to promote traditional Indigenous Foodways in the community and has grown over the last decade to include work with Tribal Nations across the country. He is also the founder of 4th World Farm which is focused on pre-colonial foods and agricultural systems of the high desert region of the southwest and is a co-founder of the Indigenous food activist group the I-Collective which has representation of Indigenous knowledge keepers of 18 tribes, from Oaxaca to First Nations, and uses Indigenous Foodways as a medium to combat structural white supremacy and continued warfare against Indigenous people. M. Karlos Baca is also a writer, a sheepherder, and most importantly a son, father, uncle, and grandfather.
P: Welcome, Karlos, to the show, Aquí&Allá: conversations with contemporary creatives from the United States and Mexico. How are you doing today?
Karlos Baca (K): I’m good. Thanks for having me.
P: Yeah. Thanks for being here. And I just gave a brief bio about who you are but I’m curious if you’d want to tell us a little bit about who you are.
K: Ooh. Who am I? A work in progress, always? Yeah. I mean, I think the bio probably covers it pretty well, but, you know, just I think that we as a people should always be striving to really just always be in motion. Right? And there’s not ever a day, you should wake up and not be in a space where you’re going to take something new away or learn something new. So that’s, that’s kind of how I move through the world and it’s provided plenty of blessings. So that’s me in a nutshell.
P: So who you are changes every day? A little bit?
K: Yeah. I mean, I would hope so. Right? I mean, you upload new information that you gained and for me learn a new plan, learn a new sound my turkeys make, whatever, whatever it is, you know, there’s something to take away from every day.
P: Yeah. Well, that leads me to my next question, which I think is very connected to who you are, it is: where are you from?
K: Yeah. I’m from the Southern Ute nation, which is nestled between Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. And I’m also from the Diné nation as well. That’s kind of definitely a descriptor of not just where I’m from, but what I am. Right? And what’s molded me into my current self.
P: Yeah. It makes me think, I was listening to some interviews with you in the past few weeks. And you mentioned at one point how you prefer the term Indigenous because of how it describes your place in the world.
K: Right? Yeah. I mean, I look at it like, if you look at indigenous motion towards sovereignty and through colonialism in general, you can break it down into certain tiers through civil rights action. Right. Like you can go, and then I teach this in the action of food in particular and how that moves. But, you know, you go from our traditional, indigenous way of being; whether that’s sedentary, agriculture or agriculture motion like the Utes have, and then you move into being incarcerated and in camps, by the United States government, and be given all this food, right. And all this stuff, you’re not familiar with, stuff that your body and our bodies still don’t, to this very day, work with at all. And then as colonialism has moved along with the assumption that the Indian was going to disappear or be destroyed. Right. And anthropology and archeology, they all pretty much had that in their minds, that’s why they’re the archeologists. Kind of, that was the whole ploy of their study of indigeneity was to say that we were going to become extinct. And so they wanted to market, you know, leave a marker of what we were. And, can you see that? Right? Like in this timeframe we were Indians. And then you move forward into the civil rights era, and then you have, you know, we’re native Americans, like this is where we are, we’re native to this place. And there’s a lot of movement going on in there. And then you have the next generation down of us, that we’re indigenous and we’re of this place and our foods are of this place. And like, that’s where that comes back to full circle, even though that’s not necessarily the truth of it too. Indigeneity as a blanket statement is cool, but where I’m from and who my people are, is the proper address. Right. So it’s like, I’m not.., people are Indigenous everywhere, Right? So, that means, in a way, I think, if you are of this land, saying that you’re indigenous is what is acceptable or the deal. Right. But then when I, in order for us to come full circle with that conversation, that needs to just be, “this is the nation that I’m from.”
P: Okay. So that, you know, there’s several things in there that you mentioned that I would love to dig into a little bit. The first thing that caught my attention was the, did you say it was rotating agriculture with the Southern Utes?
K: Yeah. Well, not just the Utes. Most tribes, of what the Western ideology would call “Hunter, gather people,” actually move entire ecosystems along their way. You know, it’s not just, we’re not just moving… Here’s the thing, in science, within Indigenous community in general, we’re always laughing about “when science finally catches up to us.” And it happens fairly often. You know, it happens often enough that it keeps the joke going. But if you look at the plains, right, there’s this concept that the plain’s natives followed the herds. With the indigenous folks of those regions who were saying, it’s like, no, we cultivated this landscape, so the game would come, you know. And now science is learning that, Oh, that’s what burning the plains was about. That’s what our fire mitigation was about. You know what I mean? There was like these things and it goes the same here in the balance of, we use the same thing, right. We use fire and we moved roots and berries and fruits, and all our wild potatoes. What I’ve really been able to, or what actually I’ve really been coming to terms with, even more, the more that I step out of the Western mind frame, which just over the last course of my last 11 years of just focusing on our traditional foodways, has really taking me to this place where I can go into the woods and like go into our ancestral space and just see it. And there’s like entire foodsheds. It’s not just like this one plant is here. Or this was moved here, no, it’s like an entire mountain valley that are an entire foodshed for the people. Right? I think the narrative has been told through the white lens for so long that the concept of agriculture was just a sedentary thing, is the mainstream thought that needs to be reanalyzed. I think that they would gather far more information about what we need to move into the future to feed people if they look towards the truth. Right?
