(bright music) - These are gilled bracket mushrooms and there's a lot of new growth.

There's also hen of the woods that grows back here, but they are in larger clusters and it'll have a slightly fruity aroma to them, also.

My culture has always influenced my perspective in cooking.

I like to bring the element of food medicine to everything that I do.

As far as Indigenous cuisine, it's just being elevated now, but a lot of the practices have always been there, and so now it's my job to kind of take what I've learned with my cultural background and bring that to the people.

It's just an invitation, really, for people to see what's out there, to taste it, and then get a little bit of knowledge on how they can go out and do it themselves.

My name is Candace Stock.

We're just north of Moorhead, Minnesota on Doubting Thomas Farms.

Foraging is land stewardship practice.

It's going out into the wilderness and interacting with all the plants.

It is a necessary interaction.

Foraging heals me, and I heal the land by tending to it.

There are a lot of invasive species and so in foraging that is also a practice and going out and pulling those invasive plants so that the native plants can flourish, but then being able to harvest all of these nutrient dense plants that can be consumed at home.

People have been looking for food medicine.

They've been looking for more natural ways to cure their ailments, and so especially being Native American, diabetes has always been a big issue and so getting back to the Indigenous diet really helps to resolve those issues.

This little flower has the anti-anxiety properties to it.

I'll make beverages somewhere with these kind of properties.

Staghorn sumac is also a really good one.

Kind of gets the blood flowing, makes people feel a little bit more relaxed.

I grew up on a farm near White Earth, Minnesota, and harvesting throughout the year was always a big part of my childhood.

So my grandmother on my mom's side is full blood native, and so she taught me about the medicine and how that would be applied and how to harvest it honorably in the native way.

In native way, foraging is about building a relationship with the earth.

Our involvement has always been that we are designed to tend the earth, and I think that in society we've been working backwards.

This is nature's candy.

This knowledge is supposed to be multi-generational.

We're supposed to be talking about it, we're supposed to be practicing it, and so the more people that are interested, the better.

Getting the youth involved right away, incredibly important, because these are memories that last.

So at Doubting Thomas Farms, we bring groups out to the farm.

I'll forage with them, do a small cooking demonstration afterwards, or just show them how to process some of the ingredients that we forage.

But I think that, you know, the long walks and the interaction with the plants and then having that nourishment at the end really drives home the purpose of why we do it.

People get to taste the fruits of the labor right away and it creates a stronger memory and absorption of the process.

In the harvesting practice, I pick with intention, I think it's very important to be prepared.

You have to bring proper bags, baskets, and you wanna align them and respect the plant so that it keeps its integrity.

Learning foraging, if you don't have a guide, there are a lot of plant identifier apps now, and I think it's best to just go out and catalog as much as you can.

Once you find things that are edible, you can take them home and process them if you feel comfortable.

If you don't, it's best to have a friend, I guess, that you can bounce some of these things off of.

But I think that the foraging community in the Moorhead and Fargo area are really expanding.

More people are practicing these different land stewardship practices and so there's more of a platform for it, I guess.

I only feel good when I forage.

It's the best way for me to ground myself, to heal, to kind of reset.

Working in a kitchen or in an office really drains me.

And so the only way to really build myself back up is to be able to connect with nature.

I'd say there are a lot of lessons that I've learned in my career when it comes to preparing medicinal foods.

So the practice of foraging really connects me to my ancestors.

This land was meant to be tended to.

It was meant to be shared.

And as far as the nutrients that come from it, it's a big part of my mission in my career as a chef to share that medicine and that nourishment.

- [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.