Tlaa Deneldel Community Group
Reclaiming our sovereignty and self-sufficiency. Building a regenerative future that centers wellness. Rematriating the landscape.
About Us: Tlaa Deneldel Community Group is a Nenana-based effort to create spaces for intergenerational learning and healing while restoring relationships with our ancestral lands and waters. Places where our Elders, youth, and community members can gather to decolonize themselves, practice traditional skills and values, and most importantly, be held and supported through collective healing. We use art, media, and storytelling to share our journey of reclaiming our land and ourselves.
Our work is much deeper than agriculture, land rights, and Indigenous stewardship - it is inspired by our peoples’ need to heal through food and culture. Our relationships with the environment, our foods, traditions, and values, and each other has been traumatized. Reconnecting those pathways is powerful medicine.
Our Current Work
Training & Workforce Development
In partnership with Calypso Farm & Ecology Center, we are honored to help build and support the Indigenous Agriculture Training Program, which has trained people from all over rural Alaska on topics such as composting, animal husbandry, beekeeping, irrigation, succession and companion planting, and seed saving.
More information here: https://calypsofarm.org/indigenous-agriculture/
Food Sovereignty
We have a right to harvest our traditional foods and to realize our role as the original stewards of our lands and waters.
Our leadership serves on multiple fish and game regulatory boards, councils and committees, including but not limited to local Alaska Department of Fish and Game Advisory Committees, Federal Subsistence Board Regional Advisory Councils, North Pacific Fisheries Management Council Advisory Panel, Yukon River Panel and National Park Service Subsistence Resource Commissions.
Our stories, video links: Indigenous Food Sovereignty Awareness Video Series: Eva Burk from Nenana
The Work Ahead of Us
Here we are building an Indigenous learning center focused on ecological stewardship, food sovereignty, cultural revitalization, and community wellness.
Culture Camps/Intertribal Exchanges
We gather Culture Bearers, Knowledge Holders, Elders, and Tribal Leaders to teach traditional skills necessary to transfer Indigenous knowledge through land-based education. Some of our workshops include cutting and smoking fish, tool making, hide tanning, skin sewing and salve making.
Our Landback History & Foundation
Our team, partners, allies, and community were brought together in opposition of the Nenana-Totchaket Agriculture Project land sale, responding with the Nenana Land Back campaign. Through our collective efforts and networks, we strategically brought awareness to the issue of land privatization, resource and infrastructure development, and its effects on Indigenous ways of life. We ultimately raised funds to purchase two parcels, about 42 acres, of the Nenana-Totchaket land, reclaiming a small portion of lands traditionally used by Nenana Native tribal members to hunt, fish, trap, and gather.
Tlaa Deneldel Community Group was then founded by Eva Dawn Burk (Nenana Tribal Member) and Charlie Wright, (Rampart/Tanana Tribal Member), in partnership with Native Movement, to hold the land in trust and carry out the agricultural interests and covenants required through the land sale. We feel it is our responsibility to teach others around us how to properly care for the land, which is ultimately a mosaic of wetlands, forest, and permafrost, created by glaciers and rivers that flowed north from mountains in the Alaska Range.
The learning center will demonstrate and teach sustainable, regenerative agriculture practices based in Indigenous knowledge and values, recognizing hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering are forms of agriculture. We are reconnecting our people to traditional use areas and capturing the importance of those relationships for land planning.
Soil Health & Traditional Plants Mapping
We are working with several tribal partners, including Igiugig, Nome, Golovin, Tyonek, and Yakutat, on a multi-year soil health building project with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Our soil health is our foundation and like ourselves, if it is healthy it can grow anything.
Read more here: Food Security and Justice at Calypso Farm, Alaska | USDA Climate Hubs
We are using drone mapping and ground-truthing to delineate our vegetation alongside our soil testing. By precisely mapping our wetlands, we plan to enhance and restore their functionality, taking advantage of their prime berry habitat. Similarly, we are carefully clearing out hardwood species like birch and alders that tend to outcompete spruce and dry out areas after wildfires.
Tlaa Deneldel is the place name for Rock Crossing, where the Burk family established their fish camp over fifty years ago. The caribou used to cross near Tlaa Deneldel but have not been present for many decades. In the past couple of years the caribou finally began returning to the area but are already being poached. Similarly, the fish began to decline in Eva Dawn’s childhood and now are at risk of also going away. These stories highlight the issues around our traditional foods and why we must look at agriculture to supplement our Indigenous food systems in Alaska.