Arizona's Indigenous communities are reviving millennia-old food that was nearly lost

Jacob Butler held in his hands the same white pomegranate that his ancestors once held hundreds of years ago.

The plump fruit hung on the vine, flaunting its bright coral hue in the simmering afternoon sun as it ripened into its final golden form. The tree from which the pomegranate now hangs is a genetic clone of the mother plant, believed to trace back to the original cuttings that were introduced to the Tohono O’odham community by Jesuit Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino in the 17th Century.

On a recent afternoon, Butler grasped the storied fruit at A'al E'es Oidag, The Children's Plants Garden, at the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community near Scottsdale where he is the senior community garden coordinator.

“They're the original trees that our ancestors had their hands on and put in the ground with those missionaries,” Butler said standing beneath the shade of the pomegranate tree. “It ties us to the history of this land and it ties and connects us to the people.”

Butler is of the Onk Akimel O’odham people, whose name means “River People,”  and has lived within the community his entire life. For nearly the past 20 years, he’s nourished the garden and established a traditional seed bank to demonstrate that farming still is sustainable in the community.

He has worked to revitalize traditional foods and farming customs that his community practiced for millennia but nearly lost.

He is not alone.

Indigenous communities across Arizona are reclaiming time-honored foodways and traditions that were almost forgotten because of federal Indian boarding schools and work programs that disrupted the flow of cultural knowledge.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the urgency of food sovereignty and self-sufficiency for Indigenous communities as grocery stores and seed banks were nearly emptied and the supply chain floundered. The Tohono O’odham Nation, which is nearly the size of Connecticut, houses only a few grocery stores to feed its population of nearly 10,000 people.

This revival has inspired the next generation of children and farmers to continue the work and keep their traditions alive.

“It all starts with just, if you will, planting a seed in their mind,” Butler said. “It's a slower start, but people are starting to gain an appreciation for what we lost and want it back.”

An intergenerational disruption caused communities to lose touch with their traditional foods, farming

Beginning in the 1800s and through the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were removed from their homes and put in boarding schools run by the government and other religious entities. The boarding school system sought to assimilate Indigenous children across the country and erase thousands of years of Native American culture, languages and family ties.

“The boarding schools really were a generational trauma that interrupted this intergenerational transfer of knowledge,” said Tristan Reader, assistant professor of practice in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona.

“The kids weren't there to learn either the practical farming, the practical work of the food, nor the cultural elements of it.”

In the 1950s and 1960s federal work programs bussed tribal members from their homes to places like Eloy and Casa Grande where they would work in commercial cotton fields in an attempt to move members into the mainstream wage economy, according to Reader.

Additionally, World War II caused a disruption in the labor force in Indigenous communities as people left to serve and sometimes never returned, Reader said.

In the 1970s, the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR), began providing commodity foods to Native American communities across the country. The commodity foods, also known as “commods,” consisted of foods that were typically high in fats and sugars and low in fiber.

The change in diet incited an intergenerational epidemic of obesity and diabetes among Native American communities that many still live with today.

Those policies and events caused an insurmountable amount of cultural loss for Indigenous communities across Arizona. Traditional foodways, farming practices, cultural knowledge and the next generation of farmers were nearly lost because of the disruption.

“All of these things really came together to see this really devastating decline in the food system,” Reader said.

Previously, Reader was the co-founder and co-director of Tohono O’odham Community Action, or TOCA, for 20 years where he worked with community members to establish food sovereignty programs meant to drive cultural revitalization and public health.

In the 1930s, the Tohono O’odham Nation grew an estimated 20,000 acres of traditional crops and produced roughly 1.6 million pounds of tepary beans a year, according to Reader. By 2000, there was just one elder growing traditional crops on about two acres and TOCA struggled to get 100 pounds of tepary beans, Reader said.

This loss of traditional farming and crops also represented an immeasurable loss to Indigenous communities’ culture and way of life, or “Himdag,” in the Tohono O’odham community.  Songs, prayers, stories and nuances associated with traditional farming practices nearly disappeared.

“It's not just a loss unto the foods, that's a loss unto our Himdag and to our culture,” Butler said.

“Things have been removed from our traditional practices and ways of life for so long that, when you really look at it, we don't even understand how much of a loss we've really sustained.”

‘We weren't just surviving here in the desert, we were thriving’

Among the Akimel O’odham community, about 80% of the diversity in seed collections was lost, according to Butler, the community garden coordinator. Of the 13 varieties of traditional tepary beans that were once grown in the community, only two remained when Butler began his work nearly 20 years ago.

“People only knew of two, which means they were off the plates and they're out of the living memory of the people for long enough that they couldn't even recall the ones that we once had,” Butler said.

For thousands of years the Akimel O’odham community practiced traditional farming by building elaborate canals and harvesting bountiful yields of corn, beans and squash.

“We weren't just surviving here in the desert, we were thriving and that was based on the agriculture that supported us,” Butler said.

As the population of non-Native settlers around the community grew, however, rivers were diverted and dammed. Without the rivers, the fields dried up and farming was no longer an economically viable option for the community.

By the 1940s, traditional farming was largely abandoned by tribal members because of numerous historical events and federal government policies, including Indian boarding schools.

The community began leasing out parcels of land to commercial non-Native farmers as a form of income. Today, roughly 12,000 acres of land in the community are under cultivation but, with the exception of a few family gardens, none of it is directly farmed by tribal members, according to the community’s website.

“Farming as a way of life died here,” Butler said. “A lot of people don't really care for farming in the community because they feel like it's a detriment or a setback.”

