BOZEMAN, Mont. — In the shadow of American Indian Hall on the Montana State University campus, the ancient culture is thriving.
Six-foot-tall corn plants stand over huge green squashes and black and yellow sunflowers. Along the edges, tall stalks of sweetgrass sprout. The seeds of some of these plants were planted over the millennia in Native Americans’ gardens along the upper Missouri River.
It’s just one of the Native American ancestral gardens growing in the Bozeman region, which covers approximately one area of about an acre. Although it’s small the garden is part of a bigger, multifaceted effort across the country to help promote “food sovereignty” for tribes and reservations members not living on reservations as well as to revive elements that are part of Native American food and culture which flourished throughout North America for thousands of years prior to their arrival by European colonists.
The restoration of the bison back to reservation, creating community-based food gardens using ancestral seeds, gaining knowledge the importance of collecting wild fruits and vegetables and learning to cook delicious meals using conventional ingredients is all a part of the movement.
“We are learning to take care of plant knowledge, cultivating Indigenous gardens, and cultivating ancestral seeds, real old seeds inherited from our ancestors those of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara which includes beans, corn, sunflowers and squash” stated Jill Falcon Ramaker, an assistant professor of community nutrition and sustainable food systems at Montana State. She is a part of the Turtle Mountain Band of Anishinaabe.
“A large part of what we’re doing at the university is culture-related knowledge creation,” she said.
However, there is a practical purpose: to offer better, more affordable and safer food options for reservations, which are typically quite a distance from supermarkets and are also places where processed foods are causing an increase of heart and diabetes.
There are many reservations that are food deserts in which prices are expensive and processed foods are typically more accessible than fresh food items. A study by the Montana Food Distribution Study A paper from 2020, which was sponsored through the U.S. Department of Agriculture discovered that the median price in Montana of the items commonly bought from a store is 23% more expensive when you reserve a room than off.
“With food sovereignty, we’re considering the possibility of being able to make healthy food choices and the ancestral food sources we ate to live for hundreds of years, and putting these foods back into the kitchen,” Ramaker said. What this means in actual terms will vary from region to region according to the food sources that are traditional including natural rice found in the Midwest to salmon along the Pacific coast.
At the heart of this effort and especially the area of Montana is the bison, often referred to as buffalo. In 2014, thirteen Native tribes from 8 reservations across Canada and the U.S. and Canada came together to sign the Buffalo Treaty, an agreement to restore bison back to 6.3 million acres. The treaty was aimed at “to to welcome BUFFALO to be part of our community as the Creator had intended, by making every effort to ensure that WE and BUFFALO will be able to be able to live in harmony and support each other spiritually and culturally.”
A decade later, numerous tribes are home to buffalo herds, including the seven reservations of Montana.
The buffalo-based food system was a huge success for hundreds of years according to Ramaker. It wasn’t just a hand-to-mouth lifestyle Ramaker wrote in an article published by Montana State, but a “knowledge of a vast area that included a profound understanding of plants, animals seasons, climate, and season that was passed down through millennia, and preserved as an aspect between life and death.”
Ramaker oversees his organization as well. Montana Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative and a regional programme, that is called the Buffalo Nations Food Systems Initiative known as BNFSI which is a collaboration together with Native American Studies Department and College of Education, Health and Human Development at Montana State.
The bison meat being as the main focus of efforts The BNFSI is trying to bring other food items taken from northern Plains Native American diet in accordance with modern tastes.
The BNFSI has been awarded a five million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to complete the work in collaboration together with Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in New Town, N.D.
Reservation life is partly to blame for the majority of Native people eating processed food, Ramaker said. Food aid provided by the Federal Government, referred to under the commodity Supplemental Food Programme, is long sent to reservations in form of boxes filled with processed food items.
“We were compelled to join the reservations, and we were provided with replacement food by the government – white sugar, white flour canned meat, salt as well baking soda,” the woman said.
Processed food items cause chronic inflammation that in turn causes cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. It occurs in three times as often for Native Americans as it does for whites.
Research has shown that people’s physical and mental health suffers when they consume processed foods. “In the past 10 years, there’s been an increasing amount of research into the effects of a healthy diet on suicide thoughts, attempts and the process of the process of completing it,” said KayAnn Miller Co-director of the Montana Partnership to End Childhood Hunger in Bozeman who is involved in the BNFSI.
The majority of Native American reservations in Montana currently have community gardens and there are eight gardens in the Flathead Reservation north of Missoula which is home to The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The tribe has been teaching members how to cultivate vegetables, with some of which are transformed into soup which is distributed for tribal elders. This year, members planted 5 tons of food to distribute.
Ancestral seeds are a part of the program. Every year, the BNFSI distributes 200 seed packets for traditional crop varieties to Indigenous people living in Montana.
Making food that is appealing to modern tastes is crucial for the mission. The BNFSI is collaborating together with Sean Sherman, the “Sioux Chef” to turn corn meat, a variety of other Native food items into delicious food items.
Sherman established an prize-winning Owamni Restaurant in Minneapolis and in the year 2020, he established his own Indigenous Food Lab, through his non-profit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. The lab, located in downtown Minneapolis also serves as an eatery and an educational and learning facility which creates meals using only Indigenous food products from across the country. It does not use dairy, sugar cane beef, wheat flour or chicken, as well as other ingredients derived from what Sherman calls the colonizers.
“We’re not cooking like it was 1491 anymore,” Sherman said in the year 2000 on “Fresh Air,””referring to the period prior to European colonization. “We’re not an artifact in a museum or something similar. We’re attempting to take food we eat into the future by utilizing as much wisdom of our ancestors as we are able to comprehend, and applying it to our modern world.”
His most popular dishes include bison pot roast topped with hominy, roast turkey served with berry mint sauce, and walnuts in black.
In collaboration and with Sherman, Montana State University is building the nation’s second Indigenous food lab. It will be housed inside a brand-new $29 million facility with modern kitchen facilities, Ramaker said. The facility will open next year and will expand on the project of creating recipes, hosting cooking classes, feeding the nearly 800 Native students, and making cooking videos.
Angelina Toineeta, who is Crow studying at her studies at the BNFSI on the campus of Montana State as part of her degree in agriculture. “Growing this kind of garden really stood for me” she explained. “Native American agriculture has been lost in the past and I’d like to bring it back.”
KFF Health News, formerly named Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national newsroom which produces in-depth reporting on health-related issues. It is also one of the main operating programs of KFF which is the non-profit source for health research, polling and journalism.
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