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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Native Recipe for Health
  • Date: Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:40:16 -0600


Native Recipe for Health
The Tohono O’odham Nation tackles diabetes with a return to desert foods.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/learn-as-you-go/native-recipe-for-health
by Gabriel Thompson
posted Sep 17, 2009

The Tohono O’odham diet traditionally came from farming in areas flooded
by monsoon rains, harvesting wild foods, and hunting. This combination
offered a healthy and varied diet. Today, the O’odham are bringing back
traditional foods. In this picture: Harvesting prickly pear fruit.

On a stretch of desert near the U.S.-Mexico border, the only eatery on the
Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation opened last spring to a full house.

The Desert Rain Café brightened a space in a small shopping complex, drawing
dozens of curious ­customers who filled patio tables by noon. Its menu, local
by design, featured ingredients from the café’s own farm: desert squash
enchiladas, mesquite-flour muffins, hummus made from tepary beans. The café
recently extended its hours to take advantage of its booming business.

But the Desert Rain is more than an earnest new venture in a sleepy desert
outpost. The café and its reliance on native foods is part of a community
solution to a community problem: diabetes and obesity.

Members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose sprawling reservation begins
southwest of Tucson, Arizona, and extends into Mexico, suffer from one of the
highest type 2 diabetes rates ever recorded.

“The concept here is not if I get diabetes, but when I get it,” explains
Christina Andrews. She estimates that, during her tenure as executive
director of the Department of Human Services (the tribe’s health department),
80 ­percent of patients were diabetic. “When you see all of your relatives
die from the disease, it begins to seem inevitable.”

Around the country, diabetes is ravaging native communities. Amer­ican
Indians and Alaskan Natives are more than twice as likely to have diabetes
than whites, and three times as likely to die from the disease. The death
rate among the Tohono O’odham (pronounced “autumn”) is even higher—twice that
of other American Indian tribes.

But O’odham members have launched their own programs in an effort to reverse
that trend. A new kidney-dialysis center has opened next to the tribal
headquarters, and a grassroots organization, Tohono O’odham Community Action
(TOCA), with its café and farm, has turned to traditional foods to solve a
modern problem.

The land of the O’odham is breathtaking. The 60-mile drive from Tucson to
Sells, the sleepy town at the tribe’s center, passes through terrain filled
with saguaro cactus, ocotillo, and mesquite. The Baboquivari Mountains—sacred
to the O’odham—unfold on the left, eventually descending into vast
floodplains.

The tribe has 13,000 members living in about 70 villages across the Sonoran
Desert. Abandoned houses are abundant, and many of the buildings are tagged
with gang graffiti. Signs of poverty are everywhere: The annual median income
of the O’odham is about $23,000, lower than the $31,600 median income for
Native Americans nationwide.

What might look like impossibly dry land used to sustain the O’odham; they
cultivated drought-resistant crops and diverted flash floods from summer
monsoons onto their fields. But when the summer rains didn’t fall, the food
supply tightened, and eventually, the scientific theory goes, “thrifty” genes
developed.

Efficient genes could help explain why the O’odham are so vulnerable to
diabetes. “There is usually a genetic component to obesity and diabetes,”
says Joan Chamberlain of the National Institutes of Health. “These same genes
that allowed people to live frugally and survive famines aren’t prepared for
the massive abundance of calories and fat.”

The average weight of O’odham men in 1938, for example, was 158 pounds. By
1978, the average weight had increased to 202. According to Dr. Peter
Ziegler, clinical director for the Indian Health Service (IHS) in Sells, more
than half of O’odham women ages 35 and older are diabetic, with slightly
lower rates for men (along with a ­potentially sizable percentage of people
still undiagnosed).

Perhaps the most dispiriting trend is how diabetes and obesity are affecting
ever-younger individuals. A 4-year-old O’odham was diagnosed with type 2
diabetes, and at the IHS unit in Sells, nearly half of the child patients are
obese, with another 20 percent considered overweight.

“All O’odham are big people,” Andrews says. “Everyone in my family is big.”

Historically, the Tohono O’odham were slender and athletic. People ran
between villages to share news or ­simply visit. For recreation, races
between villages were organized. And in order to survive in the arid terrain
(Tohono O’odham means “Desert People”), they spent much of their time
gathering food—from the fruit pods of the saguaro cactus to the mesquite
beans that would be ground into flour.

“We’re living in a very different time period,” said Danny Lopez, a tribal
elder who was born in 1936 and taught the O’odham language and history at the
local community college. Lopez, who passed away in 2008, served as a link to
traditional O’odham ways, teaching the youth songs and storytelling, and
stressing the importance of speaking the language. “Can you believe when I
was growing up,” he said, “we didn’t even have a word for diabetes?”
The destruction of the O’odham food system wasn’t only about food, it was
about culture—exchanging an active lifestyle and local diet for an existence
reliant on paychecks and processed food. Millennia of food independence
became dependence in a matter of decades.

In 1996, Terrol Dew Johnson, a tribal member and award-winning basket-weaver,
was teaching weaving classes in Sells when he met Tristan Reader, a former
tenant organizer in Boston. Reader had started a community garden on the
grounds of a reservation church where his wife had been hired as a pastor.
Johnson and Reader got to talking about the many challenges facing the
O’odham—a lack of activities for teens, high unemployment, the diminishing
knowledge of O’odham culture and history—and decided to hold a six-week arts
and culture program for at-risk youth.

Later that year, Johnson and Reader founded TOCA and spent the first several
years developing its youth and culture programs.

With the input of elders like Lopez, the organization began learning more
about the tribe’s history—just how drastically the O’odham diet and lifestyle
had changed in recent decades, and how this change was tied to the
destruction of traditional farming. TOCA took an activist approach: What
could it do, today? How could it change people’s behaviors?

