The Future of Food in the Hualapai Tribe
Rising food prices have been a hot topic (recently) – but high food prices are not new to the Hualapai Tribe in Northwestern Arizona. For example, strawberry prices at the local convenience store recently peaked at over $10 a container, and to get cheaper options, residents of Peach Springs – the main Hualapai population center – have to drive 100 miles round-trip to Kingman. From her decades of experience in Tribal health programs, Rosemary Sullivan, a Hualapai member and employee of the Tribe’s Department of Health and Wellness, sees an answer to high food prices: food produced by Hualapai for Hualapai.
Sowing the seeds of food sovereignty
Sullivan’s summers on her grandparents’ ranch instilled her with values of food sovereignty. These experiences have shaped her vision for what food sovereignty means to her tribe now. Her grandparents suffered hardships but their resilience helped them learn how to use the land they were given to farm and raise cattle. They survived on what they grew or harvested along the Upper Trout Creek of the Big Sandy River. “They didn’t get electricity until the 1930s and didn’t have running water,” Sullivan described. “They captured rainwater in rain barrels.” Because of this, knowledge about growing food, raising cattle and foraging wild plants was a necessity for daily life. Additionally, Sullivan’s family taught her about canning, dehydrating and drying deer and beef jerky from a young age. This allowed the family to be in control of what they ate and how they ate it, and they could eat both introduced and ancestral foods as they wanted.
Ancestral Hualapai foods are nurturing through both a cultural and nutritional lens. “Growing up, my grandmother made a lot of the foods children learn about in Hualapai cultural class at the Elementary school,” though they may not experience them in day-to-day life, Sullivan detailed. “My grandmother made a drink – she called it a Kool-aid – out of sumac berries (called Gith’e in the Hualapai language – scientific name is Rhus trilobata, closely related to the Rhus Coriaria) for the kids in the summer. These red berries are very tart like plain Kool-aid and they have medicinal properties that we didn’t know about as kids. Now it’s common to see the sumac spice sold as a seasoning in stores, but that was always part of the Hualapai diet.”
Sullivan recalled a number of locally available foods that are part of the Hualapai ancestral diet: sumac berries, wild rhubarb, deer, rabbit, bighorn sheep, and more. Growing up her family could access these foods not through money and grocery stores, but through knowledge and work. Today, this knowledge provides Hualapai members a way to work around high food prices.
Ancestral foods also provide a solution to the high rates of diabetes in the Hualapai community. Sullivan has seen this firsthand through her role at the Department of Health Education and Wellness. Operating a Tribal Practices and Wellness in Indian Country grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Sullivan provides education to help Hualapai members re-integrate ancestral foods into their diets. “There was one person with diabetes who came through our program and replaced red meat with meat from game he hunted and harvested locally,” Sullivan notes. “That helped him get his A1C to where it is now – at a pre-diabetic level.”
Producing and harvesting food locally provides a solution to high food prices and chronic diet-related illness in the community, but environmental factors and the echoes of colonization still pose barriers to implementing food sovereignty fully.
“That’s why they put us here”
Before contact, rabbit was the predominant meat source for the Hualapai bands. However, local rabbits now carry so much disease that people do not hunt and eat them. Sullivan said no one knows when the rabbits came to be inedible, and no one has had the capacity or funding to investigate further. Though the exact cause is uncertain, the disease has prevented wild rabbits from being part of the modern Hualapai diet, a major change from before contact with settlers.
The traditional areas of Northern Pai bands - who the US government forcibly attempted to confine to the Hualapai & Havasupai Reservations in the late nineteenth century. Map created by the Hualapai Department of Natural Resources.
Changes in weather patterns have also negatively affected the resources available for food production. In recent years, snowfall has decreased, and, as a result, the water catchments operated by the Department of Natural Resources are not filling. Local ranchers have had to haul water, a practice that was not needed in the past.
One of the most significant environmental barriers to food production, however, is the caliche in the soil. Caliche – a layer of cemented rock just a few feet below the ground’s surface – is prevalent near the Grand Canyon where the present-day Hualapai Reservation is located. The soil is much less fertile than what can be found on the Hualapai ancestral lands, of which the current reservation is just one part.
