Despite generations of sustainable farming, Native American tribes have been losing touch with these practices because of health problems and a lack of knowledge concerning ancestral farming. However, some groups, including the ones below, are seeing this as an opportunity for renewal.
Traditional Native American Farmers’ Association
After noticing the move away from traditional farming in his community, Clayton Brascoupé started TNAFA back in 1992 in Santa Fe, N.M. Today, it includes more than one dozen tribes. Education is fundamental to the organization, which is why it offers workshops in seed-saving, home gardening, traditional food production, crop marketing, sustainable design and more.
White Earth Land Recovery Project
The group’s original mission was to resolve the land rights struggles of the Anishinaabes people of White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota. However, in the subsequent years, it has grown to encompass a wide range of issues, including agriculture, for the Anishinaabes as well as other tribes. White Earth produces its own food line under the Native Harvest label, as well as hosting conferences regarding indigenous farming. The group also has an impressive seed library, which not only includes collected ones, but it has also rediscovered forgotten strains. After finding squash seeds in an 800-year-old pot, the group was able to grow 50 seeds of Gete-okosomin (“really old cool squash”), according to Sustainable Cities Collective.
San Ildefonso Pueblo Community Farm Program
Anyone who is familiar with the Pueblo‘s current eight acres (comprised of numerous families’ fields) would probably be surprised to learn of its humble beginnings as a small plot in Tribal Councilman Tim Martinez’s backyard in 2010. With crops ranging from traditional varieties of corn, beans and squash to onions, lettuce, carrots, okra and more, the Pueblo is very diverse. Its emphasis, though, is truly on the community. A community-built hoop house keeps crops growing longer, and the produce is sold at local farmers’ markets to members of the neighboring communities. Integral to the Pueblo are the lessons — including watching moon cycles and migration patterns to gauge planting and harvesting times to preparing and tending crops — taught by elders to youths.
To learn about more Native American groups, click here.
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Tag: the Midwest
How Paper Airplanes Paid for a Veteran’s Trip to Washington, D.C.
While learning about D-Day in his homeschool lessons, Jagger, a 7-year-old from Hamilton, Ind., was struck by the soldiers’ bravery. Inspired, Jagger wanted to do something to honor a World War II veteran.
So he came up with the idea of raising $800 — enough to send one veteran on a trip to Washington, D.C. through Northeast Indiana Honor Flight, a nonprofit that has four flights scheduled for 2015 to bring groups of veterans to see the World War II memorial.
“He loves folding paper airplanes and with it being the honor flight we thought that would be a really neat thing that he could give back to the people who are helping him reach his goal,” Jagger’s mother Chante Hurraw tells WANE-TV.
So Jagger began folding airplanes and built a display explaining his project. He took it and his paper-airplane-folding prowess to several dinners at American Legions and told the attendees that if they made a donation, he’d give them an airplane.
Jagger ended up raising $1,058.25, enough to send one veteran to our nation’s capital, plus extra to start saving up for a second veteran’s trip. Jagger plans to keep up his fundraising and paper airplane mission indefinitely.
“We couldn’t be prouder,” his mom says. “He’s a great person. He’s a great kid, but he is a great person. He has a big heart. That’s important to us.”
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The Unlikely Partnership That’s Helping the Poor
When low-income patients end up in the hospital with a medical emergency, it might not only be doctors, but also lawyers who save their lives.
Many medical facilities now have onsite attorneys offering free legal aid to such patients. This service makes sense, since issues such as eviction, homelessness and difficulty attaining services for a disabled or developmentally delayed child can negatively impact a patient’s health.
This model of partnership between the medical and legal professions began in Boston in 1993, and since then, it’s expanded to 260 locations in 38 states, according to NBC News.
