By Sandra James, Northwest Indian College Native Environmental Science Advisor
2024-2025 Indigenous Visionaries Fellow
As an Indigenous woman, I believe our mental, emotional, and spiritual health are intricately connected to the lands that sustains us. Through the Indigenous Visionaries: Women’s Leadership Program, I have found the opportunity to combine my passion for healing with the wisdom of my ancestors to create meaningful change. My career goal is to use traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) to foster a deep, lasting relationship between my people and the earth. I want to empower my community to reconnect with our ancestral foodways and practices and rebuild healthy and sustainable lifestyles rooted in our cultural identity.
Our ancestors knew the importance of balance and how taking care of the land allows it to take care of us in return. By living as our ancestors intended and using our TEK, we can restore the relationships between our communities and the natural world. This knowledge teaches us how to harvest food from our lands and waters, practicing sustainably to ensure that the earth can continue to provide for generations to come.
One of my key aspirations is to create spaces that encourage small, everyday changes that bring us back to these traditions. By promoting the practice of growing, gathering, and preserving our traditional foods, we can move away from the over-reliance on industrial food systems, such as big industry meat and grocery chains, which have disconnected us from the land. I also have a bigger goal of opening a butcher shop to encourage big game hunting. Without the expectation of just exchanging money for services for those that want to learn about traditional food preservation and need that little extra help. To provide a safe space to share the knowledge learned from the elders in my family and share stories together. Every person holds seeds of TEK rooted in their stories.
My dream is to host educational workshops and community outreach. I aim to teach how to preserve traditional foods, whether through drying, smoking, canning, or fermenting. I believe that as we reconnect with our homelands, we not only nourish our bodies but also restore our cultural identity. Our traditional foods are far more than sustenance; they are a living part of our spiritual and cultural connection to the Earth.
Ultimately, my vision is to guide my community toward a healthier future by embracing practices that honor both our culture and the environment. When we feed our bodies with foods grown from the earth, we contribute to the full circle of our healing including mind, body, and spirit.
By reconnecting to our land and foodways, we can cultivate not only physical health but also spiritual resilience, allowing future generations to thrive in balance with the earth.
Sandra and her husband Matthew at Blue Mountain in Whatcom County, Washington overlooking the Twine Sister trail and gathering blackberries during late summer.
The connection between oneself and the earth is grounding. This is the picture of the hard work of gathering cedar bark with my husband. We like to call it “grounding together.”
Throughout the seasons, each season will tell you what you should be doing to prepare for the year. This is a picture of a striped cedar bark from the truck of the tree and the leaves collected from the outer bark.
