Season II Episode 10 - Uplifting Tribal Youth Through Community Gardening

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[00:00:04] Colby: Welcome to Stocking the Pantry: A CalFresh Healthy Living Podcast from Leah's Pantry. We'd like to acknowledge our funder, the CalFresh Healthy Living Program, an equal opportunity employer and provider. On this show, we discuss any and all things community nutrition, food equity, and nutrition security. This is a space for thought leaders to share success stories and strategies for equity-centered and resilience-building initiatives. We hope to foster collaboration and community as well as leverage strengths among listeners, guests, and hosts as we share ideas and dreams of building a more equitable future where everyone has access to healthful nourishing food.

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[00:00:52] Carlos Alessandrini: Welcome back to the season finale of Stocking the Pantry from CalFresh Healthy Living. I'm your host, Carlos Alessandrini. In our previous episode, we talked with Holly Lacell about the ways that gardening can be helpful for folks in treatment and recovery from a substance disorder. We explored the positive physical and mental effects that gardening can have on a general well-being. Today, we're continuing that garden conversation with a focus on learning how gardens can support Indigenous youth. To do that, we're heading to Wisconsin.

Long before it was even called Wisconsin, the Ojibwe people and other tribal first nations have called these lands their home. The Ojibwe people, or the Anishinaabe historically inhabited the Great Lakes region where they hunted fish, gathered and garnered to maintain their way of life and continue to do so today. We're going to talk about this idea of food sovereignty. The term refers to people's right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through safe and sustainable methods, and the right to define their own food and agricultural systems.

That's according to the US Food Sovereignty Alliance. Food Sovereignty is a movement that empowers those closest to the land. These folks suffer from hunger and poverty and higher rates, including farmers, Indigenous folks, fisher people, forest drillers, and more. In today's episode, we're lucky to have a few guests joining us. First, we have Bridget Rongner. She's the Food Wise Administrator for Barron, Burnett, Rusk, Sawyer, and Washburn Counties, which includes the tribal nations of the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin, and the Lac Courte Oreilles.

Joining us as well is Laura Merchant, first ascendant of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Chippewa, and the Youth Enrichment Scholarship Coordinator for the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin. Janine McNulty is the High Education Coordinator for St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin. Here's our conversation. Bridget, can you start us off by telling us a bit about your work and your experience with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension FoodWise program?

[00:03:24] Bridget Rongner: Of course. Thanks for having us on. We're happy to be here. FoodWise is a program, it's offered through UW-Madison, the Division of Extension. The FoodWise program specifically is part of Extension's Health and Wellbeing Institute and is federally funded by SNAP-Ed and EFNEP. What we do is we partner with community-based organizations to promote change that help make the healthy choice the easy choice.

What's unique is although we are connected to that UW-Madison system, our colleagues actually live and work in the communities where we are programming. While we have that connection, and it's towards the university and its resources, we also understand our communities and have a personal stake and commitment in making them healthier. My FoodWise team specifically works in Northwest Wisconsin, and we provide nutrition education and policy system and environment work in five counties and the St. Croix and the Courte Oreilles tribes. Overall, every year, FoodWise as a whole delivers nutrition ed to over 50,000 people throughout Wisconsin. A diverse range of communities, including those tribal nations of Wisconsin.

Because of that, when we have these opportunities for health-focused programming, we really want to prioritize honoring those cultures and experiences so that we truly are encouraging members from all of our communities in Wisconsin to adopt healthy food and physical activity habits.

[00:05:02] Carlos: Janine, I'd love to hear from you. Tell us a bit about the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin, also known as the St. Croix tribe, and your work in the tribal education department there.

[00:05:15] Janine McNulty: I have worked in the education department at St. Croix for about 14 years. I am the higher education coordinator and also work in community development. My job is to both support those high school graduates who have gone off to college or technical school, but I also bring college place-based by bringing college programs here. Northwood Technical College has taught construction, welding, food processing, business, CDL licensing, and other programs. While the University of Eau Claire, Barron County campus has zoomed-in classes for those who are not ready to go far away or maybe need more support than campus can provide. I get them ready for campus.

