Punk Rock, Home Birth, and Indian Corn: Shelley Buffalo

12/04/19 • 50 min

Mid-Americana: Stories from a Changing Midwest

Shelley Buffalo is a visual artist and Food Sovereignty Coordinator for the Meskwaki Settlement near Tama, Iowa. Shelley was born near the Settlement, and much of her extended family still lives in Tama County. But her own journey has led her away and back more than a dozen times. For Shelley, sources of hope can come from anywhere, like her lifelong identification with punk rock, but the Meskwaki Settlement most recently called her back with its food sovereignty initiative, which restores ancestral foods, like corn and squash, and the traditional recipes that go with them. Shelley hopes to reverse the influence of government commodities on indigenous diets and to revive the stories of resilience that guide the Meskwaki lifeway. We talked about Shelley’s experience of racism in rural Iowa, how her birth experience in a hospital compared with her second birth experience at home, and why her work with food sovereignty may mean more to future generations than to her own.

Learn more about the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative at the official website for the Meskwaki Nation and on Facebook.

Learn more about the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative at the official website for the Meskwaki Nation and on Facebook.

Previous Episode

Couscous Royale: Brian Bruening

Brian Bruening lives in the northeast Iowa community of Elkader, where he is the owner and head chef at Schera’s Algerian American Restaurant, which he established together with his French-Algerian husband, Frederique Boudouani. A native of New Hampton, Iowa, Brian spent several years in Boston, Massachusetts, where he received a BA in English at Boston University and an MFA in poetry at Emerson College. In this episode, he shares what it was like growing up gay in the rural Midwest, and why he and Federique chose to move back, believing small town Iowans could appreciate unfamiliar flavors and cultures. Brian also talks about how poetry has helped him find his public voice in a region that values privacy, reflecting on the article he wrote for the Des Moines Register in response to the 2016 shooting at the Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

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People Would Call Me Iowa: Adam Hammes

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