Combining Old and New: Aquaponics Opens the Door to Indigenous Food Security

The Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations’ (FDPIR) Self-Determination Demonstration Project distributes food to tribal nations by allowing them to buy food from vendors within their own communities.The Project serves an average of 48,000 people each month, providing healthy, culturally relevant foods to low-income tribal members.

Sam Schimmel, a college student and member of the Siberian Yupik and Kenaitze tribes, helped organize a food drive on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska. The initiative, known as Operation Fish Drop — delivered more than 12,000 pounds of salmon to 400 families. It Brought together tribal councils, local fisheries, and volunteers to help address food security in Alaska Native communities due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new Southpoint Community Market in Dallas is the product of seven years of planning in a process based on community input about the need for accessible, nutritious, affordable food and other everyday groceries. Anchoring what once was a run-down shopping center, the new grocery and coffee bar is supported by Cornerstone Community Enterprises, a nearby church's philanthropic arm, and the Real Estate Council Foundation, which will cover the store's financial losses until it is self-sustaining. The store is part of a larger effort to provide for a healthier neighborhood.

A community-based grocery store is bringing nutritious and affordable food to residents in Waco, Texas. Jubilee Market is located in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood which previously lacked a grocery store. The store’s success has inspired a similar project in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas.

The Quapaw tribe runs the Downstream Casino Resort in Oklahoma where they combine Indigenous food and farming knowledge with modern hotel operations. They have seven greenhouses and two gardens with 20 varieties of vegetables and herbs that cultivate about 6,000 pounds of food per year for the hotel and casino. They also have their own meat packing and processing plant, coffee roasting program, brewery, and farmers market. By creating a system of locally sourced and sustainably raised food, the Quapaw are reclaiming their land and food sovereignty.

In the face of climate change, the nonprofit SABALA is working with nearly 2,000 women farmers in India to participate in millet farming, which can also strengthen community food security and empower women. Using traditional farming techniques, farmers can cultivate 15 to 20 of the climate-resistant crops on a 1-acre plot. Due to the success with millet farming, nearly 300 of the women came together to start a cooperative to process surplus millets and sell the grain to the local community.

In an attempt to offer healthier meals and reduce stigma around hospital food, hospitals are reinventing their dining services by hiring professional chefs, nutritionists, and dieticians. At the UC Davis Medical Center, this type of approach has already shown success with a growth in consumers, including an influx of locals from the community even coming to eat at the hospital cafe.

Community leaders are working together to address the issue of food insecurity in Mansfield, caused not just by lack of access to grocery stores and fresh food sources, but also often by unemployment, high housing costs, low wages, poverty, and health care costs. The North End Local Foods Initiative is installing food gardens in these communities, creating access to fresh produce, to educational opportunities, recreational activity and more.

With a global food crisis, farmers look for how to get long-term high yields out of difficult farmland. In Oaxaca, Mexico, farmers farm like a forest, eat low on the food chain, restore damaged land, and have reverence for the planet.

Over many months, the Wuikinuxv Guardian Watchmen in British Columbia, Canada, patrol about 2,000 square kilometers of the coast by boat, and they're doing everything from warding off poachers to participating in scientific studies. Since it’s rare to see government vessels monitoring the area, many Indigenous communities throughout Canada have created these guardian programs as a way to conserve and protect their land.