I also bring in programs and classes for the tribe that creates a better workforce for tribal employees. St. Croix holds land in a checkerboard of small sections located in Northwestern Wisconsin. All together, there are six Ojibwe bands of Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin, with St. Croix being the farthest south. Anishinaabe is what Ojibwe call themselves. They have a cultural history of food preparation, including summer camps of gardens, fall camps of wild rice, and spring camps of maple sugar.

The Anishinaabe continue these traditions of harvesting rice and maple sap and also fishing and hunting. St. Croix Education Department started community gardening over 10 years ago. The garden was taken care of by college students as a student work program. This kept students at their place of education so work schedules could be created around classes. Many of the college interns were young mothers on food stamps. Tending the garden created not only healthy food but a new way of thinking about eating and feeding their families.

Many times, the mama's little ones, would be out helping as well. I still am connected to many of these garden former interns and many have home gardens to this day.

[00:07:09] Carlos: How fascinating, especially to see the little ones out there as well. Laura, can you tell us about your work with the Tribal Education Department and explain the Youth Enrichment Scholarship Program?

[00:07:21] Laura Merchant: Absolutely. I've been involved with St. Croix Tribal Education for about 10 years now, first as a student working under Janine, and then as a Native American liaison for students in the local K-12 schools. I specifically worked in Spooner School District. Now, I am the Youth Enrichment Scholarship Program Coordinator and have been doing that for the past couple of years. The Youth Enrichment Scholarship Program or YES Program aims to provide tribal youth with career experiences, cultural education, and other valuable opportunities to prepare them for their future.

During the YES Program, youth are placed in various tribal departments and local businesses where they job shadow and learn about careers in a hands-on environment two days a week. Then we host youth in the Education Department for career exploration as well, where they do work in our gardens quite often. For many of them, this might be their very first time gardening at all.

[00:08:14] Carlos: Love those hands-on experiences. Now Bridget, how does the UW-Madison Extension Program collaborate with the St. Croix tribe and Tribal Education Department?

[00:08:26] Bridget: We've partnered with the St. Croix tribe in various capacities to provide nutrition education and health-focused programming. It's with different entities throughout the tribe over the years so the Tribal Center, the Elder Meal Sites, the community centers, Head Start, and with the Native American liaisons at the local schools, in a variety of ways. Since we're focused on gardening and garden education, really, I'll highlight how that work started. I came across an opportunity to apply for a FoodWise Gardening Grant two years ago.

Through the relationship we built with Laura and Janine out at the Tribal Education Center and the YES Program, we knew that there was this opportunity and they were some advocates for garden and food sovereignty in the tribe. Together we talked through a plan on a way that we could meet the requirements of the grant, which were to have complementary approaches of Direct Ed and then PSE changes as well, and showing a SNAP-Ed eligible audience about the benefits of food gardens and create sustainable food gardening efforts.

Laura and Janine really helped, of course, being there at the tribe, walk me through what could be important, what would be important, including this idea of access to fresh foods. especially traditional foods for tribal members and descendants, and to offer teaching tools in conjunction with that, that link traditional lifeways and foods with our education. Our grant was approved. Once that was approved, we worked together. We started implementing the plan that was Laura and Janine's vision for the garden and this food forest that would be out by their education center.

Then our FoodWise educator worked with them to provide a series of nutrition education lessons to the teens attending Laura's YES program over the summer. They were working in the garden and helping harvest the items in the garden, and then we provided the nutrition education that aligned with that. Her lessons for nutrition ed focused around things like parts of the plant, growing and harvesting fruits and veggies and herbs, preparing food that could be harvested from the garden, and then also connecting with others around the table through food.

Like I said earlier in my introduction, we really try to make sure we're honoring the culture and the environment of the people where we're working. We try to really stay in our lane. When we are doing our nutrition ed, our educators are going in and say we're highlighting the squash that was harvested from the garden. Our nutrition educator will go in and she will talk about the things you might hear about what makes orange fruits and veggies healthy, or what part of the plant does the squash come from, or let's make a sample including squash that you all harvested.

We will focus on that nutrition education component, and then a Tribal community member or leader can come in during that education lesson and then maybe they tell the story of the three sisters, or they tell the story of the history and how it's related to their people. Really trying to do a true partnership where we do what we do best in allowing our Tribal partners to highlight how it's important to their culture. That's how we connect this idea of food and history and culture altogether with the things that we're really capable and ready to answer.