P: Yeah. It’s interesting because it makes me think of like, the Gaia Theory that came into popular Western thought in like, the seventies and how, you know, it took science to put people in outer space to be able to look back and say, “Oh, it’s all one thing.” You know? Whereas people like yourself, have the knowledge and oral tradition telling you like, that exact same thing for as long as those traditions have been passed along. So like, do you even say that, like yeah of course. So it’s interesting, pointing out that science is catching up and it’s still got a long way to go, I feel.
K: Yeah, it’s like such a regular… I mean, like a couple of the more modern more televised versions of things that have happened, like the equator shifting. You have indigenous people have been saying this for a hot minute now. Or the fact that the Amazon is a botanical garden created by the people, like now science is like, Oh. Oh shit. They’ve been telling us that for a long time. Nobody ever listened, because we’re just stupid savages. You know that’s like, that is where the critique and the problem with anything that to do with Western academia is that it all comes from a place of white supremacy. So anything that approaches any conversation, it all is going to go back to that because that’s the foundationals grounds of the entire root.
P: Yeah. It doesn’t have the broader perspective. It wasn’t allowed. I mean, it also makes me think of the accounts that were written from the first colonial explorers in the West. And talking about, you’re talking about setting fire and how they would literally write letters back saying the native people set fires to the land for no reason, you know? And then here we are like, watching the forests and the mountains in Colorado and California and all over catching fire, because it’s so dense because nobody’s taking care of it. And it’s like, Oh wait, wait a minute. They knew what they were doing. It’s really interesting how, when you ignore that history, that knowledge that was gathered for thousands of years it comes back and bites you pretty hard. I’m curious, cause you’ve been talking a lot about forging and agriculture. And so I’m just curious to know a little bit more specifically what it is, what do you make? What is it you create, Karlos?
K: What do I create? That’s a good question. Yeah. I mean, it’s a mosaic, life is a mosaic and I think, what I’m most known for is traditional gathering and harvesting of our traditional foods. Right now though, while that’s still my life and my favorite place and thing to do. Two years ago we started the 4th World Farm here just South of Mancos Colorado. This Valley was clear cut for farming by the Mormons well over a century ago. This land that we’re on in particular is, I believe the first dairy in the Southwest. The barn here is actually on the property is, well it’s over a hundred years old itself. It’s had nothing but cattle and horses on it for that entire time, so the land is completely destroyed. There’s no, nothing. You know. It’s what cattle do in the wild. They destroy ecosystems.
P: If I remember correctly, that Valley is where Cortez was coming up through the Southwest, he came over and his horses and everybody was about to like, kick the bucket and they came to that Valley and it was super lush, full of grass. There was water and they were able to kind of regroup. So that’s a long history of poorly modified landscape.
K: Yeah. It’s pretty treacherous. So we began the process of, what I’ve just called, green indigenizing the landscape here. And so we’ve began cultivating the native landscape of the whole space. So that’s trees, bushes, the forbs, the grasses, the mycelium level of stuff. Along with cultivating our traditional crops in the midst of all of that. So that is kind of like my main, main focus right now. Just to make it clear, I’m usually gathering our traditional foods, you know, and now that’s kind of shifted. Not just do I do that, but we go on hikes and harvest seed from around here in the landscape, in places that weren’t cultivated to recreate. Some semblance of what this place was. If you were standing outside here right now and looked around, like, there’s just empty space until you hit the mountains. And if you drive, this road we’re on, they call it road 41, but it’s actually the old Ute trail. The Ute trail goes from here in the Valley all the way back, onto the backside of Mesa Verde, all the way to just South of Ute mountain. And so, If you know the landscape around here, like where the turn to Four Corners Monument is, if you turn on the left is the Ute Mountain Tribal Park. That’s the old Ute trail. This is the same road that I live on. And as you go down those, down the Valley where it gets more rugged and they weren’t able to clear cut stuff and you actually see what was. It’s heartbreaking to know that like, that this land was just like raped and pillaged the way that it was. So just creating this little space here, not just for the sake of the space, but for the conversation of it, and for people to get an understanding of what was destroyed, so cows could eat grass, as opposed to the fact that we have an entire ecosystem that provides plenty of food for us, plenty of medicine for us, and feeds the animals. And there’s like, but instead, there’s that mindset that you needed to completely destroy the entirety of a whole ecosystem for the sake of one creature, you know? That’s what I’m up to though.
