On a recent afternoon at Liberation Farms in the town of Wales, Muhidin Libah scooped up a handful of dried African flint corn from a huge plastic sack in the back of a cargo van.
A cascade of milky white kernels – tinged with yellow, orange, and purple – spilled from his cupped hands.
Libah is the executive director of the Somali Bantu Community Association, which runs the farm. He said flint corn is a prized food.
But Libah said he's looking forward to giving this corn away — all 2,000 pounds of it — in a first of its kind exchange with the Mi'kmaq Nation.
"So the corn has been loaded," he said. "So I will be driving tomorrow. That’s so exciting."
He'll drive back with 400 pounds of frozen brook trout from the Tribe.
Libah said he met representatives of the Mi’kmaq Nation through a grant program with the Maine Health Access Foundation, and saw a chance to collaborate.
"We love fish. And we don't have a lot of fish," he said. "They said, 'Oh, we have farmers who are farming fish.' And the idea come that, okay, why don't you give us fish, and we give you corn?"
And Kandi Sock, community support services director for the Mi'kmaq Nation, said she sees other parallels between the two groups, even though they come from vastly different parts of the world.
"Our histories are so similar," she said.
The Bantu are an ethnic minority in Somalia with a strong agricultural tradition. Many Bantu communities were violently kicked off their land during the Somali civil war in the early 1990s, fleeing to refugee camps in Kenya.
"Displacement, and the violence and the historical trauma are all there for both the Somali Bantu people and the Mi’kmaq Nation," Sock said.
Sock runs the tribe’s food pantry, which will distribute the corn — reconnecting the Mi'kmaq people, she said, with a historically important crop.
"So we as a people need to be able to go back to our Indigenous foods, our culturally identifiable foods," she said.
Up the road in Caribou, Shannon Hill, environmental director for the Mi'kmaq Nation, stood between two massive fish pools at the Tribe's land-based aquaculture facility.
"These are our babies, our fries," she said, pointing to one tank filled with small, greenish brown fish. "And there's about 40,000 in that tank of those."
Hill said the food exchange could open the door to more cooperation.
"So we're really looking forward to going down there to see how they are growing certain things, and what they're possibly doing different that we can bring back and incorporate into what we're doing here," she said.
First, though, the Somali Bantu farm came to her. On a blustery morning, Muhidin Libah pulled into a parking lot behind a Tribal administration building in Presque Isle with a van full of corn.
Using chains and a skid steer fitted with forklift tines, workers with the Tribe transferred the corn to a storage shed, and loaded fish coolers in its place.
Meanwhile, Hill sat down with Libah, as Kandi Sock handed him a vacuum-sealed package of frozen trout.
"So that’s what it looks like," Hill said. "It’s a beautiful fish, brook trout are."
"It’s a nice, pink meat," Sock added.
Libah said the plan is to dry the fish at the farm and distribute it to community members. And he saw this food exchange as just the first step in building a deeper relationship with the Mi'kmaq Nation.
Kandi Sock agreed. She said she hopes that next year, the Somali Bantu community will be able to participate in the Tribe’s Mawiomi, an annual gathering and celebration.
"So the idea is for the Mi’kmaq people, who have been here for 10,000 years, to welcome, officially, the Somali Bantu people, the new culture to our area, the new people," she said. "And to exchange those cultures in a more meaningful way."
In the meantime, Sock said she plans to try some of the flint corn. She said she’d never had it before.
