Business
Tanka Bar
Native American Natural Foods — the Oglala Lakota-owned food company on the Pine Ridge Reservation producing the original Tanka Bar (buffalo + cranberry, inspired by wasna/pemmican). Founded by Karlene Hunter and Mark Tilsen. The Tanka Fund operates alongside, working to return prairie acres to buffalo and to rebuild Indigenous food economies.
What's happening now
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What they do
Tanka Bar (Native American [[natural-foods|Natural Foods]]) makes shelf-stable nutrition products built on traditional Lakota foodways — the flagship Tanka Bar combines prairie-fed buffalo with tart-sweet cranberries, modeled on the ancestral wasna and [[pemmican|pemmican]] preparations. The company was founded by Karlene Hunter and Mark Tilsen, both Oglala Lakota entrepreneurs, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. The parallel Tanka Fund works to return prairie acreage to buffalo and rebuild the Indigenous buffalo economy at the producer level.
Why it’s listed
[[food-sovereignty|Food sovereignty]] for Indigenous nations is not a separable concern from the directory’s substrate-impact filter — restoring buffalo to prairie is one of the most carbon-effective, biodiversity-restorative, and culturally-restorative interventions available on the North American landscape. Tanka Bar is the consumer-facing operation that funds and signals the buffalo-restoration work upstream. Buying the product is buying acreage back into buffalo.
Bioregional fit
Tanka is headquartered in Kyle, on the [[pine-ridge]] reservation — the homeland of the Oglala Lakota Oyáte and the bioregion’s first directory anchor. As [[pine-ridge|Pine Ridge]] listings grow, the bioregion entry expands.
See also
Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.
- Instance of: [[indigenous-food-sovereignty]]
- Shares approach with: [[native-seeds-search]]
- Member of: [[business]]
- Contained by: [[pine-ridge]]
Sources
A listing in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].
What links here, and how
Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.
Practical
shares approach with
- Pine Ridge auto-linked from body mention
Cultural
shares approach with
- NDN Collective complementary Oglala Lakota-led operations on Pine Ridge / in Rapid City — Tanka on food sovereignty, NDN on movement and policy
2 inbound links · 4 outbound