♪ ♪ >>When I wave my little flag and say hey we could maybe help ourselves.

We could maybe eat better, and make ourselves healthier.

I could hear some of them saying: what for?

What's the point?

It's too sad to keep going.

Nobody listens to us anyway.

Not the real story.

I want to turn to them and say: win yourselves back by claiming ourselves from this colonization.

You haven't killed us yet; you haven't crushed us completely yet.

Show them that you're not gone yet.

Make it be a food revolution.

♪ ♪ Here we are a tribe, a culture that is on the brink of being lost altogether, by way of food, language, traditions, many, many ways that we used to live and we're all becoming mainstream Americans.

♪ ♪ >>As I went into nutrition, I realized that there wasn't a lot of information around nutrient content of Alaskan native foods.

A lot of our elders tell us that when they went to boarding schools; they were taken away from their families.

When they got to school, they learned about the food pyramid.

These are the foods you eat, these are the western foods, these are the foods that are good for you, and nowhere on that pyramid was anything close to a native food.

There was a lot of shame because traditional foods were associated with not having money, because they were something that you harvested.

♪ ♪ >>The government said, we're taking 10.000 acres of your land and it will be flooded because we need this dam built for the steel industry.

When that 10,000 acres was taken away, after a lot of fights and battles, within days houses were being burned down.

Prior to this, the resources were there, we didn't really need to depend on the government so much.

♪ ♪ >>I think back to treaty times when our ancestors were defining what sovereignty was.

In 1855 the very first conversation they had was about foods, was about having access to all the elk, all the seafood, all the birds, all the cedar trees, all the berries and medicines that they knew in that very world what we ceded our land to the government for was for access to our food.

Because they knew that without our food, we would be nobody.

A Muckleshoot person without a plate of salmon doesn't exist.

♪ ♪ >>I think some people are understanding how valuable those traditional knowledge and those traditional stories are.

There's a movement where people want to know where their food comes from, they want to grow their own food and they want to be healthier.

♪ ♪ >>Our lands were taken; our people were confined to reservations and our health began to suffer.

We lost the buffalo so we no longer could migrate.

We'd be issued processed meat, commodity cheese and sugar and sweetened can peaches.

White refined flour was initially dumped.

A lot of times it had maggots, it was mealy.

Pioneer women showed us how to make use of the flour, to make it into fry bread.

So fry bread came into being as a survival food.

♪ ♪ Our tastes began to change and so people that formerly embraced their traditional foods now were losing touch with that and our food way no longer supported our health.

>>We can't sugarcoat this anymore.

We have to really know why these things are happening, like increasing of heart disease, increasing of diabetes in the community.

Because we can't tolerate most of the foods that we see on the shelves today.

♪ ♪ >>My father's generation was the first generation to witness the diabetes epidemic.

My aunts and uncles as children would have never heard the word diabetes spoken cause it's a word that didn't exist.

The Native Americans are the canary in the coal mine - we are the ones who first experienced the harmful effects of processed foods and sedentary lifestyle.

>>"How's everybody today?"

<Good> "Thank you so much for joining me."

I come from a large family.

My grandmother passed away from complications from type 2 diabetes and a lot of my family members have type 2 diabetes.

"Remember sometimes we need to stop ourselves after a busy day and take a break."

There are ways that we could prevent diabetes through the food approach and through movement.

"You guys, that was an amazing job today.

Thank you so much for joining me and my friend."

>> After I started my first job and found that our children were eating less and less native foods, I realized - hey there is a problem here.

I went to a conference and it was an elder conference and they told me that I needed to really focus on getting kids a taste for traditional foods for life.

"Are you going to smile for us?"

How have we not already grasped on to this concept?

It's not just about the nutrient content, it's about being out and harvesting the foods and getting that physical activity.

♪ ♪ >>We started this pilot project to only eat our native foods for three months and not just what we think nowaday as native foods, but pre-contact native food.

So it was the food we ate before the Spanish came to this area.

I got fourteen volunteers and they agreed to get blood tests done at the beginning of the diet, and then after three months.

We had a range from diabetic people, to pretty healthy people, to heart disease, to obesity.

All of us were searching and learning and asking questions, and we were all afraid, like are we going to starve to death?

"Thank you all for coming, thank you for daring to do this.

I'm so excited on so many levels.

I realize that a lot is happening fast and I wanted people to take down notes.

Hopefully we'll gather many times to share food and learn more and more about what foods we can eat and not eat."

>>The food that we eat today is nothing like the food that we ate in the past.

Some of the stuff that's considered traditional native food is very recent.

Things like fry bread don't have much of a history at all.

The main ones of course are beans, corn, squash, pinons, wild spinach, and just tons of different plants that surrounded us and were not actually cultivated.

