David Wise: Growing Good Medicine

Today, we’re very excited to speak with David Wise, descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and founder of Native Wise, a farm which is focused on soil health, restorative farming and Indigenous agricultural practices.

David started his bison herd after a dream with Chief Buffalo, who told him to bring back his namesake. Starting with twelve, he now has a herd that numbers close to sixty, including Renegade and Brutus, two bulls that have become best buddies. The ranch is also home to three Ojibwe Spirit Horses. David and wife Patra teach their kids that good food is good medicine. They share that good medicine with the community through Native Wise’s seasonal CSAs and online store.

Transcript:

David Wise: There’s never a dull moment with the bison. Sometimes there’s mellow as can be, and then sometimes I just think, oh my god. I hope my fences are good enough. They do this thing. Whenever they get into a new paddock, they run around kicking their legs off to the side. When I put bales out there, they’ll rip those bales all up with their horns, and they’ll be running around with hay, and they’re just super fun to watch.

Cole Premo: Boozhoo and welcome to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. I’m your host, Cole Premo.

Leah Lemm: And I’m your other host Leah Lemm. Miigwech for joining us. Native Lights is a podcast and radio show, but more than that, it’s a place for Native folks to tell their stories. Every week, we have great conversations with captivating guests from a bunch of different backgrounds, musicians, community leaders, doctors, language warriors, you name it. We talk to them. They have a wonderful mixture of passions, and they share with us their gifts and how they share those gifts with their community, and it all centers around the point of purpose in our lives. And it’s another day, another opportunity to amplify Native Voices. Cole, how are you doing?

Cole Premo: I’m doing great. We were talking a little bit about sleep before we started the recording. Just trying to, you know, trying to get as much as possible these days.

Leah Lemm: Just trying to.

Cole Premo: But, you know, it’s hard to get rid of the distractions. Sometimes I put on an audio book to go to sleep. But it keeps me awake because I just, I’m so captivated. How are you doing on that whole situation?

Leah Lemm: Sleep is tough. You know, I think it’s, you know, it’s lighter outside. Gets lighter in the morning. That puppy wants up every morning, 5:30 at the latest. I try to go back to sleep after letting him out. But you know, it’s to be seen whether or not that happens, depending on the morning. But yeah, it’s tough. But I like listening to audio books too, or podcasts. Of course. Sometimes they’re, they’re so good that it keeps you awake.

Cole Premo: What’s your preferred number of hours of sleep?

Leah Lemm: Eight, nine. How about you?

Cole Premo: If I don’t get, you know, more than seven, I’m getting kind of grumpy. So yeah, at least seven, but 7.5 to 8 preferred, definitely.

Leah Lemm: Yeah. I think if I start dipping down that much, I’m kind of wrecked for the day. But do you do anything else to try to improve your sleep health?

Cole Premo: I think just keeping a solid schedule helps trying to get at least started. Start the process at a certain time, winding down, getting the blue screens out of your face.

Leah Lemm: Oh yeah, yeah. Right. For me, yeah.

Cole Premo: Try not to eat so close to bed too is a good thing. So we’re working on it. It’s a process. But onto a not so sleepy subject: Our guest for today. We’re very excited to speak with David Wise, descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and founder of Native Wise Farm. He and his wife Patra and their family supply CSA boxes, and they have an online store. David also has a ranch where they’ve introduced a bison herd. So we’ll talk all about that and more. Boozhoo, David.

David Wise: Hi there. Boozhoo.

Leah Lemm: Boozhoo.

Cole Premo: All right. Well, boozhoo, David, could you start by introducing yourself and letting us know where you’re joining us from?

David Wise: Boozhoo. I’m coming to you from the Fond du Lac Reservation over here at Nagaajiwanaang, and we’re on the southwest corner of the reservation here at Native Wise Ranch.

Cole Premo: Great How are you doing? How’s your family doing good?

David Wise: Everyone’s doing good. We did a little bit of prescribed burning, did a lot of snow, but we wanted to burn one of our old blueberry patches, so it’s nice to get that done early this spring. Otherwise, after that, it’s been pretty dry. I

Cole Premo: understand that you just welcomed a kiddo to the family.

David Wise: Little uh, Migizi June. She’s named after my mom. She was born in February. The latest edition. She’s doing great.

Cole Premo: Good to hear.

David Wise: Twenty-two inches long. She’s going to be a tall girl.

Cole Premo: Congratulations.

