Navajo Find Soldiers' Genocidal Diet Replaced Healthy Native Foods Story-Date: 06:21 p.m. PST Sunday , January 10, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------ Navajo Find Soldiers' Genocidal Diet Replaced Healthy Native Foods By Brenda Norrell, Indian Country Today, Rapid City, S.D. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News Jan. 10--WINDOW ROCK, Ariz.--Navajo say the genocidal diet introduced by U.S. Army soldiers, promoted by traders and perpetrated by the BIA, replaced a nutritious ancestral diet of wild foods and game. "Navajo traditional foods were not white flour and greasy foods," said Louva Dahozy, who along with her daughter Katherine Arviso, has spent the past decades promoting Din traditional foods. Research released this month points to junk food and over-cooked fatty meats as causes of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Rates for these diseases are soaring among Navajo and other Arizona Indian Nations, with southern Arizona tribes reporting some of the highest rates of diabetes in the world. Arviso served as executive director of the Navajo Food and Nutrition Program and directed a nutritional analysis of Din traditional foods, revealing ancestral foods contained extraordinary levels of nutrients, seldom found in modern diets. Foods in the study included squash blossoms, edible clays, wild spinach, liver, blood sausage and a wide variety of white and blue corn meal dishes. Among the astonishing findings was the amount of potassium and other nutrients available in corn meal mush -- when prepared the traditional way, with a sprinkle of juniper wood ash. Arviso explains that Din survived on wild plants and game before the diet of white flour and greasy foods introduced by U.S. Army soldiers. Those foods came during times of exile and displacement beginning in the 1860s, when Din were forced on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, known as Fort Sumner, in New Mexico. After Din returned to their homeland between the Four Sacred Mountains, trading posts were established in remote regions. The posts offered white flour, lard, salt, coffee, canned foods, hard candy and soda pop in trade. It was during these years of depleted foods and imported rations that fry bread became popular. Arviso and other Navajo say trading posts were popular because they were a place to gather, share news and trade wool and blankets for food, kerosene and wagon parts. But 20th century posts promoted the beginning of the end of a way of life. Marie Allen, Navajo, remembers her grandmother, who lived to be 96, and her grandfather. She remembers another way of eating and living, a way of life Din refer to as the Beauty Way, Nizhoni. Allen also recalls the stories of cold and hunger at Fort Sumner. "My grandfather tells the story of the people being so hungry at Fort Sumner that when flour was introduced they ate it raw by the handfuls," Allen said. When the Din returned to their homeland, sheep and goats were important as a way of life. "My grandmother's diet was sheep and goats. The goat's milk was made into cottage cheese by using a portion of the stomach that curdles milk," Allen said. Ponies were eaten in times of hunger. But corn was the basis of most traditional foods -- steamed corn, mush and kneel-down bread (ground corn baked in the ground in husks like tamales). Blue corn was shaped into dumplings called marbles. "Blue corn marbles were only made before the first thunder of spring," Allen said. The Kinnalda, or puberty ceremonial cake, also was made from sweetened corn batter and cooked in the ground in a corn-husk-lined pit the size of a wagon wheel. Rabbits, prairie dogs and deer were eaten. "My father learned how to prepare prairie dogs by skinning them after singeing their hair off, removing their insides and baking them in the ground." During harvest time, Allen's father traveled to Navajo farms in the Four Corners area for apples, peaches, pears and apricots. The family used a drying screen to dry the fruits for winter. Wild plants and trees offered ancient foods -- berries, pinons and cactus fruits. Yucca bananas, gathered from the spiny plant, were roasted and the mashed pulp rolled like candy bars. "When we would come in from sheepherding, we would take a small piece of the dried yucca and be ready to go again. You couldn't eat the whole roll. A 1-inch square was enough." Allen's family gathered wild plants -- wild parsley, spinach, onion and carrots. Journeys by horse or wagon to Zuni Pueblo were for salt. "My dad knew Zuni Pueblo people, too. So in the fall, he would trade firewood, corn, beans and potatoes with the Zunis." During the mid and late 20th century, however, sheep and goats, and the quiet life of herding and gathering wild foods began to vanish in a wave of television and rental movies; pickup trucks and satellite dishes; microwaves and fast food chains. Navajo, however, are not alone in the degeneration of a way of eating and living, now producing disease. In research released this month, experts say the all-American junk food diet could be giving millions of Americans cancer, obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Bruce Ames at the University of California at Berkeley said a poor diet damages cells the same way radiation does. "Deficiency of vitamins folic acid, B12, B6, C or E, iron or zinc, and probably selenium mimics radiation in damaging DNA," Ames said. Recent research also reveals that women who ate fatty, over-cooked meats were more likely to develop breast cancer. Nutritionists urge Americans to eat fresh fruits and vegetables daily to decrease the chance of cancer. They also advise decreasing or doing away with fatty meats, fried foods, depleted white-flour products and sugary soda pop and snacks. Allen, like Arviso and other Navajo, looks back over a century of change and the vanishing traditional diet of Din. Allen says, "What happened was that the Navajo got away from the traditional foods. If it had been included early in the BIA curriculum, I think things would have been different today." ----- Visit Indian Country Today on the World Wide Web at http://www.indiancountry.com/ (c) 1999, Indian Country Today, Rapid City, S.D. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. ------------------------------------------------------------