You have wild bird eggs of different types; turkey eggs.

And then, of course, all the wild game that were available at that time.

>>We called it our buffalo hunt.

We went to a herd up north and picked out a buffalo and they butchered it for us.

The group ate that buffalo and whatever we could find to help with our diet because there's nothing like it out there of our pre-contact food.

>>Salt is really important and it's something that your body needs, especially living in the desert environment.

For hundreds and thousands of years people have been gathering salt in the same locations where they geologically, naturally occur.

For us, the Tewas along the Rio Grande, the closest place was Salinas salt areas.

And of course it wasn't walking like they used to do, but driving down, still was basically the same path that they travelled along all those years ago.

>>This is a fantastic grasshopper catcher.

You can eat them raw, and raw is okay, but I've done stir fry and stir fry tend to be kind of chewy.

The deep frying seems to be the best way.

It's a little bit warm right now so you have to come out early in the morning when they're slow, so it's kind of hard to catch them right now.

When they're small, they're pretty easy to just eat raw and that way they have all the enzymes and stuff that bugs are good for.

One, two, three... You can see how they're cooking all nice If you had a plague, you could live off of these For the Pueblo people here and the Navajo and some Utes, any animal that roamed around here, was part of our diet; you could survive on these, cause they're high protein.

Very rich, rich source of food.

One of our dishes was in English, translated as paper bread and it's paper thin and it crumbles when you eat it and it's absolutely delicious.

Here at Santa Clara we lost that tradition, there were no more women making this kind of bread anymore.

We contacted some Hopi women that were generous enough to come out and give us some classes on how to make this piki bread again.

>>This was our first unleavened bread out of blue corn or white corn cooked on stones.

Going back to Santa Clara after practicing this method it became very, very clear how important these ancestral lifeways are.

Not just for the history or the past, but for our future.

>>"Alright, let's look and see what we have...

Squash, melon, cucumber, or gourd.

We can only choose one.

>>Rattle gourd?

>>You want to do the rattle gourd here?

And no squash here?

All right.

Maybe we'll do squash over at the other field.

>>What's rattle gourd?

>>The ones you dance with.

The rattle.

Rattle gourds!

I think we did it!

Good.

We'll have those for when we are ready to plant.

High five!"

For many, many years we've been growing out seeds, crops of our people, saving the seeds; learning different methods of growing and planting and harvesting and preparing foods.

I know that the seeds and the plants that we grew all those years are genetically adapted to this climate and this culture, so I can't help but think we are too.

♪ ♪ >>When I go out to these communities and I see what's available and I know that it's not possible for anybody to get out there and have access to fresh fruits and vegetables at a grocery store at a reasonable price, it's still very hard.

That's where we started turning to the foods that you could harvest from the land, such as fireweed Fireweed is something that grows all over the state of Alaska and it's something that you can eat in anytime throughout its growth period.

We eat whale because it's very good for us and because it keeps us warm throughout the winter months.

People who have held on to their traditional diet such as consuming salmon and seal oil on a daily basis safeguarded their health as well.

>>We call it wasna.

We'd grind up the corn or grind up the meat and pulverize it, add the fat and dried berries, It's a food that you can live on because it has everything we need to survive.

The three sisters; which are corn, beans and squash grow together and nourish us uniquely in that the beans give us protein and phosphorous and potassium, the corn gives us carbohydrate, and the squash gives us the antioxidants, the vitamin and the carbohydrate.

When we eat those plants, we are in balance.

>>Food sovereignty is a way of living together in a community of people who you are bound to for life and being able to define and have the right to eat the food that you want to eat.

That is an inherent right.

Gea who is 9 months old, her first food was just pureed nettles.

And she loved them.

I just remember her like squealing and having this scary green face afterward, just making a mess, and so excited to be eating food.

When my baby is crying for food, I think that's food sovereignty.

There she is... >>Our ancestors fought hard for us to have this 235,000 acres that we have, it is a 235,000 acre grocery store.

We have rivers and streams, tons of fish, we have different plants.

We have berries that we can pick, all kinds of different natural foods that are there for us.

I think a lot of us grow up with the teaching that you only take what you are going to eat and you use every part of everything that you grow, every part of everything that you hunt and every part of everything that you gather.

>>These are some drawings I did of some of the methods of farming that we used to do, and I've been playing around with a lot of this original farming instead of doing what the big agricultural movement has done.

Especially in this climate of New Mexico it's very fragile.

We live in the high desert so we had to deal with dry and cold and hot.

My ancestors figured out these ways to survive in this climate as farmers.

The use of arroyos so if a flood comes down, then it would stop the movement and spread out the water and it would go into the sand near on either side of that, and you could grow your corn and vegetables there.

