Native Americans return to their roots with garden
Innovative approach to diabetes epidemic
An apple a day, and a bunch of broccoli, and maybe a handful of carrots, keeps the endocrinologist away. Plant an apple tree or a vegetable garden, and you have the double-edged sword of exercise and improved diet to combat diabetes. At least that’s what the Bad River Chippewas on the Bad River Reservation near Odanah, WI, are hoping.
Since Native Americans are at two to 25 times the risk for diabetes as the general American population, members of the Bad River Chippewa band in northwestern Wisconsin decided to the confront the threat of diabetes from a number of directions. "This is a problem with life-and-death implications," says Mary Bigboy, the tribe’s health department director.
The reservation of 1,400 people has 200 confirmed cases of diabetes, and 35% of the tribe’s members older than age 40 have the disease. At least five new cases of diabetes are diagnosed each month. "It seems like those new patients are younger and younger," says Bigboy. In fact, the use of insulin is so widespread that public restrooms at a tribal restaurant have needle disposal containers.
Enter Luis Salas, director of the Northern Native American Health Alliance, offering gardens as a long-range plan to address the diabetes crisis. "It’s so simple; I wonder why no one seemed to think of it before," says Bigboy. "[Salas] suggested that getting people involved in gardening would be a great way to improve the quality of nutrition, on the theory that what you raise tastes better and you’re more likely to eat it."
"The gardens are meant as a catalyst to get people to start thinking about the food they consume," adds Salas. It took just $30,000 in seed money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service.
All ages meet in the garden
Now the Bad River community is dotted with freshly planted fruit trees — more than 300 apple, pear, cherry, and crab apple trees planted in 100 yards. Dozens of gardens just now are beginning to yield the abundance of the harvest with juicy ripe tomatoes, beans, squash, and corn bursting with flavor and nutrition.
Tribe members, from the kids to the elders, helped till and plant in the spring and have maintained gardens in individual yards and in a few communal plots throughout the summer. That activity alone has provided the gardeners with exercise, another powerful tool against diabetes. "We needed a way to get people, especially the kids, more active and more aware of what they are eating and its nutritional value," says Salas. "And we needed a way to make healthy food easily accessible to the community."
Now it’s time to reap the fruits of their first year’s labor and preserve their harvest with the help of tribal women who are experienced in canning and other food preservation methods.
The Bad River Chippewas have life challenges similar to those faced by the general population, which also is suffering an explosion in the prevalence of diabetes. "We’ve got families with two working parents who travel long distances to get to work, and when they get home, they’re just too tired to plan a nutritious meal for their families, much less to exercise or encourage the kids to exercise," says Bigboy.
The easiest solution, but far from the cheapest or healthiest, is to pile everybody back in the car for a 22-mile trip to the nearest pizza joint. That’s a solution that feeds what some researchers say is a genetic predisposition toward obesity and diabetes for Native Americans and some other ethnic minorities.
Back to the roots
"This is a get back-to-the-roots project. The Upper Midwestern tribes always had an agrarian culture," says Jack Brickner, national tribal government liaison for the USDA in Washington, DC.
Over the past 50 years, the Bad River Chippewa reservation has moved from the flood plain along the southern shores of Lake Superior further inland. What was once a thriving agricultural culture has been almost forgotten, Salas explains. "The Chippewas had the most wonderful gardens imaginable, but over these two generations, not only were the gardens lost, so was the skill," he says. So the garden project serves yet another purpose: to re-educate tribe members in their traditional ways of gardening and to re-connect them to their spiritual roots, which hold many plants and the cultivation of the Earth Mother as sacred traditions.
The newly acquired land is hard pan — rock-hard clay soil, which is inhospitable to any type of gardening. So the gardeners among the new generation of Chippewas are working in raised beds with a nutritious mix of sand and trucked-in soil and chicken and turkey manure. They’re learning about composting and soil amendments from Tom Cogger, the USDA’s tribal liaison in Wisconsin, who worked with Salas for three years getting the garden program plans in place.
Among the other adaptations devised by Cogger and Salas: 4- by 10-foot hoop houses — miniature greenhouses constructed of flexible plastic tubing and plastic to extend the growing season in the harsh northern climate.
Training, gardening tips available
In addition, the USDA offers the Chippewas and a growing number of other tribes expert advice in laying out the beds, irrigation, soil testing, soil amendments, and greenhouse construction and the start-up money to get the projects going. The Chippewa gardeners are working organically as much as possible, for health reasons and because that is the way their ancestors would have worked.
Cogger offers training classes for the budding gardeners, and he’s regularly on site to answer questions and handle problems as they arise. "Prevention is better than dealing with a disease after it’s already there, and that was the thinking behind this project," says Cogger. "I can’t believe how it has taken off. Everybody wants to be involved," he says. "The whole thing has taken on a life of its own. It’s become a community project, and it’s really bringing people together."
Down the road, there are plans for a community composting program and for community greenhouses to give plants a head start in the short growing season — and maybe even to offer some fresh produce during the winter months. "Like most of us, the Chippewas and other Native American tribes don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, so this project is a creative way to encourage them to change that and reduce their risk for diabetes and other diseases," says Brenda Broussard, national coordinator of the American Diabetes Association’s Native American Outreach program in Albuquerque, NM.
At a national conference for tribal health leaders, Broussard recently threw out a challenge: "Many people complain that fruits and vegetables are too expensive, and they can’t afford them. Yet they load up on Coke and potato chips, and those are very expensive with no nutritional value at all. "I sent them to the supermarket to compare prices and see what they could buy if they stopped buying Coke and potato chips, and they were amazed at what they really could afford that would be good for them," she says.
Broussard applauds the garden program for its simple approach to issues of nutrition, exercise, and reconnection with traditional spiritual value, and a fourth benefit: "It’s awesome. They’ve brought back gardens as a way to bypass that American get-it-quick’ culture that sets us up for diabetes, heart disease, and all kinds of trouble."
You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content