Valerie Segrest’s elders and her community are the reason she dedicated her life to food systems.

Segrest grew up a part of the Muckleshoot Tribe, located just south of Auburn, in a community where the closest grocery store was nearly 10 miles away in an area considered “food insecure.” Her elders often told her, “If I just had access to my traditional foods and medicines, I wouldn’t be sick.”

Segrest has spent the last 14 years sharing knowledge of food systems and helping people in “rekindling their relationships” with traditional food. In 2021, she co-founded Tahoma Peak Solutions, an organization that offers consulting services around storytelling and problem-solving relating to Indigenous communities, as part of that continuing passion.

Tahoma Peak Solutions offers a variety of services, including cultural education, strategic communications and giving, creative direction and food systems planning.

“We want to foster really healthy collaborations, and that means increasing the awareness and education around Native history and culture and how to engage with tribal communities in a good way,” Segrest says.

Tahoma Peak Solutions was a child of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, Segrest and her co-founder, Maria Givens, were working at the Native American Agriculture Fund, an organization that supports Native farmers and fishers, when they realized their expertise could go further than financial support.

“We kept getting these calls and requests from people saying, ‘We want to support these communities, but we don’t know how to get in touch with them,’” she says. “We’d plug them together and watch these partnerships become stressed because the knowledge base of how to engage with tribal communities is limited.”

In just more than three years, the firm has managed to garner a robust client list that includes government organizations across the Northwest, including King County, the cities of Seattle and Portland, and the Oregon Department of Agriculture, as well as national organizations such as Deloitte and The Nature Conservancy. Tahoma’s storytelling and cultural education work spans topics such as decolonization, climate resilience, food justice, and health and wellness.

During Native American Heritage Month in November, the firm launched the Native Plants and Foods Institute, which represents a “curation of all the Indigenous food research and writing and developing and curricula” that Segrest has worked on for the past decade.

“As long as we’re able to share that ecological knowledge in meaningful and powerful ways with the next generation, we’re pretty confident that that will help promote sustainable change,” Segrest says.

The work is challenging. She notes that sharing the knowledge and expertise of these communities comes with the risk of tokenization, homogenization and disrespect. But spreading awareness and education of the intricacies of Native traditions across the Northwest is exactly why she does this work.

“We also understand that in order to fight the effects of colonization, we have to make the invisible visible, and so that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing,” she says.