In a narrow industrial kitchen in late November 2017, a group of chefs and activists served a multicourse dinner to an overflowing crowd. Most of the group met for the first time a few days earlier, when they turned their donated ingredients into a free community meal at the American Indian Community House on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, presenting an alternative celebration to typical Thanksgiving festivities. Here, at what they called “Takesgiving,” each chef presented a dish made primarily from indigenous ingredients.

Most of the evening’s cooks were members of the newly formed I-Collective — a group of indigenous activists with a goal of “using food to have difficult conversations around social justice issues,” explained Erica Scott, one of the founding members. Scott is also a food justice and reproductive justice activist, and a seed and knowledge keeper from the Lenape tribe in what is now Massachusetts.

Among the nine courses at Takesgiving, Hillel Echo-Hawk offered Navajo parched corn and squash soup; M. Karlos Baca, of Tewa/Diné and Nuche heritage, cooked niche blue corn and bear root with popped amaranth, popcorn shoot, and smoked chokecherry. David Rico’s dish, plated on a slate and dubbed “Na Cano Blanco,” was a Mexican sope stuffed with succotash, served atop a puree of cushaw squash and topped with parched blue corn, amaranth, and crunchy yellow bits that turned out to be crumbled dry ramen.

”This dish is me wrestling with my own identity — native, Chicano, and white,” Rico said. The succotash was made from the “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash, a primary trio of sustenance for native tribes. The slate represented nature, from which the food itself and the people nourished by it had come, and reminded him of the shale he found in the Appalachian Mountains, where he lived as a child. The sope represented his Chicano roots, while the sprinkle of Top Ramen offered a taste of a cheap and filling food often found in American households. The creaminess of the squash contrasted the unexpected crunch of the processed noodles; it was cognitive dissonance on a plate.

“Food, while nourishment,” Rico said, “also has its own kind of narrative.”

The stories told by his dish and the evening’s other dishes are the basis of the work that the I-Collective, a group of indigenous activists from around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, is doing. The “I”s in I-Collective represent four tenets — indigenous, inspired, innovative, and independent — and while some politically leaning chefs say they use food to open people up to new experiences and cultures, the I-Collective uses it to unearth difficult conversations. It doesn’t shy away from any resulting tensions. The group sees its often-innovative cooking as a conduit for greater understanding around issues facing indigenous people today. It’s an opportunity to, as founding member Neftalí Durán said, “educate, bring people ... together, and call people out” when they perpetuate injustice.

In recent years, food has emerged as a powerful tool to inspire political and social action. At first glance, the I-Collective’s actions seem to fall into the same category as a number of food-centric social justice efforts, from the spur-of-the-moment action of feeding protesters, such as those who mobilized to support detained immigrants at JFK airport after Trump’s first “travel ban,” to events like the Displaced Dinner series, which helped fund refugee support groups by hiring refugees to cook meals for guests.

But many of these efforts appear to leave politics off the plate once the food is actually served. The I-Collective takes a different route, using dinners as the conduit for education and, sometimes, pointed critique around cultural erasure, appropriation, and privilege.

While the group also activates for more immediate concerns — including protections for indigenous immigrants who are being targeted by ICE, the high rate of police violence against Native Americans, and the fight to protect native land like Bears Ears National Monument in Utah — much of the group’s activism and education efforts revolve around the centuries-long history of the United States government sanctioning the taking of Native land and the forced relocation of American Indians, forbidding many from farming, hunting, and practicing their culture in various ways. The result was a loss in cultural knowledge, as well as a degradation in nutrition as American Indians were forced to eat government-provided food rather than providing for themselves, issues that continue to affect Indian culture and communities today.

For Rico, the youngest member of the group, who identifies as Native American, Chicano, and white, that history has informed much of his personal journey. While researching American Indian food culture as an undergraduate at Yale, he realized that his diet of mostly processed food had harmed his health. And as he learned more about what he calls the “violence and atrocities” associated with so many ingredients endemic to the modern American diet — for example, the dark history of the slave trade that fueled sugar production — he wanted to feed himself in a more conscious way, a way in line with his values.

“I decided, for me and my life, for what I wanted to do, I need[ed] to take control, and I needed to learn how to cook,” Rico said.

