In the summer of 2018, Matthew Wilson embarked on his first native-foods forage, a casual outing with friends on the Rosebud Reservation in rural southern South Dakota, where he grew up as a member of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate Nation. At 26 years old, he unearthed for the first time one of the prairie's most prolific provisions: a wild turnip known as timpsila in the Lakota language.
"I picked up the root and peeled back the skin," Wilson remembers. "Right there in the field, I took my first bite, and it was a powerful moment. Even though I had never tasted timpsila, its starchy sweetness was so familiar to me. It's like my spirit instantly recognized it." He speculates it was a surge of ancestral knowledge, downloading in one fateful moment; like many Indigenous peoples, the Sioux regard land stewardship as spiritual practice. Wotakuye is the Lakota belief that everything is interdependent and connected, and therefore, everything is kin.
