Hello, and welcome to Cooking with Tai.

Did you know that Indigenous agricultural systems have contributed over 60% of all the food that is consumed around the world today in the Americas?

I'm talking about foods such as potatoes, squash, corn, beans, blueberries, wild rice, and even tomatoes.

We have cultivated these foods for thousands of years.

Imagine what global cuisine would look like without these ingredients.

But while the whole world welcome these ingredients with open arms, the people who have been using them for eons, other food systems decimated and their populations wiped out through malnutrition and starvation.

This resulted in what many are calling a food apartheid, which happens when one population deliberately is not given access to the same quality of foods as other individuals.

No, I'm not referring to bag popcorn and canned beans.

I'm talking about access to our traditional foods.

For example, fresh produce or wild game and fish.

In this episode, we're exploring the historic and present day role of food and food scarcity in Indigenous communities in North America.

But before we begin, let's dig in to some facts.

This is a People's History of Native America.

With me, Tai Leclaire.

Let's talk about the Three Sisters.

No, no, not those ones.

These ones for thousands of years.

Many tribes, including some of the Shawnee, would plant corn, squash and climbing beans together.

Our ancestors knew that these three crops grew well together.

The beans fixed the nitrogen, fertilizing the soil for other crops.

The corn stock becomes a trellis for the beans to climb up, while the beans stabilize the corn stock from high winds to squash.

On the other hand, uses its wide, prickly leaves to stop weeds from growing and animals from nibbling on the beans.

I mean TEK or traditional ecological knowledge in action.

First, Native Americans growing or hunting food is part of our relationship with the land around us, a relationship we highly value.

And severing that connection takes away not only our ability to self-govern, but also our traditions, health, and even religious beliefs.

But today, many Americans are disconnected from the foods they consume.

According to a 2017 Michigan State University poll, 48% of Americans rarely or never seek out information about where their food comes from.

The ability to decide what crops and foods your community can consume is important to any group of people, but in Indian Country, ingredients are a way of life.

So when did we as Native Americans lose control over our food systems?

Well, we didn't lose control at all.

It was taken from us.

Bit by bit, over hundreds of years.

Take the near extinction of the bison, for example.

Although the population of the North American bison was in the tens of millions in the early 19th century, by the end of the same century it was under 1000.

The reasoning behind this catastrophic extinction of a species was that it was a source of food and other materials for Native American tribes.

The logic was if we kill the buffalo, the natives will starve to death.

In the case of the buffalo, the government appears to have committed what we would now call ecocide as a way to remove the main source of protein for many native tribes on the continent.

As a result, there are many treaties that protect tribal rights to hunt, fish, and forage within or even outside reservation boundaries all across the country.

Despite those written documents, treaties like these were rarely enforced.

Even tribes that were granted those rights soon found themselves breaking the laws, and state and federal hunting regulations would eventually override and supersede their treaty promises.

For tribes relocated to entirely new locales with different climates unfamiliar with the new food landscape.

The government promised to provide rations to supplement their diet.

The federal government called these “articles of subsistence” the retro term for commodities, food supplied by the federal government to halt starvation rather than supplement nutrition.

Here to talk more about the history of Native American food systems is DoctorValarie Blue Bird Jernigan.

Doctor Jernigan, can you talk about how tribes have had to adapt to new food systems after being forced off their homelands?

It's really important to understand that we became dependent upon these government foods because we did not have the knowledge of these new environments, and we really didn't have the people in those new environments to teach us our tribal nation, Choctaw.

We were highly reliant on river cane as a way to build our houses, as a way to survive.

It's even a source of protein.

We were traditionally farmers, agriculturalists, and our entire cultural and spiritual identities were based on that place.

And when we were moved to Oklahoma, we were moved to a really different geography.

We sowed the seeds in our hems of our skirts, and we carry those seeds on the Trail of Tears to the new home, Oklahoma.

And we planted those seeds in basically our new homelands.

And we did our best to translate that many, many thousands of years of generational knowledge into this new environment.

Part of the reason why native communities today are statistically, some of the unhealthiest in the country is because of those “articles of subsistence” or food commodities.

The Commodity Foods program was started in the 1970s and is the legacy of the longtime destruction of Indigenous food systems.

Commodity foods are what's known as commods in Indian country come from the food distribution program on Indian reservations, which is part of the USDA program.

Commods always come packaged in cans, frozen solid, or in the case of cheese, wrapped in a gold colored block.

This cheese is legendary in Indian Country.

However, cheese or any dairy was never part of the Indigenous diet pre colonization.

In fact, 80% of Native Americans are lactose intolerant.

Not like that stops us.

This is a complex issue.

So let's talk about nutrition.

Before colonization, we did not need Weight Watchers or the paleo diet or whatever dieting fad is trending right now.

Our ancestors would walk or hike for miles, hunting and foraging for food supplies.

The land was bountiful and provided our ancestors with a perfect diet that nourished our bodies and kept us healthy.

We never had to consume unhealthy processed commodities because that's just not how our relationship with our food systems worked.

Native Americans are 50% more likely to be obese than white Americans.

This is largely because fresh food is hard to find on or near reservations, and even more expensive if you do manage to find it.

For instance, chicken cost an average of 71% more when purchased on a reservation, and bread is 85% higher than off the reservation.

There are also systemic issues that block our full return to the native diet.

Currently, many Native Americans who live on reservations live in food deserts, a food desert similar to a food apartheid we mentioned at the beginning of this episode, is an area where it is difficult to buy affordable, fresh, healthy food.

Let me paint you a picture.

Literally, this is a map showing all the food deserts in the United States.

And this is a map of all the federal reservation lands.

Notice anything?

Just take a minute.

Take a moment.

Yeah.

Maybe the very significant overlap.

Yep.

Okay.

You got it.

Cool.

The food deserts that engulf Native communities to this day mean that the newer generations continue to struggle with food scarcity.

In fact, Native Americans experience significantly higher levels of food scarcity among all populations in the country.

Last question, Doctor Jernigan.

Can you give us some hope for the future?

We have to understand that land is part of public health, that we as Indigenous people conceptualize ourselves as part of that land.

We are here to reclaim our health in our traditions and our ways, not through the Western lens, but through our own practices and what was considered niche or marginal or just folk medicine.

When I was in school for public health and medicine is now shown to be pragmatic, Indigenous, traditional knowledge and science.

And it is valid and it's important.

Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us, Doctor Jernigan.

So I'm sure we're all getting hungry.

But here's the good news.

More and more Indigenous people are reconnecting with the original food sources and creating cookbooks and restaurants for us to devour.

But remember, Native American’s diet is not a commodity or a fad.

It is our way of life because we believe that the health of our people is connected with the health of the earth.

Thanks for watching.

For more, you can check out the new season of Native American now on the PBS app on your local PBS station.