As his studies met his journey toward health, he began to dig more deeply into the meaning of food sovereignty, defined by the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance during a 2007 conference as the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced sustainably. The ways that colonization has negatively affected food sovereignty, particularly for indigenous communities, remains a primary concern for American Indian activists today.

“Food is this most intimate connection to life,” Rico said. “It is where you literally take pieces of the outside world and put them inside of your body to become part of you.”

The group began with three activists — Erica Scott, Neftalí Durán, and Liz Charlebois — who first connected in 2017, mostly via email and social media, said Scott. As they brought in more members, including chefs, artists, photographers, and scholars, they insisted on keeping the group’s membership a “collective,” without established top-down leadership and with a conscious effort to amplify the voices of female members. (This is also reflective of the female leadership roles practiced by most tribes: Traditionally, women were the craftspeople, the heads of household, and the tribe decision-makers. Thus one of the group’s stated goals is to “uplift female leadership” in ways aligned with these traditions, said Durán.)

The collective has around 18 members (with a wait list), all of whom must affirm a set of values to join, including anti-racism language and support for Latinx rights, acknowledging that these groups are also indigenous and separated from American Indians by artificially constructed borders.

Since its first dinners last Thanksgiving, the group has taken part in the Food Justice Symposium in Denver in April and cooked for, and supported, a meeting of the new People of Color Land Trust in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in early May, which is beginning a conversation on purchasing land in a trust to support farmers of color and work toward food sovereignty of marginalized groups. This meeting also prompted a dinner in Holyoke: Led by Hillel Echo-Hawk, the meal used only pre-Colonial ingredients that were mostly farmed and foraged locally, as well as dishes that reflected her upbringing as a member of the Pawnee and Athabaskan tribes from the Midwest and Alaska, respectively.

Between bites that reflected the flavors indigenous ancestors might have eaten thousands of years ago, diners heard ancestral songs and discussed both history and seeds of change for the future. While serving dishes such as duck confit tacos and sustainably foraged ramps and squash puree, Durán, wearing a headscarf and “Protect Bears Ears” T-shirt, explained the group’s goals to the crowd: “food justice, food sovereignty, and calling people out,” as well as education around indigenous culture and what native people and allies can do to contribute. As Echo-Hawk and their volunteers served the guests, Durán noted that the first taco was created about 5,000 years ago by indigenous women cooks.

When Echo-Hawk addressed the crowd near the end of the evening, she didn’t mince words as she told the story of her Pawnee ancestors being displaced from Nebraska to Oklahoma by the American government, their ancestral round lodges plowed down, their foodways and customs forbidden, and their numbers diminished, through violence and hardship, from more than 18,000 to 656 people. But recently, ancestral seeds have been collected and brought back to the Pawnee’s original homeland. “Our seeds would not grow in Oklahoma,” she said, but they “flourished” in Hastings, Nebraska. “The seeds know.”

Later, Echo-Hawk affirmed that I-Collective events aren’t meant to give diners a feel-good meal; they intend to confront the question of what food sovereignty means with every bite, each dish a contribution to the discourse around the table. “We’re a pretty radical group,” she said from her home in Seattle. “People don’t like it when you call them a colonizer, and people don’t like it when you bring up genocide when you sit down and are having dinner. And… we do that.”

Like Rico, she sees food as the way to teach history and change minds. When people connect the food they are eating with the history lesson she provides, Echo-Hawk said, “You can see the change in their eyes, the change in their body language. … Once they taste something with [all] their senses, it’s a completely different experience.”

This history, Rico said, is exactly what he was missing during his youth, and why now, in his 20s, he has come to food as a medium for activism. “The foods that I ate growing up, junk food, fast food, commodity food, were foods of erasure,” he said. “They erase health, land, people, and diversity.”

This is what the I-Collective doesn’t want to lose sight of when they craft and serve their meals: the politics behind what is on the plate. While American Indian cuisine has garnered some popular interest in the past few years, the I-Collective’s goal isn’t only to make delicious, surprising, or well-crafted food. “If there’s one uniting thing we can all get behind, it’s empowerment,” Rico said. “We’re just looking to gather with our family… and have discussion about what comes next. That’s what food is: It’s the table space where important conversation can begin.”

Suzanne Cope is the author of the book Small Batch and is working on a book about food and political revolution. Alexandra Bowman is an illustrator, painter and designer living in Oakland.

Editor: Erin DeJesus