An Oregon farm dedicated to growing Native American First Foods is thriving and teaching a new generation of tribal farmers
Spring Alaska Schreiner is an Alaska Native who owns Sakari Farms on six acres of land in Tumalo, just west of Bend, Ore. The farms also include a group of all-women/Native owners who specialize in growing traditional Native American First Foods.
Schreiner is an enrolled member of the Inupiaq in Valdez, Alaska, and a shareholder of the Chugach Alaska Native Corporation, one of 13 Alaska Native Regional Corporations created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. She moved to Oregon from Colorado in 2006 when she transitioned from natural resource management to farming native foods. She and her non-native husband, Sam, who is the farm manager, entered the farming business in 2009 to address the lack of Native American First Foods in Oregon and committed to the company full-time in 2012.
We toured the farm shortly after the final harvest in early October due to an early frost and wildfires.
“I got into the farming business because my background was in wetland restoration, stream hydrology, mine reclamation, and fish habitat – growing native plants for fish habitat, that kind of thing,” Schreiner said as we sat at a picnic table in front of a stone fireplace where she bakes salmon during tribal cooking classes. Schreiner said her focus before farming was wetland restoration in Colorado. That work wasn’t available when she moved to Oregon, so she gravitated to river restoration. She got a job with the Soil and Water Conservation District. She transitioned to working as an agricultural consultant – and that’s when farming came into her life, focusing on Native American First Foods.
“I started that concept here in Oregon in 2009 with a small business because I noticed that I couldn’t find my own foods here,” she said. “I started growing them for myself, and then I noticed there wasn’t anywhere else for people to purchase them or obtain them. So, I started a business selling them.”
The farm donates 60 percent of its crops to Tribes annually. Schreiner explained that donating and trading food is a Native tradition, and she likes to maintain that tradition by donating food to different tribes in the state each year. “The way we have our farm set up is that we grow food to donate first,” she explained. “Because Natives give everything. We’re not trying to be rich. We’re just trying to give. We grow everything first to give, and what’s left, we make foods with the tribal shelf staple foods. So, it’s working.”
Schreiner said food donations are made annually to three to five tribes. This year, the Klamath Tribes were the recipients during the “Every Child Matters” conference held on Sept. 26. Jars of smoked Chinook salmon, Native seeds, and squash were delivered by tribal member Abby Hall. “The model of trying to give first and then profit is the way Natives want to do it,” she said, “because we’re trying to live in a world where we’re supposed to give everything away, but in the white world, it’s about making money. So, I’m trying to balance them.”
The farm’s inventory includes many Native American First Foods and products made from them, including a wide selection of smoked and roasted vegetables, berries for making jams and other products, roasted vegetables like roasted curry squash, spices and herbs, hot sauces, and smoked salmon, to name a few.
Schreiner said cooking Native foods was an essential part of her upbringing. “I was raised around it like picking berries, picking medicine, fishing, gathering things all the time, wanting to be a little scientist, being curious, playing in the water all the time,” she said.
Opening a farm dedicated to Native American First Foods was daunting, she admitted, and it took her some years to muster the courage to forge ahead with the business plan. “I think it felt safer to be all in as I got older,” she said, “because there’s a lot of lateral racism and not a lot of support to be Native in the Lower 48. And I still feel that today. But yeah, it just kind of swooped in because I found that I didn’t have my resources here, so I created them.”
But it didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t until six years after they bought the farm that the business started to take off. “Once we bought the farm, we had more land to grow more food, and then you sell more food,” she said. “I think the networking came because I teach a lot. I teach a lot of Native food sovereignty and Native education. So, I think those connections started there because I had been vetted and trusted about the work that I’m doing, and I make really good food to eat too. So that’s where it takes a while in Indian country to get vetted to do the work, unfortunately.”
In addition to the farm, the business operates a small tribal grocery store, the first in the state to offer only tribal food. Items like rose hip tea and lip butter, along with hot sauces, one of which won best hot sauce by Portland Monthly, smoked cedar salt and other spices from native plants, frozen elderberries and currants, native squashes, a rare Hopi Indian potato, the size of a dried pinto bean, and grows stocks of Hopi blue corn, which she smokes and mills to make tortillas. The farm also produces Native American medicinal plants and herbs like yarrow herbs and nettles and owns a seed bank of rare tribal seeds, one of a select few in the country. She grows the seeds and holds them in large bags in a storage shack, preserving them for future use.
Next to the grocery store is a commercial kitchen for tribal members to cook and develop food products to sell, like smoked elk, as was displayed in a cannery jar on a kitchen shelf. It is the first Native commercial kitchen outside a tribal reservation in Oregon, Schreiner proudly stated. She added that it is an Oregon Dept. of Agriculture-certified commercial kitchen. In addition, Schreiner said she teaches tribal cooking classes in the kitchen, keeping the classes small with around 15 to 20 students, mostly from tribes in the state. She also has seven greenhouses on the property to complement the outdoor farming.
Schreiner said the farm is very profitable, and she has 90 national wholesale accounts. Hiring Native American staff is a priority to continue the First Food farming tradition with tribal members and ensure the work continues. She is committed to supporting the community through cultural and educational work despite the challenges of rising costs.
“The goal for me is to pass the torch to get as many youths involved doing food work,” she said. “Ag work, food sovereignty, work, science education, so that I don’t have to do it all myself because it needs to be done. There’s a huge demand for eating healthy, and the traditional foods in First Foods. That’s all we used to have, and now it’s disappearing. So, I’m trying to keep it going, and I think I’ll do it for another 10 years because I’m really tired already. My body hurts, and my brain is tired. So, I’ll give it another 10 years and retire at 60.”