P: Speaking of the Ute trail, is one of the things that just screams so heavily to me of a erasure because, you know, one of the things that has been literally paved over is that travel network created by all of the communities across all of North America where you say, well they couldn’t have been that developed because where is all the remnants of them. And it’s like, well, we paved over all of those trails that they created because they did the hard work of determining where all of that was, so it’s literally like covering it up.
K: Yeah. That’s from, that’s from Brooklyn to here.
P: Yeah. Go all the way.
K: It’s pretty phenomenal.
P: So one of the things that I know you do is you teach workshops out there. How do those generally function and what are you really interested in the outcomes being?
K: Ohh well, this only being the second year of this project, you know, that’s been pretty much under quarantine. So, we’ve had to really pivot in different directions with that. Last year we had some native youth groups from Ute mountain and White Mesa come out and learn about traditional agriculture from the sedentary farmer viewpoint, but traditionally indigenous agriculture, not the Western agriculture. And then lead that into the conversation about Utes as hunters and gatherers and what that really means, you know. And like how the truth of those histories, like we just discussed, has manifested. You know, in an instance like that you have a youth that have been force-fed in narrative their whole lives. That goes with even within our own communities, that narrative is alive because a lot of people don’t have those traditional knowledges so much anymore. Um, so go ahead.
P: Kind of a follow-up question because you’ve lived that narrative, you know, like you just didn’t come to this immediately. You know, this has been, as far as I can tell from speaking with you in the past, like this has been something that’s evolved in you and with you for the past 20-25 years. Yeah?
K: Yeah. It’s been pretty interesting. You know, like I got into the culinary arts world really young. Actually started like, as a dishwasher when I was like 10, you know. And so I was always around that world, and as I worked my way up through the kitchen landscape. Once I got to a point where creating food, like say, creating a special for dinner that I would create something, and people, chefs included, wouldn’t know what I was making. They weren’t familiar with the product that I brought or harvested or, you know, whatever those circumstances were. And it really gave me an opportunity to look inward and be like, Oh. You know, and I’ve had conversations. Like, I was talking to my aunt and my grandmother one day and there was a conversation about, Oh yeah, you know, I do this in the thing. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. My aunt just goes, yeah, I guess you never think about it, right? Like you, you have your traditional, the foods that you eat or the ways that you prepare things within your family, and that’s just normal. Like, that’s just what it is, right? And then out here in this other world, that’s not the case. And so that was like my, really my first reckoning with the fact that my food ways were different. And then, we started Taste of Native Cuisine just over 11 years ago now. And that was created alongside the Southern Ute Cultural Center as an attempt to re-introduce traditional foods. And I think that is really where my official journey started with this. It was that I did this really lavish, you know, like insane, I think I did, the first year we did something like 15 or 16 dishes and every single one of them has an indigenous ingredient. And when I went back and as I continued to learn over that next year, working towards that next dinner, and looking at that menu and I realized how colonized I was. You know, and I looked at every single dish and it was influenced by a different culinary tradition, whether that’d be Japanese or Italian or French. And that the Indigenous piece of each one of those dishes was, it was just such a small part. It wasn’t the actual thing. Right?
P: Like a little flare accent.
K: Yeah. You know. And that was, that really just pushed me to this point where, you know, like I went from, we did that there at the museum for four years, and it took those four years for me to have a completely decolonized menu.
P: Oh, wow. Okay. And by completely decolonized, you mean like, no foods that originated outside of this continent.
K: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, all wildcrafted. The last year that we had our dinner out there, there was a harvest elk to go along with it, you know, like everything, everything was by indigenous hands and our land and our space. Right. And then you fast forward from there with me, I went from that to… They had a big shakeup within the museum, you know, and they brought in new people. It was like a nonprofit and then the tribe absorbed it. And then just all this stuff, everything, a lot of programs just went away. And I ended up as an executive chef at this fancy, you know, bougie château space and that gave me even more opportunity to be in the mountains. And learn those landscapes even more because, you know, that’s up at 9,000 feet and I got to learn like a whole new ecosystem. Right. And how to put that into play within a menu, because we didn’t have like a menu you ordered from. Breakfast had like a small kind of menu, but lunch and dinner were fresh from scratch every day.
P: Oh, wow. Like it was all foods that you’d gathered from that region. Yeah?
