Healing at Indigenous Foods and Cultural Gathering Day
Marion Frye is cutting sea anemones, or sa’roh, gelatinous looking fists pulled from rocks at low tide. She’s let them rest a couple days in water so they won’t sting her hands. “Yeah, ‘horse’s ass,'” she says with a chuckle, explaining the nickname of the creatures whose flowery tendrils retract when touched. She cuts into the green-gray rings and scores them along the inside to straighten them out, as one might a shrimp, until they resemble huge caterpillars. She’ll batter and fry them in bacon grease someone else is bringing today. “In most of the state, we weren’t allowed to gather our own food. It was against the law. We were criminals,” says Frye, her eyes still on the sa’roh. She looks up at her granddaughter on the other side of the table and smiles. “Gramma’s making sa’roh.” Frye doesn’t remember the first time she cooked or ate sa’roh but for some at the Indigenous Foods and Cultural Gathering Day on March 10 at Suemêg Village in Sue-Meg State Park, it will be the first time tasting this ancient food. Funded through a food sovereignty grant awarded to the California Tribal Court Coalition, the program’s demonstrations and cultural sharing focus on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), including the harvesting and preparation of foods like lamprey eel, acorns, mussels, elk, berries, greens and the sa’roh Frye is preparing. But the event’s organizers’ goals go beyond the realm of food as they seek to heal and support connections between community members, their cultures and families, and their ancestral lands. Frye and her daughter Seafha Ramos, an assistant professor at Northwestern Arizona University, work in tandem at the stove, Frye turning the chunks in the bubbling fat and poking with a fork to see when they’re done. When they’ve passed muster, Seafha cuts the thick, knobby strips into pieces and sets them on a paper towel in a foil tray. Under the savory crust of batter, the meat has a mild seafood flavor and a chewy crunch similar to jellyfish. It’s easy to understand why it’s a delicacy and why Frye’s gathering spot is a secret. Standing in the middle of the open space under an umbrella, Maiya Rainer, a California State Parks interpreter at Sue-meg State Park, has to shout a little to reach everyone over the rain hitting the trees and the roof of the kitchen. “We haven’t had a voice, we haven’t had…