“We have to remember that in the last 60 years there wasn’t some dramatic
change in genetic makeup,” Reader said. “It’s the diet that has changed. And
blaming everything on genes can disempower people and make them feel they
can’t do anything about it.”

Reader pointed to an ongoing, $100 million genetic research project conducted
by the National Institutes of Health on the Pima Indians—who are related
ancestrally to the O’odham and suffer a similar diabetes rate. A previous
study compared the diabetes rates of the Pima in Mexico—who still farm and
adhere to a traditional diet—with the Pima of Arizona. The Pima in Mexico had
a diabetes rate less than one-fifth that of their U.S. kin.

TOCA’s task was to find a way to tackle the diabetes crisis in a way that
resonated with the O’odham community and drew upon O’odham culture. In 2000,
when Johnson’s grand­father passed away from complications ­related to
diabetes, TOCA leaders had an idea.

Traditionally, the staple of the O’odham diet was the tepary bean, which
needs little water to grow and is low on the glycemic index (which measures
how fast the body converts carbohydrates to glucose), a factor that may aid
in controlling diabetes. The O’odham also cultivated drought-­resistant crops
like 60-day corn and squash.

Nutritional research has shown that foods of the desert, like the tepary bean
and mesquite flour, played a key role in regulating blood-sugar levels and
slowing sugar-absorption rates, being low in fats and simple sugars but high
in soluble fiber and complex carbohydrates.

It is estimated that in 1930 the tribe grew 1.6 million pounds of tepary
beans on the reservation for their consumption; by 2000, that amount had
shriveled to less than 100 pounds. A number of factors contributed to the
dramatic decline in the O’odham’s food production. As the city of Tucson grew
after World War II, it needed water, and deep wells were dug along the
reservation’s boundaries. The aquifers dropped, reducing river flooding and
runoff needed for irrigation. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) contributed
to the decline in subsistence farming by moving Indians into jobs as cotton
workers off the reservation as a means of assimilation.

The destruction of the O’odham food system wasn’t only about food, it was
about culture—exchanging an active lifestyle and local diet for an existence
reliant on paychecks and government commodities, mostly processed foods high
in starch and sugars. Millennia of food independence became dependence in a
matter of decades.

“They came here to civilize and educate us,” Lopez, the tribal elder, said,
his delivery characteristically dry and deadpan. Lopez was shipped to a BIA
boarding school in Phoenix for two years as a youngster, and his family was
recruited to work in the cotton fields north of the reservation. At one time,
his village, appropriately called Big Fields, included 1,100 acres of
cultivated crops. Today, the fields lie fallow.

Johnson’s grandfather farmed a small field in a village near Sells until the
1970s. After the passing of his grandfather, Johnson says, “We thought, why
not plant traditional crops on it as a way to pay homage to him?” The
37-year-old Johnson, like his parents and two siblings, is diabetic. After
locating the field with the help of his grandmother—the area had become
overgrown with mesquite—­TOCA cleared it and planted tepary beans, with seeds
provided by a ­Tucson-based seed bank, Native Seeds/SEARCH. At the time,
there was only one person on the entire reservation still growing traditional
crops.

Several years later, with financial support primarily from the First Nations
Development Institute and the Kellogg Foundation, TOCA leased land on an old
tribal farm close to the border with Mexico and later purchased a combine,
helping spur production. “If we wanted this to be more than a novelty, then
we had to increase the scale,” explained Reader.

Today, Johnson’s older brother, Nolan, is in charge of both the 125-acre farm
near the border and his grand­father’s original plot of land. This year TOCA
will harvest 50 tons of squash and melon, 45 tons of tepary beans, and 10
tons of 60-day corn, all of which ends up at the grocery store, at tribal
festivals, and in patient meals at the IHS hospital. TOCA hopes to partner
with schools on the reservation and serve traditional foods to students.

“At school, most of the kids are eating two free meals a day through federal
programs, heat-and-serve stuff from Sysco,” said Reader. “So it doesn’t make
a whole lot of sense to tell people to eat right, and then give kids who are
prone to diabetes a breakfast of waffles and maple syrup. We need a complete
systems change.”

With production developing rapidly, TOCA’s next task is to overcome the same
barriers to healthy eating that poor people face across the country.
Unhealthy food is inexpensive and quick.

Each year, TOCA gives away 2,500 pounds of tepary beans, and expanded
production has allowed it to drop ­prices. Two years ago, for instance,
tepary beans sold for $3 a pound; a customer can now buy a pound for $1.75.

A second barrier to eating traditional foods, identified through a 2002
survey of residents, is preparation. “If it takes four hours to cook the
beans, and you’re working all day, what are you going to do?” asked Reader.
“We need to make it convenient.” The Desert Rain Café, in the same shopping
complex as the grocery store, is one way to address the problem.

TOCA’s message: When respected and cultivated, the land considered sacred to
the O’odham created healthy O’odham. TOCA pushes this message to the younger
generation, planting school gardens, and organizing traditional outings to
gather the saguaro fruit and other native plants.

“We meet with kids and ask them about traditional O’odham foods,” said
Johnson. “And they start talking about things like fry bread.” Fry bread is
made from flour, salt, and lard; Indians adopted the unhealthy concoction
with the introduction of government commodities. “We have to re-educate
people and tell them that fry bread isn’t an O’odham tradition. We need to go
back even further.”

TOCA members know that the destruction of O’odham culture can’t be reversed
quickly with a new pill or program: That’s the Western way, the model of
hollow promises and quick fixes. After a century of adopting the
prescriptions of others, the results have been disastrous. New innovations
may have their place, but nothing can substitute for historical memory.






  • [Livingontheland] Native Recipe for Health, Tradingpost, 10/04/2009

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