Jonathan Nez was president of the Navajo Nation — and weighed in at 300 pounds — when he started a crusade to get tribal youth to live a healthier lifestyle.
One day, during his spiel, a kid raised his hand and asked Nez why he was telling them to stop eating junk food and start exercising when he obviously wasn’t.
“Of course, it hurt,” Nez said.
But the kid was right. That launched Nez on a health and wellness transformation that led to him dropping 100 pounds by transitioning from eating what was in front of him to a plant-based diet, and running — 5Ks, marathons and even ultramarathons.
But his crusade wasn’t just about eating right or being active, he said. It was — and is — “about the spiritual component, too.”
“It’s about sharing our views and pushing back on the standard American diet. And it’s about us sharing our traditional culture and knowledge with the people of the United States.”
It’s an ongoing effort after 200 years of forced tribal assimilation by the U.S. government, achieved in no small part by robbing native peoples of their abilities to grow and eat their own food.
“I mean, the Plains tribes, they wiped out their bison,” said Phefelia Nez, former first lady of the Navajo Nation. “And to us, the Navajo, they did a scorched earth campaign. That was basically leveling fields, just burning up as many seeds as they could so people couldn’t grow anything. It’s occurred probably worldwide in every type of occupation, and it’s the loss of seeds, the loss of knowledge of certain plants and how they were utilized.”
Navajo Nation leaders have been promoting a widespread return to native foods since 2008 when Native America Calling, a popular radio show, asked the president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine to come on to discuss a nutritional approach to Type 2 diabetes, a major health crisis on the reservation, which spans nearly 17 million acres across northeastern Arizona, southeastern Utah and northwestern New Mexico. Approximately 1 in 5 adults there are currently living with the disease and around half of the population has prediabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Physicians Committee created dietary guidelines that leaders helped adapt into the Diné Power Plate, which encourages a return to traditional, Indigenous foods to improve health. That, plus passage of the Healthy Diné Nation Act of 2014, which imposed a 2% tax on things like sugary drinks and chips, and Physicians Committee programs focused on health and well-being, have shown promising results in treating and preventing diabetes.
Last weekend, the Nezes, the Physicians Committee, two chefs and another Navajo plant-based-diet devotee, Jenson Yazzie, were spreading the word at the 50th annual Denver March Powwow, where hundreds of tribes including Colorado’s Ute Mountain Utes and Southern Utes were in attendance.
Bringing Indigenous food nutrition education into communities isn’t new, said Jonathan Nez, who is running to be Arizona’s first Native American member of Congress. But it was nice to have “more than one or two tribes to talk about it with,” he said, because “sovereignty is to help your own people and to bless others.”
Fry bread and the Indigenous diet
It wasn’t lost on the group of food advocates that not feet from the room where they were sharing their stories, hundreds of people stood in a winding line waiting to buy so-called Indian tacos — flour disks fried to a puff in a vat of fat and topped with refried beans, lettuce and a sprinkle of chopped tomatoes.
As the aroma wafted into the room, Lois Ellen Frank, founder of Red Mesa Cuisine in Santa Fe and author of the Native foods cookbook “Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky,” told a small audience how forced assimilation of Native Americans worsened as tribes were pushed onto reservations. The government-issued diet they were forced to eat included lard, flour, sugar, coffee, and later, powdered milk, Spam and 5-pound blocks of processed orange cheese that most Indigenous adults in North America can’t digest because they’re lactose intolerant.
“The government issue period was when fry bread was born, so fry bread is food from the colonizers,” Frank said. “But it’s also survival food. Had those relatives not made something out of that crap the government gave them, they would have starved, so it has this dual history.”
You can eat fry bread in small doses — say once a year at the powwow — but if you eat it every day, you’ll get sick, she said.
“Every native community gets to pick what you want on your forever menu, but listen to your body,” Frank said. “Do you feel like you want to lie down and go to sleep? Then maybe that’s not the best food for you to eat.”
Instead, the Physicians Committee promotes the reintegration of three foundational agricultural crops into the Navajo diet: maize, beans and squash, known collectively as the Three Sisters.
Frank included five other plants Native Americans “gave the world” in her talk: chiles, tomatoes, potatoes, vanilla and cacao.
These foods and fruits fill the four quadrants of the Diné Power Plate, which the Physicians Committee introduced to the Navajo Nation in 2015. A month later, then-tribal president Russell Begaye issued a proclamation recognizing National Diabetes Awareness Month, and encouraged the Diné people to eat more vegetables.
In the years since, the Physicians Committee has partnered with agencies across the Navajo Nation to streamline ways to get these foods into schools, hospitals, chapter houses and pueblos, while the Nezes and other tribal leaders have been instrumental in getting the USDA to reimagine federal food and agriculture programs from an Indigenous perspective.
The foods of their ancestors fill the recipes in Frank’s cookbook and the dishes she serves with Diné chef Walter Whitewater. Think roasted sweet potatoes with maple syrup, fresh lime and New Mexico red chile. They’re fancier versions of the meals the Physicians Committee teaches people to cook in their videos, classes and workshops. But the basic ingredients fed Jenson Yazzie’s family when they decided to try a plant-based diet.
A 100-pound success story
Yazzie started his health and wellness journey reluctantly, when he was 22 and living at home in the capital of the Navajo Nation, Window Rock, Arizona.
His dad took the bait after a meeting with the Physicians Committee, heading home and telling the family he wanted them to try to “embrace their natural way of eating as Indigenous people.” But even though Yazzie said “yeah, that sounds cool,” he wasn’t into it.
At the time he weighed 288 pounds and chronic pain pulsed through his body. His energy was low, he said, and he felt slow and sluggish. But change seemed hard, especially on the reservation.
The USDA classifies the Navajo Nation as a food desert, with the vast majority of its 27,000 square miles lacking reasonable access to healthy food. Only 14 grocery stores feed a population of around 200,000, or one for every 12,500 people. That’s far fewer than towns just over the Navajo Nation’s border, which have a per-person grocery store rate of one for every 574 people. People spent an average of 50 minutes of travel time getting to these grocery stores within the Navajo Nation. And many residents rely on convenience stores, gas stations or hours of travel for fresh food.
But with Yazzie’s mom at the reins, learning recipes, shopping, doing meal prep and meal planning, the family gave ancestral dining a try. It wasn’t the easiest at first. “I was working during the day so I’d get fast food, and then at night it was … just trying to eat, just to feed ourselves, just for survival … kind of like the mindset of the government,” Yazzie said.
A month into it, the family was “like, well, it’s working for us. Why would we go back?” And within a year, he had lost 100 pounds, regained his energy and “reversed the pain” in his body.
Keeping the weight off has been a matter of finding healthy foods he likes while getting enough nutrients. That got easier when he moved to Albuquerque to study photography at the University of New Mexico. There he had greater access to places like farmers markets, Trader Joe’s and Natural Grocers.
All this time later, when he talks about how his diet changed his life, he uses the words “wholesome,” “precious” and “pure.” It’s not just about how his body feels, it’s about how he feels mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Key for him is how it affects his art. He strives for it to be hózhó, beautiful. “To express how I walk in beauty as a person, for my family, and my ancestors. I want my art to capture peace, tranquility, harmony, love, and to be real, to capture the decisive moment.”
For Nez, it’s about reclaiming a way of life by getting the USDA and federal government to take notice, and through consistency in the habits that helped him drop all that weight.
“When I started with this I was 300 pounds and talking to kids and it didn’t make sense to them,” he said. “But when they saw me in the community losing that 100 pounds, they thought, ‘Hey, this guy means business.’ Now I truly think that movement is flourishing on the Navajo Nation.”