Rebecca Riley, an AFSC New Mexico contractor, explains the "Eat Your Greens" guide for vegetables. Sayrah Namaste
November is Native American Heritage month. AFSC New Mexico program is excited that our partnership with tribal home visitors will be highlighted at an event on November 18 for Native families served by Native American Professional Parent Resources (NAPPR).
For most of this year, AFSC NM led focus groups with tribal home visitors to co-create activity guides for parents to encourage their young children to eat vegetables. “Activity ideas began with traditional foods in mind, intended to expand the familiarity with new foods, and guide parent-child interaction,” explains AFSC NM contractor Rebecca Riley of the Acoma Pueblo.
AFSC NM also worked with Laguna Pueblo artist Marcus Trujillo, a father of young children himself, to make a colorful, engaging guide. One of the fun tasks he had from the tribal home visitors was to incorporate a squash bug, but “make it cute!”
Sayrah Namaste
Building on the first project “Connecting with Corn,” we co-created the “Super Squash” and “Eat Your Greens” guides for vegetables that families were eating through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Indigenous Farm Hub.
NAPPR partners with the Indigenous Food Hub to provide bags of vegetables every week to the families they serve, and our activity guides complemented the food by making eating vegetables fun.
And it comes full circle! Every year we gather farmers from around the state for two days of peer-to-peer learning, and this was the first year that we included the Indigenous Farm Hub.
We love supporting Native families and farmers through partnerships like this. New Mexico is the Indigenous homelands of 23 federally recognized Tribes and Nations that include Pueblos, Navajo Nation, and Apache. The Southwest has a deep connection and rich culture of both harvesting and permaculture dating back since time immemorial among Native peoples.