We know that food is medicine, and that we are connected to our foods- whether our sacred wild rice, our mandaamin, or corn, or our relatives the sturgeon, namewag and deer. Growing traditional foods restores our relationship to who we are as Anishinaabeg people, insures our health, and allows us to create food security for the generations yet unborn. We are also sure that our work to relocalize our food economy is essential for the future when a climate challenged and reduced petroleum economy is the norm.

What we have done - What we intend to do

We grow our traditional foods as a core element of our work. These foods are both higher in nutritional value, essential for our battle against diabetes (according to the Indian Health Service 30% of our community has diabetes), and are more resilient in the time of climate change as these traditional foods, like our flint corn, squash and beans varieties are strong in droughts and unfamiliar with petrochemical additives.

We are growing foods at a community level and have plowed l70 gardens these past years, as well as put up greenhouses for our people.

We also partnered with the Heifer Project to begin restoring heritage turkey varieties for our community and have one very successful project in this.

We launched a project with the Pine Point Elementary School, both addressing pesticide contamination (with the Pesticide Action Network)and we are working on the school breakfast and lunch program since l00% of the children that participate in this program are all high risk for diabetes and ADHD. The program provides traditional, local and organic foods to our youth, and now to our elders there as well. We also provide food for l70 elderly diabetic families in our community committed to food sovereignty and re-traditionalization of our foods.

For the past seven years, we have worked to combat the patenting and genetic modification of our wild rice, and succeeded this year in passing state legislation securing some protection for our wild rice. We are working with Native Hawaiians and Indigenous and Hispanic farmers in New Mexico on this same campaign in relationship to taro and Indigenous seed varieties.

REGIONAL WORK

We are working on a regional Indigenous corn restoration strategy in the Great Lakes and Great Plains region. This work is a concerted initiative between tribal farmers, tribal colleges and seed breeders to create a viable seed bank for the region and for seed and food sovereignty in the region. This project also will include an oral history of our corn varieties and these stories for our people. We hope to launch this project in 2008, formally, but have been working on this over the past few years.