Women plant the seeds of change in Little Earth’s urban farm

 

Dawn Segura bends over a black plastic seeding tray, carefully spacing out tiny onion seeds into eight neat soil trenches. She’ll deposit about 300 seeds in this tray before labeling the side with pink duct tape. As she works, raindrops pitter-patter against the translucent plastic walls of the greenhouse. Across the table, her cousin, Sindy Wright, showers 72 broccoli seeds with a plastic watering can causing water to drip though the saturated tray’s compost-laden soil onto the earthen floor.

 

The cousins are members of the Women’s Empowerment Group from Little Earth of the United Tribes, a South Minneapolis housing community that is owned, operated and populated by urban Native Americans – the only one of its kind in the United States. Together with five other members and helpers, they made this trip to the rural farm of Women’s Environmental Institute (WEI) in Almelund, Minnesota to learn more about the art of farming. Right now, their carefully planted seeds represent hope, not only for a bountiful harvest but for a renewal of pride in their community.

 

Darlene Fairbanks takes the wheel of the Little Earth Suburban for the long drive back to the city. She is a resident advocate at Little Earth and started the Women’s Empowerment Group about five years ago. Their Thursday afternoon meetings focus on issues that affect the women’s lives, from parenting to addiction and abuse. Fairbanks has long been instrumental in bringing together community resources to help Little Earth’s residents understand the value of eating – and now growing – healthy food.

 

This small group of women plans to plant traditional crops for what will be a distinctly modern urban farm. Generations of Little Earth’s Native American residents have been cut off from healthy eating and fresh produce by history, education, economics and a major highway. Now, they are returning to the land to regain cultural traditions and remedy shortened life expectancy and epidemics of diabetes, asthma and other diet-related illnesses. In the last year alone, the urban farm at Little Earth has gone from concept to reality with the knowledge and support of two environmental and food justice organizations: WEI and Milwaukee-based Growing Power.

 

Last June, a group of 40 Twin Cities residents spent two days in interactive workshops on the Growing Power farm, learning to plan, grow, operate and profit from a similar enterprise. Valerie Martinez of the Indigenous People’s Green Jobs Coalition and her children were among the Little Earth residents on the trip.

 

When the group’s bus arrived at the Milwaukee farm, Martinez remembers being in awe. “It was a whole neighborhood block worth of greenhouses and animals – goats, chickens, bees,” she says. “It was a really amazing because it was right in the heart of the inner city; the community looked very similar to my own.”

 

Growing Power creator Will Allen has become better known for his dirty fingernails than for the years of college and professional basketball he played. The popularity of movies like the Oscar-nominated Food, Inc. and books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma has catapulted Allen from the small glory of his working urban farm to international attention. His philosophy, centered on red wriggler worms helping to create nutrient rich soil, has been big news in The New York Times and O magazine. It has also earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars in foundation grants like the MacArthur Foundation “genius award.” “He really believes it is about the soil, and about rebuilding the soil,” Martinez says. “That’s the model we have to use in the Phillips neighborhood because our soil is so contaminated.”

 

Karen Clark, Minnesota state representative and executive director of WEI, helped Little Earth procure the land the farm will be on from the Minnesota Department of Transportation for $1 in 2007. Two-and-a-half football fields in length, the vacant earth is separated from the development by a side street and from Highway 55 by an enormous noise barrier wall. Having represented the Phillips neighborhood for almost 30 years, Clark knew much of the area was subject to arsenic soil contamination. Highway exhaust and other pollutants that were sure to be continuous issues for growing food. When Clark first brought Allen to hear about the project and see the site, he immediately agreed to play a part.

 

Last autumn, Allen gathered about 70 participants, including many Little Earth residents, in a community gymnasium for a lesson in vermaculture. Following the lecture, they created habitats for indoor composting. They did so by drilling holes in the bottom of large plastic storage containers which would hold red wriggler worms, a little dirt and some vegetable or fruit scraps, and then set the habitats inside another container. The holes serve as strainers for the worm pee, an organic super fertilizer referred to as “worm tea.”

 

Two of these worm bins went into the common room at Little Earth’s Neighborhood Early Learning Center, where early childhood coordinator Lucy Arias helps 38 pre-school students feed the worms weekly. The other bins went to five families, one of which was Fairbanks. “I have adopted my three grandchildren and one has asthma and is allergic to fur, so we haven’t been able to have any pets” she says. “I brought home this bin of worms and, oh, he was excited.”  Her appreciative grandson Antonio also has worms in his first grade class at Seward Elementary, so he was able to educate Darlene on the ins and outs of vermaculture.