K: There was always something in there that was that. Yeah. You know, if we’re doing like a, you know, like a tasting dinner or something like that, it would all be. Right. But there was always a piece to it and so I like, that’s how I built to the point where I am now. To where, you know, when I walked away from that space, which was coming on like probably about three years ago, four years ago now, I just left all of that behind because I realized that wasn’t serving me. You know, now all of those kitchen techniques and all those French words and those concepts, like they have no meaning to me, like I’ve completely, I’m a million and one miles away from that. And I think that, like that vision of what decolonizing the mind is, it really just has to do with who you are within your place. Right. Like what your landscape is and like your homelands, aren’t a place you live, they’re part of you, you know? And that’s really been like the journey for me. Right. Like, that’s where I’m at now.
P: I see. But that was, you know, it’s interesting because you had a chance to really explore deeply the foods and the techniques while you were there at this, I guess resort, you could call it. And I’m curious because I know we’ve talked in the past about the word ‘chef’ and how it’s a term that is not your favorite anymore for yourself. I’m just curious if you could maybe tell me a little bit more about that, around that, you know? You said you were a million miles away from that kind of kitchen, but what would you call yourself now, then?
K: Oh… Well, this conversation comes up fairly often. I think it’s really fascinating, you know. Because, you know, the term ‘chef.’ Let’s just start there for your listeners that aren’t really familiar with, like where that even comes from. It comes from a military cook that created the brigade system in France post world war one, I believe. And it has everything to do with the patriarchal structure and it has everything to do with power and control, you know. When I say it’s set up like a military structure, that’s exactly what it is. The chef is the general, the sous-chefs are the commanders. It just goes down and even the terminology is that. And if you look at what a modern kitchen setting, anywhere in the world, a chef can have anything they want, anytime they want, they can order everything. They do these things and their names on it. They control everything about it. And that’s that. And for myself, because I don’t do that, I’m at the, uh, my environment dictates to me. Right? And so when I’m gathering, what I gathered last year in mass that I could use, because of how heavy the drought was this year, none of it was here. So I had to use all different stuff. Right? So there’s one separation. You know, I have no say, unlike somebody that has that terminology attached to them and works in the modern industrial kitchen setting. Also, my kitchen is out there. You know? And so when you look at it I sit on the exact opposite side. This was really like a recognition that came through a few years ago where I just, I was looking at those structures and I was looking at like what I’m doing and I came to realize that, we’re completely incompatible. They were not even in the same conversation because I have no control. You know, like I don’t have any say in what’s going to happen. Like, all I can do is continue to honor my plant relatives and honor my animal relatives and like, learn more about them and be prepared for whatever’s going to change year to year, you know? And in that, it’s just really been a blessing for me just to be able to step away from that capitalists, you know, that neoliberal model. That’s just like destroying, not only, I mean, it’s further down the food chain, right. It’s like, it’s further down the pipeline, but it’s still equally as destructive. The restaurant industry is equally as destructive and wasteful as the corporate industries that create it, right?
P: Yeah. I mean, I can think of the influence that chefs have around the world as they put the spotlight on foods that aren’t from their region. You know, the thing that comes to mind with me is avocados, you know, and how avocados have turned into this big popular thing and all of these European and non central American places. And all of a sudden you have like cartels buying up all the avocado plantations so they can sell avocados for exorbitant amounts, you know? So it’s like, there’s just so much that can be tied into what happens just from those kitchens. And so the phrase came to mind, like, “necessity is the mother of invention.” You know, and you’re talking about having like, no control really about what you find or what the weather provides to you essentially. And so many ways that makes you so much more creative than somebody who has literally everything at their fingertips. Where you have to use so much more intuition and so much more completely internalized knowledge to take what you find and make it useful, you know, to make it food, to make it nourishing, to make it medicine. So I’m just completely blown away by that and I think it’s a whole other level of creativity and knowledge and intuitive creativity and practice. And follows, I think very closely to what your ancestors would have had to do, you know, it’s exactly what they would have had to do and how they figured out how to make all the foods that were passed down that you learned to make. Right?
K: Yeah. I mean, I think about the Western mythology that like we were just like scavenging around, you know, and like we had to chase the animals because that was the only way we’d eat. Like all of these mythologies in the Western mind about what Indigeneity looked like here. And it’s like, depending on what you look at, like what model, whether it’s like the more white supremacy model of how many people were here in the Americas pre-contact was somewhere like 30 million, to the other side of that which is 70 to a 100 million people were here. Right. And nobody was hungry. That’s the reality of it, you know? There wasn’t poverty. I’m always really fond of saying that nobody was hungry before capitalism, right. Because when you’re in a unit of people, whether that’s a village or your clan in motion or whatever it is, the abundance is so great. And I know this because myself personally, just foraging just myself, just gathering throughout a year, I can feed thousands of people by myself with limited knowledge. We’re talking about my ancestors had full knowledge of this place, you know, and break that down to the removal of people from their place and banning of ceremonies. And, you know, add all these colonial mechanisms of control on top of that, and there’s been so much loss. I mean, there’s been enough loss that I take elders up in the mountains to teach them about plants. And it’s heartbreaking. And it’s also a beautiful thing that we still have some of this knowledge and are able to be on that quest back, you know. But I mean, the reality of it is that the abundance of food and medicine that we have around us, it’s not even imaginable unless you can like see it, you know, like it blows me away every day.
