What a day October 27 was on the farm! Our annual Indigenous Fall Feast could not have been met with better weather. The meal — three sisters succotash, wild rice salad, beet poke, sunflower chia pudding, white cap cornbread, oh my — was sourced from the Old Acre, local vendors, and Indigenous producers in Hawaii and Turtle Island. Producers included Massaro Community Farm, Mexican Amaranth, Noh Foods of Hawai’i, Romona’s American Indian Foods, Red Lake Nation Foods, Schoolyard Sugarbush, Séka Hills, and Sweetgrass Trading Co.
The event honored the Three Sisters, corn, beans, and squash, grown on the Farm and gifted by Abenaki Seedkeeper Liz Charlebois, and served as a celebration of Indigenous foodways.
It was such a joy to see the community come together and to watch conversations over beautiful food, warmed by the setting sun on a picnic blanket, last into the evening. Our Native American Cultural Center Seedkeepers and Programs Liasons Emerson Harris '26 and Rebecca Salazar '26 welcomed us to the feast, explaining the significance of the three sisters as a means of resisting American settler colonialism. Salazar and Harris offered a poignant critique of Yale’s land acknowledgment and spoke of indigenous resistance to dispossession. To learn more about the history, meaning, and utility of the Three Sisters, listen to Salazar’s podcast, “The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency,” produced this summer as part of the Lazarus Summer Internship The podcast can be found here. Salazar will also be presenting her summer research at our last knead 2 know of the semester, on November 10th.
The line for the feast commenced after the land acknowledgment and gratitude to the organizers was shared. Soon, groups spread across the hill, sitting on picnic blankets while student performers Pilar Bylinsky '25 and Ryan Bibb '25 sounds spread throughout the Old Acre.
After all the cornbread was consumed, the evening concluded with Semilla Collective's Jarocho performance group Son Chaneques Rebeldes.
Conversation, in the Lazarus Pavillion and on picnic blankets spread on the hill, lasted late into the evening, augmented by the beautiful setting fall sun. Students were able to take a piece of Fall Feast home in ʻōlena-dyed cotton gift satchels, which contained rattlesnake beans, white cap corn, buffalo creek squash, hawaiian pink salt, and dried ʻōlena.
Many thanks to the Native American Cultural Center, the Native and Indigenous Students Association at Yale, and the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Department for co-sponsoring this event. Photos from the event by Reese Neal '25 can be accessed here.