The Cox family of Cleveland is an example of how these programs are effective. Tony Cox had a heart attack when he fell off a ladder during a roofing job. Out of work, he fell behind on his mortgage payments, and his family was on the verge of eviction when a legal services attorney stepped in and worked with the bank to renegotiate their loan. “We were getting ready to be homeless, to move in with family,” Donna, his wife, says. “We would have been separated.”
Colleen Cotter, director of Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, tells NBC News, “When we really look at the issues in our clients’ lives, there’s almost always a health issue involved. Poverty is unhealthy, and bad health can lead to economic chaos. I see everything we do as increasing the health and communities we serve.”
Pediatrician Robert Needleman of Case Western University Medical School says, “In general, medicine does not spend much time on the parts of patients’ lives that we can’t fix.” Needleman is striving to change that, however, by instructing medical students to chat with patients about stressors in their lives and issuing referrals to free legal aid when appropriate.
Not only do these partnerships between lawyers and doctors save people from eviction and bring about other positive changes in their lives, but they also save money. In Pennsylvania, Lancaster General Hospital established a clinic for “super-utilizers” (i.e. people who come to the emergency room frequently). When they added a lawyer to the services the facility offered, the patients’ use of the health care system declined by half.
As Megan Sprecher, a Legal Aid Society of Cleveland attorney says about one client she helped avoid homelessness by obtaining a tax refund that had been lost in the mail, “It was a very simple issue, but these systems can be hard to navigate if you’re not familiar with them.”
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The Story Behind the Boxes Bringing Holiday Cheer to Veterans
Back in 2006, students at St. John’s Lutheran school in Westland, Mich., decided they wanted to bring some holiday cheer to veterans in V.A. hospitals, homeless veterans and soldiers serving overseas. So they collected donations from the community and put together care packages that met the needs of each of these groups — distributing 200 boxes in total.
This year, the St. John’s Veterans Project has filled 300 boxes, including 50 for homeless veterans making the transition to permanent housing that are stocked with items that will help them settle in. This year’s generosity brings the total of care packages the St. John’s Veterans Project has delivered past 3,000, including the 30 that were mailed to soldiers serving in Okinawa, Japan.
The 44 students that work on the project have expanded their mission, delivering hundreds of blankets, coats, scarves, mittens and other warm clothing items to the V.A.s in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Detroit.
The students personally deliver the packages to the patients at the V.A. and spend time chatting and singing Christmas carols with the veterans.
Kendra Schaffer, mother of former St. John’s students Anna and Bethany Schaffer who help organize the project, tells Hometown Life, “We’ll take anything and everything. There’s no deadline for donations. We can store stuff for next year. It’s important people know that this is year-round.”
People give clothing, food, and household items for the vets, and Thrivent Financial foots the bill for shipping the packages overseas. The students and others from the community write cards and letters to include.
Bethany said her favorite part is delivering the packages to the patients at the V.A. “It’s more personal and it’s always nice to see how thankful they are. I like seeing the gruff ones that say don’t come in here, leave it on the table. Two years ago we saw a young man who was rolling [in] bed because of pain. We asked if we could sing him a Christmas song, and he said yes.”
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How the Bard is Helping Veterans in Milwaukee
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee associate theater professor Bill Watson had a notion that engaging with the works of William Shakespeare would help veterans cope with the problems they faced reintegrating into society, including PTSD. After all, in several of his plays, the Bard captured the conflicted, powerful feelings of warriors both in the midst of battle and after the fighting stopped.
So a year and a half ago, with the help of his professional actor wife, Nancy Smith-Watson, and Jim Tasse, an adjunct theater professor, Bill started Feast of Crispian, an organization that guides veterans in performing Shakespeare through methods uniquely tailored to their needs.
Feast of Crispian began working with veterans who were receiving treatment for substance abuse issues, PTSD and other problems at the Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center. So far, the group has held nine weekend-long workshops for veterans that start with the selection of selecting passages from Shakespeare that have roles for two veterans with plenty of conflict, vivid emotions, and only short lines of dialogue so not to trip up the beginning actors.