 

In 2009, WEI was named Growing Power’s ninth Regional Outreach Training Center in the U.S. for its promotion of Allen’s mission to bring fresh food, gardening knowledge and entrepreneurial and community spirit to what he calls “food deserts.” These are where primarily urban people end up living in an area without convenient access to affordable fresh food for themselves and their families.

 

Little Earth is one such desert, and cousins Segura and Wright are examples of why a neighborhood urban farm would make such a big difference in this community. From Segura’s front door, the nearest grocery store is 10 blocks away and located across a major highway. The other local option is shopping at the more expensive neighborhood bodega. Although the store carries the minimum amount of produce required by a city ordinance, it’s often not fresh.

 

Wright also has children, and says her food stamps would only buy six oranges. With a large family to feed, choosing less healthy products becomes an economic necessity despite the serious consequences. “One thing with the Phillips community and Little Earth, there’s high rates of diabetes, asthma and lead levels,” Martinez explains. “The only thing that offsets those diseases are good food. (With Little Earth,) we’re talking about families that are on welfare, that don’t have a lot of money, that don’t have cars, and we don’t have co-ops in our neighborhood.”

 

In the urban Native American community, the access problem goes deeper than geography or economics; it has to do with education. “My mom died at 50 years old from diabetes,” Martinez says. “I was 25 and I thought that all American Indians had diabetes – that we get it and it is hereditary. That was my understanding.” The doctor treating her mother explained that diabetes is often a curable disease brought on primarily by poor diet decisions. The new information, coupled with her mother’s death, changed Martinez’s life, turning her into an advocate for environmental and food justice.

 

History, Martinez says, plays a large part in urban Native American’s ideas about food. When first placed on reservations, American Indians were denied the ability to hunt, gather and farm in their traditional ways. Instead, they were provided with rations or “commodities” including flour, sugar, lard, and processed and canned goods, which are still distributed on reservations today. This created a fundamental shift and limited the diversity of what native people ate. “When you grow up with a family that only cooks with these certain things, it’s not about being poor anymore, it’s about a trained, learned habit,” Martinez says. As the years went by, many of the old traditions were forgotten.

 

Further separating American Indians from their customs was the practice of whisking native youth away to boarding schools until the 1940s and 1950s. Boys and girls, including both Martinez’s mother and grandmother, attended such schools where they were re-educated with the intention to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Often, students were physically threatened if they practiced tribal rituals or spoke their native languages. As adults, this “silent generation,” as Martinez refers to them, moved into city centers looking for work. They had survived traumatic childhoods but were stripped of traditional knowledge and pride. In turn, their children inherited low self-esteem and unexplained humiliation about their culture.

 

Martinez says she is also part of this lost generation, which has high rates of drug and alcohol addiction. “Since they were born,” Martinez says, referring to her own children, “I’ve been instilling that pride of who they are, where they come from, our culture, our history. I think a lot of times in the inner city you don’t get that. I think I could have faced a lot of things a lot stronger if I had my history, my culture and my identity at an early age.”

 

Mirroring this cultural installment, the women’s group plans to plant traditional items like ceremonial tobacco, wild sage and sweet grass on their farm plots. This will create outdoor classrooms for educating youth and give the community access to items that they currently have to travel to reservations or wait for powwows to obtain.

 

Sitting behind her desk in the Little Earth Neighborhood Early Learning Center, Arias looks at a bag of 2,000-year-old squash seeds that some of the Women’s Empowerment Group members brought back from a Northern indigenous farming conference. “Someone can give us this bag and say, ‘Go, feed yourself,’ and we’d probably be dead this time next year because we wouldn’t have the know-how to grow, cook, or preserve this food,” Arias says. “It’s a lost art.”

 

Information and education are what the Women’s Empowerment Group is all about. By continuing to learn and grow, they obtain a little more power over their situation, and can try to better their whole community. The urban farm differs from many former “salvation” projects that have come pre-packaged for the residents of Little Earth. Unlike the others, it is moving at a pace those involved can handle with a scope to which they are willing and able to commit. “One of the tensions is that there are so many people who are good-hearted and they say, ‘We’ll come and help,’” Rep. Clark explains. “If they do that, if there’s too much of that, then it won’t belong to the people, and it will die.” Because of this, Clark was very excited when the women’s group stepped up and declared that growing their own food was something they wanted to do.

 

Many local food activists and environmental organizations have offered their help to the women’s group and Little Earth youth groups that are also showing an interest in the farm project. But so far, everyone in that support web has limited their involvement in sharing through presentations or demonstrations when requested. They are choosing to walk alongside the residents on this journey, recognizing that for Little Earth, the urban farm is much more than a vegetable patch. “It’s 10 moms from that community spearheading the project,” Martinez says. “Every day they are an example, because once it happens to somebody that looks familiar, who has a similar situation and shows they can change. It gives you all the hope in the world that you can do it, too.”