Cultivating Gardens of Self-Sufficiency

Margaret Saraficio’s garden produced enough squash this fall for seven meals. To her that meant seven times she didn’t have to spend money at the store.

But for the crows, she grumbles, the yield would have been even higher.

“I don’t buy squash anymore,” Saraficio says as she shows off her one-acre patch, now plowed under for winter. “I like to plant. I think it’s healthier.”

Saraficio, a 64-year-old basket weaver, is one of dozens of people on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation who cultivated gardens this year as part of a federally funded program to overcome the lack of food in poor communities.

The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which last month said 10 million American families had inadequate access to food from 1996 to 1998. Arizona ranked fourth in the nation, with 12.8% of its households, or 228,000 families, threatened with hunger.

The Tohono O’odham know what it means to be hungry.

In the old days, gardens, not grocery stores, dominated the landscape of the sprawling reservation in southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. The harvest was bountiful during the summer, but barren in winter.

“One old man told me, ‘I remember when we used to have just a piece of tortilla, and that’s what we survived on during the hunger time,”’ says Art Wilson, cultural coordinator for the tribe’s elder program.

Still, traditional gardening sustained the community until World War II took the men from their families and a devastating drought struck a few years later. One by one the gardens died off, and the native food system was replaced with government commodities.

Today, with 66% of the reservation’s 18,000 residents living in poverty, commodities and food stamps provide most of the meals for the Tohono O’odham.

But there is another problem: More than 50% of the tribe’s adults have diabetes, a plight blamed on the destruction of the traditional food system and diet.

The Tohono O’odham Community Food System project looks to return to the traditional ways, to improve both the availability and nutritional value of food on the reservation.

“Some people say, ‘Isn’t this just nostalgic?’ It’s literally a matter of physical and cultural survival,” says Tristan Reader, co-director of Tohono O’odham Community Action or TOCA, which won an $80,000 USDA grant for the project.

This summer TOCA volunteers helped 50 families plant gardens using seeds for traditional foods such as corn, squash and tepary beans, a heat-tolerant crop that can help regulate blood sugar. They provided tools, fencing and, for elderly gardeners such as Saraficio, labor.

TOCA also is sponsoring field trips to collect food from the wild, including beans from mesquite trees, saguaro cactus fruit and acorns. Additionally, schoolchildren participate in a weekly food program at the reservation’s community garden, planted in 1996 next to the hospital in Sells.

At the heart of the project, says Reader, is the idea that defeating hunger takes more than ensuring that families have enough food. It’s about having the right foods, both nutritionally and culturally.

“Even for people who might have enough in their stomach when they go to bed, their bodies are still starving because they’re the wrong foods,” he says. “The solution is here. It’s in the community’s hands.”