[00:12:30] Carlos: Teamwork makes the dream work. I love the synergy that you've been able to create by focusing on each other's strengths. Lovely. As I mentioned earlier, we've discussed the amazing benefits of gardening, such as making it calmer, lowering our blood pressure, and boosting our self-confidence. I imagine that gardening can be really beneficial for young people. Laura, can you talk about how gardening can support Tribal youth and communities?

[00:13:00] Laura: Sure. When I'm working with youth in the garden or outside harvesting wild plants or anything, bringing them more in touch with agriculture and food sovereignty, some of the kids are very excited and eager to learn more. Some of the kids take a little bit of time to warm up to the idea of it. It may seem unfamiliar to them, but most of the time, I find that the youth find some benefit from it. We'll learn things that they didn't know. We'll be excited to learn new things. We'll be able to share that with their families and that's really exciting to see that.

Being out in nature or in the garden with kids is definitely a really great way to share origin stories of different plants. Talk about how they would be used by our ancestors historically. Talk about how we can still incorporate them in our lives today. Talk about the sacredness of some of those foods and those medicines that we're working to grow. Talking about feeding ourselves well and making healthy choices, and also talking about the relationships that we have with non-human beings in our environment, in our world, those plants and animal beings that we need to respect and share this planet with, and how we can respect and utilize them in a safe and healthy way.

It's also a really good opportunity to introduce some mindfulness concepts to the youth. Talk about traditional ecological knowledge and those kinship connections that are so important for Tribal communities, and get those kids realizing connections that they've never realized before and how important those connections are, and how they'll use them throughout their lives.

[00:14:42] Carlos: Wow. The power behind those conversations and information. Now, Janine, tell us a bit more about this food sovereignty part of the gardening program. How does this get incorporated into cultural preservation efforts?

[00:14:58] Janine: Food sovereignty for a tribe is to go back to the traditional ways of feeding themselves. This goes into a lot of history, but at one time, when Indigenous people were promised food for their land in treaties, the food came as oil and flour and baking soda, which then became fry bread. Feeding oneself went from hunting, harvesting, and gathering to the food shelf and food stamps and being on food assistance.

We are trying to change that narrative. We expanded the education garden from just being at our education building to a raised bed at the elder nutrition site, the Head Start, and the Tribal communities of Maple Plain and Round Lake. We continue to create relationships with the UW-Extension and the UW Spooner Agri Research Station which has always provided us with seedlings in the spring. They also send us their extra produce in the fall.

We give whey produce, we teach canning classes, we grow more traditional plants like Ho-Chunk tobacco which the youth help break down into the tobacco that is used in ceremony and sacred things like that. We take youth and families to gather medicines and introduce fishing and hunting experiences. The youth have even prepared sacred plants like tobacco, sage, and sweetgrass into medicine pouches and give them to the clinic to distribute to elders.

We traditionally hold a ceremony called the Medicine Pole Ceremony in which we feast around the new school year. Much of our bounty is cooked up and fed to the community during this feast. Gardening does the best job of relationship-building for a community. Someday, we would like to see the tribe enter food distribution by partnering with local food producers and even growing their own. Wouldn't it be amazing if St. Croix either raised buffalo or bought buffalo from local farms, processed it, and distributed it to the community, or exchanged food with other tribes in an intertribal connection?

[00:17:02] Carlos: I love that idea. Hope it comes to fruition. Now, gardening is a really beautiful way of connecting with the earth, both physically and mentally. Janine, could you share some touching moments for you working with students in the garden? I would love to hear maybe a description of what being in the garden is like, and, of course, what is it you grow seasonally.

[00:17:25] Janine: We are practical gardeners. We grow what grows well. We try to make it simple and also encourage mistakes. We don't want people overwhelmed with gardening and feel like failures. We want people to find success in small ways and enjoy what they grow. We grow tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, all the regular stuff. We also plant a three-sisters garden which is an Indigenous practice of gardening with corn, beans, and squash. Each of the sisters work to help the other, corn assists the beans to grow tall as a vine, and the beans put nitrogen in the soil, squash keeps the weeds down, and the critters out with squashes' fuzzy leaves.