“We really get right into it Friday night,” Smith-Watson tells Meg Jones of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “creating a sense of group dynamic, asking them to connect with everyone else in the group really quickly. We’ve been floored at how much that works, that by the end of the first night we have 12 to 18 people who came in saying, ‘I came to check this out but I probably won’t be back tomorrow.’ Yet we rarely lose anyone. They give up a whole weekend to do the work.”
On Saturday and Sunday, they cast the scenes and professional actors work with the veterans to get them expressing the emotions Shakespeare wrote about 400 years ago, yet still speak to the vets’ experiences. The actors define archaic words and feed the veterans their lines as they perform so they don’t have to worry about memorizing. On Sunday afternoon, the vets give a performance that’s open to the public.
Jeff Peterson, a Navy veteran who played the role of Hector in “Troilus and Cressida” in the group’s most recent performance, tells Jones, “It’s an emotional experience like no other treatment. This is something I look forward to. I don’t want it to end.”
Marine Corps veteran John Buck, who portrayed Caliban in a scene from “The Tempest,” agrees. “I consider it theater therapy. It gets veterans to open up about their problems,” he says. “You see veterans slowly opening up throughout the weekend.”
MORE: How Storytelling Can Bridge the Military-Civilian Divide
The Last Thing Veterans Need Is Student Loan Debt…
A common misconception is that any veteran who wants a college education can finance it through G.I. Bill. But sadly, this isn’t so. Both the old version and the new, post 9/11 one exclude certain education expenses and neither applies to student loan debt accrued before servicemen and women entered the military.
So the Chicago-based nonprofit Leave No Veteran Behind is offering a “Retroactive Scholarship” that has already helped 10 veterans pay off their student loan debt and get back on track toward productive post-military lives.
One of the first beneficiaries is Delaina Conour, who was attending college when the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 spurred her to enlist in the Army. During training, she suffered a back injury and was eventually medically discharged, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
Delaina’s husband is a disabled veteran, and in 2006, they had a daughter with Down syndrome who has undergone 12 surgeries. The overwhelming medical expenses, coupled with her preexisting student loan debt, was too much. “We ended up forced into bankruptcy and ended up losing our home because of medical bills,” Conour tells Hayley Fox of Take Part.
Their bankruptcy declaration didn’t clear student loan debt, however, leaving the family with $15,000 worth of debt. But fortunately, Leave No Veteran Behind stepped up and covered Conour’s $10,000 portion of it. “I didn’t even know help like this existed,” Delaina says.
Every year, Leave No Veteran Behind’s scholarship committee meets to review applications. They give priority to veterans suffering hardships — including unemployment and medical difficulties. The committee selects several and pays their outstanding student loan debt off in full.
In exchange for paying off student loan debts, Leave No Veteran Behind also asks the vets to commit to 100 to 400 hours of community service “that leverages their military skills, civilian education and lack of indebtedness to help solve the most pressing issues facing their communities,” according to the nonprofit’s website.
Veterans Roy Sartin and Eli Williamson are the founders of Leave No Veteran Behind. Both struggled with student loan debt and unemployment when they returned from service in Iraq and Afghanistan. So in 2009, they started the nonprofit that they wished had existed for them.
So far, the organization has paid off almost $150,000 in student loan debt. By getting the word out about their efforts, Sartin and Williamson hope to eventually help 60 to 70 veterans a year, removing one big stressor as these soldiers transition to civilian life.
MORE: This Nonprofit is Making Sure Kids of Fallen Heroes Can Go To College
For New Americans, These Programs Help Them Live Off the Land
The classic image of the American immigrant involves a family arriving in a big city like New York or San Francisco and working to make their way in that urban environment. But statistics show that more immigrants to the U.S. head to the Midwest where they take jobs in agriculture.