Similarly, Tohono O’odham Nation members along the Santa Cruz River in southern Arizona farmed the land using an intricate canal irrigation system for millennia. In 1887, the General Allotment Act shattered the land into hundreds of landowners that referred the responsibility of food production to individual families instead of the community growing food as a whole.

“Depending on how you look at that, some people saw it as a way to definitely colonize and assimilate Native peoples into this kind of settler way of thinking,” said Amy Juan, administration manager at San Xavier Co-Op Farm in the Tohono O’odham Nation near Tucson.

The farm, which is located in the ancestral village of Wa:k in the San Xavier District, was formed when a group of landowners came together to create the cooperative to piece lands back together and farm, once more benefitting the whole community.

Today, the farm is focused on sustaining healthy farming practices and growing traditional crops while promoting economic development within the community.

For Juan, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, the farm represents a lot more than a business.

The traditional tepary beans that the farm grows represent an intimate connection between Juan and her late grandmothers, she said. Her grandmas were the ones who first taught Juan how to cook and prepare the beans.

“A lot of these traditional foods are my way of continuing to be with my ancestors,” Juan said.

“We have a relationship with these foods and with these beans, not just a relationship by growing them, but our songs and our stories about how these foods came to us or how we're connected to them.”

Children are learning about their traditional foods

Luzmila Salcido caressed the delicate green vines sprouting from the knotted stem of a Tohono O’odham squash as the setting sun bathed the O’odham Farmers Market with golden light on a recent afternoon.

Yellow and green streaks traversed the traditional, plump crop as Salcido, 7, stood behind a squash-covered table in Sells. Salcido had grown the squash in the school garden alongside her classmates at Indian Oasis Elementary Primary School and now prepared to sell them.

The tabletop medley of squashes was the students’ first harvest in about nine years.

Salcido’s mother, Angelica Salcido, and Krishna Scott-Mattias, both teachers at the school, revitalized the garden and program after it was discontinued. Angelica and Scott-Mattias said they hoped the program's revitalization would help bring the traditional foods back to being part of the children's normal, everyday lives.

“It is part of our tradition,” Scott-Mattias said. “It is our tradition to be farmers and it brings back the traditional foods to them.”

After the squash was harvested, the children excitedly asked if the food was going to be served in the cafeteria and if they could take a squash home with them. They would find cups, fill them with dirt and plant random seeds they found outside, Angelica said.

“They're already starting to think of how it's connected to the way that they eat at home,” Angelica said. “They just believe anything and everything can grow and that's good.”

The program will keep running at the school for as long as Angelica is there, she said.

As Angelica spoke from behind a cluster of squash, the voice of Sterling Johnson boomed through a microphone, welcoming everyone to the market.

Johnson, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, serves as co-director and farm manager with the Ajo Center for Sustainable Agriculture, a Native American-governed organization that works to revitalize agricultural traditions and train the next generation of farmers.

“For us, traditional foods have been around for thousands of years and we lost touch with them,” Johnson said. “Now, these crops grow and can thrive and that's our culture and that's what we want to keep alive.”

Johnson practices dryland farming techniques that use rainwater to cultivate traditional crops alongside the organization, which has distributed thousands of seeds to farmers. The organization educates people about traditional foods and the seed-saving process.

“It inspires the next generation to keep it going and tell them to take it further,” Johnson said. “We want to continue to do those things and have those things for the future and pass that on because that's who we are.”

At a booth nearby, Rochelle Garcia, creator of Blue Corn Custom Designs, stirred together blue corn mush to place atop her signature mini pumpkin pancakes. Two large pitchers filled with the golden “Rez Palmer” drink, Indigenous tea mixed with lemonade, stood next to Garcia, a member of the Navajo Nation.

As people ordered, they often asked for boba in their Rez Palmer, an effort by Garcia to appeal to the younger generation and have them taste the traditional tea.

“The message for the youth is just to let them know that our traditional foods are waiting,” Garcia said. “It's keeping traditions alive but also helping us move forward for the younger generation.”

About two hours north of the farmers market, Jacob Butler picked a pink lemon from a tree in the garden and swiftly sliced it open with his pocket knife. As he walked, Butler pointed to a large plot of land that would soon be used to farm traditional crops on a small scale in an effort to show the community that it can be achieved.

Over the years, Butler has taught dozens of kids about the importance of traditional crops and food sovereignty. Some children now return as adults to admire the literal fruits of their labor from years ago.

Since he began his work, Butler has seen community members realize the value of the foods they once ate and farming's vital role in the survival of the community’s sovereignty and self-governance, he said.

“Over the past 20 years, our children's understanding has been greater than even their parents,” Butler said.

“It's an awesome thing to see how the integration of your culture and revitalization of traditional beliefs and perspectives can really assist the next generation into moving into modern-day society while retaining who we are and even being stronger for it.”

After nearly 20 years, Butler will be leaving the garden in December when he will join the community's Tribal Council.

As he walked out of the garden beneath the shade of the white pomegranate trees, Butler reflected on what the garden represented to him. The endeavor wasn’t only a way to promote the traditional ways of the past, it was also a vessel to preserve the time-honored seeds for the future.

When the day comes that the community is ready to invest in farming once again, it will have the access and ability to produce the traditional foods its members had grown for millennia.

Until then, the seeds will be waiting, ready to be planted.

Have a news tip or story idea about the border and its communities? Contact the reporter at josecastaneda@arizonarepublic.com or connect with him on Twitter @joseicastaneda.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona's Indigenous communities are reclaiming nearly lost foodways