Buffalo gardeners: Standing Rock Sioux restore health, fight diabetes
Published by Indian Country Today and the Huffington Post in 2011. For more on topics like this, see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle....
“They
like to be on high ground, so they can keep an eye on us,” said Mike Faith,
vice-chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. We’d driven close to a small
herd of buffalo cantering around the top of a rise north of the tribe’s capitol
in Fort Yates, North Dakota. The rolling hills were the gold and amber of fall
prairie grasses, and the early-morning sky was a brilliant blue. Eventually, the 80 or so animals halted—the bulky bulls facing us
squarely, broad foreheads slightly lowered, with the more diminutive cows milling behind them. A cool breeze ruffled their dark brown fur, which had begun to
thicken for the winter.
The program would distribute the animal’s lean, grass-fed meat to schools
and tribal members to control diabetes, an illness that affects 12% of the approximately
10,000 tribal members—among the highest rates in the country, according to the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Anyone whose condition is serious enough to
require dialysis receives wasna, a
traditional mix of finely shredded dried buffalo meat and berries that won’t
send their blood sugar soaring, explained Skye.
“This is the natural classroom,” said Faith, as we watched the buffalo. “It’s
so important for the children to learn right here on the prairie about these
animals—what we use each part for and how today they still keep both the people
and the prairie healthy.” He pointed to a cloven hoof print. “You can see their
hooves press fallen seeds into the ground. They re-seed the prairie as they
graze. They also eat a lot of woody plants, so they clean the prairie, ensuring
a healthy mix of grasses and other plants.”
Faith and McLaughlin conferred quietly. They wanted a young bull. “How
about that one, with one horn up, one sideways?” asked Faith, and McLaughlin
agreed. As if guessing the men’s intention, the bull ducked back into the herd.
When the animal trotted back out, McLaughlin took aim and, with one rifle shot,
felled him, as the other buffalo scattered across the hilltop. The herd quickly
regrouped about 100 feet away, stood shoulder-to-shoulder, heads up, eyes
alert, to survey the scene—then wheeled and galloped away. “We always use our
best marksmen when we harvest an animal,” said Faith. “We’d never want to have
one run off, wounded.”
Tribal members arrived with a pickup and trailer. John Buckley, head of
the diabetes program, offered tobacco, stuffing some in the fallen bull’s nostrils
before it was loaded onto the trailer and hauled to the group waiting at the
bottom of the hill. As the head was sawn off (at left) and the field-dressing of the carcass got
underway, the little ones and teens hung back. It’s the 21st
century, and Sioux children may be familiar with hunting deer and other game,
but they don’t witness regular buffalo hunts, as youngsters would have done in the old
days. Most tribes are building up their herds—there are about 400 animals in the four
community-owned herds on the Standing Rock reservation, said Mike Lawrence of the Game & Fish Department—and
the taking of any buffalo is a special occasion.
“This is the first time some of the children have seen a buffalo harvested,” said elementary-school teacher Kimberly White Bull. “We brought them here because we want to be sure they’re part of culturally related events like this.” After observing from the sidelines for 30 minutes or so, the kids, shown right, started pitching in, pulling hard on the hide so adults could use skinning knives to cut it away from the carcass, then tugging the rib cage open to make it easier to remove the innards, and eventually wielding the knives themselves. Everyone worked quickly, sharing the heavy labor. The carcass weighed 1,000 to 1,100 pounds, Faith estimated, and to remove the hide it had to be rolled from side to side, and at one point tipped up to a sitting position (“Everyone get behind and push!”). If one person got tired, another stepped in.
“This is the first time some of the children have seen a buffalo harvested,” said elementary-school teacher Kimberly White Bull. “We brought them here because we want to be sure they’re part of culturally related events like this.” After observing from the sidelines for 30 minutes or so, the kids, shown right, started pitching in, pulling hard on the hide so adults could use skinning knives to cut it away from the carcass, then tugging the rib cage open to make it easier to remove the innards, and eventually wielding the knives themselves. Everyone worked quickly, sharing the heavy labor. The carcass weighed 1,000 to 1,100 pounds, Faith estimated, and to remove the hide it had to be rolled from side to side, and at one point tipped up to a sitting position (“Everyone get behind and push!”). If one person got tired, another stepped in.
Praise and humor flowed. “That’s old school!” exclaimed Frank White Bull, diabetes program fitness technician, as he admired elder Winona Eagle Shield’s knife skills. A skinner joshed, “Hey, Kim, how come you’re so good at this?” She responded, “Many deer!” Kids asked questions (“Is this a vein?” “How do I cut the stomach open?” “What’s that green stuff in it?”) and were delighted to touch the heart, pulled warm from the body. “Is it beating?” one asked, as others giggled. Everyone got a chance to try raw liver—sweet, metallic-tasting and custardy-crunchy—a delicacy for the old-time hunters, who would eat it on the spot before packing up the dressed animal for the return to camp. It was a joyful community event, combining health, education and spirituality.
