the Nutritional Transition from Traditional Foods to a Commodity Food Distribution Program Amongst the Sioux
Here a paper I worked on for Public Health class last semester. I am posting it here in order to try to further the discussion surrounding nutrition programs on Native American reservations. For the most part, there is an admitted lack of research on the effects that emergency food programs have on these populations. I think an analysis of the nutritional transition from traditional foods to a commodity food distribution program amongst the Sioux reveals an interesting dimension of what food security should strive for.
“A long time ago my father told me what his father told him, that there was once a Lakota holy man, called Drinks Water, who dreamed what was to be; and this was long before the coming of the Wasichus [the White-men]. He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back into the earth and that a strange race had woven a spider’s web all around the Lakotas. And he said: ‘When this happens, you shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land, and beside those gray square houses, you shall starve.’ They say he went back to Mother Earth soon after he saw this vision, and it was sorrow that killed him. You can look about you now and see that he meant these dirt-roofed houses we are living in, and that all the rest was true. Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.” – Black Elk
“…for Native Americans, current federal dietary guidelines promoting a meaty, cheesy diet amount to, perhaps inadvertently, the nutritional equivalent of smallpox-infected blankets.” – Neal Barnard, M.D. and Derek M. Brown