P: Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely not something I’d be able to do, you know, I’m in awe. I just feel like if you’re looking at a valley and you’re seeing a much different vocabulary and context than me, you know. Like you’re seeing so much more potential there for sustenance, for livelihood, for availability, for sharing, you know, and I’m just really blown away by that. I’m curious, cause you mentioned the elders, what do you feel like were maybe some of your greatest influences in making these changes in your life that you’ve made and pursuing this sort of, I guess it’s a non-traditional path for somebody with your background, you know, to move in the direction you’ve moved with the farm, with the workshops, with the providing for your community.
K: Yeah. It all goes back to like a very specific moment in time with me being engaged with ceremony back home. In our most important of ceremonies, I was told, when I first took part in it was that I no longer belong to myself, that I belong to my people. And if anybody that’s listening just sits with that and contemplates it for a while. It’s pretty scary. You know, you come from, we come from this, this Western tradition and this Western train of thought of self, and it’s all about the self and about how we get ahead. And it doesn’t matter how that looks, you know, by any means necessary. And then pluck yourself out of that and go the opposite direction. Right. So, you know, I was blessed to have grandparents that came from a different time. My grandmother’s still alive, she’ll be coming up on 90 here pretty quick. And just having conversations… it’s really interesting to contemplate even like, birthing practice between here and there. We talk about, like when she was pregnant with my aunt, how the women of the community came, you know, and they have these very specific ceremonial ways with pregnancy. That there’s like binding of the stomach with Buffalo robes and there’s all these things. Right? And now she like watches her five-year-old great, great, great grandkids playing on these little God boxes with infinite wisdom in them. You know what I mean? Like conversations, right? Like these conversations, that’s the place that they come from. Right. And, you know, the plant knowledge that I was blessed to receive, which I’ve expanded on endlessly since then, you know, from what the things that they maintained is really where I got that base knowledge from. And, you know, there’s an article I wrote for PBS, it’s called, “Blue Corn, Bear Root, and Resilience,” it tells the story of how I got where I am. And my grandparents really influenced that, you know. And it’s still, even today just this last year I was harvesting Buffalo berries and I don’t remember anything being taught about that. I remember eating them when I was a kid, but I don’t remember any knowledge associated with them. And I was back home harvesting and I swung by my grandma’s house and I had came in with these berries and I was going to ask her about them. I had them in like a little cord container. I was just driving back in the reels and I just came across the bush and it was just the only thing I had to gather them in, at that time. I put them in this little cord container and I come walking in the house. And remind you my grandma at the time, I think she’s 87. And I’m like walking over to her and I’m like getting ready to ask her, “grandma, do you know what these are?” And I kid you not like she was like, a teenager all of a sudden. Before I could even finish my sentence, she like, had the berries out of the thing and was eating them. And she goes on to tell me about back when she was young. The women would go down the valley and they would go from Ignacio which is the, you know, the Watchtower of the reservation, all the way down the Los Pinos, all the way to, near Bayfield and collect berries. And they would do that every year, you know? And like, I would’ve never got that knowledge if I wouldn’t have just been like, “hey grandma..” You know? Cause we’re past that. You know what I mean? She’s past that age where she’s going to be going out and hanging out with me and teaching me about plants. But the fact that like, I bring stuff to her fairly regularly whenever I’m over there and she always has like, sometimes I wait for really profound answers, you know, cause I get those kinds of stories. But like, I had taken another plant over there and I was asking her about it. So she looked at me like, “well of course we use that.” I was like, “Oh, what’d you use it for?” and she goes, “you just cooked it in beans.” You know, it was just like these real simple answers like that. I was waiting for like, “we used to go do this…” Like, I’ve romanticized that in my own mind that there’s like, a beautiful story somewhere. But yeah, you know, “it was just a potter.” It’s like “oh, okay.”
P: It seems like everything, you know, she’s got it’s all in there. She knows what it all was and what it was best for. And I mean, thank you for sharing that story with us. ‘Cause, I mean, how else do you gain that knowledge? And it sounds like she, you know, I know the communities that I’ve been involved with or visited, it’s always the matriarchs really like her, that lead the gathering, you know. At least in my experience and I feel like there’s so much knowledge and experience in people like that.