In fact, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, between 2007 and 2011, 2.1 million foreign-born people lived in rural areas. Since 1990, the Midwest and South’s Latino population has grown significantly — particularly in towns with meat packing plants. Now, more children of immigrants are seeing farming as an attractive career path.
In a two-part series for Iowa Public Radio, Amy Mayer explored this shift. Five years ago, the Boelens sold their farm in the Netherlands because they weren’t able to expand it enough to sustain it and moved to Iowa. The family of seven came to America through a program called the Startup Visa for foreign entrepreneurs who plan to invest $100,000 or more in a U.S. business. Through it, five American jobs must be created in order for the visa to be renewed. Two of the Boelen’s five children tell Mayer that one day they plan to farm the family’s land.
A more typical immigrant farmer story is that of Pacifique Simon, who was born in Congo to Burundian parents in refugee camps. The Simons received asylum in the U.S. and came to Des Moines. They didn’t have enough money to buy a farm and make use of their agricultural experience, but a program sponsored by some Iowa churches has provided them with land to work.
Simon is majoring in agricultural systems technology at Iowa State University in the hopes of making farming his life. “I want to learn some skills here and then go teach people back there so they can produce enough food to feed their own family,” Simon tells Mayer.
The largest immigrant group in the Midwest, however, are Latinos, especially Mexican-Americans. Mayer found that some of the children of Mexican immigrants are turned off by the prospect of a career in agriculture since they’ve seen their parents worn down by backbreaking labor in meatpacking plants in exchange for low wages.
Still, with so many second-generation Latinos in the Midwest, some of them are turning to farming for a career. Mayer spoke to Brian Castro, who graduated from Iowa State this year. His parents are immigrants from Mexico, and he plans to make a career out of providing better agricultural jobs for Latinos.
“There’s a huge misrepresentation of the Latino population,” Castro says, “of Latino workers in the decision-making area for agriculture, even though they are the number one, the main population of the workers.”
Melissa Garcia, whose parents also immigrated from Mexico, earned a full-ride to Iowa State and plans to study to be a large animal veterinarian. “There’s a career and a job out there waiting for me,” she tells Mayer. “And then hopefully one day I’ll reach my goal of having my own farm.”
MORE: From Field Hands to Farmers: This Program Helps Latino Immigrants Become Land Owners
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this post referred to Iowa State University by its old name, Iowa State College of Agriculture, and stated that Brian Castro and Melissa Garcia are cousins–they are not.
Buy a T-Shirt, Help a Veteran
Mark Doyle didn’t know a thing about screen-printing t-shirts but that didn’t stop him from starting Rags of Honor, a Chicago-based t-shirt company dedicated to hiring homeless and chronically unemployed veterans.
Doyle now works as the director of Prairie Community Bank in Marengo, Ill., as well as the football coach at St. Pat’s High School in Chicago. But back in 2010, he was hired to help the U.S. Army investigate financial corruption in Afghanistan. While there, he was struck by the dedication of the service members and also by the fact that a lot of money was being spent on foreign aid, while relatively little was dedicated to helping struggling veterans back home.
So Doyle started Rags of Honor, a company that pays its veteran employees a living wage to produce a variety of patriotic and pro-Chicago t-shirts, as well as orders of custom-printed shirts. Rags of Honor trains workers even if they have no related experience and provides them benefits and opportunities for advancement.
The company has been a lifesaver for Navy veteran Tamika Holyfield. “I did two years and a half at the Bartons Air Base in Afghanistan,” she tells Ravi Baichwal of ABC 7 Chicago. “I returned to hardship and turmoil. I didn’t have a place to live, so I was basically living out of my car.”
The same was true for Frank Beamon III, who served as a machine gunner in Afghanistan, but found that his experience there counted for little with employers when he returned home to the Windy City. Both Holyfield and Beamon ended up homeless.
“The day I told them they were hired, they started crying on the spot,” Doyle tells Baichwal. “These are grown men and women. So never underestimate what just a job can mean to somebody who has no hope.”
