Our Sustenance, the plants, and the trees: cultural persistence wild and heirloom food species in Haudenosaunee communities

Haudenosaunee culture is fundamentally connected to the ecology of their homeland through food traditions. Many people are devoted to education and restoration of wild and heirloom food practices as key components of nutritional security, sovereignty, and justice. These educational efforts to transmit the knowledge and skills of traditional foods are central to ethical ecological identities and to peoples' ability to be environmental caretakers. This paper will contribute to these processes, by demonstrating the temporal depth and continuity of Haudenosaunee plant practices through archival and community sources from three time periods: 1. Oral history; 2. Archival sources from the 1940s - 1970s; 3. Recently compiled publications and my notes from 2011 - 2016. The paper will gather Haudenosaunee ethnobotanical knowledge, to be eventually depicted as a calendric cycle and in Indigenous ethnoecological mapping, to support cultural flourishing and the protection of biodiversity in the northeast.