Native Roots

Celebrating Native Food

The White Earth Land Recovery Project also offers an internet organic foods catalog at www.welrp.org/nativeharvest/nativeharvest.html containing wild rice, maple syrup, maple candy, hominy, raspberries, plum jelly, teas, buffalo sausage and gift baskets.

Another program profiled at the summit was the Native American Food Systems Project, a collaborative effort between the Northwest Indian Applied Research Institute, South Puget Sound Intertribal Planning Agency and The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The project is designed to assist tribal communities in addressing serious nutrition and health problems. This project encourages Native peoples in the Puget Sound area to return to production and consumption of healthy traditional foods consumed by their ancestors. Native nutrition is familiar to many Native people in the Pacific Northwest, who are only two or three generations removed from diets based on game animals and fish, a time when obesity, diabetes, and heart disease – all common today – were rare.

A nutritional analysis of Native bean varieties was shared by nutritionist Craig Hassel, Ph.D., of the University of Minnesota. In this analysis, nutrient amounts for protein and fiber were similar for Native varieties of corn and beans as compared to the commercial varieties. However, striking differences existed in the total antioxidant capacity of Native bean and corn varieties versus market bean and corn varieties. Often Native varieties such as the Potawatomi lima bean and the Chadron bean had twenty times the antioxidant capacity of the market lima bean. The Oneida corn had three times the antioxidant capacity as the market corn variety. Antioxidants are commonly found in fruits and vegetables and they are believed to eliminate harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals, which can damage the cell’s DNA and are thought to trigger some forms of cancer and other diseases. A high antioxidant capacity refers to an ability to neutralize a greater number of damaging free radical molecules.