What to Eat: Recognizing the Importance of Native Foods in the Laguna Pueblo

Lillian Rose Francis

Laguna, Santa Ana & Hopi Tribe

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Identity

The article "Sharing one Skin" Jeannette Armstrong says "We are everything that surrounds us including the vast forces we only glimpse." This means that how we treat the earth is how we should treat ourselves, with kindness and love. The second self is the emotional self, Armstrong describes this as your heart having a bond to not only to your mind and body but it is connected to other people. intellectual self is the third self. I find this as your mind and memory, How you think affects how you carry yourself as a person. Without a healthy mind or healthy thoughts you do not have a healthy body. If you let your thoughts get to you, you are only hurting yourself. The fourth and final self is the spiritual self this is the inner part of yourself that is most significant. Jeannette Armstrong says "The Okanagan says that is the true self, and it has great power. It is a source for all things and Affects all things if we engage it within the rest of our life-force activity

The article "Native American identity" the author talks about how decisions are contemplated in our lives as native people. In the article it says "we attend mainstream universities, In many ways we have assimilated into the dominant culture. On the surface it seems we are indeed like them" Perry G horse talks about how indigenous peoples sway between mainstream society and our own tribal ways. Like our elders the author stresses to us to always remember who we are and where we come from, but to learn as much as you can to bring back to our communities. Perry G. also talks about change and how it can be good or bad like all things in life. You live and you learn it is part of life, and i am willing to make changes if it helps my community. In the process I will not forget who I am.

Sources Cited

Armstrong, Jeanette. “Sharing One Skin: The Okanagan Community,” in Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (eds), The Case Against the Global Economy. San Francisco, CA, Sierra Club Books, 1996. Pp 460-470.

Horse, Perry G. “Native American Identity.” New Directions for Student Services. No.109, Wiley Periodicals Incorporated, 2005.

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History

When thinking about the history of traditional food in native communities it is hard to not think about the residential schools and how they played a part in providing food to the people. In the article “ No More Die Bread” author Patty Talahongva from the Hopi tribe, talks about her experience with food when she was sent to Phoenix Indian School. In the beginning she talks about us as native people not having livestock or wheat, this was brought over from the settlers. Being from hopi they used a lot of corn,beans and squash. ‘Piki bread’ was added to every meal the author describes as “Not heavy it is light. It is not loaded with empty calories, it is packed with nutrition.” She then goes on to tell how it is made from the blue corn, and why it is important to her community. Patty compares how she worked in the cafeteria buttering toast to how she would be cooking piki bread at home and helping her mother around the house. Being that she went to a boarding school the students were sometimes allowed to come home and when they visited their families they brought home whatever foods they were taught to cook. In the article Talahongva writes ¨ We took home what our taste buds became accustomed to and passed on to our families what can only be called a disastrous diet” Patty explains how frybread impacted her and the people around her and she now called is “Die bread” due to fry bread being made of loads of grease and how it affects us as natives of the southwest. Patty talks about her experience with Gallstones and how her diet has affected her. Patty explains how gallbladder disease affects us as native people but particularly Pima and Tohono Oódham people “American Indians in the Southwest have the highest rates of gallstones in the world! Gallbladder disease is related to our diets, and how our bodies process the foods we eat.” The article explains that there are many other diseases that affect us as native people due to our exercise and diet. To name a few, Diabetes, cirrhosis and heart disease are what can threaten our health as native people if we do not watch what we do. In the last half of the article the author writes about Roxanne Swentzell who is an artist from the santa clara pueblo, caught Talahongva’s attention because she had created “The Pueblo Food Experiment” this challenged pueblo people to eat ancestral foods this meant no beef, sugar, cheese or anything “foreign” the meals that they ate consisted of turkey, buffalo, deer, elk, corn, beans and squash they also used herbs and plants around the area. The article says “the group experienced craving that they had to find a way to overcome, in particular, they found it difficult to wean themselves off sugar.” Although the people who participated in this challenge had trouble not giving in to their craving at the beginning, they were able to overcome that and in the end. This benefited them by losing weight but by helping them control their illnesses such as depression, diabetes and autoimmune disorders.