Hualapai ancestral lands include areas along the Colorado and Bill Williams Rivers, as well as in the Verde Valley, where the soil is much healthier. Almost none of these farming areas are part of the reservation. Instead, members have to deal with the caliche, which prevents plants from rooting deep and is a barrier to critical farm and ranching infrastructure such as fencing.
A notable exception of fertile ancestral land that remains in Hualapai hands is the 160 acres of ancestral land that Sullivan’s grandfather, Adam Majenty, purchased. At that time Native Americans were under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and this purchase became allotted land with the Hualapai Tribe. This land is now divided among the Majenty family descendants of which Sullivan is part of. “That’s fortunate for [the Hualapai] that we are here [on part of our historical land base],” Sullivan reflected, “But that’s why [the U.S. government] put us here, on the part of the lands where the soil is bad for farming: they thought we couldn’t survive here.”
From Research to Action
The U.S. government has been proven wrong; as the Hualapai population continues to grow, so does the Hualapai food sovereignty movement.
In the spring of 2021, Sullivan received a call from the Arizona Food Bank Network, who was operating a project to support Tribes in conducting community food assessments. She had already been talking with her supervisor about doing a food assessment to gauge the level of food security, nutritional concerns and use of ancestral foods in the community. With the promise of some external resources – including stipends for community members to collect the survey and time from an AmeriCorps VISTA to help coordinate the project – Rosemary gathered several Hualapai departments and community members to develop the survey and distribute it throughout their networks. Through this, the Hualapai Food Security Committee was formed.
After a few months of spreading the survey at community events, over social media and going door-to-door, the committee had collected responses from about 20% of the population of the Hualapai reservation, making the food assessment incredibly rigorous. The Committee analyzed the results and gathered programming suggestions from Hualapai membership before Sullivan presented the full results to Tribal Council. The mandate was clear: the community wanted to expand food pantry services and community gardening.
Thankfully, the Hualapai Food Security Committee had already begun tackling the development of a Tribally-operated food pantry. One of the individuals Sullivan had included in the committee, Cheyenne Majenty, led an effort at the height of the pandemic to gather food donations to distribute for free to the Hualapai community. Called Helping Hands for Hualapai, Majenty and her family traveled as far as Lake Havasu City to pick up food donations for Hualapai members. In October 2021, the Committee saw an opportunity to expand on this work: the Gather Food Sovereignty Grant from First Nations Development Institute. The Committee was able to write and win this grant to create a Hualapai-operated food pantry in Peach Springs.
The food pantry set the foundation for the garden as well. Meanwhile, the Tribe connected with St. Mary’s Food Bank to get an increased and more consistent supply of food for the pantry. Through that partnership, they were able to become one of five Tribes to win the Natives Prepared grant from Feeding America, which was designed for food bank partnerships with Tribes. The garden, located at the site of the food pantry, opened to the public in May 2024, complete with raised beds as a workaround for the caliche in the soil.
For Sullivan, this is part of a larger vision: “I want to see a garden in each of our housing districts.” As the Tribe develops a strategic Master Plan, the Committee is working to ensure these gardens are incorporated.
“Being able to prepare [our own food] and not having to depend on an outside source – we’re not there right now, but little by little people learn. We have a lot of resources here, we just need to figure out how to use them locally,” Sullivan remarked. “We have cattle ranchers, we have big game that we can hunt, we need to use that meat source in our schools, our homes, our businesses. We need to create the economy for the local ranchers here so it can be a business for them. [The local cattle] are range cattle - you could say it’s more organic, and that’s a selling point for them. I keep asking livestock owners here, ‘when are we gonna get a slaughterhouse?’ Navajo has their meat in their casinos – we need our meat in our restaurant, our tourism, our businesses, our freezers. I know we can get there. To be truly sovereign you have to.”
If you would like to support the food sovereignty efforts in Hualapai Tribe, you can donate to the Tribe’s community gardens and food pantry by reaching out to their Emergency Operations Department by email at eoc@hualapai-nsn.gov.