K: Yeah, it’s beautiful to still have people like that around. And there’s also the fear of loss, right? Like there’s, particularly in this time, we’ve lost so many elders within the indigenous communities across this country. And a lot of that knowledge is just gone, right? Like we’re not going to… until we come back around that circle that we’ve lived that lifestyle, or go through the things that they went through there that we may be able to get some of that knowledge back, you know? And so there’s heavy burdens in there, you know, cause that knowledge that they hold is…
P: It’s invaluable in so many ways. As you were talking about earlier, you know, how these are going to be the answers, this is the information that’s gonna help us figure out how to keep going through all that we’re facing right now as a society.
K: Yeah. You know, we have to, I mean, there’s a saying it’s like, we don’t have to go back to not having automobiles and houses. Right. We don’t have to do away with all those things, but there has to be a willingness from both directions for us to use modern technology. And when I say modern technology, I’m not talking about oil extraction and those things, right. Like we have the ability to create anything without destroying something else. Like we’re that far ahead, you know, but when you’re under corporate control, we all know what that looks like. There’s like, a middle ground for us that I think between, just Indigeneity and modern technology that I think probably has a lot of answers for the ills that we face. And so if we’re looking towards that and getting into positions where we could guide that.
P: I agree. And I think that people like you helping to educate, helping to keep this knowledge and to pass it on is going to be incredibly important in that. I’m curious because you said you’re in year two of the farm out there, and of course we’re in the middle of this pandemic or the resurgence of this pandemic now, but I’m curious to know what does a normal day look like for you right now, out there?
K: Oh, it’s variable, but it’s… I mean, I would say that. I’m trying to think how to word this, I guess like the benefit of being my own economy, because I’ve been able to create this space. I’m able to do these things, right? Like there’s this, I can economically sustain myself outside of the typical structure. And this last year has really just, I’ve pivoted away from, you know, my livelihood typically is just I travel around the country and work with different tribal nations. I work in some of the local native schools, Navajo nation in particular doing traditional food work with youth. What all this stuff has allowed me to do, is that we just stopped all of that and use all the resources I would have put towards that, towards feeding the communities, towards what they call, there’s the terminology of mutual aid, which I don’t really subscribe to because that’s just Indigeneity, to take care of others. Right? So, food, supplies for babies, firewood, propane, hay for animals, that is pretty much what we’ve been doing and are doing currently since early this year. And so there’s like an intermix, like Ray would go out, and we have turkeys, we have sheep, we have food that we’re growing, obviously not right now because it’s that time of the season. But yeah, you know, it’s just like… We have a non-profit called The 4 Corners Collaborative, that we have been blessed that we have some beautiful board members that all come with some amazing skill sets and things like that. We have people on the board, two of them that are actually immigrants from Mexico, that work with the migrant community. Ute representation, Diné representation, we have urban native representation, as well as the rural white representation. And just pulling all of our resources into this thing where we’re able to, you know, take a truckload of, I mean, trailer loads of supplies. Not just truckloads, but I mean, trailer loads of supplies to people because that’s what we should be doing. Right. And that’s kinda my, our daily thing right now. I think we have close to, somewhere around 40 something cords of wood sitting out there right now. As well as like, a hundred or so bales of hay and, you know, all these things. I don’t know for listeners that aren’t familiar with this region, there’s 30 to 40% of the native populace are here just in the Southwest. Like Navajo nation, in particular, that, you know, they don’t have electricity or running water in their homes and it’s a different type of rural. Right. It’s like rural and then there’s like rurrrrraall.
P: Yeah, I mean folks don’t have addresses out there, you know?
K: Yeah. You know, and there’s no infrastructure, there’s no roads, there’s no trash pickup. There’s, you know, there’s these things and right now we’re just kind of racing against time to get all this stuff to people before the winter comes and like you can’t even get down there road. Right? That’s kind of where we are. We’re still doing workshops. We’ve done some online stuff. We did an online composting workshop. We did, actually this last two weeks I’ve done two workshops with the Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Institute. We did one on traditional foods for the Hopi food co-op and one that was open to the public on processing and usage of prickly pears. And so we’ve been doing that on Zoom and I actually got my fancy setup, I’ve learned to use my photography camera, like my nice Canon, to film with. And so it actually looks semi-professional, not the grainy zoom pictures and stuff, but yeah.
P: You didn’t know you’d be a YouTube channel star through all this, huh?
K: You know, I’ve left all that stuff so much that I don’t really. I would tell you right now that I pass up, I would say, on average about 10 TV shows a year. Double that in articles. It’s just not where my mind is at, you know, like we have too much stuff going on that needs to be taken care of to really be engaged with that. I’m pretty staunch anti-capitalist, you know. Our traditional ways are far more important to me. I’m not sure how to explain that.
P: I mean, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. I know you are extremely busy and I know we’ve talked in the past about how interviews or media can really take things out of context and change, change specifically, the message you’re trying to portray.
