Mainstreet Radio’s Leif Enger reports on Project Grow, a program focused on developing food planting and produce services as a way to counter the growing issue of diabetes in Native American communities. It’s a callback to traditional ways regarding food and preparation.
Diabetes was rare on reservations until the U.S. Government started distributing commodity foods.
LEIF ENGER: At first glance, the program seems tragically inadequate to the problem. Take, for example, the Leach Lake Reservation in North Central Minnesota. 35% of all adult Leach Lake Band members have diabetes, and virtually every family includes someone with the disease. Against those numbers, a bit of produce from a simple backyard garden might seem a small defense, but Leach Lake Project Grow coordinator Elaine Fleming believes for her Ojibwe people, such gardens are the beginning of healing.
ELAINE FLEMING: Our way of life was always like that. We had gardens long ago. And we always went to the woods. And we went to the fields, and we gathered those foods that were out there. And now things are so easy where we just go to the store and buy that can of corn and fry the pork chop, you know. And that traditional way of life that we came from was good. And these modern ways have made us really sick.
LEIF ENGER: Diabetes was rare on Indian reservations until the federal government started distributing commodity foods, lard, cheese, and other items high in salt and fat. If unremedied, the disease attacks eyesight, kidney functions, and blood circulation. A diet full of fresh vegetables is the best protection and Project Grow supplies tilling and seeds for hundreds of gardens on 12 upper Midwest reservations. Most of the gardens are private plots. Others, like this large flower and vegetable patch in Cass Lake are community gardens cared for by volunteers and grown from native seeds.
ELAINE FLEMING: Mandan's sweet corn. It's a real deep rose of blood color, I guess. And we leave it on there until that first frost. And then we'll just hang it up to dry. This is the Arikara squash, and it's a winter squash. And so it'll store over the whole winter.
LEIF ENGER: When Leach Lakers gather for the upcoming harvest festival, they'll find a tribal renaissance of provender. A cook fire beside the garden, bread baking in its coals, ducks slow roasting in a hole beneath, whitefish basted with maple syrup, and any number of dishes prepared from the squash, corn, and beans grown in the community plot. Gil Getz, who started Project Grow in 1991 with a $5,000 donation from 3M, says the program aims to reduce diabetes among American Indians by changing their diets and their lifestyles.
GIL GETZ: We do everything that we think is necessary to build acceptance for returning to the period of 1940 and before when the Indian people were healthy and when they grew their own food. There's virtue in going back to what was good in the past rather than just assuming that what we're going to do in the future is better than the past.
LEIF ENGER: That doesn't mean every family on the reservation is going to chuck its electric stove. The point program, organizers say, is to take what was healthy from tradition and join it to what's healthy today. Project Grow encourages its participants to avoid fast food and get daily exercise, but its focus is cultivating and preparing vegetables. Dr. Heidi Chester, who has worked at Cass Lake's public health clinic since 1986, says she's already seen evidence the project can work.
DR. HEIDI CHESTER: I've seen cases where people, by changing their diet toward a more traditional type of diet, have had very dramatic improvements.
LEIF ENGER: In the four years since it started, Project Grow has developed enthusiastic financial support. Funds have come from the USDA, General Mills, the Health and Human Services Department, and the Bush Foundation, among others. This year's budget was over $400,000, dollars spent on seed, topsoil, tilling equipment, and garden laboratories for dozens of Native schools. Director Gil Getz says, while he's encouraged by the support, wide scale progress such as a measurable decrease in diabetes rates is still many years off.
GIL GETZ: This took 50 years to develop and we're talking about changing how people live, about giving people hope, about building self-acceptance, about eliminating denial, and accepting ownership of a problem. We ignored all of that for 50 years. And now we have to change it.
LEIF ENGER: Getz says, the success of the program ultimately depends on the people's will to change old habits, to get down in the dirt and pull weeds, and to teach their children that diabetes need not be part of their future. Leif Enger, Mainstreet Radio.
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