We grow tobacco as well, and then we dry the leaves for cultural use. I have a former student who is now a staff member at a local school. This young mother of four was very poor, even bathing her children at the beach. As times were pretty rough for her, we kept her stable with the job, her studies, and her kids were bused to our education building after school. We did a lot of cooking from the garden too as students came to the school when there was a good meal.

This day, I remember, it was planting day and her oldest was not doing well at school. He was having some bad behavior days, and so we asked the principal if he could come to plant the garden rather than another day at school. It took only one day, his spirits were lifted. He ended the day of hard work, and he was able to finish that year in school in a better place.

[00:18:55] Carlos: I would take that every single day. Go to gardening instead of school, love it. Now, what advice would you give to all SNAP-Ed educators who want to better support Indigenous youth?

[00:19:07] Laura: My advice to any educators who want to support Indigenous youth is allowing youth space to share the things that they already know, the stories that they already know, the experiences that they've already had because a lot of Indigenous youth that don't get the space to do that. That's how we maintain culture is by allowing people to experience that ownership of who they are and the lifeways that they live, and to not discount their experiences even if they might be different than what we expect them to be.

I know a lot of educators who have pretty strong views of who Indigenous youth are and how Indigenous families live, and that may look different depending on the experiences they've had with tribes in the past, whether it's some or none. I just encourage all educators to be open-minded and really let the youth tell you about themselves, share who they are, share how they live, share what they're passionate about because that's how we keep our culture alive. One of the things that SNAP-Ed does and what Bridget's program does is they keep showing up. They keep coming. They didn't come to say, "Okay, let's come here once to the St. Croix tribe." They come again and again, and they form relationships, and then the kids start to remember them year by year. That's what is different about this program.

[00:20:36] Carlos: Thank you all for all those great answers. I have one more question for you all. What do you stalk your pantry with? Figuratively and/or literally.

[00:20:48] Bridget: I did a more big picture. I think my food, my pantry, and my house reflect the people, the folks I surround myself with in that I look for nourishment. Things that feed my body and my soul, my mind, my emotions, I really do believe in this idea of connecting around food. For me, food is a connector. It's also, for me, a way I show-- it's one of my languages of love. Preparing food and feeding my family and friends is a way that I show my affection and love for others.

[00:21:30] Laura: Literally, what I stock my pantry with is I do a lot of foraging and a lot of canning and a lot of gardening in my own personal life. Right now, I have a whole shelf in my pantry that's just for wild rice. It's actually taken up a lot of space, but I'm thankful to have it. Canned a lot of things from my garden, I found a pickled carrot recipe this year, that's the best-pickled carrots I've ever had. That will be stocking my pantry more in the future. Figuratively, I like to stock my pantry with an open mind and the desire to experience different things and try new things, and support other people to do the same.

[00:22:18] Janine: Then I would say that, in my pantry, it looks similar to Laura's. I don't have those pickle cures, but I have got to try those, but I do have pickle beets and I do a lot of pickles and I do a lot of salsa, and I do-- whatever's coming out of the garden, we try to put it away for the winter and it just creates healthy family. It also creates a time for me to be with my family when I can at home. Just the same as that, you can go into how gardening is relationship building and going back to that Indigenous belief of the three sisters, that everybody has a role. We all have a role, whether that's here at the tribe or whether that's UW-Extension, FoodWIse.

We all have a role in what we're doing and if we all do our role, it works out beautifully and really is the basis for solving so many food and nutrition problems that we have at the tribe and in our entire region. We do what we can and we work where we're good, and if we all do our job as the three sisters, we should be able to do anything.

[00:23:26] Carlos: Thank you so much, everyone, for those great thoughtful answers, and thank you all for joining us today.

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If you want to reach Bridget, Laura, or Janine, we'll link their emails in the show description. We also want to hear from you, our listeners, if you have guests, ideas, or topics we'd love to hear on Stocking the Pantry, tell us all about it. Send us an email to podcasts at Leah's pantry.org. Thank you for a wonderful season, we'll see you the new year for season three of Stalking the Pantry.

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[00:24:11] Colby: This podcast is a product of Leah's Pantry, made possible by funding from the United States Department of Agriculture and their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, an equal opportunity provider and employer. Visit calfreshhealthyliving.org for healthy living tips.

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