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From strawberry water to bison meatballs, Onondaga Nation Eel Clan member Angela Ferguson’s Wednesday campus dinner and presentation highlighted the importance of food sovereignty and connections with ancestors and community.

Listen to the Elders, an SU group focused on amplifying Indigenous voices, hosted the meal and presentation, in Bird Library. Ferguson, who serves as Onondaga Nation’s farm supervisor, prepared the traditional meal using homegrown ingredients, while sharing stories from her own life as a leader in the Indigenous food sovereignty movement.

“This is one of the topics that’s really dear to my heart,” Ferguson said. “It’s everything that I’ve been doing in my life since I found sobriety, honoring my ancestors, my grandmothers who taught me how to cook, how to forage, how to butcher and how to grow food.”

Ferguson said food sovereignty isn’t exclusive to Indigenous communities and explained the role of food as a “unifier” among people.

“When people say, ‘What is food sovereignty?’ There’s so many definitions, because really it’s whatever it means to you,” Ferguson said. “And for me, it means being on your ancestral lands, still having the seeds of your ancestors, and the knowledge to plan and to take care of those harvests.”

Kaliya Wachacha, a sophomore at SU and member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, said her own community lost a lot of traditional knowledge about food and said it was nice to see the efforts of other Indigenous communities in giving back that knowledge.

Wachacha emphasized the importance of hearing successful stories of the reclamation of historical objects to Indigenous communities. She also echoed Ferguson’s point that food sovereignty can be cultivated by anyone.

“In this day and age you can go to McDonald’s and get food in two seconds, but you don’t know where it’s coming from and you don’t have that connection,” Wachacha said. “It’s important for everyone, even if you have a small strawberry plant in your window. It’s the fact that you’re growing something and putting time and effort into what you’re eating, it’ll make you feel better.”

Ferguson also spoke about how when land and food became commodified, it was used to leverage power against communities like her own.

“It’s a miracle we’re still here, and every time I make one of these plates, it is like a reclamation of sovereignty, because that was the thing that they tried to take away from us,” Ferguson said.

Scott Catucci, associate director of Outdoor Recreation at SU, said he’s helped organize “Listen to the Elders” presentations on campus for years. He said their goal is to bring people together to understand the university’s Indigenous history and “the land it sits on” by hearing stories from their elders.

A moment Ferguson said helped her connect with her ancestors occurred while foraging near Onondaga Lake. She said she noticed two shiny pieces of a clay pot on the ground and realized they were remnants of her ancestors’ lives.

“It shows me we were here. It was the proof… I hear you. They see me,” Ferguson said. “They know I’m here. It was just so magical of a moment.”

After asking friends at Binghamton University to date the artifacts, she learned the pot shards were roughly 8,000 years old. A large “rock” she found was identified as a 10,000 year old Mastodon tooth.

Following an invitation from Willie Nelson to participate in his Farm Aid concert in Missouri, Ferguson and fellow tribe members learned the Missouri botanical gardens near them housed an Indigenous seed collection.

“It was horrifying. It was all the stuff that they stole… there were thousands of seeds, and I could hear me and the other girls that were with me crying,” Ferguson said. “I can’t say that I’m traumatized because it just lit my fire, it made me go on a mission to get the seeds out of there.”

After telling Nelson about the seeds, he said he would support Ferguson in her efforts to return the seeds to their ancestral owners. Although they were unable to reclaim seeds from the botanical gardens, Ferguson said she spent the last year returning Indigenous seeds from the Illinois State Museum to the communities they belonged to.

At the end of the meeting, Ferguson invited attendees to become more involved with the movement and to visit the Onondaga Nation Farm.

“Everyone has a local community. You can start with your own little fire, your own family, it moves into your local community, and then it spreads to your state, your country, and that was our way that we connected,” Ferguson said. “Food is the universal way that people can sit down, listen to one another, not be angry and have a connection to others.”

Published on March 5, 2026 at 2:50 am