In the refrain of her song, “Woodstock,” Joni Mitchell urged us to get ourselves back to the garden, a metaphor for a retreat from modern life and a return to spiritual connection with the land. For some of the Pueblo people of New Mexico, this has meant returning to ancestral eating practices, for cultural and spiritual connection and to improve health outcomes. “Nativ…
In the refrain of her song, “Woodstock,” Joni Mitchell urged us to get ourselves back to the garden, a metaphor for a retreat from modern life and a return to spiritual connection with the land. For some of the Pueblo people of New Mexico, this has meant returning to ancestral eating practices, for cultural and spiritual connection and to improve health outcomes. “Native Americans are in the highest percentage of health risks for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure than any race due to poor food quality, depression, and poverty (which is) mostly a result of colonization,” says Roxanne Swentzell, a renowned Santa Clara Pueblo Tewa artist, sculptor and founder of the Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute in Española, New Mexico.To help bring awareness of these statistics, Swentzell’s nonprofit sponsored a study, now known as The Pueblo Food Experience, which began in 2013. “It was a response to our tribal health issues,” Swentzell says. “Reconnecting to our cultural heritage was a way for us to heal ourselves.”
Returning to the Past to Improve the Present
In this real-life experiment, Swentzell and 13 others from pueblos across northern New Mexico eliminated all colonization foods such as sugar, alcohol, wheat, beef and chicken for a trial period of three months and committed to eating traditional foods such as prickly pear eggs, marrowbone butter, rabbit stew and roasted pinon nuts.The idea was to go back to the basic foods that their ancestors ate. “The study showed that we do very well when we eat traditional foods from the past,” Swentzell says. Volunteers in the self-reported study experienced lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels, and improvement in autoimmune function, and chronic conditions such as Lupus, joint pain and heart health.All of the participants lost weight, many felt increased energy and one volunteer even experienced a reversal of menopause. “We all also spoke about the spiritual component of the diet and how much clarity we had,” Swentzell says. “It was switching to ancestral ways of eating that did this.”“I lost 50 pounds in three weeks, and I ate well daily,” says volunteer Marian Naranjo, the founder and director of Honor Our Pueblo Existence (HOPE), a community-based organization located at Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, which is a federally recognized Native American Nation. “It did require more preparation. If we didn’t grow it, we had to buy it from special stores, and it could be expensive. It required thinking differently.”It also required dependency on like-minded participants. “A group of us shared a meal once a week and encouraged one another. Daily support was essential,” Naranjo says.The experiment led to “The Pueblo Food Experience Cookbook: Whole Food of Our Ancestors,” co-authored by Swentzell and Patricia M. Perea. It includesmore than 60 traditional Puebloan recipes such as buffalo tamales, blue corn cakes and jackrabbit stew, based on traditional Puebloan cuisine. Also included are essays that focus on Pueblo history, culture, the impact of colonization on the diet and the healing powers of food.The experiment and the cookbook align with Swentzell’s work with her nonprofit where she preserves heritage crops like the “three sisters” which are corn, beans and squash.
Using Food to Reconnect with Tradition, Spirit and Culture
Eating this way also helped the Puebloans reconnect with traditional knowledge and practices and reembrace the spiritual and cultural significance of these foods. “We found ourselves thinking about how our ancestors found, prepared and ate,” Swentzell says. “This made us feel close to them. Ancestral foods are place-based foods, so they help you connect to your environment in a way other foods cannot.”The study has an impact outside of Swentzell’s pueblo. “It’s amazing that when you take out the refined foods that are not in your own ancestral DNA, you get healthier and you lose weight,” says Lois Ellen Frank a Native foods historian, author of “Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky: Modern Plant-Based Recipes using Native American Ingredients,” and the chef/owner of Red Mesa Cuisine in Sante Fe, New Mexico.Other communities are adopting ancestral ways of eating. “Several years after the experiment, we started hearing about efforts to eat original foods from tribes around the country,” Swentzell says. “There seemed to be a movement happening and it’s hard not to believe that we had a hand in that.”Frank’s frequent collaborator and co-teacher about indigenous foodways sums up the impact of The Pueblo Food Experience perfectly. “Food is medicine,” says Diné (Navajo) chef Walter Whitewater. “When we go to a farm-acy instead of a pharmacy, we get everything we need for health and wellness.”
