Mystic Lake hosts Native American Nutrition conference

Prior Lake American

There are some significant factors which affect Native Americans’ health and wellness in Minnesota — poverty, mental health, obesity and lack of access to healthy food being a few.

The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community is attempting to raise awareness and address those issues by partnering with the University of Minnesota to host the Second Annual Conference on Native American Nutrition, held this week at Mystic Lake Casino Hotel.

The conference is part of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community’s Seeds of Native Health program, which is a philanthropic campaign designed to improve Native nutrition nationally.

Conference attendees were able to sit in on a variety of workshops and presentations focusing on issues in Native communities regarding health and how to address those issues moving forward.

“The rate of diabetes in Indian Country is astronomical, it’s an enormous problem,” Conference Planning Committee Chair Mindy Kurzer said. “There’s a huge interest now in considering the possibility that learning more about traditional foods ... will enable Native folks who have some of these problems to reverse them.”

Kurzer is also the University of Minnesota director of the Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute.

Some additional issues include sobering statistics regarding Native experiences in Minnesota, some of which can lead to unhealthy habits — for instance, 50 percent of children under age five in Minnesota are in families that fall below the federal poverty level, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Center for Indian Country Development.

Native American youth ages 2-5 in Minnesota also have one of the highest obese rates across all racial groups at 28 percent.

“Most of Indian Country is in a dietary health crisis, caused by food access problems and contributing to the worst health disparities of any group of Americans,” Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community Chairman Charles Vig said in a conference packet. “For the past three years, our tribe has collaborated with many partners on promising solutions, but a great deal of work remains to be done to address this crisis.”

One of these solutions is the conference, which aims to reach not necessarily just to individuals, but policy makers and leaders of communities who can take the information they’ve learned and make a difference.

“They’re people who are in positions in their communities or their institutions to go back, utilize the information from the conference and influence policy, influence programs that will affect a large number of people,” Kurzer said.

The conference is a partnership between the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community and the University of Minnesota to bridge a gap of distrust between academic researchers and Native communities so the scientific extent of the problem can be understood, Kurzer said.

“The research that’s been done at this point, much of it would be considered by academic scientists to be anecdotal,” Kurzer said. “There’s been a disturbing history of justified mistrust on the part of Native communities because of exploitation that’s occurred. Therefore, we’re utilizing this conference as a way to rebuild trust between the academic world and the Native world, so that we can work together, utilizing the best of both worlds, to evaluate what the problems are and then solve them.”

The tribe will host a third Native American Nutrition conference next year Oct. 3-5 at its upcoming Mystic Lake Center.