August 2012


www.hamptonroadsmessenger.com


Heritage Cuisines, Indigenous Practices Address Health Traumas


BY DEVON G. PEÑA SAN ACACIO,


Colo.--One of the consequences of the conquest and settlement of North and South America by Europeans was the displacement and destruction of native biological and cultural diversity. The environmental historian Alfred Crosby has called the European invasion of the Americas [sic] a biological conquest and a form of “ecological imperialism.”


The Hampton Roads Messenger


actively seeking physical, mental and spiritual healing from the effects of intergenerational trauma caused by colonization and forced assimilation policies of the U.S. government. The project works at improving tribal health through traditional tuwaduq first foods.


New studies in nutrition science and


anthropology of food are demonstrating that we can eliminate the debilitating negative health outcomes, such as from obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular illnesses, by promoting first foods, and heritage cuisines.


The First Foods Sovereignty


Valerie Segrest, co-author of Feeding the People, Feeding the Spirit


No space or native habitat touched


by colonialism was spared the effects of this bio-invasion. Indigenous plants and animals were diminished by the violence and displacement associated with the arrival of European colonizers and their biotic baggage. Cattle displaced bison; sheep replaced native deer; wheat displaced maize and amaranth.


Europeans and others benefited


from the arrival of the crops of Native America, including amaranth, agave, avocado, bean, bell pepper, cashew, cassava, chili, cocoa (for chocolate) corn, guava, peanut, potato, pumpkin, tomato, vanilla, wild rice and many more.


A demographic catastrophe


resulted and native populations declined by 70 to 98 percent. This was caused by genocide through war, enslavement and forced labor, introduced disease (smallpox, measles), and widespread hunger and malnutrition. Many people were worked or starved to death in mines, plantations, and sweatshops.


Historical Trauma and Native Foods Recently, we have become more


aware of the peculiar form of death facing Native peoples as a result of processes that Russel L. Barsch calls ecocide, or death caused by destruction of indigenous ecosystems including the agricultural and food systems of entire cultures and civilizations.


Research demonstrates that access


to traditional foods—the nutritional substances a given people co-evolve with over generations of living and adapting to place—is essential to our health. Thus, eating poorly is not a case of persons making “poor personal choices” or engaging in “bad individual behaviors”; it is a matter of systematic discrimination and structural violence when people are denied access to the resources they need to maintain their own indigenous food traditions, cuisines, and diets.


Barsh, Gary Paul Nabhan and


others have documented the devastating effects of nutritional genocide in their studies of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. The health effects are still being amplified by institutional racism and colonial domination and the ecological wreckage left in the wake of conquest, enclosure, and domination.


This peculiar form of barely


visible structural violence proceeds from the destruction of ecosystems and indigenous farming and heritage cuisines. A principal consequence of this


form of ecocide are increased morbidity, reduced life spans, and the greater incidence of chronic conditions related to diseases like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes linked to malnutrition, hunger and culturally inappropriate non-traditional diets.


Trauma studies emerged after the


Nazi Holocaust, but the concept was applied to Native American communities for the first time in the 1980s as a result of the work of Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart and her colleagues.


Their basic idea involves


recognition that “Historical trauma is cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma. Native Americans have, for over 500 years, endured physical, emotional, social, and spiritual genocide from European and American colonialist policy.”


The effects of historical trauma


include alcoholism and substance abuse, domestic violence and child abuse, malnutrition, obesity, and cardiovascular illness. The forced eradication of Native foods, foodways, and farming traditions has caused grave damage to people and the land. But the silent killer of nutricide is being challenged.


Deep Food: Healing Through Heritage Native peoples are resilient. We


are organizing to reverse the damage produced by centuries of historical trauma and structural violence. Today, we are witnessing the emergence and florescence of a pivotal movement involving the recovery of ancestral food crops, wild plants, and heritage cuisines.


This is what I call “deep food”


to distinguish it from the “local” and “slow” food because this is about the recovery of the deeply rooted ancestral foods and food ways of the First Peoples.


This indigenous movement focuses


on improving health through heritage cuisines. It also ties together respect for and assertion of treaty rights as civil rights and the restoration of traditional hunting, foraging, and farming methods and principles. An important part of this work involves establishing community gardens, home kitchen gardens, agro-forestry mosaics or “food forest” projects, and many other innovative campaigns. Here are two examples from the Pacific Northwest.