Eagle Shield, who volunteers at the Boys and Girls Club, laid claim to
the stomach and intestines. “Now we know where to go for dinner tonight!”
exclaimed Skye, who runs the Native Gardens Project, a division of the diabetes
program. Through the project, Skye, shown right, encourages tribal members to consume more of
the garden produce and gathered fruits and vegetables that make up a healthy diet. Each year, he tills about 125 home
gardens around the 2.3-million-acre reservation, distributes seeds, teaches
seed saving and food preservation and organizes forays onto the prairie to
collect wild fruits and prairie turnips.
Skye had brought along a big pile of Hubbard squash for the club. “You
can make that into soup to sell for your trip to Bismarck,” Eagle Shield told
the teens. A dearth of lunch places for the tribal workforce that shows up each
weekday in Fort Yates is an opportunity for home cooks, who offer made-up
plates at the tribal hall and other spots around town.
The farmers market has also attracted artisans who’ve sold their work
there and has presented lecture-demonstrations in topics such as drying wild
fruits and prairie turnips, plant-medicine making, greenhouse operations and
community supported agriculture, said Harrison, who hopes the Native Gardens Project will be able to
open a second farmers market in McLaughlin, South Dakota, another Standing Rock
population center. Eventually, Harrison said, she wants to involve more teens
in gardening and marketing their own produce. It’s about saving lives. “We have a high teen-suicide rate, and this is such a healthy activity
for kids,” Harrison explained. “I’d like to see after-school gardening going on
in youth centers around the reservation.”
Standing Rock is promoting a healthful lifestyle via many tribal
projects, including the gardening and buffalo programs (animals in the reservation’s Porcupine District herd shown taking dust baths, at right). That lifeway is not new; it descends from two
historical Sioux economies. The Lakota/Dakota buffalo tradition is well known.
When that ended with the massive federally sponsored buffalo slaughters of the
late 1800s, the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes confined to reservations
along the Missouri River and its tributaries quickly replaced it with a
less-well-known agriculture-based economy.
In fertile, tree-sheltered riparian
areas, community members planted household gardens, gathered food and medicine
plants, raised livestock and used driftwood and fallen timber for heating,
cooking and building, according to an interview in 2000 with the late Sioux
elder Philip Lane, who lived on the Standing Rock and Yankton reservations in
the early years of the 20th century. Villagers supplemented those
foods by fishing and by hunting deer and other game. In today’s parlance, the
newly created economy would be called sustainable, since it fit perfectly with
existing resources.
That way of living continued until the 1950s, when
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built giant dams along the Missouri and
inundated the rich bottomlands. On seven
Sioux reservations in Nebraska and North and South Dakota, the closing of the
dams’ gates created lakes that flooded valuable farmland, swept away thriving
villages and forced families onto the windswept prairie, said Skye. Once
self-sufficient, many Sioux were suddenly destitute, homeless and dependent on
high-starch, high-saturated-fat government commodity foods. The low-nutrient
fast food available during this era took its toll as well, and by the 1960s,
diabetes had appeared at Standing Rock, Skye said.
Modern foods are still causing health havoc. Soda pop is one of today’s
top drivers of diabetes, said diabetes program staffer Gerald Iron Shield, who
conducts home visits to patients. Research bears him out. Scientists at the Harvard
School of Public Health announced in 2004 that a large, decade-long study found those who
consumed more than one sugared soft drink per day increased their diabetes risk
by 80 percent, when compared to those who had just one soda per month. In
contrast to those harmful sweets, Iron Shield said, traditional Lakota/Dakota
treats included gathered fruits, such as chokecherries, buffalo berries and
wild plums, which have healthy natural sugars and plenty of nutrients. “Avoid
soda pop, and you improve your chances of avoiding diabetes,” he said.
The CDC says
maintaining a healthy weight is another major way to defend against diabetes.
That’s traditional, too, according to Skye. “When I give presentations to our
people, I show them a photo of a large group of 19th-century Sioux
chiefs. I ask, ‘What do they have that we don’t?’ After the audience
hems and haws for awhile, I say, ‘Cheekbones.’ Some of us have gained too much
weight and have big, full fry-bread faces. If we want to be healthy, we have to
eat right, acquire more of our food through energetic pursuits like hunting,
gardening and gathering, and get our cheekbones back,” said Skye, shown above following his own advice and filling his family larder by pheasant hunting.
Returning to old-time traditions for nutrition,
including the buffalo ways, is about restoring spiritual as well as physical
health at Standing Rock, said Buckley, who recounted the assistance the buffalo
gave humans when they first emerged on earth from an underground cave. “One of
those who was still underground, Tatanka [buffalo],
asked the Creator for permission to follow us up here and help us, and that’s
why we have been related ever since.” At the very beginning of this buffalo
harvest, Buckley pointed out, the group prayed to the Creator for help in
carrying out their tasks in a good way. “For us, everything has a spiritual
grounding.”
Back at the buffalo pasture, the young bull’s carcass
had been divvied up, and the major hunks of meat were on their way in the back
of a pickup to a nearby USDA-approved meat-packing plant, where cuts would be
processed before being handed out to tribal members. Just the skin remained. “A
good hide for a vision,” Buckley said. He
and fellow tribal member Eliot Ward folded it lengthwise and, staggering under
its weight, carried it to the back of Buckley’s truck. Tribal members dispersed, returning to home, school or work, and all that was left on the prairie was the blessing.
Text, photographs and video c. Stephanie Woodard.