Tom Douglas

Gourmet Article about Red Cloud Indian School by Shelley Lance

A stellar article on food politics in the brand new April issue of Gourmet magazine, “No Such Thing as a Free Lunch” by Sam Hurst, relates the story of the Red Cloud Indian School in South Dakota.  For more than a century, Jesuit “Black Robes,” originally invited by the Lakota chief, Red Cloud, ran a boarding school for American Indian children as a self sustaining community. The students learned to grow vegetables, raise chickens and cattle, and cook and preserve the harvest on a school farm located on grassland plains that supported small migratory herds of buffalo.  Cecilia Fire Thunder, who enrolled at Red Cloud in 1952, remembers “the main thing was three square meals a day. No junk food. And nobody went hungry.”  Another former student remembers, “Nobody ever got sick.”

Like most real-life stories, this one is complicated, full of good intentions gone wrong and unintended consequences.  “The history of American Indian boarding schools is extremely conflicted and horror stories about the abuse of children are legendary.  Schools like Red Cloud that have survived into the 21st century have been forced to undergo painful soul searching and reconciliation.”  Long story short, the Jesuit farmer-priests retired or died and were not replaced.  Fast forward to the present where the school has no farm, no chickens, no home-cooking, and instead a school lunch program that runs under the guidelines of the National School Lunch program.

Today, the Indian Health Service reports that nearly a quarter of the adults on the Lakota Nation reservation are diabetic. A great number of the children are obese and/or diabetic. When teachers asked students to track their daily eating habits they found that students mostly ate unhealthy fast food or convenience foods both at school and at home, and many ate only what they were served at school (ie. ate nothing at home).

Red Cloud officials took steps to improve nutrition for their students.  Today, breakfast is served to the younger kids and a hot lunch is served to all students.  Campus vending machines selling soda pop, processed snacks and candy have been removed.  One of the heroes of this story is Iowa senator Tom Harkin who managed to slip the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program into the Farm Bill of 2002, a pilot project which serves about 100 schools.  Because of this bill, fresh apples and bananas as well as other fresh produce are available to the students of Red Cloud.  For most of them, this is the only fresh food in their diet.

Still, it’s an uphill battle for school administrators to provide healthy meals for the students.  Red Cloud, like all American public schools, is required by federal policy to use up cheap, institutional commodity foods- ie. cheap processed foods- and the lunch program has to operate under a strict budget.  As school superintendent Robert Brave Heart explains, tater tot casserole is considerably cheaper to serve the students than roast beef with fresh vegetables. When the reporter asked why the school doesn’t buy grass-fed buffalo from the tribal herd located just a few miles away, he was told National School Lunch Program guidelines make getting approval to buy the meat difficult and expense makes it unattainable.   “Healthy food, so close and yet so far,” the reporter comments.

For the record, Senator Harkin also fought to “establish a program to support school and community gardens” and to “encourage school districts to purchase food when possible from local farmers and ranchers rather than large institutional contractors.”  Although the school garden program is now authorized, so far it is unfunded.

Should we Americans consider it a pie-in-the-sky dream for every school in this country to have, in not a farm, at least a school vegetable garden, plus, perhaps more importantly, a kitchen equipped and staff trained to cook meals from scratch using fresh foods?  Is it really out of our reach to re-invent the best part of that remembered history of the Red Cloud Indian School where “nobody every went hungry and nobody ever got sick” for every school age child in every school in America?

March 19th, 2009