During Wisconsin’s season-stealing turn this year on Bravo’s “Top Chef,” one episode stood out – when the cheftestants were asked to cook a modern dish using Indigenous ingredients.
Guest chefs Sean Sherman and Elena Terry curated the pantry for this challenge and cooked a meal of wild rice patties and cedar-braised bison to help set the cheftestants on their path. It was a transformative experience for Terry, a Ho-Chunk Nation member and founder of Wild Bearies, a Wisconsin Dells-based nonprofit that provides mentorship and support focused around ancestral foods.
“I know for myself, to be considered on that level, an expert – it’s been a long time coming,” she says. Terry talked with MilMag about food, mission and the national holiday many of us celebrate.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
How does the name Wild Bearies reflect you and the group?
It’s me, it’s my daughter, it’s this group of incredible individuals that, together, we’re stronger. It’s we instead of I, the “Bearies” [referring to members of the Ho-Chunk’s Bear Clan]. And we named it Wild because I’m unapologetically myself. I’m tired of trying to conform. Being authentic individuals is not something that we’re really given the privilege of doing in our community.
What is one of the ways Wild Bearies serves its mission?
We have a space for our culinary mentorship program, where [I can give back] teachings that I had the privilege of receiving throughout my life, from tribal elders, to my community. Wild Bearies, very transparently, is a program for people in our community who are overcoming alcohol and other drug abuse issues or emotional trauma through the healing power of our food.
And it sounds like a very simple statement, but for our community, tribal communities, nobody is exempt from one of those two categories. And so it drops the wall of intimidation for people who really, truly need that space to come back to community [and] be proud of what we created together. This is the medicine that we’re talking about.
You and your fellow Wild Bearies traveled to Washington D.C. last summer to present at the Indigenous Voices of the Americas program at the Smithsonian. What do you hope experiences like that lead to?
I was able to open a door for a soil health specialist and a pollinating expert to come and talk about the work they’re doing, about how impactful it is in their lives, and to give these young women a space to share their journey with people who are affected by that journey – who have something to learn from that. So what a perfect outcome for me would be to see more of them supported.
If I could be a door opener and not a gatekeeper for women in my tribe, for Indigenous women or chefs or community members – like tribal people in general, to find space – that is the win for my work. And every day, I’m just blessed to be able to do something I love. I love being a chef, and there’s no other job in the world aside from being a mom that I would like to do.
Many Indigenous Americans see Thanksgiving as a day of mourning. How can we honor them on this holiday?
I’m not anti-Thanksgiving, but I would really like to have the day be a day to open up a conversation about America’s true history. And not in a way that has to be negative, but in a way that you acknowledge that there was somebody that existed on this land prior to us coming, and maybe it would be making a wild rice dish, or even having the conversation be about your local Indigenous people. Just an acknowledgement of the history that brought us to this day.