David Wise: Thank you. We had six baby bison born this spring. So far six. We got Renegade. I traded the Red Lake Nation for some white fish that we did from Lake Superior for their Christmas party a few years ago. And they had a bull up there that he had quite a history when he was little. He ran away, and so they named him Renegade. And just about the time that they thought they might have to harvest him, because he was so far away from the pen, and he was getting off the rez, he came back, just like a miracle, and got back in there. And then they actually wrote a children’s book about him. But he was related to a lot of the cows, so they were nice enough to trade them to us.

Leah Lemm: Wonderful. Well, why don’t you give us a bit of an overview of Native Wise, your company, please.

David Wise: Well, we specialize in Native food, or what we call good medicine. My grandmother always said good food is good medicine. And so that’s what we kind of modeled our business off of. We started it. My family’s always, you know, did a lot of wild rice harvesting and processing, and we, you know, sold that. And we always had big gardens and stuff. We started a CSA back in 2019 and so we were providing vegetable boxes once a week to Duluth, basically to a lot of different people around Duluth. And it was organized through the AICHO. The American Indian Community Housing Organization in Duluth helped us organize it. We also donated a couple boxes every week to Native American community and inner-city Duluth, like needy families and stuff like that, whatever we’d have extra. And so that was a really great relationship. It got our name out there. And my kids are kind of younger. They’re like eight and five. The ones that are able to help. Maggie can’t quite do much yet, but anyway, they help put the boxes together every week. We also did CBD hemp. We grew that, five acres of that, on our property, and we hired community members to help our wild rice, the maple syrup and maple sugar that we produced. We do bees on our ranch too, because they help out with pollination, and they also are just great to have around. And honey is so healing and good.

So I did this report for work for the USDA. At the time, I was a tribal liaison. I worked with all 11 federally recognized tribes in Minnesota. After I graduated from college, I went on to work for the NRCS [Natural Resources Conservation Service] as tribal liaison. My main job there was trying to help roll out the farm bill to tribes and help them understand all the different possibilities in the Farm Bill and interpret some of the different, you know, like complicated rules and things like that. And that was pretty rewarding, and I got to learn a lot about some of the needs of the tribes. It really made me think a lot about food sovereignty and like where we were as a people, and what kind of food we’re eating, and how healthy we were at that time. And I started thinking there’s a lot of things that we could do to improve our health, to improve our connection back to the land. You know, one of the projects I had to work on was for my job was called working effectively with American Indians. So it would basically be training the government employees on how to network with the tribes, like some of the protocol and part of my presentation I had. I was researching tribal leaders and giving a report on historical leaders. And so I picked Chief Buffalo. He was one of the chiefs that signed a lot of the different treaties in the 1800s and I found out that I was related to Chief Buffalo. He was actually would have been my like, seven generations back. My grandfather, his daughter married a man, and then that was where our last name came from.

Cole Premo: You’re listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today we’re speaking with David Wise. David is a descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Superior Chippewa, and is the founder of Native Wise Farm, which focuses on Indigenous agricultural practices, restorative farming and soil health. So why did you want to work with the bison? Tell us about the process of bringing them back to the registration, back to the ranch.