The Skokomish Community Garden


and Elder-Youth Mentoring Project will reintroduce traditional native plants, game, and vegetables, such as camas and medicinal herbs to a community


Project: From Shoreline to Mountain Tops engages tribal elders in mentoring relations with tribal youth. The elders have wisdom and knowledge of the medicinal herbs and plants and wild game and foraged species and are guiding and mentoring Skokomish youth.


Young people will provide the


creative labor and learn the deeply rooted traditions and practices of gathering, foraging, hunting, and gardening that will revitalize connections to landscape. Delbert Miller, elder leader and organizer of the project, describes the work in eloquent terms:


Our elders will instruct youth


in food and place from shoreline to mountaintop. There is a phrase in the Skokomish native language that captures the ultimate goal of this project: Sqa hLab hLits hLa Wa Wa. This means the food for future children.


Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project A similar effort is underway in a


collaborative project uniting three first nations from the Puget Sound bioregion through the Northwest Indian College. A report from the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission explains that this project works to assist “tribal members incorporate more traditional foods in their diets.”


ObamaCare • well-woman visits;


FROM PAGE 1 • screening for gestational diabetes;


• human papilloma virus (HPV) DNA testing for women 30 years and older;


•


sexually-transmitted counseling;


infection


• human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) screening and counseling;


• FDA-approved contraception methods and contraceptive counseling;


•


breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling; and


• domestic violence screening and counseling. New health plans will need to


include these services without cost sharing for insurance policies with plan years beginning on or after August 1, 2012. The rules governing coverage of preventive services which allow plans to use reasonable medical management to help define the nature of the covered service apply to women’s preventive services. Plans will retain the flexibility to control costs and promote efficient delivery of care by, for example, continuing to charge cost-sharing for branded drugs if a generic version is available and is just as effective and safe for the patient to use.


The administration also released an


5 The Muckleshoot project joins


teaching with harvesting and farming. It also makes a very clear argument that food sovereignty is a matter of environmental and social justice. We cannot separate access to local, fresh, organic, and culturally-appropriate foods from the struggles to overcome decades of environmental racism that have polluted our waterways, soils, air and bodies.


Billy Frank, who chairs the


Fisheries Commission, explained the history and objectives of this project:


The Food Sovereignty program


helps tribal members make those foods – such as nettles, camas, huckleberries, salmon and wild game – part of their everyday lives. The project reminds us that to have traditional foods, we must continue to be good natural resources managers…[We] are sovereign nations, and part of that sovereignty includes access to the traditional foods needed to keep our communities and ourselves healthy and strong.


The production of food is as much


about taking care of the land. Taking care of creation is the first step toward taking care of each other and our homes.


The principal lesson I have learned


from these inspirational projects is perhaps best expressed by Mohawk scholar, Taiaiake Alfred: “The time to blame the white man, the far away and long ago, is over. People should recognize that the enemy is close enough to touch,” and to eat, I will add.


The colonizer’s food is slowly


killing us. Food is the weapon of self- destruction the colonizer placed in our hands and sells to us at fast food joints and convenience marts. But food is also the solution. It is our tool for liberation, health, and spiritual healing. Deep food is the means to move toward autonomy and the renewal of a living traditional community.


amendment to the prevention regulation that allows religious institutions that offer insurance to their employees the choice of whether or not to cover contraception services. This regulation is modeled on the most common accommodation for churches available in the majority of the 28 states that already require insurance companies to cover contraception. HHS welcomes comment on this policy.


Previously, preventive services


for women had been recommended one-by-one or as part of guidelines targeted at men as well. As such, the HHS directed the independent Institute of Medicine to, for the first time ever, conduct a scientific review and provide recommendations on specific preventive measures that meet women’s unique health needs and help keep women healthy. HHS’ Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) used the IOM report issued July 19, when developing the guidelines that are being issued today. The IOM’s report relied on independent physicians, nurses, scientists, and other experts to make these determinations based on scientific evidence.


The announcement is another


part of the Obama Administration’s broader effort to address the health and well-being of our communities through initiatives such as the President’s Childhood Obesity Task Force, the First Lady’s Let’s Move! campaign, the National Quality Strategy, and the National Prevention Strategy.


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