“Camas isn’t just camas,” said Briece Edwards, manager of the historic preservation office at the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. The iconic periwinkle wildflower blooms in Willamette Valley springtimes just as deer and elk begin their migration through the meadows, Edwards explained, presiding over a table of old-school tools, such as a kupin (a T-shaped digging tool traditionally made from antlers), at the third annual Camas Festival, hosted by Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon, in mid-May.
Camas grows in shaded white oak savannas, which were hallmarks of the landscape before settlers forced the land into timber production. Deer and elk forage on the wildflowers and acorns. As they browse, Edwards said, they paw at the ground, loosening the soil and making it easier for Native people to harvest camas bulbs later in the year. Harvesting the big bulbs helps the camas patches, aerating the soil and making room for smaller bulbs.
“You use fire as the management for both the oaks and the camas,” Edwards said.
Fire helps other plants, like ocean spray, grow straight, he went on. “Once you’ve got a nice straight stick, you can use it for basketry,” Edwards said, holding up an ocean spray stalk with an arrowhead affixed to the end. “You can use it for putting sharp pointy things on, to go get the protein that just did a nice job of turning up the soil for you.”
By harvest time, the camas blossoms are gone, replaced by pods that drop seeds into the turned soil as Native gatherers brush past them. Properly tended, the camas patch will bloom again next year and provide even more food. Camas is a cornerstone of the ecosystem that cradles it, the cultures that manage it, and the diets of Northwestern Indigenous people. It used to be so prevalent that Euro-American colonizers mistook distant camas patches for lakes. “When people hear ‘camas,’ if you’re outside of a tribal cultural understanding of it, you don’t understand all of the rest that goes with that,” Edwards said.
Linfield University’s camas festival began when the school’s environmental studies students cleared invasive Himalayan blackberry from a creekside meadow on campus. Unexpectedly, a dormant bank of camas seeds sprouted, and the university found itself with a thriving patch of Indigenous first foods. Linfield University was already working with the Grand Ronde tribes to change the name of a campus street that had previously honored a former science professor who stole Indigenous burial objects. They chose the name “Lakamas Lane,” after the Chinuk Wawa name for Camas, and the university and the tribes continued the collaboration by launching the festival.
As the creekside camas patch has spread, what started as a small event has grown into an all-day festival with artist talks, panel events, childrens’ activities, and pop-ups serving contemporary Indigenous cuisine.
“There’s nothing like camas to give you patience.”
“The future of Linfield’s Camas Festival is to co-create with Grande Ronde,” said Gerardo Ochoa, Linfield’s vice president for enrollment management and student success, in an email to HCN. “We were very intentional in starting small the first year and have since integrated several different components every year since its inception.”
But bringing public attention to camas also brings potential hazards. Camas sometimes blooms in a white variety easily confused with the white-blooming death camas — a toxic bunchflower that shares a habitat with camas and looks so similar, especially after the flowers fall during harvesting season, that it’s almost indistinguishable from edible camas. “If people don’t understand how to identify what camas [is], they are putting themselves at risk,” Edwards said. Cook death camas bulbs by accident, and predictable consequences follow.
If you do get the edible camas, undercooking it results in a painful stomachache — which happened to members of the Lewis and Clark expedition. “It’s got a chemical called inulin in it, which isn’t digestible,” said Chris Rempel (Kalapuya, Chinook, Klamath), a cultural resources specialist for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, speaking to a handful of festival-goers at a tour of the creekside camas patch. The inulin transforms into digestible sugars when cooked for two to three days in an earthen oven, although contemporary Kalapuyans could use a Crock-Pot. The process caramelizes the bulb, giving it the sweetness and consistency of a fig. “There’s nothing like camas to give you patience,” Edwards said at his festival table, noting that people tend to want things expedited. “We want our answers early. We want our plants to grow faster, and camas is anything but that.”
Newly sprouted camas looks like grass. Only after two or three years does it mature into a flowering plant, and it takes years longer for the bulbs to grow to harvestable size. “It’s all about forcing you to slow your pace,” he went on. “And that creates a relationship to the food, and the process.”
Edwards said there are always concerns — including commodification and overharvesting — when the non-Native public gets excited about an Indigenous food.
These issues of food sovereignty — or the ability of a people to source and govern its own food according to its own ways — were the focus of a panel at the end of the Camas Festival. One of the panelists was Sara Calvosa Olson (Karuk), author of the Native California cookbook Chími Nu’am, who grew up on the Hoopa Valley Reservation without electricity or indoor plumbing. Her mother gardened and her father hunted. She recognizes that this way of life might be stigmatized in the outside world. “All of our foods, they might say that they’re weeds,” Olson said, noting that the same plants aren’t considered weeds when they’re on the menu at a Bay Area Michelin-starred French restaurant. “They have rabbit, and quail, and deer meat, and our mushrooms, and our fish, and our shellfish, and all of that, that they are serving as the height of what you could eat as a human being. But they’re unavailable to the people who originally cultivated these foods into existence.”
Olson gave the example of the tan oak mushroom, a first food from her homelands that grows in few other places in the world—including Japan, where it’s called a matsutake. When Japan had a shortage in the 1990s, she explained, buyers set up shop in her community. “Foragers from all over came in and were raking the forest floor and destroying our mycelium mats and just converting this to dollars,” Olson said, adding that none of the revenues or benefits stayed in her community.
“You have the privilege to go out and gather these things without fear of harassment, but my community, who’s native to this place, we just don’t have that luxury.”
As this kind of extractive “wildcrafting” has become popular, supposedly treaty-protected Indigenous access to ancestral gathering sites has diminished, said Michelle Week (Sinixt, Arrow Lakes), who runs x̌ast sq̓it, an Indigenous foods farm in east Multnomah County. “You have the privilege to go out and gather these things without fear of harassment, but my community, who’s native to this place, we just don’t have that luxury.”
Alexa Numkena-Anderson (Hopi, Cree, Yakama, and Skokomish), a chef who’s trained in French cooking techniques and recently opened a pop-up Indigenous restaurant in Portland called Javelina, said public ignorance of Indigenous foods affects her financial model. “People are willing to pay exorbitant prices for French food,” she said, “but people know nothing about Indigenous foods. So they will gripe about the prices that I have, even if they are reasonable.”
These issues reflect a complicated line walked by the bearers of Indigenous food culture, who seek to get the public involved and educated without sacrificing cultural resources to the destructive capitalist forces that have already badly damaged Native communities.
According to Edwards, instead of hoarding information with a scarcity mindset, tribes can invite the public into the abundance that’s natural to tribal cultures. From there, Natives can teach other people about developing relationships with plants like camas and taking responsibility for understanding how to process and consume them. “And with that,” he said, “there is stewardship.”
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