David Wise: I started having a lot of dreams about Chief Buffalo, and I was like, thinking about how it was back in his time and all that. And then one time he was talking about bring back his namesake, or bring back the buffalo, you know? And we didn’t even own the ranch at the time, and it ended up that my cousin was, you know, she doesn’t even live around here, so she ended up giving us a great deal on part of it, the ranch. And then just at about the same time, we learned about this Tonka Project, where there’s this organization that helps bring bison that are on public lands, instead of slaughtering them or sell them to non-Natives. They bring them back to the reservations, and they work with tribal landowners. So there’s another organization called the Intertribal Bison Association. They work mostly with tribes. And I worked with both of these organizations in my job, or knew of them. You know. Because we did a lot of like habitat work with the tribes, we contacted them, and we were able to get on their list and meet the requirements. Some of the requirements is, you have to have land, you have to have watering system that’s adequate, you have to have fencing and a few other things. And they also have some funding to help out with that. We were able to tap into some different USDA funding for some of our fencing and things like that. And bison has been our latest and for sure, for me, the most enjoyable. Just to see them back on the landscape. We’re setting up a real high-quality rotational grazing, so that we’ll be able to rotate the animals, like, every seven or eight days to a new paddock that’s nice and fresh and green. It’s not all crazy in western like, you know, Yellowstone or something like that, you just open the gate up and, like, they just want to go to the other one, and as long as you treat the bison with respect, they don’t try to get out. You know, I did build these big like Jurassic Park fences to begin with, because that was, like the requirement, or whatever, and but they’re just fine. I did have a little break at one time. We call them the Dirty Dozen, and they got out. But they were real small, and they got out into the big backfield that I haven’t gotten fenced in yet. And that was quite the adventure. Oh my God. They almost made it out. They were going down our driveway, and the neighbor guy, I called him, and he headed them off, and just by chance, happened to be going by. He’s our tribal chairman now, by the way. I call him up. I’m like, Hey, where are you? And he’s like, Oh, I’m just on Spirit Lake Road. And I’m like, Hey, can you drive up my road? My wife always just laughs because he was eating a bag of Doritos or something, just munching down, driving in his little Volkswagen car. And all of a sudden, here’s the bison running right in front of him, and they went back up and into the along this riverbank where we wanted them to go. And I literally fenced it off for like, three days in a row just to get, like, a temporary fence up. And those little buggers were watching me the whole time, trying to, like, think about getting out. Feels crazy. And then finally, I lured them back in with all the others. They wanted to get back in with all the other bison. And so I took these cattle panels and I made a funnel type thing. They like apples and pumpkins and stuff and like, you know, like alfalfa pellets and stuff like that. So I got some of them to come back in there through, like a fish trap, kind of a narrow, you know. So they went in between there, and then they got back in with the other ones. But there was still, like, seven or eight of them out. And so then I was thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to do. The weather was getting cold. I thought they might go across the river if it froze, and I had to keep notifying, like, the authorities and everything. And finally, one day, I got them all to go into the corral, the ones that were in. And then we got the gate opened up in the back. And that night, they they all came back. And so we snuck around the back, and we just caught him like it was like, oh my god, it’s crazy.

Cole Premo: I’m curious, David, how much experience have you had with bison before you introduced them into the ranch?

David Wise: Well, pretty much, not much, other than what I read. And you know, my uncle was a Native American cattle guy his whole life, and that’s kind of a rare deal. He just loved farming, and he had dairy cows and beef cows, and he was like an old bachelor, and he just loved it. And I helped him all the time. I would go there and help him with cleaning and feeding the baby calves and all that. So, you know, I kind of knew a lot about animals. We always had gardens, so I knew a lot about crops. Land that we live on here isn’t like a typical farm, you know, it’s like some of the areas are wooded that I got fenced off, so there’s grasses that grow underneath the trees. And they love that area. They absolutely love it. We had a fire on the ranch. They loved it where it burnt, and they tear up the brush. And one lady from the USDA came out. She’s like, well, you can’t fence in those, those wooded areas. And I said, Well, I’ve been reading about bison, and they, they actually love to have some woods in their paddocks, you know. So anyway, I finally convinced her, after she’s seen how good they were doing in there.

Leah Lemm: How many bison Do you have?

David Wise: We started out with 12, and we had 12 for like, a year. And then we got those 20, and that was the Dirty Dozen that got out. And they were just, yeah, they were crazy little buggers. And then we got like, 15 more. And then the babies were born. And I think now we’re up to like, 50. Oh, we had to, we had to butcher one from the ranch. He got injured by a bigger bull, I think, is what happened. Because I went out there in the morning and he was having problems. But he was fine to salvage and stuff. Right now, we’re up to, I think 56 or somewhere around that number.

Leah Lemm: Do they have names?

David Wise: Oh, my wife named one Boss Babe, because she’s like the bossy cow, lead one. I did name one other one, Rosie. She got off the truck and she had a bloody broken horn from the trip over. Kind of grew a little bit funny. So I can recognize her. And she’s always super friendly and like, they know the second I start my tractor up, or what I’m doing. When they first got here, they weren’t real vocal. And now, like when I’m out there, they’re just, they talk and they grunt, and those babies are crazy. Oh my God. They just, I can’t believe how fast they can run and right up to the fence, and they’ll spin around the other. There’s never a dull moment with the bison. Sometimes there’s mellow as can be. And then sometimes I just think, oh my God, I hope my fences are good enough. They do this thing. Whenever they get into a new paddock, they run around kicking their legs off to the side. When I put bales out there, they’ll rip those bales all up with their horns, and they’ll be running around with hay. They’re just super fun to watch. In our herd here, we’re kind of just kind of trying to build up, like a good genetic diversity. So the one bull’s from Wind Cave in South Dakota. The other bull came from the zoo. His name is Brutus, and he’s a monster. He’s like 12 years old but he always lived in the zoo, and so he just loves it out here. And they got into it a little bit. At first. They butted heads for probably about 20 minutes. And now they’re like best buddies. They just lay together out on the field. They have a little wallows up there, and they always go to the highest points, and then they’ll be checking out what’s going on.

