'Hey, I grew that': the Native American school that's decolonizing foodways

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/07/native-american-school-decolonizing-foodways

‘Hey, I grew that’: the Native American school that’s decolonizing foodways

In the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation, teens learn about nutrition and build tribal sovereignty by farming for their school and community

by Kate Nelson

Thu 7 Mar 2024 07.00 EST

Before joining her school’s gardening program this year, 14-year-old Emilie Lyons had never encountered an eggplant. She is a freshman at Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation public school, which serves more than 600 students on the Omaha reservation in Macy, Nebraska. When she brought the vegetable home, she and her dad looked up recipes for how to prepare the peculiar purple nightshade and were surprised by how tasty it was.

…

Macy is considered a food desert, with no grocery store and just a gas station serving the north-eastern Nebraska town of approximately 1,000 residents. The village also has some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the state. To address these overlapping issues, the Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation’s farm-to-school initiative began as a state-funded Jobs for America’s Graduates (Jag) program, designed to equip youth with employable skills and improve their success in education and their future careers. It was the students’ idea to develop a community garden where they’d log their work hours.

Three years in, the summertime program employs about 50 teens, who grow and harvest more than 25,000 plants each season, including cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, onions, sunflowers, pumpkins, beans, corn, squash and, yes, eggplant. They prepare and preserve that produce in the school’s culinary department to be served in the cafeteria’s fresh salad bar, sold at the local farmers’ market or dished up at a new cafe in town (Macy’s first). There’s also an outdoor classroom on campus, where naturalists, elders and other knowledge keepers impart traditional Indigenous knowledge.

“This was my first experience gardening,” said Lyons. “At first, I did it for the money, but I actually really enjoyed doing the activities with my friends. It was a very powerful experience to plant a seed, care for it, watch it grow, then put these food products up at the farmers’ market. When my friends and I walk by the salad bar in the cafeteria, I’ll point something out to them and say: ‘Hey, I grew that in the garden.’”

…more… many kids don’t have birth certificates…many are homeless… opening bank accounts… also heat and bee stings… money and food in the community…

[pandr32]

1. This is wonderful.

Hopefully, other communities will follow suit.

[MagickMuffin]

2. Native Americans were farmers for centuries

They knew about planting crops in threes, hence the term 3 Sisters

The Three Sisters model was not just a means for modeling a specific intercropping practice but was, and is, a significant cultural and spiritual construct.

Diohe'ko, the Three Sisters, had been cultivated for at least five hundred years prior to contact by the Seneca, an Iroquoian tribe inhabiting western New York State. The Three Sisters, corn, beans and squash (pumpkins, gourds), were planted together in hills in fields, cultivated and harvested by work parties of women….The Three Sisters was an important cultural complex. The Sisters are protagonists of a number of Seneca tales, myths, ceremonies and legends. p. 76
Lewandowski, S. (1987). Diohe'ko, the Three Sisters in Seneca life: Implications for a native agriculture in the finger lakes region of New York State. Agriculture and Human Values, 4, 76–93 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01530644

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History broadens the classification from the specific Seneca Nation to that of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy in its description of the Three Sisters.

To the Iroquois people, corn, beans, and squash are the Three Sisters, the physical and spiritual sustainers of life. These life-supporting plants were given to the people when all three miraculously sprouted from the body of Sky Woman's daughter, granting the gift of agriculture to the Iroquois nations.
Carnegie Museum of Natural History. (2018). The Three Sisters: Sustainers of life. https://nsew.carnegiemnh.org/iroquois-confederacy

Hopefully this practice is being taught as well!


And a great big shout out to the 3 Sisters!

[progressoid]

3. Kind of surprised Nebraska would fund this.

[Bayard]

4. Big K&R