With the continuing robust support of Running Strong for American Indian Youth, the hard work and dedication of Tom and Louie Cook at Pine Ridge Reservation and Dennis Limon and Robert Reifel from Plenty, as well as donations from Onaway Trust, Plenty and the Susan Katzenberg Memorial Fund, the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Gardening Project continues to grow. Tom Cook is a Mohawk who married Loretta Afraid of Bear, Lakota, and Tom has lived at Pine Ridge ever since. Tom started talking to us in 1983 about wanting to do a project to encourage growing food on the Reservation. The first gardens were planted in 1985. Like everything else people try to do for themselves at Pine Ridge, making a successful garden is a huge challenge. First of all you’ve got a very short growing season. A killing frost can happen at any time of the month in April and as early as late August. Plagues of grasshoppers are common as are hailstorms, drought, and tenacious weeds like Canadian thistle. The Oglala Lakota culture is deep and rich and resilient, but the people have been robbed of their land, deceived, and neglected by the dominant Anglo society since earliest pioneers arrived in the 18th century. Today Pine Ridge is the second largest reservation in the US (about the size of Connecticut) and one of the poorest, with 97 percent of the population of 40,000 living under US federal poverty levels with unemployment pushing 90 percent and most annual incomes stuck under $5,000.

Project Director,Tom Cook (in hat) and Jack Red Cloud harvests watermelon from the gardens at the Lakota Reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 2010.

Death from heart disease is twice the national average and, from alcoholism, ten times. Life expectancy is 44 years for men and 54 for women. One third of the people live in old dilapidated mobile homes. One third of all   housing has no electricity or running water. Sixty percent of homes are infected with black mold.      

In spite of the desperate poverty and sometimes overwhelming sense of despair, people maintain their strong tiospaye (extended family) connections and look out for each other. Many participate in sundances, sweat lodges and pow wows and anchor their lives in long-standing spiritual traditions, but now less than 1500 still speak Lakota and most of them are elders.

The agriculture project is supporting home and community gardens for many reasons but primarily to enhance the health of the people. The commodity foods offered by the US government tend to be high in fats and sugars and are one reason a third of adults over 45 have diabetes (when 75 years ago it was unheard of). Gardens also help reconnect people to the land and in some cases provide supplemental incomes. They also give people something to do that’s creative and positive and fun.
     
Plenty’s current support is focused at the Slim Buttes, Kyle, and Manderson communities with the Slim Buttes Agricultural Development Project, Roots and Shoots Gardening Project and the Sustainable Homestead Project. This support involves the training of local residents in organic permaculture methods of gardening, helping to set up greenhouses and providing seeds for plant starts that will be distributed to these communities in the spring. We estimate that as many as 200 gardeners on the reservation will benefit from this support during 2011.