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An Indigenous-led food coalition in the Four Corners is giving locally grown produce to Native families.
As Clark Adomaitis reports, this is part of an effort to address health inequity in the community.
In a warehouse in Cortez, Colo., Karlos Baca, a Southern Ute and Dine chef and food organizer, is demonstrating how to fry green tomatoes in corn meal grown on the nearby Ute Mountain Ute reservation.
“Flour egg wash and then this one’s just corn meal. So it’s yellow corn.”
Karlos Baca demonstrates how to fry green tomatoes in flour, egg, and yellow cornmeal — all local ingredients. (Photo: Clark Adomaitis / KSUT/KSJD)
Twenty Indigenous families from the Four Corners area stop in to watch Baca demonstrate how to cook, and to pick up packages of produce from local farmers.
One woman eats Baca’s fried tomato.
“Yeah. Good. Thank you. See you next week.”
Baca has been working to feed Native people in the Four Corners region for 15 years.
Now, he’s working with the Four Corners Food Coalition, an Indigenous-led nonprofit that received a grant to set up weekly packages of local produce or Indigenous Shared Agriculture boxes for 20 families for 16 weeks.
His work here is not just about providing food – it’s part of a larger social justice movement.
“One of the first systems of warfare is always destruction of people’s food systems, their food stores, their agriculture, to make them make them subservient.”
One of Baca’s food justice goals is to fight the effects of colonialism on Native people.
“If you look at colonization, the history of it didn’t happen overnight. the change in diet, even though the enforcement of government rations, you could say, you know, really did massive damage to the Indigenous diet and lifeways, foodways, everything. If you look at our Indigenous foods as microchips, you know, and that on a cellular level, everything that your ancestors ate was, is still in your system. So as you’re plugging each one of these individual items of food back into your body, you’re also unlocking those memories, right?
The Four Corners Food Coalition hopes to grow the food distribution program in future years.
Indian Health Service Director Roslyn Tso (center) toured the Billings Urban Indian Health and Wellness Center earlier in July. (Photo: Kayla Desroches / Yellowstone Public Radio)
The state of Montana is directing millions of dollars to boosting psychiatric services within Indigenous communities.
Yellowstone Public Radio’s Kayla Desroches reports.
Gov. Greg Gianforte (R-MT) announced $6.5 million in one-time grants will be available to tribal Nations and Urban Indian communities through a proposal process.
The Billings Urban Indian Health and Wellness Center is one of five Urban Indian Organizations in Montana to receive a portion of its funding from the Indian Health Service.
It also runs on grants.
Director Leonard Smith says the building needs updates to its cooling and heating systems along with other renovations.
“We’re trying to build the resources and space that is needed to provide the services that we’re developing and designing.”
The funding announcement comes from a pot of $300 million lawmakers set aside from the state general fund last year for improvements to Montana’s behavioral health and disability support systems.
A commission that includes elected leaders, a rural mental healthcare representative and a member of disability services is in charge of recommending areas of need.
The Montana Department of Health and Human Services says tribes and Urban Indian Health Organizations interested in funding should submit proposals for how they would use the money.
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