Slim Buttes Agri-Dev is widely known for its frontline advocacy, community education, direct action against the disconnection of people from their land, and for its foundation on cultural norms, ceremonial usages, and Lakota language.
For the past twenty-three years, Oglala Lakota county where Pine Ridge reservation is located has been listed as the third-poorest of the 3,147 counties comprising America. For the twenty years before that, it was listed as the poorest. The population remains vulnerable in so many ways and is in real need of help such as Slim Buttes Ag provides.
The gardens program goal is to increase access to nutritious foods and reduce food insecurity for low-income Lakota families. The gardens program operates day to day in a depressed population burdened by isolation, intergenerational poverty, alcoholism, chemical dependency, and scarcities. Too many families rely on free government commodities high in fats and sugars, which is a major reason why more than half of the adults over 45 years old have diabetes, when 60 years ago diabetes was unheard of on the reservation.
Off-season fresh produce is difficult to obtain in the 2.1m-acre reservation where limited grocery options prevail. Pine Ridge is classified as a “food desert”, requiring long drives, a vehicle and gas money to get to any store and buy groceries. As long as people live on their own lands, many will invariably want to grow food; and so long as this is the case, our gardens program answers a need based on the self-determination of the people.
The seedlings of 15 varieties include Jalapeno, Ancho and Serrano peppers, Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Roma and cherry tomatoes, basil, zucchini, pumpkin, acorn squash, butternut squash, Mandan Bride corn, bush beans, and watermelon. They are grown in a 16’ x 32’ underground greenhouse with polycarbonate roof angled south to let in the sunlight and beamed fully to trap in heat. Plants are distributed to growers in mid to late May after the average last frost.
Applications for gardening assistance swell in the Spring months during the Wojub Oyanke (Talking of Things Growing) radio show. Hosted by field director Milo Yellow Hair, the weekly prime-time bilingual program delves into health, gardening methods, life of the soil and importance of fresh foods in daily diets. The three-month radio program can be heard Monday mornings from 8-9 a.m. Mountain Time Zone on KILI radio at 90.1 FM and on the internet www.kiliradio.org. Milo maps the congruency of Biodynamic and Biointensive gardening methods with ‘thinking in Indian,’ as a culturally appropriate means of maintaining soil and plant health.
Biointensive and Biodynamic gardening is based on spiritual insights and practical suggestions for live inputs to soil and plant life. Staff utilize an indigenous version of the methods, combining Lakota sweat lodge ritual with the indigenous view that the ingredients in soil and plants must be alive and sentient. For planting dates, staff use the Maria Thun Biodynamic planting calendar to determine the optimal zodiac and moon phases for planting root, flower, leaf, and fruit crops.
For most of the 38 years of operation, the program had made gardens in seven of the nine districts. In recent years we have focused on the three western districts of Wakpamni, White Clay and Pine Ridge, since gardening programs have started in the distant districts to meet local needs. In most cases Slim Buttes Ag has been acknowledged as inspirational to their program origins.
Faced with more deadly and more frequent heat waves, floods, wildfires and dryness triggered by human-caused climate breakdown, the prospects for growing food plants are, to say the least, challenging. Boxed, raised-bed gardens have become the focus of help to people by Slim Buttes Ag. Some 70 frames were filled, and seeds placed in 2023 with positive results for their ease of maintenance and concentrated planting.
In 1983, Plenty representatives were invited to Pine Ridge to participate in a Wounded Knee Memorial Walk (years later it would become a two-week ride on horseback in the dead of winter). We met with Tom Cook, a Mohawk, and his wife Loretta Afraid-of-Bear, an Oglala Lakota, and started to talk about the potential for projects at Pine Ridge. One possibility was home gardening. The program started in earnest after an annual Sun Dance ceremony, with a vision “to help the people where they live.” Plenty International has been a fiscal sponsor for donations and grants since 1985, as well as providing volunteers and technical support as needed. Running Strong for American Indian Youth has also been a fiscal sponsor since 1989, and the Center for Sacred Studies since 2007. The annual program has operated continuously since, impacting people reservation-wide and directly supporting more than 200 household gardens.
Plenty is a not-for-profit organization that was created to help protect and share the world’s abundance and knowledge for the benefit of all.
