Native American health garden to stay at Ya-Ka-Ama

Ya-Ka-Ama, which means “our land” in the Kashaya Pomo language,
will continue to be the site of a garden project designed to
provide a healthy food source for not only the county’s Native
community, but, eventually, other area families as well.
Known for a number of years for its former native plant nursery,
Ya-Ka-Ama had also been the site of a large garden established
nearly ten years ago by and operated under the auspices of the
Sonoma County Indian Health Project which it has been using to help
combat diabetes.
Officially known as the Ya-Ka-Ama Indian Education and
Development Inc., the site itself became part of Indian Country in
the early 1970’s after a group of Indian activists took over the
abandoned, former Central Intelligence Agency listening post –
located on more than 100 acres on East Side Road – as a center for
the local Native community.
More recently, following the arrival of a new Sonoma County
Indian Health administrator last fall, however, the garden’s future
at Ya-Ka-Ama was put in jeopardy as the result of a subsequent
change in the agency’s funding plans.
That spurred community activist and former temporary Indian
Health diabetes prevention worker, Amy Lemmer, to round up support
in order to keep the garden idea going.
Her brother, Aaron Wilkins, a healthy food preparer at Indian
Health, and who is engaged in Native cultural traditions, is
working with her on the garden project.
“We decided to just engage Ya-Ka-Ama ourselves to continue the
garden as a priority for the community,” said Lemmer, a member of
the Choctaw Nation. “Such a garden is important spiritually as well
as for healthy eating for Indian people. It’s a real priority to
connect with Mother Earth.”
Lemmer said plans include starting a community garden plot for
families to raise healthy food, with its current chief gardener,
Stefan Stehling, offering planting expertise.
The garden itself was initially created by Helen Maldonado, a
member of the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians, who in 2001 was hired as
a diabetes coordinator at Sonoma County Indian Health resulting
from a community health career she began in 1981.
Currently a California Area Diabetes Consultant with the
California Area Indian Health Service in Sacramento, Maldonado, who
is also a licensed vocational nurse, physician’s assistant and
certified diabetes educator, said her clinical work showed her the
health toll diabetes has brought to her community.
“As I worked in the medical clinic as a clinician and witnessing
the increasing problem of diabetes and heart disease in my
relatives, friends and community members,” she said, “I started
asking why?”
She said the prevalence of diabetes in Native people in Sonoma
County runs at about 11 percent.
“Native youth have an increased problem of overweight and
obesity, which leads to social problems as well as physical
problems, including an early onset of type 2 diabetes mellitus,”
Maldonado said.
“Childhood obesity is on the rise and a current statistic states
that for every Native American child born after the year 2000, one
out of two will develop diabetes. This is shocking if you consider
that prior to 1940 diabetes was a rare occurrence in Native
people.”
After reading a paper by a doctor working with the Cherokee
Nation Maldonado learned “that it was important to understand as a
medical provider that it was not the fault of Native people that
they had diabetes or struggled with obesity. Rather, the impact of
generational and present trauma physiologically altered the brain
chemistry and metabolism of our people, compounded by loss of
traditional foods and lifestyle. I agreed that this made total
sense and I set out to develop a program that reflected this
belief.”
She said that the Healthy Traditions program at Sonoma County
Indian Health grew through funding by a Special Diabetes Program
for Indians (SDPI) grant, allowing her to hire a registered nurse,
an administrative assistant, a community health educator and a
licensed vocational nurse.
“As a few years passed, it became evident through conversations
with patients and community-based focus groups, Native families
didn’t have access to fruits and vegetables due to lack of finances
and unfamiliarity with preparation of more uncommon vegetables,”
she said.
“Being a member of the same community I knew this was true, all
I knew was corn, potatoes, peas and salad ingredients,” Maldonado
said, adding, “I learned (through) a nutritional study performed by
a university in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, that the
traditional diet of the Kashaya people was rich in mono-unsaturated
fats, low-fat proteins and high fiber.”
“Unfortunately,” she said, “we were not able to hunt and gather
all of our foods any longer, but if we could try to parallel the
same types of nutrients through fruits and vegetables and low fat
meats, we could try and battle this obesity problem and ultimately
diabetes.”
As a result, she said, a garden was started in 2002 – 2003.
As a result, she added, children who previously were ignorant of
how food was produced, “would come out to the garden through school
programs and really enjoy their time learning from Stefan how
plants grew and fed us. It was understood that there would not be
an immediate turn around, but a beginning of an awareness through
community gatherings and children learning the difference of
processed fast foods and living natural foods.”
In addition, traditional basket weaving materials and
traditional medicine plants were planted there.
“The four elements we would educate community on are: physical,
being active as much as possible; mental, learning always from
elders or school; spiritual, connected to spirit through traditions
or church; and emotional, understanding our feelings and living in
the present. The garden was a place we addressed all four elements
of wellness.” Maldonado said the garden was “started with prayer
and ceremony and continues to be a peaceful sanctuary. There are
memorial trees planted there as the beginning of a hedgerow that
would protect the garden and provide habitat for birds and insects.
This garden not only feeds our bodies with wonderful food grown in
a spirit of love and kindness, but a place to come when our spirits
are sick and our souls are crying.”