K: Yeah. Well, I mean, if you don’t have an understanding, right? Like I don’t typically do anything in November. Because that’s like the time when everybody wants to interview about Thanksgiving and this and that, and it’s just recycled every year, every year, every year, every year it’s this one thing, you know? And I always use those, when people reach out to me, as a moment to teach real quick. It’s like the feel-good stories about indigenous things that are every day, all day, just in this one month, right. Is not, the answer in any way, shape or form, so yeah.
P: Make it part of every day, you know? Well, I don’t want to take too much more of your time and we’re getting close to an hour here. I know you have lots of things to do, but I had a few short answer questions that I wanted, I guess, bombard you with a little bit to sort of close things out. If that’s okay with you.
K: Yeah.
P: Okay. I know you used to be active in the music community down there, I don’t know if you still are. But do you have a favorite album that you would recommend?
K: In anticipation of these questions, I was cracking up because anybody that knows me knows that like books and music are pretty much the only things I spend money on. And I have somewhere around 5,000 albums and asking me to pick one out of that is so difficult. I seriously, I sat there and thought about this for like the longest time earlier. And I was like, Oh man, where do you even go with that?
P: Yeah. That’s how I am with art, man. People are like, what’s your favorite art piece? And I’m like…
K: I mean. You mean today? Or what do you mean? Like it shifts, right. It shifts every day. Like I listen to different genres and different everything all the time. So like, I’m sitting here, like looking towards my records and like the one that’s sticking out right now is Nina Simone Sings the Blues. So we’ll go with that.
P: Yeah, okay man. That’s a killer, killer album. So since you mentioned books, what are some books that you’ve been checking out recently that you think people should look into?
K: Yeah. Currently, so here’s me. This is how insane I am and how nerdy I’ve been my entire life. I’m typically reading no less than like 10 to 12 books at a time. Yeah. And the reason that is, is because I’m not always focused on like one thing. It’s more like wherever my mind is, is what book I’ll pick up. So like right now, I’m working on Red Skin, White Masks. I just picked up the newest, Oneness vs the 1% by Vandana Shiva. I’m reading a book called Eating NAFTA, which is really, really fascinating. I’m reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. What else? Oh, there’s a book called The Other Slavery, which is about indigenous slavery in the US and Mexico.
P: Which I think people don’t know enough about, at large, like that’s one of those.
K: Yeah. Unless you live down here, you know. My family history is very intertwined with Indigenous slavery. I picked it up and it’s kind of hard to read cause it’s such a, more of an academic work. And plus, I think one of the main reasons why the Indigenous history of slavery is missing, in a lot of the ways, is that if it happened in your family it’s not something you really talk about. You know, it’s not like if you talked to my grandmother about how they ended up over here, on this side of the mountains, because our traditional homelands are on the other side, she’ll say, we were Navajo slaves, or our grandparents didn’t talk about it, or mothers. Like that’s the end of the conversation. Yeah. So, I mean that’s that.
P: Yeah, yeah. It reminds me a lot of actually the way that folks I know in Oklahoma would talk about the Indian schools, you know, you couldn’t get them, they’d say, yeah, I went there and that was it. That was the end of the conversation.
K: Yeah. My grandma won’t talk about it at all. About boarding school.
P: Yeah. So you mentioned books and music are your two real passions there outside of food and food sovereignty. But it sounds like they are very much intertwined. You’re not reading a lot of fiction,
K: I don’t really read fiction. I actually have like, even a section of books that are just like music related, you know.
P: You got to have some sort of escape, I guess sometimes, huh?
K: Yeah, it’s fun. I mean, like I said, I’m a music junkie. And so like learning the history. Like I’m reading this book called Assimilate, which is like the history of industrial music. Like I’m a pretty heavy industrial music head and have been since the eighties. So, you know, getting all those histories and like those pieces that I didn’t catch when I was younger.
P: Like were you in a band ever?
K: I was a hip hop artist. And my buddy, J.O. and I had a recording studio in Albuquerque that was called Grand Scheme Records. And we did kind of like an industrial punk, hip hop kind of thing, man this is going back already almost 20 years. So yeah, no, definitely like I’m still, I still have lots of friends that are in the industry. And some people that are on major labels that are friends of mine and people that are on the underground circuit, that they’re friends with, you know, like I’ve definitely a music junkie.
P: Yeah. It was a pretty intense music scene in Navajo nation specifically, in Albuquerque, in that whole region, you know? You know for sure, but I don’t know if all of our listeners know that. So if they want to go down a rabbit hole, they could start checking out what’s there and what’s coming out of those cities.
K: Yeah, Google Navajo nation and metal music and you’ll come up with a hole you can go down for quite a while, for sure.
