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The Four Corners Food Coalition distributes produce and shares food knowledge with Native families

Karlos Baca demonstrates how to fry locally grown green tomatoes in yellow cornmeal from the Ute Mountain Ute reservation.
Clark Adomaitis
/
KSUT/KSJD
Karlos Baca demonstrates how to fry locally grown green tomatoes in yellow cornmeal from the Ute Mountain Ute reservation.

Twenty Indigenous families from the Four Corners area stopped in a warehouse in Cortez, Colorado, to pick up packages of produce as part of the Four Corners Food Coalition’s Indigenous Community Supported Agriculture program. The grant-funded program involves organizers setting up weekly packages of local farms’ produce for 20 families for 16 weeks.

Amber Lansing, co-founder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit, is Diné, Acoma, and Shawnee. She organized produce for the families to pick up.

“We've created a really well-balanced way of helping folks understand and relearn how to heal their bodies with food, not just physically but culturally and socially. This is a program that is needed and wanted by our community,” said Lansing.

Lansing co-founded the organization in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic after she and other local community organizers identified a need for mutual aid and access to information about healthy food.

Indigenous families pick up fresh produce from local farms, like Anatolian Farms in Mancos, Colorado.
Clark Adomaitis
/
KSUT/KSJD
Indigenous families pick up fresh produce from local farms, like Anatolian Farms in Mancos, Colorado.

Karlos Baca, a Southern Ute and Diné chef and food organizer, demonstrated how to fry green tomatoes in cornmeal grown on the nearby Ute Mountain Ute reservation.

“All local, everything here is local produce,” said Baca. “Every family gets to leave with the bag. Hopefully, everyone shows up, so 20 bags will be leaving, and everybody gets to take his knowledge home.”

Baca has been working to feed Native people in the Four Corners region for 15 years. But Baca’s work is not just about providing food. His efforts are part of a larger social justice movement.

“One of the first systems of warfare is always the destruction of people's food systems, their food stores, their agriculture, to make them subservient,” said Baca.

One of Baca’s goals for food justice is to fight the effects of colonialism on Native people.

“If you look at colonization, the history of it didn't happen overnight. The change in diet through the enforcement of government rations did massive damage to the indigenous diet and lifeways, foodways, everything. If you look at our indigenous foods as microchips on a cellular level, everything that your ancestors ate is still in your system. As you're plugging each one of these individual items of food back into your body, you're also unlocking those memories,” said Baca.

Many Indigenous communities have limited access to healthy, fresh food. According to the Centers For Disease Control, Native Americans experience obesity and type 2 diabetes at higher rates than other racial groups—both conditions linked to poor nutrition.

Karlos Baca demonstrates how to fry green tomatoes in flour, egg, and yellow cornmeal — all local ingredients.
Clark Adomaitis
/
KSUT/KSJD
Karlos Baca demonstrates how to fry green tomatoes in flour, egg, and yellow cornmeal — all local ingredients.

Cassandra Freeman and her husband run Anatolian Farms in Mancos, Colorado. Their green tomatoes and jalapeño peppers are featured in this week’s Indigenous Shared Agriculture Boxes.

“It's probably one of the most empowering things I could do. I feel like in a way, we're able to kind of take back the land and give it back to the people that it was taken from. If we support the local folks of this area, that ripples effects out to everybody in the community. We all become healthier and stronger together,” said Freeman.

The Four Corners Food Coalition hopes to grow the food distribution program in future years. They’re also working on other food justice projects, like opening a community kitchen and purchasing four acres of land that will provide farmable land access to local youth.

Clark Adomaitis is a shared radio reporter for KSUT in Ignacio, CO, and KSJD in Cortez, CO for the Voices from the Edge of the Colorado Plateau project.