Addie Hudgins of the Wahzhazhe Cultural Center showed Go Healthy study participants how to process a butternut squash last week, in the first cooking demo of the Go Healthy study, which is based on the concept of food sovereignty. According to researcher Kaylee Clyma, a Cherokee citizen of OSU’s Center for Indigenous Health, that means defining what “healthy” means to the Osage.
The OSU Center for Indigenous Health partners with tribes to utilize community-based participatory research. That means “everything about the [Go Healthy] study is co-designed with the community, with their priorities out in front,” Clyma said. “Nothing is really done on the outside.”
Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear is among the collaborators on the Go Healthy study, which has already provided eight weeks of produce, Osage-designed healthy recipes, a slow cooker, and more to the households of self-identifying Native adults residing on the reservation who have a BMI designated as obese.
The study was developed based off data from past food studies done between 2016 through 2018 at WELAs and Head Start locations. “That data was taken to the household level,” said Clyma. “And everything has been in collaborating with Osage priorities [of] people living in the community, facing these things daily.”
In creating the boxes, Harvest Land ensured that all the ingredients and produce inside the weekly packages could also be easily found at local grocery stores throughout the reservation. “We tried really hard not to make it anything different than what they would have in their pantry, like normal seasonings [in the recipes] and just normal things that they can just get [easily]. They’ll have their recipes and could use that as a foundation and … make the same meals just going to the local grocery stores,” said Dr. Jann Hayman, Secretary of Natural Resources for the Nation.
Of the study, and Harvest Land’s overall work on food sovereignty, Hayman said, “the very foundation is stripping apart [the Westernized food system] and rebuilding it to be what could really benefit the Osage people.” Hayman likened the Go Healthy study to the making of ribbonwork in that the materials are Western, but the end result is totally Osage.
Hayman oversees Harvest Land, which is in an ongoing process of rematriation by focusing on the past and the future at once. They are doing this by asking head cooks of each district what they want next, so the farm can produce it, and also by creating a seed bank to protect Osage seeds. In focusing on both tribally relevant contemporary and future focused as well as historic Osage foods, Harvest Land is an example of food sovereignty in action.
“We want to be able to address the historical component with the seeds and the original strands of corn, but [also] have Westernized foods, and create something new. If you go completely back to our traditional foods, people are just kind of like, ‘What am I going to do with this?’” Hayman said. “So it’s a process of kind of [like with] these [Go Healthy study produce] boxes, of bringing those cultural foods into it, and just [addressing] the overall loss of knowledge over time. People don’t know how to cook a butternut squash anymore, because they just didn’t have access to it, so kind of bringing that knowledge back, bringing those skills back, and from there, continuing on,” she said.
Taking the Westernized agricultural system and breaking all that down has been just as easy as creating ribbonwork, it seems. Dr. Hayman said her team has not encountered any major obstacles, or even heard of anything negative in response to the study.
The process she references, of breaking down and remaking the elements of Western food, goes for everything at Harvest Land: “the greenhouses and everything, and creating something that’s specific to what the Osage people need and what they can use.”
Hayman explained that after relocations and forced removals limited access to sovereign food sources, it increased usage of commodity foods. “Decolonize” may not resonate; but creating sovereign approaches to healthy eating with what’s available now, however, does.
Today, four out of the five leading causes of Native deaths are food related; so the Go Healthy study comprises a “nutrition intervention” which could help improve health inequalities for Native people. The food box approach works by crowding out nutrient-poor foods with fruit- and vegetable-dense meals which concentrate nutrients, rather than empty calories.
To support this healthy eating process, participants in the study received a weekly vegetable box stocked with recipes developed by Hudgins along with Ben Jacobs of Tocabe, and the Wahzhazhe Health Clinic. Also inside the food box are curriculum sheets empowering Natives with more knowledge about how and why to eat meals produce-forward, nutrient-dense meals.
Harvest Land and OSU asked Hudgins, Jacobs and the WZZ Health Clinic to create a recipe booklet given out as part of the study so that participants would have an increased likelihood of cooking with foods they may not already be regularly accustomed to.
The Go Healthy recipe book will go through a reprinting and redesign in the spring, and will eventually be available beyond the study, along with—possibly—weekly produce boxes, that is, if the study determines the boxes could be a sustainable offering for Harvest Land.
Interest in the recipes and produce boxes is anticipated to be high, given that the study had more interested qualifying applicants than those the project could accommodate. “We had to turn people away,” Clyma said.
Once complete, the study will be published, after being reviewed by multiple Osage Nation departments, including Historic Preservation, the Department of Natural Resources, and the Wahzhazhe Cultural Center.
It’s the perfect timing to focus on health, Clyma observed. Last April, she sat in meetings while still a student gaining her master’s in public health, and was amazed to see how the community interest, Harvest Land’s development, and the tribe’s strategic planning were aligning.
“I distinctly remember sitting at the table [and] hearing this was the perfect time,” said Clyma. “Harvest Land is continuously growing,” she said, and if the growth priorities match the Nation’s continuing initiatives, Osages can expect to see community health resources grow.
Avoiding overwhelm is one key to success when it comes to supporting healthy changes long term, Clyma said. “It’s really hard to give people a lot of things at one time.” Instead, gradual exposure to new healthy foods, over time, can have long term effects.
Healthy changes take time, so it’s important to make the process sustainable and enjoyable, Clyma said. That way, participants can hopefully see results. “With those [ongoing] exposures to those new foods, comes behavior change – are they eating healthy? Is it improving blood pressure? Is it improving BMI? Is it improving mental health? As Indigenous people, it’s so much more than [physical] health,” Clyma said.
Increased fruit and vegetable consumption also improves mental health, too, and supports a traditional lifestyle. “For Native people, health isn’t just measured by [physical] health alone,” Clyma said, but also by mental, emotional, and spiritual health as well as connection to land, people and community. “It’s very relational,” she concluded.
By giving Osages the resources needed to slowly incorporate healthy foods in their lives, they can be empowered to actually make a change in the long term. Years down the road, the connections with ancestral foods, new recipes, and family cooking experiences could turn into long term health results such as improved blood pressure, decreased BMI, and higher longevity.