Leah Lemm: Yeah, I was gonna ask just one more question about the bison, if they play. So do they like splash around in the puddles or anything like that?

David Wise: They play, fight all the time, and I don’t like to get to know them too good, because some of the bulls will probably get butchered, you know. But the cows, we’re trying to keep all them for our breeding stock. We haven’t really been butchering too many of ours right off the ranch, yet. Our latest project is we’re building a warehouse. It’s all up. We got it all done, except for the inside, like some of the plumbing and stuff still needs to be done. But we’re hoping that we can start doing quarters and halves from the ranch. In the near future, we’re planning a workshop some of our niijiis, our brothers, and sisters from South Dakota are going to come over. We want to know how to utilize like right now we use the bones. The fat gets used, made into cosmetics. So we want to be able to utilize the whole animal, donate the head or whatever for, you know, Native art, part of the hair, for ceremonial purposes, the hides. We want to be able to utilize the whole animal. These people are going to come over and talk to us about that kind of thing. And then I have a large outdoor wood smoker. You know, for generations my family smoked Lake Superior trout, white fish, deer, meat, all that stuff. But I want to learn their way. They talk about making these products where they just hang them up over a fire, and there’s really not even any seasonings added to it. So it’s a little bit different than like a traditional jerky that you’d put more seasonings and stuff on. An old elder named Virgil [Two Eagle, Sr.], Black Feather Ranch, I think is the name of his ranch. He’s right down in the South Dakota, Nebraska Wyoming kind of border down in there. Anyways, he’s coming up, and then his nephew and a few other people, and a couple other elders, I think, from over there, and then anyone else that wants to come. I think Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef’s coming, some of his staff, and we’re going to do a traditional harvest, and then talk about how to utilize that entire animal in a good way. Yeah, we want to reconnect our community. We try to do as many workshops with the youth.

Leah Lemm: You’re listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today we’re speaking with David Wise. David is a descendant of the Fond du Lac Band and is the founder of Native Wise Farm, which focuses on Indigenous agricultural practices, restorative farming and soil health.

Cole Premo: So Ojibwe Spirit Horses, you also have these on the ranch. Could you talk a little bit about that?

David Wise: These elders contacted me. They just came over there. Like, can we come over? We’re from First Nations in Canada. And I was like, Yeah, sure. And, you know, I didn’t even know them, you know, and they just came over one February day, and they sat on the couch for a while, and they looked around. I showed them around. I thought, you know, they said they wanted to see what the ranch was like and stuff. So I showed them the bison. I showed them a few horses that we had. We had a couple horses, and my wife made food for them, some hot dish, and we just visited. Before they left, they said, You know, we’re getting up there in age, and we’re looking for a good fit for some of these Ojibwe Spirit Horses. And they start telling us a story about the Ojibwe Spirit Horse. They almost were extinct, and there used to be a lot of them. They always lived around here. They’re unique animals. They got different genetics than all other horses. And I didn’t even know about them up until these elders told me the story. And then I started looking at trying to do some research into it. And it turns out that there were down to only four of them. The Canadian government was trying to hunt them down and kill them because they were eating their crops and stuff. And so these three or four guys from Bois Forte Reservation went out into Canada and got them and brought them back. They were using them for, like, helping with logging and stuff like that, pulling nets from the water, which is kind of what their original use was. Little bit smaller than a typical horse, but they’re kind of shaped like a little workhorse, and they’re really cute little things. They got strong hoofs and really thick, long tails and manes. They got a special nose flap to keep the really cold air out of their lungs. In the wintertime, they’re well adapted to hearing, and they eat a lot of like the Native browse is what’s good for them. Like, if you feed them like clover or anything like that, they’ll get almost like diabetic symptoms. So the one had gotten into too much of that. So when we came here, the little Native lady from Canada said, do not let him eat like clover and stuff. You got to give him like the swamp grass. His name’s Shy Boy. And we got Shy Boy on a somewhat of a diet, and now he’s like, I mean, he’s doing amazing. Any kid can ride him. We take him to the school sometimes, just so people can meet him. And yeah, he’s like the ambassador for the Ojibwe Spirit Horse. He’s a really cool horse. And then his little buddy, Echo, he’s a little more of a handful, but he’s cute and good too. And then we have Ochitimoo, and she’s the Grey Squirrel. Got like, a gray coat with a stripe down her back. She was supposed to be pregnant when she came. So I was like, well, we gotta feed this horse pretty good, you know. So I put it on with the other mares and thinking, oh, man, she’s gonna have such a cute baby. One of these days here. Went past her due date, and here she was getting fat from eating too much, and she wasn’t even pregnant. She’s a cute little thing, and the kids can ride her. She’s kind of big for an Ojibwe Spirit Horse. She’s almost, I think she’s 13 and a half hands. So that’s like, definitely not a pony. I’d definitely consider that a horse, but kind of a smaller horse. So yeah, they get along really good with the bison, they’re nose to nose on the fence sometimes when we rotate them. And one thing I noticed about those Ojibwe horses was they almost had, like, a memory for the bison, like they weren’t scared of them. I got a quarter horse and a thoroughbred. They were all wound up like, Oh, these things are gonna kill us, like they’re big bear. I mean, they were all just freaking out. Had to take a lot of time to, like, finally get them used to it. The little Ojibwe horse I went down or the first day after we got him, he’s laying down right next to the fence by the bison. They’re just, like, taking a nap. And I’m like, wow, he’s not scared of him at all. Shy Boy, just that was the only Ojibwe horse we had for two years. And then we got the other ones. Our goal to try to bring the breed back. So we hope that Ochitimoo can have a baby, because their genetics is really like limited. And so we’re working with the University and trying to do like a non-profit to raise money to help bring them back. We’re just care taken for them. You know, the elders still own their horses, but we’re just taking care of them, and we hope that all the tribal communities could have Spirit Horses and be reconnected with them, because they are so cool and they’re different than all other horses. They’re more uniquely adapted to our area. They want to be around people, a lot of horses do, but they take it to a different level. You know? They’re really friendly.