P: Yeah. Well, so much for being short answer questions, Karlos, I’m terrible at this.
K: You know, same here.
P: So, I think a really important question I love to ask everybody I interview is, what advice would you share with a young person that’s beginning their professional life, in your field, or maybe any other creative fields?
K: Be you. Don’t worry about other people’s opinions. When I was in college, my art history teacher started the entire course off by asking everybody in the class, what is art? And everybody had a lot of answers and my answer was what isn’t. You know, and you can get caught up in like the Western warlording, you know, the Western ideal that dictates to you, what is what, or you can create from your heart and be you. And I would say that with any enterprises that you’re going to follow, that that’s really just really your thing. Because I’ll tell you right now, I never would have seen myself where I am today. Except for that I just keep following. Right. Like I just keep learning every day and keep moving. So, and don’t be afraid to change. Yeah.
P: I think that’s a beautiful response and a really solid way to cap off this interview. I’ve really, really enjoyed speaking with you today Karlos and I greatly appreciate your time. I’m always so inspired and impressed by all that you’ve been doing and all of the changing and shaking things up you’ve been doing too, for the past, you know, what four or five years that I’ve known you. And I wish you the best and safety and prosperity out there on the farm.
K: Thank you very much. And I appreciate you having me.
P: I look forward to following what you do in the next 5, 10 years and I’ll to give you a call
K: Yeah, definitely feel free to reach out.
P: If you would like to follow Karlos’ work, check out his projects on Instagram @tasteofn8vcuisine or @4thworldfarm
REFERENCES:
- Tewa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tewa
- Dine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation
- Nuucui: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_people
- Southern Ute Nation: https://www.southernute-nsn.gov
- Taste of Native Cuisine: https://www.facebook.com/TasteofNativeCuisine/
- Southern Ute Cultural Center and Museum: https://www.southernutemuseum.org
- Indigenous Foodways: https://civileats.com/category/food-and-policy/indigenous-foodways/
- Tribal Nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe_(Native_American)
- 4th World Farm: https://www.facebook.com/4thWorldFarm
- high desert region of the southwest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_United_States
- I-Collective: https://www.icollectiveinc.org
- Oaxaca: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaxaca
- First Nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Nations
- structural white supremacy: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/structural-racism-definition/
- Diné nation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation
- Western ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_culture
- Hunter, gather people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer
- foodsheds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodshed
- Gaia Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
- Mancos Colorado: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancos,_Colorado
- Mormons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormons
- Cortez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernán_Cortés
- Mycelium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycelium
- Ute trail: The routes the Utes established were used by other Native American tribes and Europeans. The Ute Trail became known as the Spanish Trail used by Spanish explorers as early as the fifteenth century when Alvar Nunez Caveza de Vaca (1488-1558) and Juan de Onate (1550-1630) were sent from Spain to explore the uninhabited areas of Texas and New Mexico, claiming vast lands for their Spanish rulers. https://www.southernute-nsn.gov/history/
- Mesa Verde: https://www.nps.gov/meve/index.htm
- Four Corners Monument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Corners_Monument
- Ute Mountain Trail Park: http://www.utemountaintribalpark.info
- Ute mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_Mountain
- Quarantine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine
- Ute mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_Mountain_Ute_Tribe
- White Mesa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Mesa,_Utah
- Decolonized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization
- Tasting dinner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasting_menu
- Brigade system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigade_de_cuisine
- Neoliberal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
- Pre-contact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_era
- PBS: https://www.pbs.org
- “Blue Corn, Bear Root, and Resilience”: https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blogs/native-voices/blue-corn-bear-root-and-resilience/
- Ignacio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacio,_Colorado
- Los Pinos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Pinos_River
- Bayfield: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayfield,_Colorado
- Navajo nation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation
- 4 Corners Collaborative: https://www.facebook.com/the4CC/
- Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Institute: https://www.hopitutskwa.org/?fbclid=IwAR2OO2LfXmTNDSqsaKkNJoM1cIiMxswUmu8x5lYXLVYEpPGheTrrkSwrG-c
- Hopi food co-op: https://www.hopifoodcoop.org
- Anti-capitalist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-capitalism
- Nina Simone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Simone
- Sings the Blues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Simone_Sings_the_Blues
- Red Skin, White Masks: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/red-skin-white-masks
- Oneness vs the 1%: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/oneness-vs-the-1/
- Vandana Shiva: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva
- Eating NAFTA: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520291812/eating-nafta
- Entangled Life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entangled_Life
- Merlin Sheldrake: https://www.merlinsheldrake.com
- The Other Slavery: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Other_Slavery.html?id=Z2gpCgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description ??
- Indian schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools
- Assimilate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilate:_A_Critical_History_of_Industrial_Music
- Albuquerque: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque,_New_Mexico