Ancestral Healing

Ancestral Healing

Wild Food Donations Bring Home and Heart to Hospital Stays

Food can bring you back home, it can connect you with others, and it can create or rekindle a love of the land, water, and air that surrounds us.

At Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), we believe food is medicine. Not only in the way it tastes but also in the way it connects us to our culture and our way of life. It serves as a vital asset to the care we deliver to our patients. For our people, harvesting our food is a sacred connection that has been passed down for generations dating back millennia.

ANTHC has recently returned Food and Nutritional Services to in-house management. Through this transition, we’ll streamline our operations and gain the flexibility to collaborate with our community in important ways including our Traditional Foods Program.

We incorporate Traditional Foods in our Alaska Native Medical Center inpatient menu as well as in our cafeterias. The Traditional Foods Donation Program relies on food donations of hunted and gathered foods from Alaskans that can’t be purchased, like seal, moose, caribou, and much more. We partner with Alaska Native and local Alaska businesses to create commercial partnerships. Why? Traditional foods are comforting, healing, and they taste like home.

We are grateful for the donations we receive and the partnerships we have created. ANTHC’s Food and Nutrition Services staff can feed salmon bellies, fish head soup, moose, caribou, Alaska Native farmed reindeer, and so much more in the 5,000+ meals we serve per day. Amy Foote, our Director of Traditional Foods and Executive Chef, says the intention behind donations can be quite powerful. “One of the things that I love is when someone has had an auntie or a grandma or grandpa in the hospital who we’ve helped heal through food, so they want to come back in and give back by donating berries or fish or moose or seal.”

The Traditional Foods Donation Program relies on food donations of hunted and gathered foods from Alaskans that can’t be purchased, like seal, moose, caribou, and much more.

As you plan your next dipnetting trip this summer or get ready for a fall moose hunt, please contact us so we can work with you to collect your donations.

All donated foods that are received will be used in their entirety. Nothing goes to waste. Anything deemed unusable due to human food safety guidelines is given back to local programs that support Alaska animals or returned to the land and the sea.

If you are interested in donating or have questions about traditional foods being served at ANMC, please email NativeFoods4Life@anthc.org, call 907-729-2682, or 907-575-3486 after hours, or email Amy Foote, Executive Chef and Director of Traditional Foods, at afoote@anthc.org.