- In "Return", the documentary on food sovereignty and reclaiming food ways.

It's a story about how indigenous people began on this continent with an incredible food system.

They domesticated most of the world's cultivated crops and sadly their food system was disrupted through a series of events that happened over a timeline.

And the consequence of that food system disruption is their health declined.

And now native people suffer from high rates of chronic disease, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, cancer.

And so we've seen this shift in our health directly corresponding to the shift in our food system.

Many native people eat very similar to the rest of America, which is very foreign for their bodies.

And so, return really kind of highlights what tribes are doing across the nation by region.

And so my role was just to speak to the northern Plains tribes and what we're doing.

When you serve people whose health has really been impacted.

When they're just got out of the hospital for maybe ketoacidosis, which is a situation with diabetes where it's very critical.

People are ready to change just 'cause they wanna keep their health, they wanna live.

And if living means making a shift in their eating pattern, they're usually open to that.

And so for Native Americans, there are some foods that are, I call foreign.

We never saw flour, wheat flour until the government issued it to us.

When we first saw wheat flour, this is after the Fort Laramie Treaty that was ridden into the treaty.

They were gonna issue it to us and they did.

And they were gonna take our land and they were gonna take our buffalo.

And they did.

When we first saw the sacks of flour, we took our knife and we cut the sack open and we dumped it on the ground 'cause we could not eat powder.

And so eventually, they say the pioneer woman showed us when we were hungry, we were starving how to use flour with skillet fry bread.

And so fry bread came into being, it spared us starvation and we eventually adopted wheat.

But our carbohydrates were corn varieties, bean varieties, squash and potato or starchy roots.

We had many starchy vegetables that were colorful.

I call 'em the colorful carbs.

And they work better for our bodies 'cause they're more slowly broken down.

They, when we eat something like a corn-based meal, a bean-based meal, things like squash, our bodies can break down those fuels or they break down in our system more slowly and raise our sugar gradually.

Unlike sugar and flour, which are both highly-refined, they pull up our blood sugars much more quickly.

And so the food system in America is built on sugar and flour.

That's the foundation of the foods that you get out there.

But really over time, they do make us sick.

They make Native Americans very sick over a lifetime.

One of the tools that we use is called "My Native Plate."

You need a variety of nutrients and this reflects captures most of those nutrients.

In this plate.

We have a carbohydrate and carbohydrates are easily identifiable based on their appearance.

They appear very pale, very starchy, which I guess is kind of white and but you need a carbohydrate as a fuel source.

That's your primary fuel that your body burns on a regular basis.

So we have a carbohydrate on the plate.

We have a good source of protein.

It looks like fresh meat that was just prepared, fresh beef, or it could be fresh chicken, maybe prepared with some herbs.

And then we have some color.

So color, this side of the plate looks very different than that side of the plate 'cause you got red, green, yellow, bright colors.

And those are found in the plants that we harvest or that we grow.

The colors are actually antioxidants and they do work with your cells to defend them from bad chemistry.

Things called pre-radicals.

So on this side of the plate, we have what we call the really micro, very small nutrients, the vitamins, antioxidants, and things like potassium.

Very critical.

And as we get older, we actually need more of them.

As we get older, we also need fewer carbs.

So maybe in the past, half your plate was carbs.

But as we age each decade, by the time you're probably in your '50s, hopefully your carb is no bigger than what you can hold in your hand.

Corn, bean, potato, squash.

Under that food system, we never had diabetes.

And so diabetes is a new thing.

Just as we accepted flour, under starvation, we can now turn away from flour and sugar.

If you identify as Chinese or Greek, hopefully, you're eating the foods of your ancestors.

And it's no different for Lakotas.

I should be eating soup 'cause my grandma ate soup.