An Indigenous-led food coalition in the Four Corners is giving locally grown produce to Native families every week. The grant-funded program is part of an effort to address health inequity in the community. 

In a warehouse in Cortez, Colo., Karlos Baca, a Southern Ute and Dine’ chef and food organizer, demonstrated how to fry green tomatoes in cornmeal grown on the nearby Ute Mountain Ute reservation. 

“All local, everything here is local produce,” Baca said to a participant. 

Twenty Indigenous families from the Four Corners area stopped in to watch Baca demonstrate how to cook, eat his fried tomatoes, and pick up packages of produce from local farmers. 

“Every family gets to leave with the bag. Hopefully, everyone shows up, so 20 bags will be leaving, and everybody gets to take this knowledge home,” Baca said. 

Baca has been working to feed Native people in the Four Corners region for 15 years. Now, he’s working with the Four Corners Food Coalition, an Indigenous-led nonprofit that received a grant to set up weekly packages of local produce for 20 families for 16 weeks. But Baca’s work is not just about providing food. His efforts are part of a larger social justice movement. 

“One of the first systems of warfare is always the destruction of people’s food systems, their food stores, their agriculture, to make them subservient,” Baca said. 

One of Baca’s goals for food justice is to fight the effects of colonialism on Native people. 

“If you look at colonization, the history of it didn’t happen overnight. The change in diet through the enforcement of government rations did massive damage to the indigenous diet and lifeways, foodways, everything. If you look at our indigenous foods as microchips on a cellular level, everything that your ancestors ate is still in your system. As you’re plugging each one of these individual items of food back into your body, you’re also unlocking those memories,” said Baca. 

Many Indigenous communities have limited access to healthy, fresh food. According to the Centers for Disease Control, Native Americans experience obesity and type 2 diabetes at higher rates than other racial groups—both conditions linked to poor nutrition. 

Cassandra Freeman and her husband run Anatolian Farms in Mancos, Colo. Their green tomatoes and jalapeño peppers are featured in this week’s Indigenous Shared Agriculture Boxes. 

“It’s probably one of the most empowering things I could do. I feel like in a way, we’re able to kind of take back the land and give it back to the people that it was taken from. If we support the local folks of this area, that ripples effects out to everybody in the community. We all become healthier and stronger together,” Freeman said. 

The Four Corners Food Coalition hopes to grow the food distribution program in future years. They’re also working on other food justice projects, like opening a community kitchen and purchasing four acres of land that will provide farmable land access to local youth. 

This story is part of Voices From the Edge of the Colorado Plateau, a reporting collaboration between KSUT Public Radio and KSJD Community Radio. It seeks to cover underrepresented communities in the Four Corners. The multi-year project covers Native, Indigenous, Latino/Latina, and other communities across southwest Colorado.