Reviving Native Foods, Health, and Culture: the Tohono O’odham Community Food System
3 February 2003
The introduction of processed foods had a devastating effect on both the health and culture of the Tohono O'odham nation. Their new Community Food System seeks to rejuvenate traditional foods.
By Tristan Reader
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Just as the sky began to brighten behind Baboquivari Peak on the Tohono O'odham Nation in Southern Arizona, the sound of gourd rattles, desert fiber drums and singing could be heard coming from the bahidaj (saguaro fruit) camp. The voices of young and old joined together in a traditional Tohono O'odham harvest song, giving thanks for the blessings of the desert.
By the time the sun rose above the mountains, small groups of people were scattered across the desert floor, gathered under towering saguaro cactus. Using long poles made of the ribs of dead saguaros, the bahidaj was knocked to the ground where it was collected. Buckets soon filled with the sweet, bright red fruit.
By the time the afternoon heat reached 110 degrees, everyone gathered back at camp to begin boiling the fruit into a thick syrup which would be used to make the ceremonial wine to "sing down the rain" and bring the monsoon floods to dry desert fields.
More than a fun summer outing or a quaint cultural relic, events like this traditional bahidaj camp may prove to be the hope for restoring indigenous food sytems, physical health and cultural vitality to Native communities across the U.S.
Shortly after the arrival of Europeans in North America, the Native populations of the continent were ravaged by diseases that had been borne across the seas. Such infection caused more devastation of indigenous cultures than all of the weapons intentionally wielded against them.
Having been repeated over the years, this statement may seem like a "politically correct" telling of the earliest contact between Native Americans and Europeans. However, it is also an accurate description of the effect that the destruction of traditional food systems has had on Native communities throughout the U.S. in the last half of the 20th century. In indigenous communities the loss of local food systems has led to devastating health problems, contributed to the destruction of systems of local self-sufficiency, and played a central role in the loss of traditional cultural practices.
The effects of the destruction of an indigenous food system cannot be seen more clearly than in the case of the Tohono O'odham community. Known to many outsiders as the Papago, the Tohono O'odham and their ancestors have thrived for millennia in the dryness of the Sonoran Desert. Living a semi-nomadic life, the O'odham traditionally combined dryland farming, the collection of wild desert foods and small amounts of hunting to provide food for their families and communities.
These strategies served the O'odham well until relatively recently. In his book, The Desert Smells Like Rain, Gary Paul Nabhan notes that the O’odham still used traditional dry land methods to cultivate more than 10,000 acres as late as the 1920s. By 1949, that acreage had decline to 2,500 acres. Today that number is certainly less than 100 acres, perhaps not more than ten. At the same time the once common practice of collecting and storing wild woods has declined in an equally dramatic way.
The result of many factors, particularly the introduction of processed foods through federal food aid programs, the loss of the traditional food system has led to severe consequences for the Tohono O'odham.
For centuries, traditional desert foods--and the effort it took to produce them--kept the Tohono O'odham healthy. Over thousands of years, the Tohono O'odham metabolism had become especially well adapted to the foods of the Sonoran Desert. The introduction of processed food, however, changed all of that. The new foods were metabolized by the body in a much less efficient manner, leading to a previously unexperienced disease among the Tohono O'odham: adult-onset diabetes. As recently as the early 1960s, diabetes was unknown among the Tohono O'odham. Today, more than 50 percent of the population develops the disease, the highest rate in the world. As a degenerative disease, diabetes causes many subsequent health problems, including kidney failure, loss of eyesight, circulatory problems and severe organ damage.
The exponential rise in diabetes has mirrored the reduction of traditional foods in the Tohono O'odham diet resulting from the loss of the traditional food system. Indeed, several scientific studies have confirmed that traditional O'odham foods--such as tepary beans, mesquite beans, cholla (cactus) buds and chia seeds--help regulate blood sugar and significantly reduce both the incidence and effects of diabetes. In a very real sense, the destruction of the traditional food system is killing the Tohono O'odham.