Patty Talahongva, Patty. “No More ‘Die Bread’: How Boarding Schools Impacted Native Diet and the Resurgence of Indigenous Food Sovereignty.” Journal of American Indian Education, vol. 57, no. 1, 2018, p. 145., https://doi.org/10.5749/jamerindieduc.57.1.0145.

Where the Schaam grows

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Traditional Pueblo Foods

In summary of the video from New Mexico InFocus tv show Roxanne Swentzell was interviewed about a project that she had conducted in 2014 with pueblo people. This project was to give insight to pueblo people and others of what food was eaten and used back then. Swentzell talks of different animals and plants that were harvested back then, she then explains the reasoning behind this challenged that she created “It was one way to try to bring back the actual crops back into the culture and to find out if it’s possible in today’s time also because of the health issues we find in- all tribes at this point and seeing what it would do to us physically to eat only ancestral foods” in the end the challenge paid off because many of the participants experienced weight loss and this helped to sustain and even improve their health conditions. In the interview we hear from Lois Ellen Frank, she is from the kiowa tribe and is a chef who tries to incorporate native foods into a more modern cuisine. During the interview she says “ We have 566 federally recognized tribes. Every single one of them knows how to fry bread. The government succeeded” Lois Frank talks of the fry bread because it was introduced to everyone during the Relocation And Boarding School Era. Lois talks about incorporating traditional food practices into her cooking such as using a hand stone grinder instead of a blender or something electric. Being a native woman in the culinary world, Lois Frank talks of how there are very few Indigenous chefs and that there are not many indigenous foods being produced. For example corn, beans and squash are all used in modern day meals but we as indigenous people do not get that credit. When asked about how she incorporates Indigenous things into her career Frank says “As native people we have always been artists and we see that in this beautiful pot, we see it in the Jewel like colors of our corn, we see it in the way we dress and we see it in everything. So, how we present it, how we design it, is also art. We used to paint all of our pottery and design our beautiful regalia and we do that same thing with food. As a contemporary chef I am bringing in that artistic element”. Going on into the interview, it is clear that Lois has a passion for teaching the youth how to cook and why cooking certain foods are important. As a chef she states her view on what she feels that they are doing to help native communities, she believes that though things might be similar to one’s other teachings they all are meaningful and matter to indigenous peoples.

Episode 1024 | Traditional Pueblo Foods; YouTube. New Mexico In Focus, a Production of NMPBS, Dec 9, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9zy9pRfrRA

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Recovering Traditional Foods to Heal the People

From the book “Food Is Medicine” Pages 5 & 6 ‘Commodity Foods’ authors Winona LaDuke and Sarah Alexander talk of the government food assistance program which brought in commodity foods when indigenous peoples were being relocated to different areas throughout the nation. When new food was introduced it affected people tremendously, from diet changes to learning how to make new meals with what you have. The book talks about the 1930’s commodity food distribution program and how the diet has changed over the past 50 years when food packages were being given to native peoples the author wrote “In 1989, a study by the Government Accountability office reported that the prevalence of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension was ‘likely to continue’ unless food packages distributed to Native Americans are improved.'' While talking about food from different communities the narrative mentions that the hopi peoples diet consisted mostly of corn food dishes and from what i gathered from the illustrations are that many indigenous peoples had corn as their staple as well as bellies. According to the story “Hopi diet included more than 60 corn dishes, today’s diet is primarily beef, mutton, eggs, store-bought bread, potatoes, some canned vegetables, fruits and fruit juices, lard and other snacks” after listing most modern food, the narrative then goes into diabetes it says “Prior to the 1940s, there is little record of diabetes in most communities.” Introducing new foods that aren’t regular to our diet took a toll on many of our grandparents and great grandparents causing our bloodlines to be affected by diabetes and other health problems. This problem will go on and still (2021).

LaDuke, Winona, et al. Food Is Medicine: Recovering Traditional Foods to Heal the People, Honor the Earth, Section 2; Removal From the Land and Food, commodity foods, diabetes. Minneapolis, MN, 2004.