Cole Premo: Great. Yeah. I was curious how their temperament is different.

David Wise: You know, they’re just bred differently. And these guys are kind of like that. They’re like, they’re like, a little miniature draft horse or something. They’re real chill, and they’re strong. Boy, we trim our own horses’ hooves, because you gotta clean all their feet. Then you gotta sit there and try to hold all that weight up and trim them. And those Ojibwe Horses’ hooves, they would never need shoes. Man, they got like, the toughest hooves in the world. I mean, you can just barely cut through them. Echo wouldn’t let anyone trim his hooves unless he was sedated or whatever, because he didn’t trust people. But this old guy that I bought a saddle from, he was, like, feeling bad when I bought the saddle. I was like, why don’t you come out to the ranch and help? Turns out he did all kinds of, like, crazy rodeo stuff back in the day, and he just loves working with horses. And so he comes out, and he’s made a great bond with Echo, and now we can actually trim his hooves without any kind of medication or anything. So he’s doing, he’s doing really good.

Leah Lemm: Well, I see here on your shop, in your online shop, that you have a buffalo t-shirt that says, Do not pet the fluffy cows. And also I see that you use the label Mino Mashkiki. Is there a story behind that?

David Wise: Yeah, my grandma always said that “Mino mashkiki,” you know? She would always talk about good medicine. Good food is good medicine. She said she had like, a little medicine shop in her one room with all of her different stuff. If something happened, she would break out whatever would be good for that. I remember one time I got poison ivy, and she broke out this fire weed root, and she had it all mushed up, and she put that on there, and, man, it made it feel pretty good, you know? So, yeah, those old grandmothers, they sure know a lot of things.

Cole Premo: Well, thank you so much for your time. We always like to ask, as we close out our chat here, just if you have any final thoughts?

David Wise: Yeah, I would just have an open invitation to anyone. We like to donate to different causes if there’s a good cause, you know, some of our products. And yeah, I’d like to see more Native local businesses spawn from maybe some of our ideas, or maybe some different ideas. I think we can create our own little economies if we, if we try hard enough, miigwech and giga-waabamin.

Leah Lemm: David Wise, very fun, clearly, very knowledgeable now about bison, and a lot of good information there about them. And it’s really fun to hear about the Ojibwe Spirit Horses too.

Cole Premo: Exactly, and their personalities. I hear that. You know he’s doing that work. So thank you to our guest, David Wise. He is a descendant of the Fond du Lac Band. He is the founder of Native Wise Farm, which focuses on Indigenous agricultural practices, restorative farming and soil health. I’m Cole Premo.

Leah Lemm: And I’m Leah Lemm. Miigwech for listening. Giga-waabamin.

Cole Premo: Giga-waabamin. Leah Lemm: You’re listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

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