The harm caused by food system destruction goes beyond the physical health of individual Tohono O'odham; it has also had a devastating effect on Tohono O'odham cultural survival. Virtually all elements of traditional culture--ceremonies, stories, songs, the language--are directly rooted in the system of food production. O'odham culture is truly an agriculture. For example, the saguaro harvest and the wine ceremony (noted above) served as the cornerstone of O'odham ceremonial life for centuries, calling forth the monsoon rains that make agriculture possible in the arid desert environment. After weeks of preparation, people would gather together in each O'odham community for the multi-day ceremony, telling stories, singing songs and passing on culture. But all of that has begun to change. Today, only a tiny portion of the O'odham community participates in this sacred rite. Each year, O'odham still gather near the roundhouses for the ceremony, but only one or two communities with fewer and fewer people participating.
The reason for this is relatively simple: today, few O'odham produce their own food. Grocery stores and federal commodity programs, rather than the desert, are the source of food. Is it any wonder that the saguaro wine ceremony is endangered? The endangerment of this essential element of O'odham culture is the direct result of changes in the food system: People did not stop planting the fields because the ceremony was dying out; the ceremony began to die out when people stopped planting their fields. The ceremony is in danger of being lost precisely because it no longer has any connection to the material reality of people's lives. When food comes in cans from the grocery store or in sacks from USDA commodity distribution programs, it no longer really matters to most pepole whether or not the rains come. In such circumstances, there is no longer a compelling reason to spend long, hot days camped in the desert collecting bahidaj, no reason to learn the songs which bring down the rain, no reason to bless the ground...no reason for a key element of Tohono O'odham culture to continue.
The destruction of indigenous food systems is causing similar, albeit somewhat less dramatic, damage to the health of Native people and communities throughout the U.S. The physical and cultural survival of many Native peoples requires the rejuvenation of these food systems. Like in Native communities across the U.S., such renewal is beginning to happen on the Tohono O'odham Nation.
The Tohono O'odham Community Food System, a project of Tohono O'odham Community Action, is working with individuals, families, communities and institutions to combine elements of the traditional food system with new forms of organization. These strategies include:
establishing community gardens where the traditions and techniques of O'odham gardening can be passed on to a new generation;
helping families grow traditional O'odham crops at home;
organizing trips to collect traditional O'odham foods such a cholla buds, saguaro fruit and mesquite beans;
revitalizing farming in traditional flood plain fields;
sponsoring storytelling events and other cultural activities which are based in traditional food production; and
providing opportunities to sell and distribute traditional O'odham foods within the community and elsewhere.
Through these strategies, the program nurtures the production and distribution of traditional foods on three different levels: First and most importantly, families and communities are provided with the resources they need in order to grow and collect traditional foods for their own consumption. Second, the program is developing opportunities for people to engage in microenterprise projects by marketing their surplus O'odham foods to local institutions (such as the hospital, elderly programs and schools) where they are served to other community members. Third, after all local need has been met (and only then), additional microenterprise opportunities will be developed by marketing to surrounding communities, such as restaurants and specialty groceries in Tucson.
The Tohono O'odham community is not alone in the realization that physical health and cultural survival are dependent upon the rejuvenation of the traditional food systems. Native peoples from the deserts of Arizona to the ice flows of Alaska are actively seeking to redevelop the ways of producing, processing, distributing and consuming foods that have nurtured both body and spirit for generations.
Shortly after the bahidaj harvest was over and the monsoon rains had brought precious moisture to the desert plants, Christine Johnson, a basketweaver from the village of Nolic, reflected on her experiences harvesting and planting in the desert heat. "Every year, I sang the songs that called down the summer rains," she said. "But this year, I had a garden filled with devil's claw and corn, melons and squash. This year, I sang for them. This year, I sang like I really meant it."
Tristan Reader is co-director of Tohono O’odham Community Action in Sells, Arizona.
