A New Day For Old Ways

Education is the first branch of our vision for change. For many urban and rural native people, the loss of cultural knowledge and connection to their communities has been a deeply traumatic experience. These severed ties caused by settler colonialism cut across both our nuclear family circles and our greater connections to tribal group interconnectivity. Our ancestors were members of food highways that have been continuously interrupted by the politics of settler colonialism, which now threaten to endanger what remains through the installation of dangerous pipelines and fracking. We must work to preserve and transmit our Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) by creating networks of community that span across the many tribes and nations on Turtle Island.

At First Foods, we aim to repair our connections across our inter-tribal communities and the diaspora through innovative use of technology and collaboration. Our A New Day For Old Ways educational series was founded on the belief our cultural knowledge keepers hold the keys to saving us from the threat of climate change and are one step on our shared path towards indigenous food sovereignty.

To date, we've held 50 classes with another 72 arriving in 2023. Our viewership has increased dramatically over the last 3 years leading us to a current view count of over 3000 on our class recordings (this does not account for our live views but we are working to access these metrics for future classes). Our following rate across platforms has reached over 4500 and we foresee this number rising again as we move to hybrid online/in-person classes. Our program began with our online audience and we want to keep them in the fold with the addition of live-streaming content in 2023. The metrics of this new format are forthcoming.