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Hunger and Health

The article “November is Native American History month” has many different sections covering the problems that Indigenous Peoples face today such as food insecurity and other problems related to diet and the food we consume.This article also stresses that the removal of Indigenous people off of their land has had a great impact on our diet changes and how we evolved as Native peoples. Today our diets have drastically changed and will continue to change if we do not do something about it. The article states “One out of four indigenous people experience food insecurity compared to 1 in 9 Americans overall” that means that for every fourth native person one goes home to little or no food at all, specifically food that is healthy and good to eat is not available to them. As we are now familiar with covid 19, this has also had an impact on the food insecurity that we face because many native people do not have access to a local grocery store or healthy food, especially those that use EBT SNAP which is not always available in stores. Recently during the pandemic many food distributions in communities have popped up and began handing out food to the people. In paragraph 5 the article says “To provide Additional assistance, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service Purchased $4 Billion in fresh produce, dairy, and meat products from American Producers of all sizes to supply food boxes to food banks, community organizations, and other non profits serving Native Americans in need” in conclusion many pueblos and other tribal nations have received food boxes that have benefited many families with non perishables. These things I'm sure have helped families through the pandemic especially during the 2020 year because many were unable to farm or hunt.

In this article it talks about Food Security and Food Sovereignty being two different things but are both solutions to helping us fight our food related problems such as health and sovereignty. The authors understanding of both of these terms is “The fundamental difference between food security and food sovereignty is that food security seeks to address the issue of food and hunger through the current dominant food systems while food sovereignty challenges this approach and seeks to build alternatives and address the root causes through a bottom- up, grass-roots approach”. Food sovereignty starts with hunting, gathering and fishing and also farming. In today’s time we as indigenous people are still dealing with land issues such as reservation boundaries, this determines how far on our reservation we can go, once you hit a certain place that is as far as you can go. For example while hunting say you shoot an animal and you go to track it down, but yet you come across the fence and you see your kill on the other side. You have no choice but to leave that kill where it is because if you cross that fence you are considered a trespasser. The article provides information on how we can go on with the food sovereignty movement it says “Native people are best suited to identify, develop, and implement solutions: Tribe-led workshops on native food gathering, preparation and preservation; removing legal barriers to hunt, fish and gather; restoring traditional rights to hunt, fish and gather on Tribal ancestral lands------To support Native food sovereignty, federal and state programs should address regulatory barriers and increase funding for the purchase of traditional, locally sourced foods like bison, wild rice, salmon, catfish, and blue corn meal” If the federal government were to fund these projects and remove barriers they would see how much it would benefit us as indigenous people and the wildlife and area around and across the land.

Meredith , Eric. “November Is Native American Heritage Month.” Hunger and Health, 10 Nov. 2020, https://hungerandhealth.feedingamerica.org/2020/11/november-native-american-heritage-month/

Now add the Cornmeal

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Food is a living, breathing being

In summary of the article “Food is a living, breathing being” a navajo woman named Cynthia Wilson has started a project during the pandemic which started back in the year 2020 where she was able to give plant seeds to navajo families in need that needed help with food during this time, she also gave out sheep. She wanted to do this because so many Navajo people live in rural areas where there is no town nearby. When asked why she started this project she says “In a larger context, I feel that the pandemic kind of opened up people’s eyes when it comes to sourcing food, that we can’t always depend on the grocery stores when something like this happens, that you should always go back to our self-sufficient lifestyle over the longer term” wilson’s project has grown since she started and has helped many navajo people throughout the navajo nation. In the rest of the article it explains how we can begin to continue our ways of farming if certain groups educate people on how important food is.We can begin to plant gardens and teach the younger generation the works of farming on the land. In the article Casey CampHorinek from Oklahoma says “Our garden is going to be big enough not only to sustain our large family but also to sustain those who may not have the ability to go to stores”. As Casey works with her community to operate this garden she explains that she teaches the children the works of how to garden and then the students become interested and want to know more. Teaching kids how to dry corn and put them to use and to cook certain meals during different seasons will help to preserve indigenous culture, through food. A director at the United Tribe Technical College, Linda Black Elk talks about how planting and going out to hunt is much more than what we think she says “it brings us closer to our ancestors and each other, decreases food insecurity, increases health benefits as well as mental and spiritual” In conclusion Black Elk believes that if we continue the tradition of teaching the younger generation the ways that we onced lived we can begin to restore our health issues and this will make us stronger. Rekindling new ways can bring us peace because we are becoming closer to our ancestors when we restore these teachings. By making community gardens we practice not only tribal sovereignty but food sovereignty because we are then able to sustain ourselves with the food that we grow, we would no longer have to rely on processed food or commodities from the Federal Government.