For those who might think that they don’t have the power to reach out and help veterans, “You don’t have to be the President,” Doyle says. “You don’t have to start Google. Make a difference in the lives immediately around you. Give somebody hope. That’s what we’re doing. That’s what we do, one t-shirt at a time. If I can leave anybody with anything, give somebody hope today.”
MORE: For Homeless Veterans, Gardening Can Be the Therapy That Gets Them Back on Their Feet
For More Than 100 Years, This House Has Been Welcoming New Americans
Neighborhood House in west St. Paul, Minn. has come a long way since Russian immigrants in the area built a simple wooden structure in 1897. First opened to give newcomers the support and information they needed to make their way in this country, Neighborhood House now has a bigger and fancier home and the immigrants it serves come from different countries than they did 117 years ago. But the nonprofit’s mission remains the same.
Neighborhood House supports immigrants of every kind — from struggling newcomers who rely on its food pantry, family crisis center and refugee resettlement services, to people striving to become educated and advance their careers. It also offers a free preschool for the children of immigrants and an after-school program for teens that teaches them about health, education and careers and encourages them to engage in community service. But that’s not all. The center also provides health programs, gang-prevention activities, English language classes and GED prep courses.
Over the years, people from about 40 countries have benefitted from Neighborhood House’s services.
Nancy Brady, president of Neighborhood House, tells Angela Davis of CBS Minnesota, “Our mission at Neighborhood House is to help people gain the knowledge, the skills and the confidence that they need to overcome whatever the challenges are that they’re facing in their life — and move forward.”
The nonprofit’s three-year-old college access program is already changing lives — providing scholarships to adults of all ages who want to attend college. “Year one, nine people went to college,” Brady says. “Last year, 61 of our participants went to college. That’s how we measure success.”
Neighborhood House is funded through donations from its community, and for more than 100 years, residents in St. Paul have considered it a worthy investment. “We want to help people dream,” Brady says, “and then work to make their dreams come true, and to help all people see a positive future.”
MORE: From Field Hands to Farmers: This Program Helps Latino Immigrants Become Landowners
When a Bomb Left This Veteran Without Legs, He Decided to Help Others with Disabilities
In 2003, Robert “B.J.” Jackson was deployed to Iraq while serving with the Iowa National Guard. While there, a roadside bomb exploded, destroying his Humvee and causing a traumatic brain injury (which left him with PTSD) and the loss of both of his legs.
Back home in Clive, Iowa after grueling rehab, B.J.’s wife Abby thought he could use a night out. The two went to a nightclub for New Year’s Eve, but the bouncer turned them away, saying that the custom tennis shoes Jackson wore on his prosthetics didn’t meet the establishment’s dress code.
Abby protested, but B.J. wanted to slink away. When the club’s owner found out what had happened, he apologized and paid to fly B.J. to a veteran’s event. More importantly, though, the incident sparked an idea in B.J., who had been demoralized by his injuries.
“That night gave me a new outlook,” he tells Daniel Finney of the Des Moines Register. “I was ready to just let it go, like there was something wrong with me. But my wife and my friends said, ‘Hey, no, that isn’t OK.’ I realized there’s a stigma on people with disabilities. And I was going to do something about it.”
B.J. and his wife, who now live in Florida with their six children, founded The Right to Bear Stumps, an organization that raises awareness about the challenges faced by people with disabilities and raises money to help them. B.J., who struggled to learn to talk again after his brain injuries, is now a motivational speaker — delivering his message at places like churches and the Harley Davidson rally in Sturgis, S.D.
Through the Right To Bear Stumps, B.J. also helps build modifications to houses to accommodate disabilities and organizes golf outings for people with prosthetic limbs. Although he still struggles with issues stemming from his injuries, he jokes with Finney, “The biggest challenge I face right now is getting all the kids in the van.”
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