Water collection here is so, so important, so the use of just the contours of the hills and the rock mulch and sand being a big deal of how you collect the water around here.

>>Menominee's were the first farmers.

Menominee's were the first gardeners in this area that is now known as Wisconsin.

And we were very advanced and we had some incredible technologies and had some incredible soil adaptations that people are realizing how valuable they are and that they can possibly help us today.

>>The Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Crow, the hunter-gatherer tribes on the prairie, we all shared a similar food way and our diet gave us excellent health.

We ate from the land and we ate within the cycles of nature.

>>I find myself reading labels a lot, cause most of these foods that we do buy have to come from like either the nearby co-op or organic places.

Especially when I'm reading the things that I thought were healthy are actually turning out not to be really healthy and the scary thing is that there's really no foods that have no GMO anymore.

>>We'll all make together some sweet tamales.

>>It's opening my mind to show me the kind of work that was done in order for people to eat.

And I'm also seeing that if it was a community working together, gathering the food, growing the food, preparing the food that it wasn't a hard thing, everybody knew what role that they played in the everyday life way.

My grandchildren came over and were tasting my food.

The little four year old, "ooh grandma this tastes really good, I like Indian food."

>>If you're known as a cook and suddenly all your ingredients have changed on you, it may be hard for you to accept it because you have to start from zero again.

I know how to cook brownies and cake and Jell-O, but I don't know how to cook an elk dish.

People sometimes are scared to try something new because the unknown a lot of times is frightening.

♪ ♪ >>The resistance that I've seen is when I have not been meeting people where they're at.

When I talk to youths, I talk about our ancestors and our elders and how excited they were for them to be living here, and what they gave up for them to be here.

>>My generation and younger especially, we choose to cook or not to cook.

The health cost of that choice, we're now beginning to understand.

>>One of the big challenges is finding the original foods.

A lot of plants and animals that are now extinct were part of our original diet.

Raspberries are on our diet, they were native to this environment usually found up in the mountains.

I planted these so that we would have raspberries close at hand and this year's a good crop.

So we're lucky.

>>A lot people, especially with climate change and with what's happening with our environment are questioning the safety of our traditional foods.

When you look at what you can buy at the store and what those foods have been exposed to; the pollutants or the pesticides.

Our foods still are the safest and best to offer to children at a young age.

>>Just looking at what the creator gave us versus what the government gave us; in my opinion that's how I look at traditional foods.

>>We have to take a stake in our food way and be involved.

It's our land and our resources that we can use for our health.

We now use the "My Native Plate" which looks very much like the Medicine Wheel.

Every tribe has their own food model now.

We regain in restoring pieces of that early food system.

We brought back the buffalo.

We brought back heirloom varieties of corn.

>>Everybody had different health issues and mine was high cholesterol.

I had been seeing the doctor for several times about it, they had done all kinds of tests on me and came up with the conclusion that there was nothing to do about it.

Lo and behold after three months on the Pueblo Food Experience I went back to see the doctors, got our blood test done and just eating our original food my cholesterol was perfect.

>>Eating ancestral food I lost 90 pounds.

I made it my mission every day to walk five miles.

To barely start to mirror the physical activity that our ancestors did.

Reconnecting with our ancestral ways of being is very much also about looking at how our ancestors no matter what part of the world they lived at had that intimate relationship with their place.

>>When you do eat the foods that your ancestors ate, it benefits you not just health wise, but mentally.

You're talking to other participants about recipes or what they added and what they took out and what worked for them.

It's more of like a community tight knit; You become helpful to one another, you learn from one another.

You grow food together, you share meals together.

>>I welcome you to the pueblo food experience.

Persevere and manage to do it and be as a group through it.

I think it will be quite an experience for you.

♪ ♪ What I'm doing right now is a cookbook.

A lot of people aren't going to commit to the diet for their three months cold turkey kind of stuff, but they want to do it more safely in their comfort zone and the cookbook would be a good way for that to happen.

>>As indigenous people we have the right to feed ourselves our diet and chose those foods that are accustomed to our own DNA, but not only that but to our cultural life ways.

♪ ♪ >>It's feeding your spirit, it's feeding the people, it's feeding who you are.

It's helping you to remember who you are and the land that you come from and that is the medicine that we're after.

>>We're relearning though food sovereignty that we have the wisdom to prevent diabetes; it's right there in front of us.

We just have to look back to what our grandmothers were doing.

>>If there's one thing I could change is to let our community know that they're powerful people.

We've been here for ten thousand years and there's a reason.

We're a very strong people and we persevered and we'll continue to persevere.

>>The things that we learned have been more than just this is pretty good food, it's been, oh my god, we are the descendants of the people that figured this out.

♪ ♪