Reinhart , Katelyn, and Cronkite News. “Food Is 'a Living, Breathing Being'.” Indian Country Today, Indian Country Today, 5 Aug. 2020,

https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/food-is-a-living-breathing-being

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Native Americans Fight Food Insecurity

In summary of the video “Battered by CoronaVirus, Navajo Nation fights for elders and the traditions they safeguard” It addresses the issues that again Navajo People have faced when living in rural areas. The video explains that the running to the grocery store takes its toll on the navajo people who often have to drive long distances and sometimes the store does not have what they need. The people are also faced with the hardship of going to get food and fill up their tanks that are supposed to last a week or even two. With the Navajo nation on lockdown this made it harder for them to conserve their water because much of that water is used for everyday activities and even their livestock that has been in their family for years. If their livestock can not get water they then start dying off and then there goes the families food and even income because some do make a living selling livestock. In the video Dr. Jarred McAteer, who works in tuba with internal medicine says “ it is really hard to follow CDC recommendations of keeping sanitized if access to water is a challenge, that water is supposed to be used for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and livestock” Dr. McAteer makes an interesting point about how much navajo families lack the access to water. Animals need water just as much as the people do and to make trips out almost twice a week can become costly which then takes a toll on having little money for groceries or other necessities.

Ortiz, Erik. “As the Coronavirus Pandemic Strains Supplies, Native Americans Fight Food Insecurity.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 25 May 2020,

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/coronavirus-pandemic-strains-supplies-native-americans-fight-food-insecurity-n1213116

New Things Can Be Good Too

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Global Connections

In an article by Marianne Nazareth, a freelance journalist she speaks on the environmental community and how food can affect the environment. The topic of food wasting is shown in this article when Marianne says “Poor transportation and harvesting methods waste one third of all the food produced which can be as high as 1.3 billion tonnes worth around US $ 1 trillion”. Due to having to ship food across the world this causes much waste as well as loss of money this also contributes to another problem which is producing a much larger case of global emissions/greenhouse gasses. The article goes on to explain that back in 2013 Mongolia launched a campaign that focused on sharing cultures' food preservation method in order to reduce these emissions as well as wasted food. The process of preserving food is different in many countries and cultures and all ways work best in keeping ourselves nourished. Methods that were explained in this article were storing food underground in cool temperatures, Boiling food and canning it, roasting and drying and even applying bacteria.

March, Marianne De Nazareth19, et al. “Traditional Cultures Show How to Preserve Food.” About Islam, 19 Mar. 2017, https://aboutislam.net/science/science-tech/traditional-cultures-show-preserve-food/

Teach them Young

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How to Preserve Food

In an article by Michael Kraft he talks with different peers about different perspectives on how important food is to them and their family. A student named Rahel from Germany says “it’s a German thing, our grandmothers always teach us how to cook different types of food.” The article then goes on to say how food connects us mentally and spiritually through the way we come together to eat. Food is prepared often by yourself but is brought together with family and friends when eating together. The meals that each student mentions is all a part of their home town and culture and when talking and thinking about the food that they prepare it brings them a sense of home and peace. Food is comfort and can bring back and hold memories just like water.

Kraft, Michael. “Students with Differing Cultures Explain How the Importance of Food Unites Them.” BYUH Ke Alaka'i, BYUH Ke Alaka'i, 30 Jan. 2020, https://kealakai.byuh.edu/students-with-differing-cultures-explain-how-the-importance-of-food-unites-them

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Importance of Nutrition on Health in America

In a video from a well known organization, Feeding America. They talk about the issues that families face everyday with food insecurity and how that can lead to more health problems such as high blood pressure and diabetes. By having health problems this digs an even bigger hole for families by having to dish out more money to cover medical expenses and cutting out more healthy meals. The video mentions “ 1 in 9 Americans are food insecure and lack consistent access to nutritious food and a healthy life” This means that many people are unable to make ends meet in order to provide food or keep providing income to support the household. With the cost of food prices, rent/mortgage and other bills rising faster than 2 years ago, I'm sure that the percent of Americans who have food insecurity has drastically increased.

“Importance of Nutrition on Health in America.” Feeding America, https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/impact-of-hunger/hunger-and-nutrition