Reclaiming the plate through buffalo school meals

RAPID CITY – The Regional Buffalo to School Training conference was held in Rapid City at Western Dakota Tech June 22-24, 2025. The event was sponsored by a large coalition of various organizations working together to integrate Indigenous foods, particularly buffalo meat, into school programs. The Intertribal Buffalo Council (ITBC), Intertribal Agriculture Council, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Buffalo Authority Corporation, Tanka Fund, the Great Plains Food Sovereignty Corporation, World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, Montana Partnership to End Hunger (MT-PECH), the W.K. Kellogg foundation, and other partners gathered to learn, train, share and eat.

KayAnn Miller (Potawatomi), Co-Executive Director of MT-PECH said this is a first-of-its-kind training designed to help school food service staff, school administrators and buffalo producers begin or continue Indigenizing local school menus with buffalo meat.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in 2022 in a well-referenced article about Tribal Sovereignty and Food Insecurity, reported that these Native American traditional food systems and lifeways have been disrupted since federal policies promoted settler colonialism, land theft and forced removal of Native nations, contributing to generational food insecurity and poor health outcomes.

This movement, to return bison herds to their ancestral lands and by doing so restoring both the ecological health of the land and the cultural and nutritional well-being of the people, is a part of the ongoing fight for sovereignty, which is the inherent right to self-governance and self-determination, including traditional territories, resources, and cultural practices. Food sovereignty, a component of the right to self-govern, is the right to return the people to a healthful state by restoring traditional food ways, Indian Country food and agriculture markets.

Native Americans have significantly contributed to the more recent “farm-to-table” movement through their traditional agricultural practices and ongoing food sovereignty efforts. Although they are not widely credited, these contributions embody the core principles of the movement and have played a crucial role in its development.

“The objective is to get more buffalo into school meals. And so the dishes that are available for tasting here are all new school meal dish recipes that Indigikitchen chef Mariah Gladstone (Blackfeet) has developed. And Chef Sean worked with all the cooks that were here from the different schools to prepare those recipes.” Indigikitchen is an online cooking show dedicated to using foods native to the Americas and also gives viewers the tools they need to find and prepared the same foods. Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota Sioux) founded the Indigenous Food Lab and is an award-winning chef, educator, author, and activist.

Cooks and chefs at the conference were tasked with different meal assignments during the conference. Gladstone said that she had created the recipes for the tasting event. “Two of them are from my cookbook. It’s a kids cookbook called Mountains to Oceans. I wanted something that would showcase some of the food from around here but also to show that it can be scaled up to serve on a big institutional level with relative ease.” She said that some of the recipes have been served in hospitals. “So, rather than individual, cute, plated meals, this is something that can be served en masse, but it’s healthy food, food that can be sourced locally, and of course, is something that people also enjoy.”

Gladstone said the two items from her cookbook that she made for the tasting event were marinated buffalo steak and bell pepper rollups in a berry sauce and turkey meatballs made with wild rice and dried cranberries topped with a blueberry and strawberry sauce accompanied by a bowl of pumpkin lentil soup. “I made the turkey meatballs thinking that maybe some people were a little buffaloed out from the buffalo heavy diet during the conference.”

While Native Americans have been actively working to restore bison populations to their ancestral lands, not just for cultural and spiritual reasons but for their nutritional and economic value, the more recent wide-ranging interest in bison has been as a specialty food. Gladstone said that this cuisine should be approachable and can be easy to eat and serve in the lunchroom. “I think bison should be everywhere. While the numbers of bison today are a far cry from what they once were, making sure that people know how to cook bison, know what to eat with bison, is part of that circle that will help to re-energize bison populations on the continent as well. But people need to know how to cook with it and what kinds of recipes they can make with it.”

The nutritional value in bison as food cannot be matched. “They’re high in protein and low in fat,” explained Gladstone. “They are species that, when raised, interacts with the landscape, right? They naturally are strong and resistance against a lot of predators. They are ecologically beneficial to the landscape itself. When bison are reintroduced to an area, they naturally increase the biodiversity of the native plant species on the prairies, and they naturally aerate the soil. They help increase germination rates of certain plant species that rely on them, either for their wallows and those bare patches of the ground, or by passing through their digestive system, it increases the germination rate of their seeds. There’s a whole bunch of different factors, but for Native people, they’re also a species that has played a role in our ceremonies and our cultures for so long, and that’s something that is really important. When you combine all those things – the nutritional value, the ecological health, our cultural reliance on buffalo – it works together. I think kids deserve to grow up learning about bison in their school meal programs.”

She said it’s important that kids connect with where their food is coming from. “They need to know it doesn’t come from grocery stores. This can help kids to go beyond that thinking, so they understand that if they take care of these places where their food is coming from, then they’ll understand that it’s also taking of them and their food. “That is part of this cycle of reciprocity that I also think is an important part of the food systems.”

“Bison were millions strong across this continent,” Gladstone explained, her passion evident as she discussed the deeper significance of reintroducing buffalo to school lunch programs. “Our goal isn’t just about serving food – it’s about reconnecting children with their cultural roots and the ecological landscape.”

(Contact Marnie Cook at cookm8715@gmail.com)

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