Chicken-keeping is not a traditionally Indigenous foodway, at least in Mvskoke culture. However, I do my best to approach it in an Indigenous way.
My friend, Jodi, said to me a few days ago, “There are people who have chickens and there are people who own chickens. You are a chicken owner.” She was insinuating that I treat them as pets rather than a food source. While I don’t feel as though I own my chickens, the sentiment is not lost on me. I am a steward of these birds. I cannot, in good conscience, take stewardship over an animal and not try to give it the best possible life it can have in my presence. As an Indigenous woman, it is important to me to have a deep and reverent relationship with my food. While I don’t eat my chickens, I do eat their eggs and I believe that if I nurture them to the best of my ability, they will, in turn, nurture me to the best of their ability. This is reciprocity. I try to practice this in animal husbandry, plant husbandry, and even hunting.
As Americans, we have collectively lost our relationship with our food. Whether you’re a carnivore or plant-based, do you know your food? Do you cultivate it? Do you have relations with it? The answer is often “no.” I think the difficulty increases when we eat meat, because it is often heart wrenching to harvest an animal, so we let others do it so we can mindlessly eat our meat without thinking of death. We do this with plants, too- letting other people grow our food so we aren’t bothered. Unless you garden, you will not know the bitter sweetness of harvesting the life of a plant that you nurtured from its infancy. When we harvest our food ourselves, whether meat or plant, we grow within ourselves a deeper reverence for it. It is blessed with intention and, as a result and in my opinion, more nutritious for our bodies. We have more respect for life and death and a concept of the challenge of taking a life to sustain our own. We learn and appreciate the complexities of humanness when we are food sovereign. We understand existence, and in turn, the Self more when we steward our food.
